For a number of years now I’ve been a console gamer. I mean I have, and always have had since buying my first Atari 400, a computer capable of decent gaming but at some point I started finding the simplicity of turning on a console and flopping down on the couch much more enjoyable than tinkering with settings while spending another few hours per day in an office chair.
The Steam Deck has really shaken up my life in some positive ways. Honestly I don’t even USE it a ton but I love the damned thing and the knock-on effect of having it is that I pay more attention to the PC gaming world. There are (as y’all know) just a ton of games that come out on PC that never make it to console, and for some genres mouse and keyboard is just so much better than a controller. (I know for a lot of you a controller is always inferior but I’m talking about my personal preferences and a controller at this point just feels totally natural to me.)
The Deck also has me reevaluating my opinion of Valve. I have never liked that Steam dominates PC gaming like it does. This isn’t a feeling really specific to the company; I just didn’t want any single entity to have so much control over gaming. But with the Deck, Steam’s benefits start to outweigh those concerns.
And finally, with the Deck being so hot it feels like finally “controller support” isn’t an anomaly in Steam games any more. Maybe this change isn’t new but it is new to me. I used to try, once every few years, to bring PC gaming to the TV to get the best of both worlds but it has always come with its own set of issues, generally having to do with winding up with a keyboard and mouse on the living room table cluttering things up.
The other day I dug out the Nvidia Shield, which I had purchased for GEForce Game Streaming (which Nvidia is about to drop, by the way). Back then Steam Link was kind of a glitchy mess (for me at least) but Game Streaming worked pretty well. It didn’t really stick at the time, though, because too many games required me to jump up and run upstairs to the host PC to click a button or type something in. Also the controller that came with it wasn’t great and I had trouble getting 3rd party controllers to pair and stay paired with it. It didn’t take long for the Shield to wind up in the Closet of Forgotten Tech.
Fast forward to today. GEForce Game Streaming is being phased out, but Steam Link has gotten so much better. I will say I attempted to use the Link app on my Samsung TV, which was terrible, and even tried it on my Chromecast With Google TV, which worked better but suffered from input lag. But on the Shield, which has a pretty beefy CPU for a streaming device, it works great. Somewhere along the way 3rd party controller support got better so now I can use an Xbox controller. Steam Link now offers a “virtual mouse” option for those games that require a mouse click here and there (I wouldn’t want to play a whole game using it) and generally everything just works really well. My only real complaint is that my PC runs stuff at 1080P and when that gets blown up to a 65″ 4K display it looks a bit ‘soft’. I need a better monitor because my PC is capable of more than 1080P but I don’t have a monitor with better resolution.
The other thing I want now is Steam Controller 2.0. Basically a controller that replicates the track pads on the Steam Deck, and maybe the back paddles too. I think this is something that Valve wants to eventually offer (I think I read that somewhere) but for now they’re so focused on the Deck that there are no concrete plans.
So now I have an ecosystem where I can play a Steam game on the PC, or on the TV in the living room, or on the Steam Deck. Same game, same save file. To be fair this isn’t really new, not even to me (I can do the same with Xbox or Playstation via in-home streaming), but it is new for me for PC games and it makes the whole experience more appealing. At least in theory. I’ve spent a lot of my holiday break getting stuff set up and watching a ton of YouTube videos about PC gaming but so far I haven’t really PLAYED many PC games. I have some ideas about why that may be, but I think I’ll save them for another post.
December has been a bit of a strange month. I guess that may be true for a lot of people, what with the holidays and all. But I feel like I’ve just kind of flitted around and haven’t really gotten deeply involved with anything. Having the Steam Deck has been a pleasing distraction as I’ve messed around with it a bit, and the knock on effect is that I’m paying attention to PC gaming again. I haven’t really PLAYED many PC games but over the holiday break I started watching a bunch of YouTube videos about great deals in the Steam Sale, as well as watching lots of gaming-related tech videos.
Genshin Impact is back in rotation but once again I’m ruining it for myself by being fixated on the “Battle Pass” and playing to advance that rather than playing to enjoy the game. Not sure how I can break myself of this habit. I still haven’t started Chapter 2 of the story, for example.
Dying Light 2 got an update that includes a ‘prevent motion sickness’ setting, which led me to reinstall it. The setting in fact helps, so after making a huge announcement about how I am DONE with that game…I’m back to popping into it now and then.
Gotham Knights is, I guess, dropped for now. Haven’t played it at all recently, but I DO want to get back to it. I was liking it well enough, I just get so easily distracted.
Spiritfarer I guess I have to admit, is dropped. This was an Indie darling in 2022, I think, and I kind of like it but the pace is just so slow.
New Games This Month
Steamworld Heist completed. I’ve been poking at this on the Switch for months. Maybe years. It’s kind of a space opera. You control a crew of Steambots on a series of missions. Movement is turn-based but shooting requires aiming a wavering gun at the enemy. It was a pretty good game that, for me, overstayed its welcome a bit. Might have been due to how I play games, since I kept trying to keep all the characters leveled up which meant replaying missions over and over. Once I started getting bored I just focused on 4 characters and moved through the game fairly quickly. I ended up finishing at something like 26 hours when Howlongtobeat says it should take 12.5. So yeah, just me being me.
Geralt rides past a hanging tree.
