All right. This is (probably) going to be my last post on games for this year. Maybe. I will say that my Christmas game (the one I ‘m hoping to play over the holidays) is Sea of Stars (Sabotage Studios). I have it downloaded on Game Pass, and I have heard such good things about it.
To that end, let me talk about the games I’m most looking forward to in 2024. Here’s yesterday’s post on my gaming in 2023 first, and then let’s move on to my most anticipated games of next year. There are two, and they are both not new, per se. You’ll see what I mean in a second. There was a third, but…
Ok, look. Cozy Grove was one of my favorite games of 2021. It’s played in real time, which means they’re only so much new content on any given day. You can farm resources and whatnot, but the specific story-related events that push the story forward? Once you do the quests for that day, you’re done for twenty-four hours. There were fora and fauna that only showed up in certain seasons, and if you missed them in that season, you were SOL until the next year. It was a big gamble, but I thougt it really paid off. At the end of playing this game, I would have heartily recommended it.
Until the DLC came out. It introduced three new characters, and I ompletely adored one of them. A shy, introverted writer mouse who was bullied in her job. She broke my heart over and over again, and I just wanted to wrap her in a comfy duvet and give her a cup of tea.
I had no problem with the new content . In fact, I really liked the new content. It’s the bugs and glitches that completely turned me off the DLC. I won’t recount what those bugs were because I raged about it at the time I was playing it, but it has dampened my enthusiasm for the sequel. I’m still going to play it, probably, but I’m not as hyped for it as I once was.
I also forgot to talk about a game I played quite a bit of, but ultimately gave up because I just was not having fun with it. Once again, the developer had taken the wrong lessons from the FromSoft games and dialed it up to a hundo. Shall I give it an award? I shall not.
It’s Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty by Ninja Theory. And, yes, it’s a soulslike-ish. The term has lost all meaning, really, In this case, it’s just ‘the game is hard as balls and you’re going to die a lot’. I actually think it’s a Nioh-like/lite (their other games) rather than a soulslike.
Either way, it’s clear that they have bought their own hype. I just read an interview with one of the devs, and he said that they only have one difficulty because they want it to be hard, but they give a ton of ways to beat the bosses so players can tailor their gameplay.