What are you all playing right now?

[Angrboda]

I purchased several difficult platformer/Metroidvanias during Steam's winter sale.  I've always avoided games that are described as hard or difficult in the past because I'm not very good at games, but I'm finding the intense challenge is half the fun.  I'm working on Dead Cells right now, and have Cuphead, Celeste, and Hollow Knight waiting after that.

Good luck and have fun with them... I envy your upcoming journey ; I used to play those sorts of games, Mario and Sonic etc, back in the day when I was young and dexterous, but now I'm middle aged and prone to RSI, I can't. So everything I play now has to be slow and/or cerebral, and not based on dexterity/physical skill. Not saying I don't love the new sorts of games I play nowadays, but they're very different from the sorts of games I played when I was young.

***

At the moment I'm playing another stint of Astroneer, since they've just released a major update. It's a great game with a uniquely lonely sort of atmosphere... of a lone Astronaut in a silent and still, but visually vibrant Space... but it doesn't have the greatest 'gameplay loop' to keep people interested long term... so despite how rich and interesting the game is on the way up - explore planets to gather resources (and meet other exploration goals which I won't spoil), to build machines, to process resources, to build more complex machines, to process resources, to build more complex circuits of interconnected machines, to, you guessed it, process resources - the most common complaint I ever see of it is that people are bored and have run out of things to do. Ie once you've built your perfect factories for processing and sorting resources, there's not much else to do beyond whatever goals you can create for yourself.

If you're creative in a certain way, there is added value in the sense that in Creative mode (ie no gameplay progression but infinite resources) and outside you can create all sorts of abstract circuits, that won't directly help with the game (such as calculators), but which are just design challenges in their own right, made possible largely due to the fairly recent 'automation update' which added all sorts of switches and sensors to the game as components. Personally I'm not very interested in that, but in the Astroneer community, there are plenty of people who are... in the forums regularly sharing their latest designs and projects.

Back to the gameplay loop though, what seems to be a common experience is end-gamers dip into the game every time there's a new update, hoping that it will solve this gameplay loop problem in some substantial way, but so far, not really. The last update added two new vehicles to the game, which required extensive fetch quests and resource processing to unlock and build, but though that was great for the exploration side of the game, ultimately it feeds back into the same gameplay loop, so didn't really solve the problem beyond a few extra weeks of play. The latest update might though... as it's the first time fauna has been added to the game (up to now it's just been Triffid-style flora)... pets which give character buffs, and which require feeding/caring for in some way... I don't know anything beyond that since I've just started the quest... but hopefully it will amount to more than just a few weeks of play, and provide a more sustainable long-term/regular gameplay loop. Here's hoping.

I don't get games that one might describe as pastoral, just a loop of repeated, moderately pleasurable activities. I do however love my sims, though. Train sims, truck sims, farming sim. There's just something about them that I can't put my finger on.

[emjay]

...
I don't get games that one might describe as pastoral, just a loop of repeated, moderately pleasurable activities.  I do however love my sims, though.  Train sims, truck sims, farming sim.  There's just something about them that I can't put my finger on.

I guess for me the lure of games like Stardew Valley, is that you're constantly building a persistent legacy of sorts... your farm, your business... just that sense of slowly and incrementally working towards multiple long and short term goals concurrently. Like I don't know, you're growing your crops but you've also saved up enough to buy a tree sapling, for which the expected return on investment is a much longer term goal... 28 days or whatever to grow the tree, but after that it will give you one fruit per day when it's in season, without needing any maintenance like watering as you do for other crops or whatever... it'll take a while to pay for itself, but you weigh up whether you want to make that investment, and just enjoy working towards it, day by day. Stardew Valley was the first game like this I'd played, and it was so addictive that I found it really hard to disengage even when I wasn't playing, sad as that is; even in my downtime I'd find myself daydreaming about this or another goal in the game, and, as they accumulated, I'd just have to boot up the game, just to get them out of my system, in case I forgot them. So yeah, no other game has had that sort of effect on me.

As for those sorts of sims, I've never really played any... unless you count something like Elite Dangerous or something... a kind of space sim. I think I might one day give the farming sim you've mentioned on steam a go, maybe after this current binge of Astroneer, but I can only usually handle one game at a time ;-). If that's your type of game though, I did come across one game you might find interesting... it's a sailing sim, on Steam, called Sailwind, currently £15.49. I saw a youtube video of it and though it was only in early access (don't know if it still is... probably), it just looked really interesting from the sim point of view. The guy that was playing the game in the video clearly knew about sailing outside of the context of the game, from the way he was speaking, so was using a lot of technical language I'd never even heard of, not being a sailor, but it was clearly all really well represented in the game. So yeah, although I think it would be too complicated for me, if that's your thing, this looks like a really good and immersive sailing sim... it was certainly immersive to watch the guy playing it on youtube... I could have watched it for hours. As far as the early access goes, it's looks like they've concentrated most on the sim part, at the expense of the locations/quests etc in the game, but if the part of this sort of game that you're interested in is strictly the sim part, as in in this case, sailing the boat, taking every minute detail into account like the direction, speed, and presence or absence of wind, the weather etc, which sails are up and down and how far up or down etc, ...if that's what you're interested in, this looks great

[Disagreeable]

Mafia.