The Witcher 3 got that Next Generation update so I decided to start it up again. I’m TRYING not to get distracted and do a ton of side quests because the last time I had a go at The Witcher 3 I got bored out of my mind because I became so over powered. That said, I noticed there is now an option to Scale Enemies and I don’t know if that is new or just something I never noticed before. As I write this I’m in Crookback Bog so still pretty early.
Immortals Fenyx Rising is a game I bought at launch since it was made by the team who made Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, a game I simply LOVE. But Fenyx is a lot more puzzle-based which I wasn’t expecting, and I bounced off it pretty hard. Now I’m giving it another go, starting fresh and knowing to expect the puzzles. I just got going with this one in the past week so we’ll see if it sticks or not.
Wasteland 3 is a game I’ve started a few times but never made a lot of progress in. Giving it yet another go. I mentioned I’ve been watching a lot of PC gaming videos on YouTube and they’ve created an itch to play something turn-based and tactical and Wasteland 3 seems to fit the bill. I’m playing it on the Xbox, but it is on Game Pass for both Xbox and PC and I’m a little conflicted. It definitely plays better with mouse and keyboard but I spend a lot more time gaming on the TV than I do on the PC so… we’ll see.
Final Fantasy, the pixel remaster, is my first Steam Deck game. I actually started it on the PC a while back and picked up where I left off but, boy howdy they don’t make this easy. There is no kind of quest log or anything and so I have NO idea what I’m supposed to be doing. I finally had to look at a walkthrough and I’m using that as my external quest log. You forget how hard these old games could be in unexpected ways!
TV
The Peripheral (Amazon Prime) was really good. It’s run by the same folks who did West World on HBO and has kind of that same trippy vibe. But it’s also the kind of show I don’t want to say much about because you should discover it all for yourselves!
Mythic Quest S3 (Apple TV+) has been quite enjoyable. Love this series.
Star Trek Voyager continues plodding along as our lunchtime viewing. I find it all really uneven. Some episodes are decent, some are super cringy. But you probably know this already. Who hasn’t seen Voyager?
The Essex Serpent (Apple TV+). It’s (I’m guessing) late in the 19th century and the fishing village of Essex is in a panic over a mystical/mythical serpent which may or may not exist. Meanwhile in London, well-to-do Cora is freed from a horribly abusive marriage by way of her husband dying. An amateur naturalist, she gets it in her head to go to Essex to determine if the serpent is real or not. She finds a village still in the throes of dark age religion, with the exception of a handsome vicar who tries to re-assure the villagers that the serpent is not real. He is constantly undermined by another religious figure (I was never sure of his rank) who preached fire and brimstone and claimed the serpent was sent from god to punish the villagers for their sins.
This is a 6 episode limited series that quickly turns from an interesting mystery to a painful romance. The first 5 episodes are grim, but it doesn’t take long for the serpent to be forgotten in favor of watching Cora be horrible to the people around her, all of whom, for reasons that I never understood, seem to be in love with her. She encourages them all before friend-zoning all but the one married man in her circle of influence, breaking hearts left and right with apparently no awareness she is doing so. Then in episode 6 all the bad stuff goes away and suddenly it is rainbows and butterflies. Even the people who die seem to get a happy ending somehow. It’s all very bizarre. I loved the first couple of episodes that focused on Essex and the serpent but it quickly went downhill from there, with many mysteries just being dropped along the way and a very unsatisfying ending. I’d skip this one.
Bocchi The Rock (Crunchyroll) was a delight. Thanks to Rakuna for recommending it. It’s about a painfully shy girl who decides to learn to play guitar so she’ll be popular. She ends up joining a band. I found the show laugh-out-loud funny at times, but even though the main character’s social anxiety is the source of much of the humor, it isn’t mean, which is quite a feat. In the end it’s a funny, heartwarming show and I found every character very likable. I sure hope we get a season 2. This was my favorite show for this month.
See (Apple TV+) posits a post-apocalyptic future where (almost) everyone is blind. Sighted people are considered witches and are killed, because it was sight that caused the end of the world. We’re in the last season and for me I’m kind of hate-watching it, though PartPurple enjoys it more. It just seems really implausible. Every character seems to have some kind of sonar or something. It’s also super violent and has some really detestable characters. Jason Momoa stars and he gives it his all and kind of carries the whole show. I was happy to see Joe Flannigan and David Hewett are both in the cast; they were both Momoa’s co-stars on Star Gate Atlantis, which was, IMO, a much better show than this.
The English Game (Netflix) is a period piece about the beginnings of football in England. It was recommended by Bree TruLove or I’d never have found it. It was created by Julian Fellowes, who was also behind Downton Abby and The Gilded Age, so if you liked those you’ll probably like this. Good stuff.
Conversely The English (Amazon Prime) is a western starring Emily Blunt so I was pretty excited for it, but after I sat through 2 episodes I was done. It’s just one long trope. Skip it.
Reading
Aside from my annual re-reading of A Christmas Carol, no reading this month. 🙁
And so we charge headfirst into 2023. What new disaster awaits us this year? My Resolution this year is not to make any resolutions so I don’t have too much interesting to say about 2023…yet.
Well I finally finished Pentiment, the recent game from Obsidian. If it is a game. I’m not sure. For the sake of simplicity we’ll call it a game.
