Rinn

@Rinn@literature.cafe
0 Post – 13 Comments
Joined 11 months ago

I'll be a contrarian and throw in my vote for the second game - it's rushed and flawed and the asset reuse is blatant to the point of being legendary, but the setting and story are the best and most original of these 3 games. Just being a hero of one single city instead of the entire world is surprisingly refreshing.

In general I'd say that 1 has the best combat/tone, 2 has the best setting/story, 3 has the best characters. I've heard that 3 can be quite enjoyable if you pretty much only do the main story and companion quests - but I wouldn't know, I'm one of the poor fools who got stuck in the Hinterlands, and that mistake + the very underwhelming main story sapped my will to continue playing.

The spices are pretty good - great, portable money source that won't get you killed for being a witch. Everything else sucks.

I have a T450, I'm dual booting Windows 10 and Ubuntu (...I know, I know, I'm just too lazy to swap) on it and it works great, I get better performance on Ubuntu than I do on Windows. The fans worked oob.

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Trams are, as you've noticed, a different usecase - subways are for getting you from A to B quickly, and trams are for getting you to the subway stop/straight to your destination on a shorter trip. One prioritises speed and throughput, the other - access and ease of use. Both should be used together to form a good transportation network, with buses and trains going to more remote/less dense areas.

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Maybe Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente? Her Orphan's Tales have some interesting cities too, but that's a bit of a stretch.

Again, not just one city, but take a look at Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino - it was a direct inspiration for Fallen London.

China MiƩville might be worth checking out - go for either the City and the City or for Perdido Street Station.

...wait, you just throw socks onto the pile without putting matching pairs together beforehand? I've learned that an alternate universe exists, and I'm not okay with it.

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Not mentioned yet: Chronicon. A small indie game that doesn't take itself very seriously. It has much less build variety than something like Grim Dawn (obviously) but it's got some, and it's aiming to be a much more streamlined/casual experience. Won't demand as much of your time and attention, will deliver hugely satisfying colorful explosions across the screen. When I'm in the mood for an ARPG it's a toss up whether I'll install this or Grim Dawn.

Something kind of adjacent to this happens in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series. Aliens come over to fix the Earth and humanity, but decide that human nature is part of the problem, and set out to modify it. It's a really interesting read.

All of them, honestly.

The Crucible is the weakest - it's just an arena mode, but it's got a lot of utility for speed leveling new characters + some QoL for existing ones.

Ashes of Malmouth is the direct continuation of the base game's story, adds Necromancer and Inquisitor which are both very well-loved masteries, and you need it for Forgotten Gods anyway. The zones are a bit meh - great overall mood but you spend a lot of time in cramped corridors.

Forgotten Gods adds Oathkeeper (very fun) and tons of huge new zones with a refreshingly different vibe to the rest of the game. And you can go to this expansion's zones from the start! (Except that you probably shouldn't on your first playthrough, you'd get destroyed and you probably want to focus on the main story anyway.)

I'd wait for a sale and get them all if you like this genre, or just base game + AoM if you just want to give it a shot (and technically you could hold off on AoM until you're close to the end of the campaign).

I grabbed Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Sleeping Dogs Definitive Editon, both of these are supposed to be great on the deck! Still stuck in Packaged purgatory though, so it's going to be a while before I actually get the chance to play them. There were some other games I was considering, but I gotta stop spending so much money right after buying a new piece of hardware... One day Sekiro will be at 70+% off, and that is the day I'll buy it.

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I had a N3DS, it was my first handheld and it was great! Really good selection of games. My most played were Monster Hunter Generations (which was my introduction to the series) and Fantasy Life - one of my absolute faves, a charming and colorful fantasy adventure with life sim elements. The story is a bit meh but the gameplay loop is incredibly satisfying and there's nothing else quite like it. I've been replaying it on an emulator (rip Yuzu/Citra devs) recently and it's still a blast.

Nothing quite like Hardspace: Shipbreaker, but farming games/life sims often fill this niche for me. The classic one to recommend is Stardew Valley, I also really like Graveyard Keeper, Slime Rancher and Fantasy Life (3ds, works well on emulators).

ARPGs (Diablo style, so kill stuff to get loot to get your numbers up to kill bigger stuff) can be nice zone out games too, I recommend Grim Dawn (going to get an expansion soon, quite complex), recently released Last Epoch (very enjoyable, but might want to hold off for a while if you want to play online - the servers are a mess right now), and Chronicon (most casual of these three, very cheap, colorful explosions across the screens).

Other games I've tagged as "Space Maintenance" : Planet Crafter (pretty chill number go up/building kind of game where you're slowly making a planet livable), Deep Sixed (short roguelike, try to keep a ship together enough to get through the game, very hectic and no progression between runs so may not be what you're looking for), Delta V Rings of Saturn (top down space mining).

Just finished Lies of P. My hands are still shaking from fighting the final boss, that one was a nightmare, took me 3 hours of attempts. ::: spoiler spoiler (yes, the true final boss) ::: Still, this is a great game for fans of Soulslikes - more of an iterative improvement than anything revolutionary, and not as thematically interesting as Fromsoft titles, but a very polished experience. Really good boss fights.