I’ve been playing Great God Grove and really enjoying it. I’ve been taking lots of screenshots so I can try to redraw the characters and get better at doing expressions. Right now Ive got a pretty rigid way of drawing faces and I think incorporating this looser style could help me a lot.
Playing Dragon Ball Xenoverse. Was on discount for cheap: 3 dollars. Such a nice game. I remember watching gameplays of this on my childhood. Now I get to play it and its so good.
I finished The Drifter yesterday. It took me three weeks to get through a 10-hour game, that tells you a bit about how little I’ve been gaming lately. Anyway.
Game is absolutely great. 9.9/10, a must-play if you like the genre of point-and-click adventure games, and a game you should seriously consider even if you don’t.
I’ve already waxed lyrical about it in past weekly threads, so I am not going to repeat myself here. All I can add is that the game does stick the landing.
From what I have played, this is the most logical puzzle game ever. There were only something like 5 convoluted puzzles over the course of the whole game, and even those did make some sense in retrospect. Besides those five I got stuck on, I was able to figure out the rest of the game without outside help, and everything felt like it was logical and made sense.
The story is a lot of fun, it was more sci-fi than I expected but I don’t really mind it. It’s a breakneck pulp thriller and it keeps throwing curve balls at you, there is always a twist and turn and you never know what to expect. The writing is super sharp, it’s witty and fun and the dialogue is great. In the latter half there were a couple of voice actors that were only okay, but the rest of the cast is absolutely top shelf and the protagonist especially is great.
Overall I can’t say enough good things about it. The conclusion is satisfying, the main theme of the OST hitting with its heavy synths at a climactic moment was epic and there is even an emotional arc.
Play it, it’s fantastic. Even if you don’t like puzzle games, the story and presentation is great, so if you have to look up a few hints or solutions then so what? You’ll have a good time regardless.
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (original release)
I’ve played it before, though never finished it. After jamming on Skyrim for a couple of years, I wanted an RPG with some fresh content so I picked it up again. The graphics are so dated that they almost wrap around to retro again, but I’ve been having fun planning and then executing a build wrt stats, skills, playstyle, etc.
It’s been enough fun that I’m thinking of picking up the official remaster at some point, but I’m more interested in the community version made in the Skyrim engine, Skyblivion. Have been following the project for a while and it’s almost done!
For what it’s worth, I played about 90 hours in the remastered and had a great time with it. Some people had performance issues which I think is where most of the negative press came from, but I never noticed it personally.
Making my way through the last of my achievements in Hitman. I figured these last ones would all take a long time but I’ve gone through 3 or 4 in just a couple hours so maybe I’ll have it all done before I thought I would.
This is the fourth reference to hitman in a week… time to breakout Absolution.
Unpacking and Hungry Horrors. Both great games!!
I’ve also been doing one Sonic Generations stage a day :D When I’m done with those I’ll move into Shadow Generations!
Red Dead Redemption 2
This is probably the 5th time I’ve gone back to it after a long break. I was really tempted to restart from the beginning but decided to continue from where I am. It’s such a beautiful game and so far I’ve mostly spent my time hunting and fishing :D
Honestly, RDR2 but just hanging out is such a good time.
Still playing Caves of Qud. Probably will be playing that for quite a while (relatively speaking… I mean I tend to lose interest in most things after so many hours).
Live and drink! Good luck with Golgotha!
Patient gaming, Blasphemous. Not much to say about it. I enjoyed the pixel art and the world building but found the gameplay somewhat janky and maybe partly because of it also hated most of the boss battles. I haven’t fully completed it, the in game progress meter gives me around 70% done and I’m just looking if I find the motivation to push it to the finish line. But I’m more stuck in my not so patient gaming game.