Ahem. Pentiment is a 2D medieval adventure. Gameplay consists pretty much exclusively of walking around and talking to other characters. There’s no combat and no fail state that I ever encountered. There’re almost no puzzles. There’s very little in the way of exploration. Just walking, talking, once in a while examining.
There’s no voice acting, it’s all written. And when I say written I mean the act of writing out the dialog is animated, so you watch the letters appear accompanied by an appropriate sound effect (the nib of a pen scratching on parchment, most of the time.) Sometimes there are even typos that get corrected. This went from seeming pretty neat in the first hours, to being super annoying since it just kept the pace of the game so slow.
You can pet the dog, so you know it’s a good game
However, just the other day a patch dropped that includes a setting for the text to just appear instantly when you hit a button. That made the game SO much more enjoyable and in a way invalidates a lot of my issues. I had the most fun playing in the first couple hours while everything was fresh and new, and then after this patch hit when the pace of the game sped up significantly.
What really flustered me was that I couldn’t understand what impact the few choices I made had on the story or the world. There are points where you pick some kind of character trait, which gives you additional dialog options. But so what? Sometimes you’ll say something and a banner will pop up: “This Will Be Remembered”. OK, so what? And there were a handful of times when an interaction was tagged a Success or Failure. I failed all but one of these and… so what? There’s only one ending to the story from what I’ve read, so you’re always going to get to that same ending. I guess parts of the middle of the story can change based on your decisions. I didn’t like it enough to play it a second time to see for sure. The lack of feedback was disappointing to me. What did my choices impact? There’s no way to tell without a second play-through.
This is the glossary you can consult to learn more about unfamiliar names/places/events
I mean, it’s a really good story (it’s a murder mystery). The location & time period are interesting, the characters are interesting, I didn’t guess the solution of the mystery until pretty near the end. There’s a neat interactive glossary explaining who various historical figures and organizations were. The writing is good. I wanted to hear the story. I just felt like the actual gameplay was so shallow as to just be a hinderance. I never really felt like what I was doing mattered. The story was on rails and no matter what I did, I’d arrive at the same ending that everyone else did.
I don’t know how long it took me to get through. My save file said something like 238 hours so I think it was counting all the time the game was sitting in Xbox Quick Resume or something. Howlongtobeat says the main story is 14 hours but I think it was longer than that. A review I read said 20-25 which feels closer to the truth, at least for me. I think if it had been 8-10 hours I would’ve enjoyed it more and maybe replayed it to see the results of my decisions, but 20 hours is too long for me to play it again. At least not any time soon.
This is one of those critical darlings that’s getting amazing ratings, but for me it was just OK. I would’ve LOVED it as a novel or a Netflix series. I probably wouldn’t have finished it if I hadn’t snagged the Steam Deck. It was a good game to play in bed before going to sleep, because that made it feel a bit more like a novel, if that makes any sense. Sitting on the couch essentially reading a story off the TV screen 10 feet across the room just isn’t a super engaging experience for me.
But again, that 1.8 patch changed things a lot, and I think if I’d played the whole game after that patch hit, I’d have come away with a much more positive reaction. So given that, I’d say check it out if you like the aesthetic and the historical fiction angle.
Header image: My Xbox Series X mirrored on the Steam Deck via in-home streaming. Sorry for the poor image quality. It’s tricky getting a shot that doesn’t have a ton of glare/reflections.
I finally got a Steam Deck and so far I’m quite happy with it. But there are a million reviews of the thing so I’m not going to bother.
As an Xbox gamer one of the first things I wanted to do is get the Deck and Xbox talking to each other. There’re two ways to play Xbox games on the Deck. The first is just using xCloud, the Game Pass Ultimate streaming service. Microsoft themselves have a post up on how to do this:
I followed those steps and everything worked fine, with the one caveat that after the initial setup I had to reboot the Steam Deck before the controller would work while playing games (which admittedly is a pretty huge caveat).
Unfortunately xCloud has never worked that well for me. I think I am just in some kind of Azure dead zone or something. Stadia (RIP), Nvidia, & Amazon Luna all work well. But xCloud I’m constantly getting pixelation and stutter.
Greenlight running on the Steam Deck, ready for some Xbox in-home streaming from the living room Xbox
But I do have an actual Xbox of course, and I can stream from that just fine. But the Microsoft solution listed above won’t help with that. Fortunately the open source community provides. I found a few guides to get this set up but in the end this is the one I followed. It’s a video, unfortunately. Well maybe not unfortunately, this is a case where it being a video kind of helps for certain steps.
To summarize the process, you need to install two bits of software on your Steam Deck
1) AppImageLauncher & specifically the -x86_64.AppImage version. I used version 2.2.0. You just download it and run it from the console with the “install” parameter.
2) Greenlight, and for me specifically I used 2.0.0-beta2. Download the .AppImage version, drop it in the Applications folder that AppImageLauncher created. Add it to Steam as a non-Steam game, and you’re basically done, though the video goes into details like recommended controller configurations and so forth.
Greenlight can be use both for home streaming and for xCloud so if you’re going this route you don’t need to follow the Microsoft instructions for xCloud streaming.
Greenlight ready to stream some xCloud games to the Steam Deck
Fair warning, when you first start Greenlight you’ll get an empty window for a few seconds and you might think something has gone wrong, but this just seems to be part of the boot up process.
