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[Mephisto]

Epistory is a fantasy game wherein you fight insects as a lady on a wolf in an origami world... with the power of TYPING! It's pretty good.

Intended to come out around Q3 2019 is Nanotale, something that sounds like it would be cyberpunk but is not.

[Zangi]

Epistory is a fantasy game wherein you fight insects as a lady on a wolf in an origami world... with the power of TYPING! It's pretty good.

Intended to come out around Q3 2019 is Nanotale, something that sounds like it would be cyberpunk but is not.

Hmmm... gonna have to get my niece some sort of typing games once she gets smart enough to use computers.  But that is still a few years off, still in the keyboard smashing phase.  The tiny blighter can somewhat use a smartphone for youtube videos though.

[Cthulhu]

Been playing Blade and Sorcery on the Vive.  Pretty great.  Basically like Gorn, but with a more realistic aesthetic and much better physics.  You've got a full body with physical presence in the game, your hands stop when you touch walls, weapons can tangle together, full collision means you can halfsword, mordhau, all that stuff, though the longsword handles pretty awkwardly.  Two handed weapons are always awkward in VR games, but when they're right next to each other any discrepancy between in-game hands and real hands confuses the game too much.  You can get around it by putting the foregrip handle through the hindgrip ring, which approximates the handle well enough, but it's still hard to swing effectively.

Fighting in a more realistic environment in VR makes you feel like a fucking badass though, moreso than Gorn.  Fought an enemy wizard, walked up on him with my shield up to absorb his lightning, until he was backed into a corner and I just shield slammed him over and over until he was dead, while warding off his friend with my sword.  Then bashed the friend so he fell back against the wall, grabbed his sword hand, and cracked his head against the wall, feels good man.  Full collision makes things so much better, you can chokeslam people, grab two guys and knock their heads together, catch an enemy's wrist and make him stab himself, pretty much anything, and when you're actually doing it with your body instead of pushing a button and watching a canned animation it feels so cool.

If you've got VR you gotta get it.  It's apparently even cooler with the Index controllers, full body tracking including fingers so you can grab things more naturally, throw your weapon up and kick it at somebody, ridiculous shit.

[Akura]

Watching videos of Blade & Sorcery is what convinced me to plan to upgrade my PC to handle VR. Unfortunately, I might not have any physical space to set up a VR rig in the foreseeable future.

[Mephisto]

ActRaiser spiritual sequel by those weird Zeno Clash people, out now.

[nenjin]

I’d be interested to hear how it’s turned out. Loved Actraiser but I didn’t necessarily feel like I needed more of it.

[Aoi]

Godhood by the same guys who did Reus... is... uhm... frankly kind of uninteresting for something that has such a grand premise and description. Ultimately, not recommended.

Ostensibly, you're a god that has only loose, indirect control over your worshippers, and you're trying to build up a city of followers. It sounds kind of like a Populus or Black and White thing going on. I mean, during creation, you get to set color themes, a light/dark alignment or something like that, key ethos (I went with Lust...), how you and your followers are described, and how you're depicted. Pretty cool stuff. Not particularly groundbreaking here, but could be used for some nifty stuff nonetheless.

Then the game kicks in and it's really just party management RPG with depth that's more reminiscent of a wading pool. Having said that-- there's certainly room for additional complexity. Maybe it just doesn't rear its head until later. But even then, it'd be more toward just being finicky-- either building teams to minmax for fun, or because the difficulty spikes up to enforce it. Six basic stats, an elemental type, up to four(?) passives, a... birth sign with other bonuses, a hodgepodge of classes, a set of skills that are dependent on what class a unit is and where you train them, and even more stuff that makes each character technically unique. Like how unit sexual preference actually matters-- as a Lust-based faith, I primarily deal Charismatic-based Mental damage... which gets major penalties/bonuses depending on if the opposing unit likes my main damage dealer or not.

Which brings up what the results of all your party management is: You pick three of your units and wage... ritualized war with other tribes. Your three units use one of their skills at random, on some target that's picked through who knows what process, and repeat until one side takes enough damage that the battle is resolved. Yep.

City building is mostly just a matter of picking what stats you want upgraded since that's done at one of your limited building slots.

[Mephansteras]

It needs...something, yeah. Right now it is kind of a nice casual party manager game. Think Darkest Dungeon, but if you didn't actually control your guys at all in combat.

It's diverting, and probably a good game if you're not in the mood to have to think too hard. But it does feel like it might get dull after a while.

It is still in early access, so hopefully they'll add some stuff in that makes it a bit more engaging. Right now the core game is decent, just not spectacular in any way. I think one thing that does bug me is that you can end up with 9 disciples, but can only tell 3 of them to do something each season. So you're constantly feeling not only short on various resources, but it feels like you *should* be able to be doing more and can't for unexplained mechanical reasons. They don't even go do little stuff without you. They just sit around.

Not recommended right now. Maybe once it is out of Early Access it may be improved. As it is, I'd say it's an ok game to get on sale and sink a bit of time into. It isn't *bad*. It just falls a little short of *good*.

[Aoi]

It needs...something, yeah. Right now it is kind of a nice casual party manager game. Think Darkest Dungeon, but if you didn't actually control your guys at all in combat.

It is still in early access, so hopefully they'll add some stuff in that makes it a bit more engaging. Right now the core game is decent, just not spectacular in any way. I think one thing that does bug me is that you can end up with 9 disciples, but can only tell 3 of them to do something each season. So you're constantly feeling not only short on various resources, but it feels like you *should* be able to be doing more and can't for unexplained mechanical reasons. They don't even go do little stuff without you. They just sit around.

I actually kind of like the hands-off style of combat; it does some interesting things to planning how they have to develop, and adds a bit more... godliness? to the feel when you're not actively mucking about.

