What are you currently playing?

[Bobchillingworth]

I'm actually pleasantly surprised that Chronicles contains 10 cases; when the Steam store page mentioned a "duology", I assumed it was referring to the bundle with the Ace Attorney Trilogy on offer.

[Herman Gigglethorpe]

After playing more of Cyber Sleuth, I'm glad I decided not to write a Let's Play of it for this forum.  The game is poorly balanced on Hard, and it sometimes shows on Normal starting around Chapter 9 as well.  Bosses have too much HP and defense:  some recommended "strategies" online tell you to get a specific Digimon for faster experience gain, and also go for the few that have defense piercing attacks.


Bosses are also fast, and can get one or two turns before your party acts.  On Hard, this can easily kill you in later chapters, and even reserves entering the fight can't save you due to how turn order works.  Battles aren't tactical, since direct stat buffs are 10%, and combo chance buffs can still be unreliable.  For the most part you just pick Digimon with a type that's strong against the boss and select the strongest attack.  Diminishing returns for experience set in quickly in Cyber Sleuth, so it's hard to power level.


Cutscenes are unskippable, and can occur before and between multiple mandatory fights.  If Pokemon Sun stole the Poke Pelago idea from Cyber Sleuth, it also copied the concept of characters talking for too long.  As far as Switch monster RPGs go, Pokemon Sword/Shield is for solo challenges, and Nexomon Extinction is for team building.  Only get Cyber Sleuth if you already love Digimon or something.  I have no earlier attachment to Digimon, so I probably won't pick Cyber Sleuth up again when I'm done playing it.


I need to learn to be more skeptical of reviews, even player reviews. . .


EDIT:  Hacker's Memory is as bad with the cutscenes as Cyber Sleuth.  Planescape Torment gets it right because although there is a lot of dialogue, you can read it at your own pace, or skip through it quickly if you've seen it already.  With a game like Pokemon Sun/Moon or Cyber Sleuth, you have to keep pounding on the "confirm" button to get to the actual gameplay.

[haphazard1]

Along with occasional runs of Jupiter Hell (finally got to Io), I have been playing Iratus: Lord of the Dead. Lots of similarities to Darkest Dungeon with the groups of four in position-focused combat, exploring and fighting, and building up your home base. But while Iratus can be very tough, it is much friendlier than Darkest Dungeon on things like inventory management and showing upcoming turn order. Watching Sullla's most recent Friday stream reminded me just how much Darkest Dungeon goes out of its way to screw the player just because it can. I bounced off Darkest Dungeon hard, but Iratus has been a lot of fun.

Send forth your undead minions to slaughter the living, then turn their body parts into more undead minions. You can also take direct action to assist your minions by casting spells for everything from direct damage to shuffling positions (your minons' or the enemies') to various buffs and debuffs. Managing your limited resources and developing your minions' abilities are key aspects of the game, along with lots of battles of course. Can you grow strong enough to defeat your enemies and fight your way up to the surface world? There are a limited number of encounters available before you have to fight the bosses of each stage, so staying ahead of the power curve is crucial.

I have beaten the game on the first two difficulties, and am working on the next level ('Good Always Wins' ). There is also a DLC, which I am planning to pick up.

[Herman Gigglethorpe]

I got sick of Cyber Sleuth and Hacker's Memory, so today I played Risk of Rain instead.  Huntress won on Rainstorm this time.  It wasn't easy, as I took too long and the difficulty was at HAHAHAHA by the end of the Providence battle.  Instead of a healing Use item, Huntress had the boomerang saw, which happened to deal the final blow.


Huntress teleported the Gauss Cannon, healing station, and random Use item chest to the final battle.  The first two were necessary, while the chest had nothing better than the boomerang saw.  One advantage Huntress had over other classes was the ability to strafe while shooting arrows.  Huntress brought a healing drone, attack drone, and laser drone to the Providence fight, but only the laser drone was active by the end.  The others were too expensive to repair.


Huntress's ending:  ". . .and so she left, her soul still remaining on the planet".


Final Time:  43:56


Tomorrow I'll be able to play Subnautica.  The Switch version is said to be as good a port as possible.

[haphazard1]

I have been playing Fort Triumph. It is a fantasy-themed turn-based game that is like someone glued together the overworld/strategy layer of HOMM3 with the tactical combat of the Firaxis XCOM remakes. So far (I have completed only the first story line arc) it has been a lot of fun. Exploring the map with your active heroes, visiting locations for encounters and events, collecting resources, and building up your town is very reminiscent of early Heroes of Might and Magic games. But rather than recruiting creatures as your army, you have heroes with classes and skill trees who fight tactical battles with action points and abilities, cover mechanics, and overwatch. There is a big emphasis on using the environment against enemies, such as toppling trees to crush enemies or using push/pull abilities to slam enemies into obstacles (or each other) to damage and stun them.