The only real issue I have so far is that Greenlight doesn’t seem to be able to turn the Xbox on, even from ‘Stand By’ mode. If the Xbox isn’t on I get an error. This isn’t too big an issue for me but figured it is worth mentioning.
Ideally I’d love to see Microsoft come out with an officially supported way to do in-home streaming to the Steam Deck, though so far Greenlight seems to work fine.
There are certain games, like Pentiment, that I just enjoy more when playing on the handheld. Pentiment has a lot of written dialogue and it’s more comfortable to read the screen from a handheld than from across the room.
So far I’ve barely used the Steam Deck to play Steam games. I’m having too much fun playing my Xbox games on this thing!
Here we are, 11/12ths of the way through 2022. I love this time of year. Honestly November and December are about the only part of the year I really love. We need to move back north so summer can once again be something I look forward to instead of dreading.
Big news for me this month is I broke down and ordered a Steam Deck. It hasn’t arrived yet; I guess it is my Christmas present to myself. I’m not even sure WHY I want one but it just got stuck in my head that it was a cool gadget I needed in my life. I haven’t really bought a ‘toy’ since the new consoles 2 years ago so I don’t feel TOO guilty about spending the money.
Last Month’s Games
Spiritfarer is still being played every once in a while. I wrote a post about why I’m more or less done with it, but I still take a poke at it every now and then.
Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree’s Woe and the Blight Below got completed: here’s a post about that.
Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris has been dropped. I haven’t been able to shake off the ill will generated in the first part of the game.
Actually a lot of games have been dropped for no particular reason other than too many games, not enough time: Fallout 3 Yakuza 0 Destiny 2 Cyberpunk 2077
New Games This Month
Dying Light 2 wound up warranting its own post. I have a complicated relationship with this game. In fact I finally had to uninstall it because I kept finding myself playing it even though I wasn’t enjoying it much and it was making my physically ill. Uninstalling it broke the cycle and I’m FREE!
You can pet the dog, so you know it’s a good game
Pentiment is a nifty little narrative adventure from Obsidian. It is (so far) all just talking to other characters so it is pretty chill. I really enjoy what I’ve played but that game play loop of just reading dialog is always a struggle for me. I always think “Heck, I should just read the book.” I do want to finish it, though. There’s been a murder and it must be solved.
Gotham Knights was a Black Friday purchase and despite my best efforts I’ve only put a short time into it. I’m enjoying it, but it is such early days I don’t feel qualified to say much about it.
And just at the very tail end of the month, I let Genshin Impact back into my life. 🙂
TV
Andor was great. Rogue One is my favorite ‘modern’ Star Wars movie and I really enjoyed the darker, more serious tone that Andor shared with that movie. Can’t wait for Season 2.
Winx: The Fate Saga was bad. Granted I’m not the target audience, but I’m kind of over these shows where some young person thinks they know every, and go off and do whatever they want, and wind up being the hero.
Star Trek Voyager is still voyaging. I think it generally has gotten better (I think we’re in Season 5 now?) but not consistently so. Some episodes are real clunkers.
Currently we’re watching Wednesday, which I expected to be a rather silly show, but has turned out to be kind of a dark dramedy and we are LOVING it. In case you haven’t heard of it, it’s about Wednesday Addams of The Addams Family after she’s been sent away to boarding school for non-human types. Now that I think of it, Winx is about a teenage girl sent to boarding school for non-human types as well, but the two shows are night and day in terms of quality.
Reading
Nadda. I’m back to not really doing any reading. 🙁
And that’s November. Wow, that was a short recap, eh? Hope everyone has a great holiday season and I’ll be back with December’s recap next year! Har! A dad joke to finish things off!
This post started as a section in my monthly recap for November but it got long enough I figured I’d better split it out on its own, in an attempt to keep the monthly recap a bit shorter.
I was pretty excited for Dying Light 2 when it came out last winter. I even pre-ordered it. Then it came out and it was pretty buggy and overall, I wasn’t that thrilled with it. Let me quote myself:
Anyway I could go on and on but I think you get the point. I expect Dying Light 2 to get polished and tweaked over the next few months, and I’ve decided that rather than play the worst version of the game now, it makes more sense to wait and play it maybe in summer or next fall. So I’m putting it back on the shelf for now.
So as predicted, here it is fall and I’m back. I’ve played a lot more of it than I did last winter, but I’m not even sure why because overall I don’t enjoy it all that much. Technically it has gotten better; much of the jank is gone and it runs nicely on the PS5, so that certainly helps. But I still have a litany of complaints, most of them fairly personal.
First, the gore factor. This is 100% on me. I knew going in that the game was going to be super-gory; it’s one of the title’s calling cards. I completely support and respect their decision to make a game like this but, that vibe is just no longer for me; it is just too much. I kind of feel the same way about DL2 as I did when I stopped watching The Walking Dead. Enough is enough, y’know? After a while the gore just starts to wear me down. Also it’s bad enough that @partpurple started commenting on it, and so I stopped playing when she was in the room.
Second, there’s a lot of facets that have to do with time pressure. You’re infected and any time you are out of the sunlight (UV light keeps you healthy) a timer starts ticking down and if it hits zero, it’s game over. Again, this is 100% me and what I do and do not like: I hate time pressures in my games. I am a slow and deliberate player (side note: there are endless zombies so being slow and deliberate wouldn’t really work even without the time pressure). There are a lot of side quests that are “complete this challenge in under x minutes” that I just refuse to do. Also, minor thing but there’s no way to abandon a quest so my journal is full of timer-based side-quests that I will never do.
