Isn’t there at least indications that corvids have an actual language, beyond just a set of specific calls? There have been indications they are able to transmit fairly complex information.

That’s fair enough, but I really do recommend going into NG+ after too even if you start over from the beginning. It’s a really fun twist, and also streamlines things quite a bit so the NG+ run will be much faster than your first playthrough. And it has an exclusive ending!

I’m so impressed with this game, I can’t wait for the sequel.

Did you do NG+? It had one of the best NG+ implementations for me, so much fun. God I love that game. I really hope the sequel is a banger.

I mean, I love atmosphere to be clear. Several of my favourite games stand on the foundation of atmosphere, like STALKER, Cyberpunk, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, Dishonored… Withering Rooms that I played recently was dripping with atmosphere, which is part of why I had trouble moving on from it.

Limbo does have good atmosphere but… its atmosphere is kind of one-note, like yeah it’s spooky shadows but that’s all there is. It’s neat, but it’s not really wowed me to the extent that it really elevated the game for me or anything. From what I’ve heard Inside has a bit more of a story to it, a which makes me hopeful I’ll like it better.

Artsy indie platformers can work for me, I really liked both GRIS and INMOST.

I think we’ve already been over it before, some time last year when I played Limbo. I’m not a huge fan of puzzle platformers in general so it starts as an uphill battle. There were one or two puzzles I liked (like the anti-gravity stuff was cool), but most I didn’t for various reasons. Most were either frustrating or forgettable. The liquid stuff was a bit overused. Towards the end it got a little too precision platformy and timed for my liking, some with really tight and unforgiving timing. Although I recognise that some people might enjoy that. Story wasn’t really anything either. It’s a cool mood and some decent looking scenes at times but apart from the graphics and art it almost felt like a browser game.

I finished Withering Rooms last week, and finally managed to tear myself away from it instead of doing a third straight playthrough. I’m still low-key obsessed with this game and am now waiting anxiously for the upcoming sequel. What a piece of art this game is. Beautiful art direction, beautiful music (all composed by the solo dev!), great gameplay despite the clunky combat and just such an interesting world and story, with some thematic throughlines of morality and responsibility running throughout. Possibly also a commentary on generative AI. It’s a super well made, super interesting and captivating game and I can’t recommend it enough.

Death Howl

I moved on to Death Howl as my next main game. It’s a Soulslike grid-based strategy deckbuilder (yes, that’s a mouthful) and so far it’s been… Decent but mixed, I’d say. I love the art. Beautiful pixel art in a very minimalistic but expressive style and a distinctive muted color palette. The story is okay but very very obvious and predictable, so while it’s a classic template and theme I am not really excited about getting to the next bit of story as I can already tell where it’s going, what it’s about and how it’s going to end.

The gameplay is fine so far, although the game is quite grindy which I don’t love. You need to do a lot of trash fights to grind out your deck for each area, and there is a mechanic that increases the mana cost of cards from outside your current area, which means you have to regrind a deck for every new area. It also means creativity in deckbuilding is restricted, as you really kind of are just limited to building one of the two deck archetypes provided by each area’s cards.

There are also some QoL features I don’t love, such as disabling fast travel while doing quests, which just means you waste enormous amounts of time walking. Overall it’s interesting but I don’t know whether I’d recommend it, outside of diehard deckbuilder fans who have already played everything else. It’s also fairly difficult.

Ninja Gaiden 4

I got derailed in my playthrough weeks ago, but have picked it up again and am probably in the final third now. I’m playing it in parallel for whenever I need something faster paced. Not much to add about it that I haven’t said previously. I have a ton of gripes with it, and it feels more like a half-brother to the older 3D Ninja Gaidens than a full blooded family member, but in isolation its combat systems are phenomenal, it’s fast and it’s fun and free-flowing and if you like action games you should absolutely play it.

It’ll probably be my next intermission artsy short game between longer titles. Did you play Limbo? If so how do they compare? I thought Limbo was only okay but I’ve heard people say Inside is a stronger game.

I forgot that since I usually just check 6 months/1y/3y but they do huh. Even better!

https://isthereanydeal.com/ has 3 years of price history and tracks valid 3rd party stores too (not greymarket sites like G2A).

Oh damn I missed that in the OP text! -_- Shame on me for skimming. Happy birthday!

It’s no wonder the VII remakes feel like KH since they are being done by Nomura.

You know, Lost Odyssey wasn’t on the radar for me but you may have put it on the map. Will have to look into it.

Planetside 2 at its peak was such a cool and unique experience. Shame it’s withering and dying

Okay, but what game was she playing!? I feel like the reporter is leaving out crucial information here. We need to know!

