Balatro

Finally dipped into No Man’s Sky this week. I didn’t bought it when it launched, so I don’t know how it was then. NMS has me hooked. The game doesn’t tell you everything and after the short tutorial, you’re pretty much left on your own.

The gameplay loop of extracting resources, scanning stuff, and getting better upgrades or unlocking new stuff does appeal to me. It’s the kind of game I put on a podcast or YouTube on in the background and just zone out for a while.

It does get repetitive, since most planets are just copy-paste versions of something you’ve seen before with different colours and patterns, with the whole infinite universe stuff and whatnot and there are still some bugs, like items disappearing from your processor.

I’m still very new to the game, but I think hello games, despite their false advertising, kinda made this one work. Even if it did took a long time to get NMS to this point.

I’m hoping they’ve learned something from this and make next game, light no fire, enjoyable from the start.

Finished Skald: Against the Black Priory, and it was a lovely experience overall. It’s one of those games that knows exactly what it attempts to do, and is very good at limiting its scope and not biting off more than it can chew. I might have liked a bit more agency and player choice - it is very linear for an RPG - but I can see how that would have been a challenge for a small studio and could well have ended up hurting the quality of the experience. As is it’s a very enjoyable ride, full of retro charm, nostalgic music and pretty pixel art but without retro clunk like memory limitations or poor controls and UX. I liked the story and found the writing solid, with a great gloomy atmosphere and some nice cosmic horror touches. The combat and character customization could have been a touch more elaborate, but at around 20 hours the game isn’t long enough that it really becomes a problem.

I’d give it somewhere around an 8 to 8.5/10 and definitely recommend it, especially to anyone who enjoys retro RPGs. It’s quite cheap too, even at full price.

Up next will be Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. I was a little miffed that only the console versions got HDR, but I got the RenoDX mod working and the game looks beautiful. Only just started the tutorial mission though.