Lastly, the first person stuff makes me queasy. Again, this is a Me thing; you might not have any issues at all. It’s a fairly minor issue when I am in control. The big problem happens during in-game cut scenes when you lose control of the camera and your view of the world starts flailing around. Our vision does not work like that for one thing, so it feels dumb to me. More importantly, it makes me feel really sick really fast. At times I had to look away from the screen. One night after a long session of this nonsense, the game made me so sick that the next day I still had a headache from it.
So that’s a lot of bitching. I keep deciding I’m done with it…but then I keep going back. I’m not sure if I’m hate-playing it or what. Maybe I just want to finish to say I finished, given how much time I’ve sunk into it. I can’t tell you. But I keep booting it up. It’s like scratching poison ivy. I know I shouldn’t but I keep finding myself doing it. Mind you, there are certainly satisfying moments. As gory as it is, the combat can be fun and some of the parkour stuff is delightful once you get the hang of it. The world is pretty interesting and the game looks really good.
Still though…the other day I started something new even though I hadn’t completed Dying Light 2 and I found myself slightly surprised that I didn’t get a headache while playing. My brain had started to associate “video games” with headaches and nausea thanks to DL2.
Maybe I should just put it on Easy difficulty and blast through what remains.
Regular readers (Hi mom!) know that I’ve had “cozy management game” Spiritfarer hovering around the back burner of my ‘currently playing’ stove {Wow, that really didn’t work, did it?} for a while now. This week I decided it was time to see if I wanted to finish it, or if I’m done with it.
A little more backstory: this game was on Xbox Game Pass and I only started playing it right before it left the service. I was having so much fun I bought it and then proceeded to not play it much. Because, just me being me.
Anyway over the last several nights I’ve gone back to it more seriously. The overall game loop is that you have a ship which is also basically a floating town (see header image). You sail around an ocean, visiting various islands in order to find spirits to bring on board. You then satisfy the needs of these spirits (often by building them a house on the boat, and then improving it), and eventually the spirits pass on to whatever comes next. Last night my first spirit left me and I think I might be done with Spiritfarer, myself.
There’s a log of hugging going on!
This is one of those instances where I think it is an interesting game that I’m sure a LOT of people would enjoy, but it’s just not the right game for me. It is very, very chill. Very soothing. Soothing to the point where I sometimes literally start nodding off while playing. As someone who is perpetually tired, I’m generally in search of stimulation rather than soothing.
Most of my issues have to do with the pace of the game. You sail the ship, oh so very slowly, back and forth across the sea. When it gets dark your ship stops and you have to go and sleep to pass the night before you get going again. In theory while the ship is underway you can work on crafting but — and maybe I’m doing something wrong — but I find that takes up like 10% of my travel time. The rest of the time I’m just staring into space waiting to get to where I’m going.
Eventually you do unlock “Bus Stops” which are fast travel points, and that helps some. And just before I quit last night I crafted something that makes my ship travel 20% faster. Those might help but they also may have come too late for me. I’m just kind of bored. I go to a place, I gather some materials, I process them, I build a thing to make a spirit happy. Then I do the same thing again only with slightly better quality materials. As far as I know there is no fail state (maybe that’s what makes it cozy?) so there is no pressure or urgency. It is so very, very…relaxingzzzzz….
I also have to admit I was ‘stuck’ for a while and that may have just extended and slowed down the game beyond what was intended by the devs. When you first start the game you are limited in what parts of the ocean you can explore. By building upgrades for your ship you can expand your operable area. First thing you need is an ice breaker to get past an ice barrier.
I had everything I needed to build this except a Spirit Flower. I spent several play sessions sailing around the ocean visiting points of interest looking for a Spirit Flower, and had no luck. That was frustrating and felt really tedious.
Simultaneously, my first spirit (Gwen) had gone missing from the boat. I was supposed to locate her. I found her, over and over again, at shops where she’d be buying yarn, but I think this was a bug. Yarn-buying Gwen wasn’t the Gwen I was supposed to find. I was finding “for flavor” Gwen when I need to find “Active NPC” Gwen.
Summer is having strange dreams…
Eventually I got frustrated enough that I turned to Google. Apparently the other spirits on the ship are supposed to give you clues to finding Gwen, but that never happened for me. Luckily once I knew where to find her, I went there, finished her questline, she passed on to the great beyond and suddenly a Spirit Flower appeared in her house. ARGH!
So yeah, I did those two things in the wrong order. Now I know. Now you know. You don’t harvest Spirit Flowers, you get them when spirits leave the ship for good. Also Gwen’s location, in retrospect, was pretty obvious in that we’d been there before, but for me the player that was like in August when I first started playing, and I’d forgotten. So kind of a perfect storm of bad results for me.
Anyway I’m not deleting Spiritfarer or anything like that, but I’ve pretty much determined this can’t be my “main game” but maybe like a “mellow out at the end of the evening” game I pick up now and then. But if you’re looking for a game that is chill and relaxing and quite pretty and often charming, this is a title that tics off all those boxes.
