Hey again, you’ll probably need a minute to remember making this post, but I saw Intergalactic Fishing was on sale in the Steam Summer Sale, so I went ahead and bought a copy. This lives up to everything you’ve said - I very much enjoy the gameplay of messing with the lure puzzle minigame and collecting information on all the fish in any given lake, and I’m absolutely wanting to catch Just One More Fish.

…I guess I’m hooked.

Thanks again!

I finished Overload this weekend, so I’m wandering through my backlog looking for a next thing that sticks with me for more than five minutes. Oxygen Not Included doesn’t seem to be cutting it, so… we’ll see. I’ve got Cataclysm: DDA around as a light diversion until I get pulled into something, and there’s always Guild Wars 2 and Deep Rock Galactic.

Symphony of the Night has an entire pile of bangers and is my clear winner in this category.

I’ve actually set my Deck up with a wireless keyboard and mouse and a monitor and spend a lot of time using it in desktop mode. The “real” gaming PC is still around, but it’s a fallback. So I’m arguably playing Beehaw on it right now, but I just alt-tabbed away from Overload to do this. I’ll play Guild Wars 2 on it for a while tomorrow…

Utopia is pretty universally agreed to be the most important DLC. Past that, Overlord is a good pick since they’ve made vassals something you actually want beyond RP reasons and it makes them much more effective, plus it adds hyper relays. I like Galactic Paragons a lot, a lot of people think Federations and Apocalypse are pretty essential, and at that point you’re into picking and choosing what you’d like to have more of.

My grip on AAA is definitely weak. but Stellaris works very well both in terms of performance and ability to work the interface; using and customizing a community profile recommended.

I am paradoxically okay with winding up paying to be a beta tester! …if it’s for a tiny indie studio doing something weird, interesting, and experimental where I can join a Discord and talk to people about it. That’s a fun experience. To hell with paying a major corporation for the privilege of being any form of sucker.

I was focusing on Overload a bit, which I’ve found to be a fun homage or spiritual sequel or successor or whatever to Descent. It does a pretty good job of addressing the problems of players potentially getting lost and disoriented in complicated 3d spaces, and it absolutely preserves the fun of wandering around, trying to spot robots before they’re already firing at you, and then frenetically blowing them up. Lots of fun exploring and poking around for secrets and figuring out how to win fights. I feel like I’m only okay at it, I’m playing on a medium-ish difficulty and taking significant advantage of save-anywhere to decide I didn’t actually screw up that last fight that badly, but I’m having fun anyway. A bit daunted by how difficult some of the later levels are turning out to be, though…

Anyway, I was doing all of that - plus other things, I have a bunch of gaming balls in the air right now - but then No Man’s Sky had a new expedition come out. I only got the game in the last year or two and haven’t been interested in it at the same time as an expedition happened, so I spent last night focusing on it. It seems okay? It’s nice that my knowledge of the game allows me to render some tasks that might be arduous completely trivial, like knowing exactly what weapon to go fetch and what to do to get my hands on a quad servo fairly quickly. I think I spent too much time early on just getting a bunch of basic supplies lined up, but now I’m moving through everything pretty quickly so maybe that was correct and has paid off; I’m definitely overthinking the experience a bit. It doesn’t really seem like that big of a deal, overall - it’s not a major transformation of the game or anything, it winds up being what it says on the tin, just a quest line to go do to unlock some cool stuff. The cool stuff is actually mildly appealing to me, which is nice and a bit unusual.

I can go on, I found a novel (to me, anyway) way to break Chronicon a few days ago, but I think that’s the appropriate amount of rambling.

I looked at this thoughtfully a while ago and decided that my baseline level of interest in fishing qua fishing was too low. I’ve at least thrown it on the wishlist now, thanks for the info.

I despise stealth in video games, and Heat Signature is the only game with stealth elements I have ever unequivocally enjoyed. Very glad to see it getting some attention here.

I’m not sure Siralim Ultimate qualifies as “underrated”, but it’s the kind of game where if the idea resonates with you it’ll keep you happily busy forever. It’s often compared to a Pokemon game, but I think it’s better described as Pokemon meets a dungeon blobber.

At its core, you build a group of six creatures and go into a procedural dungeon where you will fight other groups of similar creatures, picking options like fighting and casting spells. The creatures each have special traits which change game rules for them, and your job is to take advantage of this so that you win these fights. Your character also has perks which act as additional modifiers, and fusing creatures and slapping artifacts on them means you can apply even more changes to how everything works.

The interesting part emerges from the fact that these traits are generally not modifiers like +3.5% damage on Tuesdays; they are instead drastic and game-warping options like “If this creature successfully attacks, there’s a 50% chance that a dead creature on its team is resurrected.” That by itself is kind of hugely impactful… and it’s also kind of basic and boring for Siralim. Now let’s fuse it with a monster that immediately gets a free attack if the enemy attacks any other monster on your team, now we’re starting to cook.

Your actual goal isn’t to play fair, it is to fold, spindle, and mutilate the game’s mechanics to allow your team to win in increasingly unfair and ridiculous fights. It’s also pretty good at letting you control your level of challenge, incidentally, but you are at some point going to have to win against enemies with their own completely bonkers tricks. If you enjoy figuring out how to warp complicated rules to your benefit and stack absurdity atop absurdity, this game is calling for you. It’s absolutely got indie jank, by the way - the graphics aren’t amazing, the game sometimes grinds along very slowly processing all the silliness, and while it has lots of reference material ingame there’s still just way too much information to take in.