Game of the Month - July 2020

Ghost of Tsushima over here.

Streets of Rogue for me. Crazy game, in a good way.

I’m 70 hours into Death Stranding and only halfway through the plot.

Hey, I played through this one last week too. A pretty enjoyable couple of hours in a realistic spooky space station.

GotM for July for me is probably The Last of Us II, even though I finished it in early July.

Persona 4 Golden which I dropped after ~40 hours on Vita years ago but this time on PC I’m going to see through to the end - in the home stretch now and glad I came back to finish it.

Horizon Zero Dawn on the PS4 Pro. Really digging the main story as it has gotten going.

Also still having fun with the OO Warlords 3 Darklords Rising PBEM game.

Thought it might be PSVR Iron Man, but VR headset in summer humidity means I can only play it in the morning on weekends before wearing a VR headset gets too annoying (no AC here).

I have put a lot of hours into play the 1978 Yankees in digital Strat-o-Matic Baseball. They were having a sale, so I bought it and 3 seasons. For years I’ve been tempted to get it because I loved the board game as a kid. I love seeing the possibilities laid out in front of me - what the dice rolls will result in. I like how stolen bases are handled. Playing out the game is so much more fun in Stratomatic than it is in OOTP. But…OOTP handles all other aspects of baseball better, so it depends what you’re in the mood for. Me, I just want to see Ron Guidry wrack up the wins and strikeouts while I exert my influence calling steals, hit and runs, and when to call in the bullpen.

Before my baseball kick, I had a transportation / builder kick and played The Colonists and Transport Fever 2. The Colonists is pretty fiddly, but you have a ot of control over how goods are moved throughout your colony. I’ve been playing the campaign, taking the non military route and like it quite a bit. It’s rewarding getting things balanced and the logistics efficient (enough). Transport Fever 2 has also been mostly positive. I’ve played through chapter 1 of the campaign and one sandbox game. I like having the structured objectives of the campaign, but some of the optional goals are pretty dumb and not fun - like dig holes looking for some object. It can be very relaxing watching the trains run their routes and filling the cities’ needs to grow.

To a lesser degree I’ve played some Temetsi and Hand of Fate 2. My pace with Temetsi has slowed since I started with Stratomatic. HoF2 is OK. Very cool presentation, but the combat doesn’t feel great. Maybe a bit better than the first one.

I noticed there were some new cities in Mini Metro, so I played one to meet the achievement goal. It’s funny how quickly things can get out of hand.

Also some dabbling in Humankind, American Truck Simulator, Nimbus, Superflight.

Been trying to stay a bit more focused in my gaming so, mostly, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. (Special edition, of course, a bunch of mods.) Much further into the game than I’ve ever been before. I’ve completed all the guild storylines, the civil war, and the main quest, plus a bunch of miscellaneous stuff, and so far three quest mods - Project AHO, Moonpath to Elsweyr, and Moon and Star - as well as several quests from the Legacy of the Dragonborn mod, the questline to rebuild Winterhold in the Immersive College mod (I think? the questline is there, I don’t remember what it’s from), like half-ish of Helgen Reborn, and a whole lotta dungeon crawling, relic retrieval and house-building. At this point most of the remaining achievements are for the two DLCs, plus vampire perks, finishing finding the various guardian stones and doing the rest of the daedric artifact quests, and a couple re: bounties and jail escape that I’ll knock out real quick on a non-permanent save. I might actually get 100% achievements on Skyrim. Crazy. (There’s also Falskaar and The Forgotten City for quest mods, and I’ll want to finish off the questlines in Helgen Reborn - imminently on the list - and Legacy.) So, dozens of hours still. But I’m on the home stretch.

Also getting there with Elder Scrolls Online, where I’ve finally finished the entire base game, or at least the bits that are solo, and the same with Vvardenfell (as well as Clockwork City, Orsinium, and Murkmire, earlier…still working on the Thieves and Dark Brotherhood). Probably 30% of the way into Summerset currently. I thought that would be good timing considering the event but in practice it means my limited time has mostly gone into doing dailies instead of spending all that much time advancing story quests. Oh well. It’s still happening. Plus yesterday I was actually patient enough to get into and complete Moongrave Fane - I haven’t done a dungeon in that game in probably a year, and apparently this one is infamous as being too much of a pain to regularly do, thanks to the second to last boss fight. Which…yeah, we died like ten times. I’m amazed the PUG didn’t fracture and quit.

Finally, I spent several hours with Raging Loop, an excellent time loop/werewolf/Werewolf visual novel. I’ve completed the first path but fell off partway through the second due to spending downtime with playthrough videos for a boardgame I was considering on Kickstarter. Need to get back to it.

Mostly Drox Operative 2.

Edit: Halo Master Chief Collection as well.

Wrapped up Tale of Wuxia Pre-Sequel and moved on to Underrail.

Kudos to Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion for getting my 10-year-old to sit down for multiple boardgaming sessions for the first time in several months. I was worried that I had lost him entirely to them new-fangled vidya games.

That Atari’ll be the end of us all, let me tell you.

I guess I’d have to go with Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for this month. I’ve actually owned it for quite some time and I knew I’d enjoy it, I just held off because I knew I’d be kind of bummed when it was done, since who knows if we’ll ever get more Deus Ex? I really enjoyed the game, there aren’t enough games that let you completely avoid conflict as a viable option, and I really like the cyberpunk sci-fi setting, really hoping CD Projekt’s game lives up to the standard this game and its predecessors set.

I’ve been avoiding both TLOU2 threads for fear of spoilers. As a fellow fan of the first, without any spoilers, what was your overall assessment of the game?

If you liked TLOU1 theres probably an equal chance youll hate it or love it, but you really ought to play it. It swings for the fences, building on the themes of the first game.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was mostly June, but the last couple planets were in July. Don’t know if it truly excelled at anything, but it all meshed together well enough to feel like more than the sum of its parts.

Ori and the Blind Forest was very pleasant, with a really enjoyable range of movement powers and a beautiful world to explore. Not sure if the infamous escape sequences have been toned down since the initial release, but I enjoyed all of them, and found them a refreshing alternative to traditional boss fights.

Slay the Spire’s mobile port finally got me to really dig into it – it just works better for me for a few battles here or there than when sitting down to a full-on gaming session. Currently up to ascension 6 on each of the characters.

Stardew Valley also finally got its hooks in me after a couple aborted attempts. In this case, the catalyst was my daughter seeing a trailer for Story of Seasons and wanting to try it, and me realizing that we already had this and should give it a shot first, especially since it actually has multiplayer.

It’s pretty incredible and well worth experiencing.