I talked a bit about Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree’s Woe & The Blight Below in last month’s recap, and I said I had played enough of it. And I thought I had, but then I kept going back to it. Last night I finished it from the sense of seeing the “The End” screen. After that the game gives you a bunch more quests. Rather than being excited by that, I just felt daunted.
Just to repeat what I said in the recap, this is a Mosuo game like the Dynasty Warriors series. You and 3 NPC team mates take on hundreds of monsters at a time, and your attacks can hit 10 or 20 baddies, depending on how clustered they are. Each character has a few special skills/spells to use, and as you fight you build up a tension meter that, when maxed, let’s you go into a super-amped mode where spells don’t use mana and you’re more or less impervious to damage. At the end of this segment you have one final, often area-clearing, coup de grace attack.
Monsters that are defeated sometimes drop “Medals” that you can pick up and use to summon that type of monster to guard an area. This gives the game a bit of a tower defense element. These monsters won’t travel with you through a level, they just patrol the area you place them in.
You can control any of your party members, though I mostly stuck to my main hero, other than jumping to another to fire off their coup de grace now and then (the AI won’t use that ability).
The story is very linear. There are maybe 12 “playing fields” in the game that you’ll revisit often. It’s not a bad story but not super compelling either. The set up is that you live in a world where monsters and people are friends, until suddenly one day the monsters started attacking. The cause is the titular blight. The solution is to slaughter thousands of your former friends in your attempt to stop the advance of the blight on Yggdrasil, the World Tree.
You eventually have a stable of 13 (going from memory here) heroes to choose from. The Main Character is always in the party then you slot in the other 3 as you see fit. Characters not in the party get some experience, but not as much as those doing the fighting. As characters level up they get skill points you spend to make them more powerful. Early on you have some tough-ish choices to make in spending skill points, but eventually you get to where the updates are more subtle. Do I want 5 more health, or 5 more mana? That kind of thing. Every character gets geared up with a weapon, an ‘orb’ that acts as your armor, and accessories that you can craft from monster drops, though I didn’t do much with that.
There are some side quests but for the first 25 hours or so they are super low-effort. You’ll be asked to gather X quantity of rare monster drop Y or just to kill X quantity of monster type Z. To complete these quests you’ll revisit levels and fight infinitely spawning monsters until you chose to “evac”. I found this portion of the game super tedious and doing these is when I initially decided to quit.
Then, near the end of the game, suddenly you start getting quests with some narrative backstory. One character is getting married and you’re tasked with gathering items for the ceremony. Another character had a grimoire stolen and you need to track down the thieves and recover the tome. None of this was earth shattering but the associated missions had a start, middle and end, which made them MUCH more interesting to do than the earlier side quests. Some of them also require specific party members, which was the first time I’d bothered to change up my party. I have NO IDEA why they held this type of quest back until so late in the game; it would be a much strong title with more quests like these nearer the start of the game.
Combat becomes so chaotic you just have to swing and hope
OK so hopefully that gives you a vague idea of what the game is about and how it plays.
The weird thing is, I don’t know that I would recommend this game even though I kept going back to it. I think what appealed to me is just how kind of mindless it is. With election day coming up, and some difficult projects at work I’ve been feeling pretty stressed. DQH was something I could boot up and just work out my aggressions on without really putting much thought into it. The game isn’t very difficult (I suppose it could be if you rushed through it, I was doing all the boring side quests which leveled up my characters) and I mostly button-mashed my way through the whole thing. There is no death penalty. In fact if you fail a mission and give up, you still get to keep the experience and gold/items you accumulated up to the point you failed.
The big issue I have with it is that the UI is terrible, or at least terribly slow, in a lot of places. Yesterday I posted about how slow it is to refill healing potions, and that slowness appears in a lot of places. Lots of repeated, voiced, un-skippable dialog throughout the game. SO MANY “are you sure?” prompts on the simplest things.
The combat itself is so chaotic that you’ll either love it or hate it. This becomes more an issue as opponents get physically larger. The way the camera is set up you can’t look up very far, so you’ll be fighting monsters based on what you can see of their knees or something. In the final boss fight, the boss at one point starts to fly and I literally could only see the bottom of its feet.
Also all monsters of a type look exactly alike. So if you’re fighting 3 trolls (which are huge) you probably want to focus on one of them at a time. But if you lose track of that one — say you get knocked across the room by a troll club — when you get re-oriented it’s really hard to know which one you’d been fighting; monsters do have health bars but they’re up over their heads and if you can’t see the head, you can’t see the health bar. Similarly if you summon a monster, it looks exactly the same as the enemy monsters, though it does get a name. Problem is, if it is a tall monster you probably won’t be able to see the name (which, again, floats over its head).
So in the end I’d just give up and mash skills and attacks and wait for stuff to die. It was mindlessly entertaining. Which for me right now was enough, but I dunno that I’d suggest anyone else go out and track this game down.
Here’s more combat footage to put all this in perspective. It is long and boring so please, if you watch, skip around through it. You don’t want to sit through the whole thing, believe me!
I’ve been playing through 2015’s Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree’s Woe and the Blight Below recently. Almost through with it I think, but I’ve nearly bounced off it several times due to really curious decisions with the UI that lead to simple things taking SO long to do. I get frustrated, jabbing a controller button, waiting for the game to let me move on.
Finally just to be “that guy” (I mean, it’s a 7 year old game, it isn’t like it’s going to get patched at this point) I recorded the process of refilling your “healing stones” (which is essentially the same thing as buying healing potions in other games).