I’m not a huge fan of the excessive use of exclamation points in the writing, and there is also something about the entire thing that strikes me as off. I don’t think this author actually likes video games. Especially as the cited illustrious examples of video game excellence at the end are more art pieces than games, and while there is absolutely nothing wrong with that (I also like that genre) I think there is more to gaming than simply making slightly interactive movies.

A good example is the discussion of Celeste compared to Getting Over It. The author acknowledges that repeatedly performing the gameplay loop in Celeste feels good and is fun, but then immediately dismisses it out of hand as having “no meaning”. Again I think this author is too firmly stuck in purely narrative and artistic media. The operative verb in gaming is “play”. It is closer to dancing in that sense. Why do people dance? It has no meaning either. But it feels good. We enjoy exercising our hand-eye coordination, we enjoy moving to a rhythm, we enjoy learning and executing patterns. These are all elements of gaming too.

There is space in gaming for art, and I think there is something to the suggestion that a game that is purely narrative and/or artistic does not need a gameplay loop. But I think it’s also important to not lose track of the fact that games can exist in a pure “medium is the message” state akin to sports or dancing or whatever else - playing an instrument. We don’t play a pickup game of basketball with our buddies because it has a higher meaning, and we don’t denigrate it for lacking that meaning either.

Gaming is just something we do with our free time. It can have a “higher meaning”, or it can just be the pure dopamine of clicking heads and watching them explode in Doom. Both types of games are valid. Either way we’ll die eventually and that time will have meant just as little whether we played another hour of Doom or spent it reading Dostoevsky.

You will not regret it! I hope the sequel sells millions of copies because this guy needs to be let loose on a AA budget. I was completely shocked when I found out he composed the OST himself (apart from one track and one Bach piece). Some people are just too talented.

Haven’t had this much fun exploring a dangerous and interesting world filled with weird ass NPCs since Dark Souls 1 all those years ago.

This does give me a small sliver of hope.

I finished Withering Rooms a few days ago, having done both a full first playthrough and a quick run through NG+ to get the ending exclusive to NG+. Since then I’ve been in that odd spot where I’m kind of having trouble moving on to the next game. I just keep thinking about Withering Rooms.

This game was so amazingly good, it is seriously unbelievable it is the work of a solo dev. Especially since he also composed pretty much all the music - and the music is as phenomenal as the game. I don’t think I’ve been this impressed with a solo dev since Lucas Pope and Obra Dinn.

If you vibe in any way with what you see on the Steam page, I heavily encourage you giving it a shot. It is one of the most unique games I’ve ever played, which is funny because it simultaneously wears its inspirations on its sleeves. But the influences never end up leading to derivative end product, instead they are just the foundation for the very distinctive artistic vision of an auteur developer that is doubtlessly doing his own thing.

And it’s not just about the story and world building and art direction and atmosphere, but the gameplay and build variety is also really good. All the gameplay systems are so well designed, the puzzles are intuitive and the game has so many thoughtful little touches you wouldn’t expect from the first game of a solo dev, especially on the QOL front.

The combat itself is a little clunky, but you do get used to it and there are several ways to build both melee and spellcasting, there is a ranged weapon build that leans more into consumables, you can sneak around and place traps, you can be a summoner… Probably more that I didn’t think of yet. And using all these different tools is a lot of fun.

Having played this I am unbelievably excited for the sequel, which enters Early Access this year.

I’m still deep in the Withering Rooms trenches - almost literally now (although I can’t say more without spoilers). The game is just absolutely excellent, and I am even starting to get used to the janky and clunky combat. I’m in Chapter 4 now and starting to get some kind of idea of a possibile endgame, although I’m sure there are plenty of more mysteries and secrets and twists to uncover. I also know there are multiple endings, but I am still unsure what decides which one you get as I’ve just been playing blind and I don’t feel like I’ve locked into anything yet.

I know it’s a completely different game and a completely different vibe, but this game’s exploration is giving me almost similar vibes to back when I was first exploring Dark Souls 1. An interesting and dangerous world, weird ass NPCs, distinct art direction, mysteries and secrets, world building and story in item descriptions, locations that connect through shortcuts and link back to previous areas… It’s just great.

Next on the agenda is exploring the extremely cursed attic, but I think I might need a dedicated gear loadout for it as my default set gets overwhelmed by curse damage after just a couple of seconds in there. After that’s it’s the endgame, I guess? Can’t wait to see how it ends.

Strong light is the enemy. If the ceiling light is in it’s hard to do anything other than trying to actively look away from it at all times.