What are you playing right now?

[Sharecrow]

I’ve been playing Outlast II and Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord almost exclusively. I occasionally practice my ninjitsu in Ninja Gaiden Sigma on PS4 as well as play DWVII and Fatal Frame III: The Tormented when I boot my PS3.

[Niahak]

Been away for a couple weeks and have done a lot of gaming stuff. So this will probably be a bit meandering...

I finished Disco Elysium. The Switch version crashed several times (~10 total I think) but it was still worth playing.
I expected it to branch a little bit more than it did. As is though it's a good non-successor to Torment. Around halfway through I thought the story was going to go someplace wilder than it did (pushing hard on the Jamais Vu thought, since the description implies it's one of the most important in the game), which is actually strange given it already goes pretty wild places. Kim is one of my favorite game sidekicks - in part because he's the straight man to your nonsense, which you really can't help given your situation.

Afterwards, I picked up Hades and Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. The original Mount & Blade (pre Warband, even) was one of my favorite games ever, and Warband only improved it so I was really anticipating Bannerlord but was hoping for it to go on sale. And I knew I would be hooked on it which isn't great.

Overall I've been lukewarm on Hades, but really enjoyed M&B2. Hades is flashy and stylish, but it's a little twitchy for me - I did manage to get a good run where I made it out of Tartarus, but I haven't played it much since. M&B2 refines the "vanilla" (pseudo-1300s pseudo-Europe) experience quite a bit and the addition of perk-style bonuses rather than skill points is a good change. It surprisingly still has several bugs and the user experience is kind of meh, but Smithing is a fun system and politics have been improved at least a bit - while crossbows are more fun to play than they used to be. M&B2 is still the kind of weird party-and-politics-management and action game its predecessors are - sometimes an entire play session involves hardly any real combat. The birth-and-death mechanics seem interesting but I've never actually seen them come into play as I've restarted a few times so the "still growing up" siblings never age enough to join my party.

While out of town, I was looking for a Switch game that would fill the same kind of sandboxy niche that M&B2 does, and saw Port Royale 4 on sale (never tried the series before). I tried it for a few hours but it seems like a bit of a scatterbrained sim. It's part city-builder, part trading sim, part naval combat but really excels at none of them (Sailing Era does two of them well, so I found it much more satisfying). I found myself pursuing the story objectives too early, which sent my trading empire into a death spiral because there is no debt system - it seems very easy to run into situations where your trading fleets aren't able to buy stuff, and maintenance is so expensive that you really need passive income from those fleets to keep going. City-building actually seems kind of vestigial as it produces little benefit compared to trading OR combat. I also built several businesses that should have been making money, but couldn't find any way to actually view that income. It felt like the game was difficult but in bad ways; I knew that things were wrong with my trading empire, but correcting it would require configuring many trading fleets and looking up a lot of information that, to its credit, Port Royale seems to try to surface but never manages to make as accessible as I wanted. In the end I ditched Port Royale in favor of Langrisser 1&2 for something strategic but less fiddly. I'll provide my update in the related thread as I seem to have hit the character limit on posts.

[Sharecrow]

I’ve been playing the arcade version of Image Fight, I just started SteelRising (February free game) and really dig it so far, and Fatal Frame III whenever I‘m in the mood. Haven’t had much time to play stuff lately due to work…it’s my busy season presently.

Occasionally play Outlast 2 and FFV as well.

[Niahak]

Started LoZ: Tears of the Kingdom and I'm around 15-20 hours in. I'm finally focused on it more, having decided that my M&B2: Bannerlord campaign is more or less a foregone conclusion. Oddly Bannerlord is still receiving patches, to the apparent consternation of the small mod-using community it has - which is wild, because M&B Warband had an incredibly vibrant mod community.

Tears of the Kingdom has been good so far. I've wrapped up one "regional phenomenon" and am working on my second. I have ~10 hearts and 2 stamina upgrades.
I've been apparently picking all the wrong things to try when it comes to sidequests - I only just unlocked armor upgrades and the auto-build functionality. I was wondering when I was going to use all the ore I've stockpiled, and a bunch is probably going to go to monocycles because the horse system is a little more restrictive than I'd like.
(I've actually gotten two battery upgrades already, and will probably be using more ore for that as I find it... but the depths are a little intimidating still)

[Sharecrow]

I just started playing the remastered Tales of Symphonia - haven’t played it in twenty years or so. Love this game! It’s still fun.

I also forgot to mention I’m playing Sinking City. A game based on a Lovecraft tale which I’ve queued up for reading sometime in the next few months. It’s more than a little unsettling, but pretty fun and interesting. This game took the place of Wizardry once I somehow beat it.

[Sharecrow]

I fired Sinking City (too disturbing and too clunky) though I will still read the story it is based on soon. I also fired SteelRising as I wasn't any good at it.

Playing Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Arise (though it's admittedly confusing to play two of those games since the controls vary) and occasionally Ninja Gaiden Sigma (despite its also being too hard for me), Outlast 2 (same...somehow even tougher than Ninja Gaiden IMHO), and Image Fight (same...I don't see me beating much in the near future LOL). I think I'll start Etrian Odyssey to replace SInking City.

[Niahak]

Glad to hear the remake of Symphonia is worth playing - I enjoyed the original myself, and would probably return to it at some point.

I started up the Mario RPG Remake and wow, it's a lot easier than I remember. And I remembered it being pretty easy. It's a serviceable remake, lots of nice QOL features and good music. Just got Geno and entered the mole village.

When my daughter asked for the cartridge back, I switched over to the Unicorn Overlord demo. Some of the character designs are kind of gross, which is a shame because many of them are great and the story's been fun so far. Compared to Ogre Battle it feels a little too simple (counters are more obvious and formations too straightforward) - but then Ogre Battle went from 0 to 60 with you expected to learn everything from the instruction manual, and it seems clear that more skills and characters available will change the equation a bit.

I'm not sure I'm ready to buy Unicorn Overlord right away, but I'll probably wishlist it for now. Need to decide whether to spend some of the money I've budgeted for a steam deck or Switch games, and I'm sure I could get a similar-ish game (TO Reborn, Triangle Strategy) at a much lower price. But it is tempting...

[Sharecrow]

To be clear, I don’t think they did much to the game other than add trophies and maybe some tiny tweaks. But it worked well in the first place so that’s probably a good thing.

[Niahak]

To be clear, I don’t think they did much to the game other than add trophies and maybe some tiny tweaks. But it worked well in the first place so that’s probably a good thing.

Yeah, calling it a remake was just shorthand on my part - it's largely a port from my understanding. Which is good, there's already plenty of good game there.

[Kong Wen]

When my daughter asked for the cartridge back, I switched over to the Unicorn Overlord demo. Some of the character designs are kind of gross, which is a shame because many of them are great and the story's been fun so far. Compared to Ogre Battle it feels a little too simple (counters are more obvious and formations too straightforward) - but then Ogre Battle went from 0 to 60 with you expected to learn everything from the instruction manual, and it seems clear that more skills and characters available will change the equation a bit.

Gross in the usual Vanillaware way? I haven't booted up the demo yet. All I know is Ogre Battle good, gambit system good, Vanillaware usually good, so I would be shocked if I don't enjoy it.