We had a little bit of a shakeup happen this month at Dragonchasers. My Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription ended as of October 28th.
So first of all, why did I let this happen? Mostly it had to do with Playstation Plus Premium. When Sony rolled out their new ‘subscription service’ tiers for Playstation Plus, I wanted to try them but I had banked about a year of old-school PS+ time via sales and so forth. I had to convert this time to Playstation Plus Premium which cost me around $60, but it set me up with PS+P until next July.
It turns out that having TWO “play all you want” subscriptions feels kind of wasteful. I only have so many hours to play games, right? And since PS+ was paid for, it seemed to make the most sense to let Xbox Game Pass lapse, at least to see how that felt. I knew I might get too much FOMO from this but I figured, if nothing else Black Friday is coming so maybe I could get a good deal on it if I took a break even for a month.
All that said, for me Xbox Game Pass is a far better value than PS+ Extra or PS+ Premium. Microsoft regularly adds new games to the library, and I mean new both in terms of “new to Game Pass” and “newly released”. Sony, so far at least, adds games once a month and they are predominantly older titles. There’ve been 1 or 2 exceptions like Stray, but for example in October these were the games added to Playstation+ Extra:
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City — The Definitive Edition
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Assassin’s Creed 3 Remastered
Assassin’s Creed Syndicate
Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China
Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India
Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: Russia
Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age — Definitive Edition
Dragon Quest Builders
Dragon Quest Builders 2
Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree’s Woe and the Blight Below
Dragon Quest Heroes 2: Explorer’s Edition
Inside
Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker
Hohokum
The Medium (PS5)
So one additional new-ish PS5 game (The Medium is fairly new to PS5 though was on Game Pass long ago) and one new-ish (Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker launched at the end of August) PS4 game, then a bunch of older titles from last generation.
In the same month Microsoft added Scorn, A Plague Tail: Requiem, Ghostbusters Spirits Unleashed & Medieval Dynasty to Game Pass, all of which are new games. (This is not all they added, just the new titles I can think of off-hand.)
In spite of all this, the optimistic plan was to run with PS+ Premium until it expired then go back to Game Pass.
In the end, it took me less than 24 hours to resubscribe to Game Pass. A lot of this is because I forgot that without Xbox Live Gold I couldn’t play Elder Scrolls Online (which, tho I never mention it in these recaps, is a game I play pretty consistently at a low level). So I needed Gold anyway, and once you have Gold you can upgrade to Game Pass Ultimate for $15, no matter how much Gold you have banked. So I bought a 1 year Gold subscription from Amazon for $60, then I bought seven 3-month Gold subscriptions using MS Rewards points. That left me with Xbox Live Gold until July 2025! Then I bought a 1-month Game Pass Ultimate subscription (also with MS Rewards points) which converted all that Gold time to GPU time. End result, I now have Game Pass Ultimate through August 2025 and I spent $60 out of pocket (plus a lot of time spent idly clicking on things with my coffee every morning in order to earn MS Rewards points.)
Pretty good deal.
Anyway on to the recap.
Last Month’s Games
Genshin Impact took up a good chunk of my October before I finally bounced off it. Overall I played this game nearly exclusively for about 8 weeks. The first 6 weeks were SO much fun as I sat alone in the corner with my PS5, noodling around in the world of Teyvat doing whatever seemed fun at the time. Then I started getting drawn into conversations about the game and the ‘right’ way to play, while at about the same time I decided I was going to try to max out the monthly Battle Pass. Net result: instead of wandering around the world having fun, I was logging in, doing my daily commissions then focusing on most efficiently burning through my daily resin allotment in such a way as to max out my progress both of my characters and of the Battle Pass. It didn’t take long for this to begin to feel like a total chore and for me to start playing GI just as a daily commitment I wanted to get out of the way as quickly as possible. Once I hit the end of the Battle Pass I was done. So I’m setting Genshin Impact aside for a while. I hope someday to come back to it and play it for fun again because I was having an utterly lovely time before I decided to “git gud.” (I dunno why I do this to myself but I do it often.)
Spiritfarer I am still playing, barely. One or two sessions all month. I would still like to get back to it so I don’t want to let it go. We’ll see what happens; I might have to let this one go next month if I don’t re-engage more significantly.
Yakuza 0 is a Game Pass game so I dropped it once I’d accepted that I was going to let my sub run out. Now that I reversed that decision, I have to decide if I want to bring it back into rotation.
Destiny 2 has fallen by the wayside. Not for any particular reason. I think Genshin just pushed a lot of games out of my limited brain capacity and Destiny 2 was one of them.
Cyberpunk 2077 never really got going but I did purchase it so I might get back to it. I’m on the fence with it. I think I just need to decide to devote 4-5 hours to really getting going into it so I get to the good stuff.
New Games This Month
Beacon Pines is a strange little game that is part choose-your-own-adventure story and part point & click adventure. The game is framed as a story book and at certain times a page of text will come up that describe decision points. You have to fill in a blank, Mad-Libs style, but you can only choose words that you’ve collected via exploring. The twist is that at any time you can (and I think, will have to) ‘rewind’ the story to an earlier decision point and try something new. Frequently by this time you’ll have found new words (eg new choices to try).