Not patient gaming, Witchfire. Blasphemous left me with a dark fantasy itch so I was looking for something to scratch it with and I remembered Witchfire had a major update a month ago. Now to talk about Witchfire itself. Witchfire is a game by the former developers of Painkiller (for those who are ancient enough to know about Painkiller) and is about a fictional church vs witches war where you’re the church assigned “preyer” (witch hunter) who has to go and recover a lost relic from an area controller by a witch that may change the tide of war. Thematically it’s a dark fantasy and while I’m getting some Dark Souls vibes in some of the gameplay elements I feel like there’s much bigger inspiration taken from Bungie with the emphasis on verticality, impressive vistas and tight gunplay.
As for the gameplay, if we were to be genre fluid it would fit in the extraction shooter genre. You go on expeditions into one of the 6 maps to gather resources, level up weapons, explore the maps, do quests or progress the meta progression and when you’ve completed what you set out to do or you feel like you no longer have resources to continue you go to an exit portal and effectively extract. The game very much has every aspect of an extraction shooter except for the multiplayer PvP and it will never get that because the developers have been very clear it will be single-player only. I guess technically there’s also no time limit for how long you can stay in the expedition but there’s a late game mechanic that you can interact with to ramp up the difficulty to a point where sticking around becomes extremely dangerous. The gunplay feels really good. Not as good as Destiny 2 but for me it comes very close because it’s one of the very few games where I can easily intuit how my character moves, where the enemies are and which shots will and won’t land. I have no idea what micro interactions are happening there but the moment to moment gameplay is so satisfying for me. The only exception is when enemies are so close that the particle effects are having a full-on rave on my screen and I can’t see if I’ve killed everyone or if there’s an enemy about to attack me.
It’s still in early access with a release around the corner (last roadmap that was released a few weeks ago had a late Q4 2026 release window) so it’s not patient gamers ready, but I think it’s definitely worth putting on your radar because I genuinely think it’s also worth the $40 price tag. I bought it when the 0.8 update came out and had fun but ultimately put it down because the late game mechanic (world corruption for those who have played the game) was a difficulty spike I wasn’t expecting and it sucked the fun out of it, at least for me. I was going to skip to 1.0 but like I said, Blasphemous gave me an itch and Witchfire was going to scratch it. And I’m glad I didn’t wait because I experienced it first-hand that the developers are taking feedback from early access and they’re actually listening because with the 0.9 release I was blown away how significantly they altered the the late game mechanic. It went from something that forces difficulty to ramp up to something you can choose to interact with and if you do it doesn’t just ramp up difficulty, it also gives you a few choices to power up yourself as well. So a mechanic that at first was just something to make the game harder became a mechanic that makes the game more challenging. This on a whim decision to play Witchfire has made it one of my most anticipated releases of 2026.
I absolutely love the art, music, story and world building in Blasphemous, but I could also not really vibe with the gameplay. Way too much platforming combined with instant kill hazards and janky ledge//ladder grabbing. Also enemy placement that seems deliberately designed to waste your time and prevent you from rushing through areas, even when you backtrack.
I didn’t have much issue with the bosses though, at least in the main game. Isidora from the DLC was a fucking pain, though.
My issue with the bosses was a lot of them were just floating hitboxes way above the player which boiled those fight down to jump under the boss to spam up attack. I also didn’t enjoy that pretty much every boss had an AOE attack that (at least as much as I tried) you couldn’t counter which ended up just prolonging those fights.
And now that you mention it I also felt like some enemy placement and platforming hazards were there just to waste your time.
The first one or two bosses are alright, I think. I’m pretty sure you can parry all their attacks. But I can see what you mean, there is definitely a very simple design behind a lot of the bosses in vanilla. None of them were really super fun, but they also weren’t really all that difficult so I guess that’s why I didn’t think too much of it. I died way more to the environment than to any boss, except Isidora. She got my ass like 50 times. Though to be fair I never did the rest of the DLC so there may well be another equally tough boss there.
But yeah, the game seems to really lean into the whole “virtue of suffering” theme - which works great with the story, world building and vibe and all, it’s just… not necessarily fun.
Beat Divine Divinity for the second time, first was in 2004, it’s a nice and simple rpg. A fine story and some diverse quests. The game still plays fine, missing some modern features and the pathing is not that great, but the writing carries it.
