Anodyne
I’ve been aware of Anodyne for a while and bought a copy a few years back but never got around to playing it until this last week or so. It was really good! I love exploring in games, and it’s a big focus of this one.
The map can help you generally but intentionally leaves off a lot of details, so you have to rely on notes or memory to fill in the rest. The areas, both in the overworld and in dungeons, encouraged you to get familiar with them and understand how they fit together.
Perhaps what’s most impressive is how much exploring there is with only a few ways of interacting with the world; unlike in Zelda, you don’t end up with a backpack full of goodies to let you open up new paths. But the careful attention to layout and the way screens can work with each other still makes the world feel big and interesting.
The sense of exploration also extends to the characters; you often can’t get a lot of information about the few characters you encounter, and have to piece a lot together from observation and implication.
I really enjoyed it, and I’m giving myself some time to sit with it before moving on to the sequel.
The Local
A first-person movement game with lots of fun techniques to explore and a big playground world to try those techniques out on. Neon White really got me interested in these kinds of first-person speed games, and while Hot Lava scratched some of the same itch the games in that style are not super common so seeing The Local fitting into that mold was great.
Being more free-form rather than using individual bespoke levels is a nice touch; like in Tony Hawk or Burnout Paradise, knowledge of your environment becomes a skill you can hone alongside jumping and grinding and air-strafing. It lends itself to a playful approach to the environment as well, causing you to look for interesting paths across a given part of the world as you explore, which really feels like it captures the mental vibe of parkour.
Balatro
I got this on release about a year ago and had fun clearing a few decks before getting distracted by other stuff, but I’ve recently been diving back in.
It’s nice because it lets you scratch some of the fun roguelike combo itch without necessarily being as intense as something like Slay the Spire, where having to manage things like card flow and resources feels a lot more punishing even on its base difficulty.
Guilty Gear
I’ve been playing Xrd off and on for around 6 years, but a year and a half ago I found a local scene so I’ve been playing a lot more consistently.
Having a core group of people to play with is a lot of fun in fighting games; you can more consistently measure your progress against them and there’s also a lot more room to make niche adaptations to each other’s playstyles. I’ve never been a big ranked grinder in fighting games, so playing consistently with people in person has been very useful for helping me get more hours into the game which ultimately is needed for improving.
FF14
Another pretty long-term game; I’ve been playing since just after Shadowbringers came out and having a great time. I’ve messed with most of the different things in the game, from Savage raids to Eureka to Blue Mage.
I recently started learning Futures Rewritten Ultimate with my current Savage group, which has been a lot of fun – Ultimates are one of the few things I haven’t dabbled in, so getting a taste of what they’re like has been cool.
I’m looking forward to the new field operation in the upcoming patch at the end of the month. I’m curious what they’ll do with it after Eureka and Bozja; I hope it’s a bit more collaborative like Eureka, but we’ll see.
FF12
I’ve been playing through the whole series of mainline Final Fantasy games, and I’m at the tail end of 12 currently. It was a game I had fond but vague memories of, and I’m really enjoying revisiting it. It feels like a throwback to the more dungeon-crawl-focused earlier games like 1-5, where resource management and attrition are big considerations. After 6-10 going for shorter dungeons with more emphasis on plot and characters I’m enjoying the change of pace.
I like the idea of the gambit system, but it feels like it’s still missing some things. It could just be my own lack of vision though; it seems like it’s pretty flexible in some ways.
Somewhat similarly, the battles taking place in the world instead of a separate screen is cool but doesn’t feel like it leads to a ton of extra gameplay. Being able to sneak past monsters is good, but that’s been a thing even in the ‘see monsters on the map and touch them to initiate combat’ style of games. You do occasionally get monsters wandering into your ongoing fights which is cool, and having to have a retreat path through a dungeon is also interesting since if you run the wrong way you’re probably just going to find more monsters.
Anyway that’s it! I’ve been busy with lots of games, and it was fun to reflect a bit on them.
Also I have to admit, part of making this post was because on my last post I found out I couldn’t upload images to wordpress due to some PHP configuration issues on my server, so I wanted to test it out after I made some tweaks.
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