There are a lot of options to customize your heroes, with choices of skills within class plus cross-class options. Certain items or visits to special map locations can also unlock skills outside what the hero class would normally offer. The campaign progression has a lot of things locked early on, with more buildings, upgrades, and choices opening up as the story moves forward. There is also a skirmish mode for randomized games against the AI or other humans, with multiple factions available that have different town development options. (Again, very HOMM2/3-ish.) The story line has been decent enough, if rather full of standard fantasy tropes (a goblin invasion, scheming nobles causing trouble, etc.), with some humor mixed in.

If you like the early HOMM games or the Firaxis XCOM games, and especially if you like both, Fort Triumph is worth a look.

[El Grillo]

someone glued together the overworld/strategy layer of HOMM3 with the tactical combat of the Firaxis XCOM

Well that's one way to get my attention!

I was recently introduced to an overhaul mod for FTL called Multiverse, and I've been enjoying it a lot. It uses a newly developed modding tool to introduce way more new content than was possible before, including lots of new races with unique characteristics and abilities, items, ship layouts (with 100+ unlockable player ships), and events. The mod is under active development and has introduced lots of custom assets for weapon/drone sprites, ship art, and backgroudns. The setting is that after your original victory, the Rebels figured out multiverse travel a la Into the Breach and have set out to conquer other timelines, with the player set out to thwart them.

Unlike Captain's Edition which I tried briefly and disliked immediately, Multiverse tries to preserve gameplay balance and the overall difficulty curve, with the player and flagship both ending up with higher power levels than in vanilla, and weapon quality and event RNG is far less punishing. Unlike the CE flagship which could and would frequently generate unbeatable cheater layouts, the Multiverse flagship has been tuned up but you know what you're getting every time and can prepare accordingly, like in vanilla. Sectors are also a bit more varied and well-defined, for example I just lost my most recent run because I thought I'd go through the Rebel Stronghold (instead of a green sector), which has a very tough fight on entry, the rebel fleet chases you down faster, and good luck finding an opportunity to repair.

I played a couple hundred hours of FTL unlocking everything and then basically never played it again, until now. There are a couple of menu-based interfaces that take getting used to, and some of the new art and music feels a bit out of place compared to others, but overall I'd highly recommend it (currently on ship #5 after about 15 attempts on hard difficulty).

EDIT:

Flagship spoilers:

   

I've never had a run quite like this. The Engineer Cruiser A starts with a Halberd beam and combat drone, but I converted it into a implacable grindy crew-kill machine. I found an early Renewable Bomb (deals 2 system and 30 crew damage, but no hull damage, and doesn't require missile ammo in exchange for longer cooldown) which originally just served as a nice pair to the Halberd, removing a shield bubble on a similar 17s cooldown. Then I found the Nephthys mine launcher, a new class of missile weapon which trades off greater efficiency for much slower projectile velocity. This variant doesn't require missile ammo, has low cooldown, and deals 2 hull damage with a good breach/fire chance, but no system damage. With these two weapons, I had a setup that could effectively ignore shield bubbles entirely, (if it could survive the enemy alpha strike for long enough) to bomb their systems into oblivion, stall repairs with Nephthys, and then pick off the crew at my leisure with more bombs. I wasn't sure how long this would work, but then I got a second Renewable Bomb and that setup was more than good enough to win with. I picked up a Hellfire drone (toggleable between fire beam and 2-damage beam; most drones are now toggleable between modes, which makes them a lot more useful) specifically for the flagship to deal with the Zoltan shield and speed up the end of the fight.

In addition to the usual survivability tools of defensive drones (now with significantly more reliable targeting), hacking, and cloaking, I also had access to a new augment called the Targeting Jammer which let me, upon beginning combat, choose to spend 3 reactor power and 1 fuel to lock 2 power out of the enemy weapons system. This made the run rather tight on fuel and also didn't work on some enemies like the flagship artillery, but set most enemies way too far behind the curve. I took all my damage in phase 2 where one of the hacking drones snuck past my defensive drones and hit piloting during the drone swarm.

Also, RIP my entire starting crew of 4 Humans, plus a whole bunch of other dead crew. I went through multiple Crystal sectors on this run, which explains all the crystal crew, but facing crystal boarders who use lockdown is basically a guaranteed crew death. Even using Hacking on the enemy Teleporter wouldn't work because the cooldowns wouldn't be synced.

[Herman Gigglethorpe]

Subnautica ended in the best way possible.  Just after the Sea Emperor Leviathan said "Now you go among the stars, and I fall among the sand.  We are different.  But we go. . .together", a Switch error message appeared and kicked me out of the game.  This is almost as good as the endless final battle in Tales of the Abyss 3DS when Tear failed to use her cutscene magic.  


(Subnautica runs well on Switch otherwise.  The only noticeable problems are framerate stutters on rare occasions, a graphical glitch that happened once to me with a teleport, and myopic draw distance.)


EDIT:  This game is actually longer than many RPGs considering the amount of travel time and material gathering required.  Tales of Vesperia took less time to beat than Subnautica in Survival Mode.