Now it’s over to Fields of Mistria as it is finally out of early access.
I beat Nine Sols earlier this week. Great game. Very difficult last boss.
I’m playing PalWorld now and it’s addicting.
Last week I finally picked up pilgrims. Fun lil game from the maker of samorost. Was faster than expected so I switched back to ufo50 which I (dunno why) hadn’t picked up in a while cuz those games are fun and I still didnt even touched every game in the list :D
So yeah right now I pick up more games which are fast to start without any commitments.
Also I bought binding of isaac rebirth with all dlvs in the sale (its good to be patient) And damn I still love it after all those years :D
Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter
I tried playing this game a few months ago but couldn’t get it to work - well, it worked out this time. Can’t say it was worth it though.
I started this playthrough knowing these games aren’t really my type of thing but willing to give it a real shot, if only so I could talk with my friend (a huge fan of the series) afterwards and say “hey, I gave it a chance”. Things were relatively alright at the beginning, not great but decent enough to not feel put off immediately. It didn’t take long for my experience to sour though even then I was willing to chuck it up to it to “not being my thing” and wanted to finish the game - by the time I got to Metropolis (level 9 out of 13) I simply gave up.
This was probably the worst gaming experience I had in years. Between mediocre level design, encounter design ranging between “well thought out packs of enemies spread around logically” to “lets just spam a ton of random enemies at once, preferably in small space to make it difficult to avoid” and combat music constantly fading in and out, the whole thing ended up feeling like complete waste of time (in a bad way).I do not want to touch this series ever again and leave it to those who actually enjoy it.
Scarface: The World is Yours
On a more positive note, I started playing Scarface again. Well, I say “positive” but the this one started pretty rough as well, though for different reasons.
Initially, I planned to play the game with the Scarface Remastered Project (mod improving textures, restoring missing effects from PS2 version etc) but had very little luck with it. I couldn’t install it on Linux and when I set up the new files using a Windows partition, none of the new assets would load anyway.
Alright, that sucks but whatever. Let’s just play with the GangstaPatch (mod adding better widescreen support, improving performance and fixing a bunch of other issues) instead - this should be fine, right?
I spent like two hours trying to figure out why the game kept crashing. First it was right after the intro mission, then during said mission the moment I fired my gun. Guess what? You can’t play the game with framerate above 60 (especially during intro). It’ll work fine but only after the intro mission and even then it WILL crash the moment you finish any other mission as well.
Fine, this isn’t a huge deal even if it took me a while to figure out (should’ve start with the obvious solutions first but eh).Great, so the game is working perfectly now. How is it?
Well, it’s pretty easy in terms of difficulty, mouse controls (camera movement and aiming during combat) are abysmal, driving is stiff and weightless, there’s no proper radio system (only a semi-manual music player) and everything looks… pretty bad in terms of visuals. Despite all of these flaws however I really enjoy it.
While it looks and feels like a rushed budget title from a different era, it does have some interesting ideas like active drug dealing, ability to bribe cops, having to launder your money to keep it safe etc. Those things might not be perfectly executed but they’re enough to make the game feel somewhat unique compared to GTA titles. Add the “super serious” if corny story and pretty good voice acting (at least for most of the named characters), and you end up with a pretty decent licensed title. Nothing groundbreaking, sure, but an enjoyable romp nonetheless.
Hopefully I can finish it this time instead of getting distracted again.
Borderlands 4 since it went on sale on PS5. Getting my Siren to the last few UVH ranks, farming some bosses, going through DLC, grouping with my buddies when we can. We’ve been enjoying it.
I’m being the most patient of gamers this week and playing WoW Wrath of the Lich King :D
Just got my server set up today. Now I need to set up addons and some playerbots to populate the world. There’s even a client with updated graphics for it which is sick.
After trying quite a few games that I didn’t get on with, I played so much of the Guildrun demo that I got a bit sick of it (it’s really good though).
I’m planning to try the Combolands demo this week too (it’s a roguelike city builder).