Might be a case where a picture is worth 1000 words…
It’s a very chill game (honestly, the challenge level is quite low), though also kind of creepy at times. I found the story to be really enjoyable, and at around 5-6 hours it’s the kind of game you can easily play through in a weekend. I think I finished it in 3 sessions over the course of the month. Recommended.
Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree’s Woe and the Blight Below is something I bought back in 2015 and never really played. When I saw it and its sequel were coming to PS+ Extra I decided to dust it off and give it another go to see if I maybe wanted to play the sequel. I put about 18 hours into it playing it seriously, but then I started to get a little bored. It is predominantly a musou game (think Dynasty Warriors or Sauron in the flashback battle at the start of Fellowship… it is you against dozens or hundreds of enemies, but each swing sends 10 or 20 baddies flying) with a bit of tower defense in the form of placing ‘tamed’ enemies to defend areas.
It is fun, but musou isn’t a favorite genre for me and after a while I needed a break and I thought I was done with it. A few days later I was back. So now I’m playing a level or two (which is like 15-30 minutes) every other day or so. That feels like a sweet spot for me and this genre.
Here’s 5 minutes of random combat. Don’t watch it all, you’ll get bored. But this shows the kind of game it is. All the combat feels pretty much like this!
The story, such that it is, feels really shallow. The side quests are super-low effort, along the lines of “go replay earlier areas until you kill 75 of enemy X” with zero narrative hanging off them. There are a ton of characters so if you love just grinding through enemies in this type of game you might really like it. There’s also some real QOL issues. Lots of talking to NPCs that should just be menu items. Some dialogs that you can’t manually advance through and just have to wait for the game to decide you’re done reading them. Things like that. Good reasons to quit playing. And yet… I keep going back.
Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris is another game I bought a long time ago. At launch it had a ton of technical issues so I just set it aside. Genshin Impact had me in an anime mood so I decided to give it another go. So far, not loving it. The first 10-15 hours are just clicking through dialogs and cut scenes which re-tell the anime. Every so often you’ll fight an enemy. At one point I went 2 hours trying to get to where I could make a hard save but it was just cut-scene, dialog, cut-scene, dialog with no opportunity to get to a save point. TWO HOURS.
Once the game finally “opened up” I was so sour on it I didn’t care any more, and I’m having a lot of trouble understanding the combat system (there were some tutorials but they were so long ago I’ve forgotten what they said) although so far button mashing has worked fine. I think there are far better RPGs out there to play, so this one is going back into the backlog.
This month there was all kinds of fuss made about Fallout having an anniversary so that somehow translated to me booting up Fallout 3 again. I’ve never finished it, and for once I resisted the urge to start over, so I’m level 7 or so, wandering the wasteland shooting stuff in the face and selling everything I can carry. The game runs really well (as you’d expect) on the Xbox. It’s not something I can spent 3 hours playing, but it’s a fun game to just dip into here and there. Maybe I’ll actually finish it someday. Not that I can remember what my goals are!
TV
She-Hulk ended up being really good after a somewhat slow start (for me). Mind you if you’re very serious about your Marvel content you might take exception to the more light-hearted tone (and 4th wall breaking) in the series, but I found it an absolute delight.
Sticking with the House of the Mouse, Andor is also really good, only here my caution is exactly the opposite. If you enjoy Star Wars because it is generally fairly ‘light’ then Andor might be a bit gritty for your tastes. But hey, it has the first Star Wars booty call that I am aware of.
I almost gave up on House of the Dragon after the first few episodes but I’m glad I didn’t. About half-way through, there’s a time jump (and some of the actors are replaced since the characters have aged) and at that point the series gets really good. There’s a bit less of the gratuitous and over-the-top violence and the story gets much more interesting. It is still for the most part a political drama though. If you’re tuning in primarily for lots of sword fights and dragon flame, you might be disappointed. I can’t wait for season 2. Someone please confirm we’re getting a season 2!!
Sadly Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power never really found its stride for me. I liked it, but I didn’t love it, and writing the recap of it now, a few weeks after the last episode, honestly I can hardly remember it. I do kind of feel like a more binge-ish re-watch might help me to get more out of it. We watched 2 episodes at a time with 2 weeks between each session, which probably did the show no favors.
Tales from the Explorer’s Club (Discovery) is a ‘light’ documentary show talking about the real-life adventures of members of The Explorer’s Club, an organization that’s been around for over 100 years. It’s hosted by Josh Gates who we’ve watched since he came on the scene with a silly cryptid/paranormal show on SyFy called Destination Truth. These days he deals with topics closer to reality, like some of the first polar explorations or exploring the depths of the ocean. This one was quite a surprise and we enjoyed it a lot. Sadly there are only 6 episodes.
Star Trek: The Lower Decks was amazing. It is always amazing. It’s renewed for another season too, which is also amazing!
Star Trek Voyager is really kind of dumb. I’d forgotten how dumb it is and how many huge plot holes there are in it. It is getting a little better now that we’re into season 3, but seasons 1 & 2 were like “Waaa?” constantly
Reading
OMG I finished a book. Cibola Burn is the storyline that takes place on Ilus, which I thought was a great season of the show, and the book was pretty great too. Now I’ve started Nemesis Games. I didn’t like that season of the show too much so we’ll see if I find the book more interesting.
So that’s October and good lord, I need to start doing mid-month recaps or something. This is way way too long!