[Bobchillingworth]

I'm currently wrapping up the Ace Attorney Chronicles, which are excellent, perhaps my favorite games of the franchise. Wonderful characters, and each case ties into the main plot in some fashion.


Also unreasonably excited that AI: The Somnium Chronicles (currently on sale!) is getting a sequel, which was apparently announced back in June.


Next on the list is probably the new Pathfinder game; Kingmaker was kind of a mess (but fun regardless), and I hear this one is buggy, but it sounds like the writing is much improved and the current issues are more "frustrating" and less "unplayable".

[Bobchillingworth]

Been playing Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. It's substantially more polished than Owlcat's previous Pathfinder CRPG (Kingmaker) was around the same point from release, though many of the same annoyances which kept that game from being excellent crop up again here, to (sometimes much) lesser degrees. Buggy combat, random spikes in difficulty, quests on hidden timers and/or which are easily permanently missed, success in the main CRPG game being tied to a half-baked glorified minigame from another genre (in this game a barebones Advance Wars-style strategy game).

That sounds like a series of substantial complaints, but whereas Kingmaker could (and would) become literally unplayable if you ran in blindly without a guide or stumbled into a particularly nasty bug, WotR is more stable and lets you customize your character and the difficult on the fly, so you can make up for whatever nonsense the developers left in their game.

[Herman Gigglethorpe]

Been playing Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.  It's substantially more polished than Owlcat's previous Pathfinder CRPG (Kingmaker) was around the same point from release, though many of the same annoyances which kept that game from being excellent crop up again here, to (sometimes much) lesser degrees.  Buggy combat, random spikes in difficulty, quests on hidden timers and/or which are easily permanently missed, success in the main CRPG game being tied to a half-baked glorified minigame from another genre (in this game a barebones Advance Wars-style strategy game). 

That sounds like a series of substantial complaints, but whereas Kingmaker could (and would) become literally unplayable if you ran in blindly without a guide or stumbled into a particularly nasty bug, WotR is more stable and lets you customize your character and the difficult on the fly, so you can make up for whatever nonsense the developers left in their game.

This sounds like Romancing Saga 3's Mikhail campaign if it were a CRPG.  Or maybe if Suikoden 2 were more challenging.  (Can't be bothered to continue playing Romancing Saga 3 right now.  Too burned out on traditional RPGs at the moment. . .)


As far as my games, I've beaten Risk of Rain 1 a few more times on Rainstorm, with HAN-D, Mercenary, and Engineer.  Mercenary should get melee range bonus items, HAN-D can heal with one of its attacks, and Engineer needs mobility items like Hopoo Feather because the class is so slow by default.  Attack Drones are recommended for all classes as usual, but Mercenary can do surprisingly well against the final boss in melee with dash and rapid stab moves if you get to him fast enough.


Downwell is a "roguelite" that I haven't mentioned here.  If I bothered to write game award ceremony, Downwell would win Best 1980s Arcade Game That Never Was.  The concept is simple:  jump down levels of a well while stomping enemies, or shooting them with your gunboots.  Exploring side areas can give you currency, gun upgrades, or access to shops.  The classes I've won on Normal difficulty are Boulder, Arm Spin, and Levitate. 


Boulder gives you 6 HP with a penalty of fewer upgrade choices at the end of each level, and is the easiest choice.


Arm Spin is probably 2nd easiest.  It has 4 HP, it replaces gem caves with gun upgrades, and shops are rare.


Levitate has 4 HP like most classes.  The difference is that you fall slowly.  This can give you more reaction time, or the ability to jump on enemies like bats that would be otherwise hard to hit.


The gimmick style I haven't won with yet is Handstand, which eliminates all end of level upgrades in exchange for cheaper shops.  Some of the upgrades are so useful that it's a handicap to play with Handstand, especially since you still have 4 HP.



Recommended upgrades in Downwell:


Laser Sight-More range and accuracy.  It's good mostly because you can stay farther above the final boss.

Candle-Longer invincibility period after you get hit.

Knife and Fork-Eating enough enemy corpses restores 1 HP, or gives you a point to a max HP upgrade if full.  Be sure to get this before Aquifer (3rd area) if you can:  it has plenty of calamari and turtle soup.

Apple:  Heals 4 HP.  If you take Apple when at full HP, you get a guaranteed max HP increase.

Blast Module:  Creates a blast whenever you stomp on something.  Great for killing enemies beneath objects in Limbo (4th area).

Timeout:  This upgrade is more situational, but it stops time in a small area around you when you get hit.  This can help in the final battle.

Youth:  Heals 1 HP, creates more upgrade options in future areas.  Great for Boulder style in particular.

Member's Card:  Guarantees a shop at the beginning of each area, and provides a 10% discount.  This eliminates Arm Spin's weakness, especially if you get gems from combos in Limbo.

Gem Powered:  Gems restore gunboots ammo.  If your current playthrough doesn't give you many ammo upgrades, you'll be glad to have this!  (Normally, you restore ammo by touching the ground or stomping on an enemy.)