What game(s) are you playing right now?

[Zero Kirby]

Been rotating between Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Burnout Revenge, and the Dead as Disco demo over the last few days. Just kinda chippin' away at getting my island set up the way I want in New Horizons day by day. Hoping I can turn a profit on these turnips I just bought.

Burnout Revenge is just good ol' classic fun and after 100%-ing Paradise I wanted to go back to when you could just slam through same-way traffic without a care in the world. I've been playing the Mario Kart World soundtrack over the game and holy guacamole it's a hell of a vibe

And then Dead as Disco is just my most anticipated game at the moment. I've gotten dozens of hours out of just the demo alone - it's basically if Hi-Fi RUSH had Arkham-style combat and you could plug in your own music to fight to. Again, the Mario Kart World soundtrack has provided some fun fights

[littlelum]

I'm currently bouncing between Final Fantasy V and DK Bananza. For both of them, I wasn't too sure about them at first, but the more I play them, the more they grow on me.

Bananza was really easy at the beginning, and it felt like there was too much handholding at first. I'm now later in the game, and it is much more enjoyable once it gets challenging. I just finished the elephant level, and it was a lot of fun.

For FFV, while everyone says the story isn't that great, I've been enjoying it. I wasn't expecting to like the combat as much as I am, since most FF games I just spam the basic attack. I'm still doing that, but I can't over rely on it like I usually do.

[GideonWilhelm]

I've never been a fan of DRPGs or grid-based dungeon crawlers or whatever it pleases you to call them, like Legend of Grimrock or Wizardry.  I'd tried some out before, but they didn't really click until this past week when I decided to finally try Vaporum, since I've had it in my library.  And I gotta say... I'm obsessed.  I think I've immediately fallen in love with this genre.  Even games I bounced off before, I'm loving now. 

But Vaporum is unlike anything I've experienced before.  Combat is so simplistic, but so satisfying.  You can actively dodge and bait enemies around the environment.  Since everything's on a grid, your options for motion are extremely clear at all times.  You can get a feeling for enemy timings and defeat entire encounters without taking damage if you're careful. 

There's an optional time stop mode that's amazing if you're struggling and don't have the greatest of reflexes, and is very much a "time only moves when you do" type thing, so you don't have to manually toggle it over and over to step through time, even attempting to attack while your weapon is on cooldown advances time.

Some of the puzzles, however... on the floor "Haunted", there's a box puzzle that has you circumnavigating the room several times over.  You get an automap, but the automap doesn't show the boxes, so you kind of have to map it out on paper in order to comprehend the whole picture, because otherwise, you can really only see what's in front of you, and what's next to what's in front of you.  I had to look up the solution to this one, and I hope the dev who designed it is cursed with somewhat uncomfortable office chairs for the rest of their natural life.

It's also really easy to allocate stuff wrong and screw yourself.  I took the Thauma rig, which is like picking Wizard in a typical RPG, but I didn't realize for a few hours how things would scale as you level up, so even on Easy mode, encounters felt brutal because I was investing perk points into maces, shields, and guns.  You really wanna lean into what your rig is good at and focus your point investments into getting chosen stats as high as possible before you diversify, it seems.  I've started over, still picking the Thauma rig because I like magic, but investing into gadgets (spells) like the rig was meant for.

The game could also do more to explain what "fumium" is before offering you a class partly defined by the fact that it gains additional fumium from all sources.  It's experience points.  That's basically it, at least as far as I can tell.

Overall, though, the guns are very satisfying and hit like a truck even without investment, attacks being a short windup followed by a nondescript, general slash/gunshot animation is something that tickles my brain in a way I can't describe, and the cooldown system feels very old school King's Field.  I absolutely love this game and I haven't even gotten halfway through yet