[emjay]

Mafia.

We used to play that a lot on this site, and still have a whole section/subforum set up for it, but it's been dormant for quite a while due to lack of interest. Granted even in it's heyday it was often difficult to get the numbers, meaning we couldn't play games uninterrupted back to back (which in a way I was glad of, cos in my experience they take a lot out of you ;-)) and often had to spend a lot of time between games proactively trying to recruit old or new players on the site, but we managed. It was a nice little mafia community we had here, a lot members of which have since moved on to other things/sites, but in theory there's no reason why we couldn't play here again, if we could drum up enough interest. Here's hoping that will happen in the future.

[Angrboda]

Mafia.

We used to play that a lot on this site, and still have a whole section/subforum set up for it, but it's been dormant for quite a while due to lack of interest. Granted even in it's heyday it was often difficult to get the numbers, meaning we couldn't play games uninterrupted back to back (which in a way I was glad of, cos in my experience they take a lot out of you ;-)) and often had to spend a lot of time between games proactively trying to recruit old or new players on the site, but we managed. It was a nice little mafia  community we had here, a lot members of which have since moved on to other things/sites, but in theory there's no reason why we couldn't play here again, if we could drum up enough interest. Here's hoping that will happen in the future.

He may be referring to the computer videogame.

[emjay]

We used to play that a lot on this site, and still have a whole section/subforum set up for it, but it's been dormant for quite a while due to lack of interest. Granted even in it's heyday it was often difficult to get the numbers, meaning we couldn't play games uninterrupted back to back (which in a way I was glad of, cos in my experience they take a lot out of you ;-)) and often had to spend a lot of time between games proactively trying to recruit old or new players on the site, but we managed. It was a nice little mafia  community we had here, a lot members of which have since moved on to other things/sites, but in theory there's no reason why we couldn't play here again, if we could drum up enough interest. Here's hoping that will happen in the future.

He may be referring to the computer videogame.

I didn't know there was one?... I know there's the video game 'Impostors' which seems to be largely based on it, and it's equivalent mode in Fortnite, but I don't know of any video game of Mafia itself... but you may be right he meant something like that, if so, my bad... but still here's hoping we can get Mafia going on this site again sometime in the future.

ETA: Ah, I think I know what you might mean, in which case my bad yet again... I think I've maybe seen around a game called 'Mafia'... nothing to do with Impostors or the forum game Mafia, but just an action game? If so, sorry about that, I've never played it or have any clue what it's like, so even if I may have seen it around on Steam or wherever, it didn't immediately come to mind when I thought of Mafia.

[Angrboda]

Playing some Train Sim World 2. It's strangely both more immersive and more arcade-like than Train Simulator 2022. It's more immersive because you're hopping on and off the engine and walking around to accomplish various tasks, but at the same time, things like good brake operation are not as sensitive as they are in TS2022.

[Angrboda]

Set up the Gog Galaxy game center to handle launching my games. After some figuring out I've learned that while it's not as intuitive as the Steam interface of collections, you can accomplish basically the same thing with Gog Galaxy, and all my favorites end up on one screen, broken down into my current categories (priority games, second choices, and additional games of interest). The only disadvantage is that there's no provision for adding locally installed games that are not associated with any service. There might be a gimmick you can exploit, but for now until I find out differently, my Go oriented programs cannot be integrated. I've added Gary Grigsby's War In The East to my 'hot' games and have started reading the intro manual. I found the manual after taking a quick peek at a scenario. There were so many strange symbols presented all at once that I almost panicked. And I started reading one of the books on Go that I got from the library. The history is fascinating, but the idea that I'll need to play thousands of games to acquire even basic competence is a bit intimidating.

[BloodyHeartland]

Far too much recently. I’ve been pretty sporadic with my gaming habits, having so much to play and very little free time. I was having a bit of a Kirby marathon in preparation for the new Kirby game coming end of next month, but I also started playing Dark Souls again because I want to finish at least one Fromsoft game before Elden Ring comes out. And today it’s been announced a sequel to Voice of Cards is coming on the 17th, and I haven’t even finished the first one yet.

[emjay]

Rogue Tower... a game that came out recently on Steam. It's a 'Roguelite' tower defense game that's very addictive. Great if you're looking for a decent war game, with lots of carnage... shit blowing up left right and centre ;-)... but don't want something quite as involved/complex as a full-on RTS like Starcraft or Age of Empires. This one is part RTS but also turn based... each turn as you uncover another square of the map, a path leading to your tower, which can split at forks allowing multiple choices of where to expand next, the enemy starts flooding in along that uncovered path and you have to line it with defenses... making them run the gauntlet as it were... and stop them reaching the tower where they can damage it. It's just so much fun and so addictive leveling up and unlocking new weapons, and when you inevitably die, as is expected with these sorts of Roguelite games, you get XP that you can spend on a massive skill/tech tree to unlock better stuff for your next run, so pretty addictive gameplay loop there. I took one look at this on YouTube and fell in love with it, and playing it, have not been disappointed.