Nothing in that list does it for me, but from your wishlist, I can’t help but see Soma. Although that is anything but seasonal, what a great game if you can stand its grimness (? is that even a word). Gremlins Inc is also a very nice game, but playable online only, even in single player. It requires to be able to stomach the dice rolls (I think you do), and to dedicate to it one full hour at a time (barely time to even go to the bathroom), so I don’t know if you can fit that in our schedule (I am not even a father, and I have a hard time finding time at home for it!)
This sale, I grabbed Archibald’s Adventures, a little game I had read about what… ten years ago?
Everything else has been a lot of gifts: I had to balance out what I spent for myself on Thanksgiving (I was very thankful for myself, apparently). Somehow, my math failed? I seem now to have two times less money?!
There are certainly better games on my wishlist, even some within the $22 limit I have. The Surge would be pretty good, but I think I’d rather play more of Lords of the Fallen. Gorogoa sounds unique, but I can easily wait on that one to see if it goes into a bundle / price drop. I’ve had Soma on my list for a while, but I’m not a big walking simulator person and it sounds like there is not a lot of game to Soma. I recently played Everyone’s Gone to the Rapture and I just couldn’t stick with it - got bored, so I’m no quite ready to jump into Soma. I had wanted Shadow Warrior 2 for a long time, but the more I think about the melee the less I want it. Sooo, another bundle game probably. I did think about Gremlins and it is worth considering. How does it play single player?
It’s a fine little distraction in single player, but I played only 3 or 4 games of it, all the rest in multiplayer. The dynamic alliances in the game, based only on player’s actions and a few emoticons (there is no chat!) is some sort of gaming wonder of mini-society to witness, for me. Also the game scales very well depending on the number of players, proposing quite various experiences.
Anyway I wouldn’t suggest it for the single player only.
I picked up the Stellaris Utopia DLC and Elite: Dangerous w/ Horizons. I know that space game guru Brian Rubin has poopoohed E:D, but I think it’s beautiful and fun, and it is so much easier to dock with stations than in the Apple ][e version I played with thirty years ago as a dumb kid. The learning curve is steep enough where it still takes effort to learn all the parts of the newbie spaceship, yet delightful enough when I figure out how to do something, like plot a course and jump to a system I couldn’t before because my FTL drive wasn’t good enough before.
My sister gave me the Star Trek Adventures RPG rulebook. I’m looking forward to playing it with a buddy that I also convinced to pick up the Blades in the Dark RPG. For Star Trek, I was intrigued by the mechanic that lets you play a main character, but you can also generate a cast of dozens when needed, on the fly, that persist in future games. The rest of the rules, at first glance, look a little cumbersome. I bet when I actually play, I’ll be needing to leaf back and forth between sections of the book. I hope with practice they become familiar. The book itself is filled with great fanfiction asides that immerse the reader into the different eras of Star Trek (except the recent reboot movies and ST: Discovery). It can be a little frustrating with the black pages that resemble the Next Generation LCARS system. Maybe I should wear gloves when I handle the pages; my hands are clean but oils on my human fingers leave noticeable marks as I flip through the chapters.
A friend also gave me the board-and-card game Five Minute Dungeon. My wife and I played it last night. It’s fun and irreverent, but (with two players) we keep running into fatal roadblocks. I think a more relaxed view of the rules may be needed to keep having fun with it.
Oh man, I love this. I mean I say that as someone who never actually played the RPG, I just collected sourcebooks and modules as reading material. They always had such great adventures in them, I wish I could have tried them out but I didn’t really have any fellow geeks as a kid. Aw man, my story got sad.
Yeah, Elite: Dangerous is great fun. Brian is also right in that there’s a certain threshold after which you’ll run out of things to do, but that’s true in every game to some degree or other. I had great fun mining my first asteroids, for instance. I spent a weekend mining, and felt like I’d been doing the dredge work in the galaxy and never wanted to do it again. :) I think there’s something spot on about that. Mining should be hard, tedious work, and it is in the game. Definitely worth doing once just to get a feel for it.
Fighting with a variety of weapons is tough, and that was the phase I was on when I got distracted by other games. Being a bounty hunter is a fun way to earn money.
Exploration was going to be my next big phase if I go back to the game. @Rod_Humble made exploring new systems sound pretty awesome.
You don’t run out of things to do. I could go in there and run missions and crap. I just ran out of things I WANTED to do because I basically hit a grind wall, where nothing I did felt like it mattered.
Well, yeah. But it’s the same principle as what I talked about with the Mining. Mining is great! But I don’t want to do it again. Each activity in Elite has its own threshold, with mining having the lowest, and probably Bounty Hunting or Trading having the highest threshold, but eventually everyone is going to hit their own personal threshold for each of these main activities the game provides to earn money. (Mining, Exploration, Trading, Exploration, Bounty Hunting. That’s it, right?)