I think I stopped when I ended up with five disciples, but I thought they did actually do a random job on their own, depending on how fervent a believer they were? You just can only order("inspire") three to a specific job. Otherwise, that seems kind of weird.

[Mephansteras]

Maybe they do? If they are actually doing stuff it doesn't seem obvious. I'll have to actually pay attention next time I play.

[nenjin]

Godhood

This is how I felt about Reus, immediately. There's something so......passive about Abbey Games and the stuff they make. Like someone really doesn't want you to ever feel overwhelmed, or worked up, or even going down the rabbit hole of making too many decisions. I feel like someone is very sweetly trying to lull me to sleep when I play their stuff. They make very casual games, which is fine, that keep hitting areas I'm interested in. But the game play just doesn't deliver.

===

Played an...interesting game during a 3 day LAN party.

The Red Solstice (2015)

It feels like if a moba, Diablo, and an Aliens wave survival game had a baby. Add a dash of DOOM in there with undead and alien-looking demons or demon-looking aliens.

It's 8 player coop, click to move, click to shoot style thing. Sounds straightforward on paper.

But man, it took all 5 of us a good night to even figure out WTF we're doing. The game is rich in features but many are poorly explained if you don't play the SP campaign first.

Maps are basically randomized open areas broken up by pre-fab buildings and streets. Open areas are littered with and buildings are packed full of objectives to interact with, loot containers, hazards and the like. You have multiple primary missions, multiple secondary missions and an hour to do the whole thing, while enemies are constantly spawning and making a beeline toward you, in ever increasing numbers and difficulty as time goes on. After an hour all hell breaks loose and you have to evac or die. Limited rezzes on low difficulty and no rezzes on normal difficulty.

After 11 hours we never managed to go the full time just with us (some veteran randos almost finished it) and have never actually beaten the first mission on recruit difficulty. You still earn XP and unlock shit no matter how early you fail so you're encouraged to just keep throwing yourself in to it.

It's bananas, frankly. There's tons of cool little things going on though. Limited ammo drives a lot of game play. You can turn on auto aim so your guy aim bots everything while you move along, but you take a big accuracy and damage penalty vs. manual shooting. Shooting your replenishable flares or found flares or activating building power to turn on lights drastically increases your accuracy. You can auto follow people, or find NPCs that you can then order to follow you around while they shoot enemies. Multiple combat suits (classes) you can unlock with various weapon and ability unlocks as you level it up. A few ways to tweak the suits' strengths and weaknesses or tailor it to your specific playstyle. Friendly fire on explosives, a wound/de-buff system, a moba-style consumable inventory system for everything from artillery strikes to sensors to traps to heals and cures to all sorts of stuff. Some of the way you do things is a little clunky and/or needlessly complicated (like there are tons of different kinds of explosives in game that you need a detonator item or skill to use, or having to click shit out of your inventory then click on a person while everyone is moving and everything is going crazy), and I can't say the game ever exceeds these problems enough to not notice them.

It's a lot to take in just dropping in to the game. It's the kind of game that, after an hour or two I figured I could probably learn all its ins and outs given enough time. But during a LAN party we learned it by the seat of our pants, with a lot of shouting and "HOW THE FUCK DO I USE THIS THING?!"

You can tell a lot about a game from going straight to the keybinds, and my first reaction when I saw it was "Oh boy."

Veteran players seemed to traipse through the level with no problems by themselves for the most part but we found we have to play very tight like scared little newbies, coordinate our fire and support each other with our combat suit specialties (I played Medic), communicate and constantly move forward as a group. It was fun and pretty challenging, and I feel like we had to make each mistake at least once and wipe the party to understand how to play the game. (Our explosives guys kept blowing us up in the heat of combat, the party leader called down a quest-based thermonuclear weapon and killed us all, I called down a saturation arty strike with an item that wiped the whole party, getting split up being greedy for loot, not paying attention and wandering off by ourselves, all these things got us killed and ended our game.) Many of our deaths came directly from trying to figure out how to use items.

I can't call the game great despite a lot of its positivies because it's a first title from a Croatian studio and has that indie feel and some indie problems. Bad translations, opaque mechanics, story bits you don't care about, occasionally sloppy feeling balance. But by and large it looks good, most sound effects are good (voice acting is kinda eh) and, like I said, it's surprisingly feature rich and deeper than you'd think at first blush in the way everything comes together.

And seriously, 8 player coop that isn't a survival or building sim, in a land where 4 player coop is King. Some people didn't like it as much due to the fact we hot dropped in to the middle of multiplayer and it's the kind of game that wants you to really learn everything to be effective. We still did not win because the mega huge fuck off late game monsters we just couldn't stay alive long enough beat. (Mostly because "bosses" seem to require a mega-fuckload of well positioned explosives to truly beat.)

But game play feels quickly paced and you're rarely not doing something, either looting or shooting, while still retaining some of that sorta tense bug hunt experience, deflated a little bit by the horde monster mechanics. It's generic yes but there's a fair amount of obvious love that's gone in to it. Despite the failing and the learning and some people not being super hot on the game, I think we all had some good fun with it.

Apparently they're making a sequel that's supposed to be out this year, and based on the first game I'm honestly kind of curious about it now based on the first one.

[Frumple]

Heeyy, I got that for free at some point, iirc. Think it might have actually gone for free more than once? Folks interested but not particularly impatient might just want to keep an eye out for it and see if it goes gratis again at some point.

[Aoi]

Fate Hunters. It's a deck-builder (a la Slay the Spire), like another eleventy-billion things cashing in on this fad, except this one is somewhat interesting and has enough different features to actually be worth a look. I'm going to assume familiarity with the genre...

Opening with the bad: There's meta progression. And it's not like StS, where you get progress for a good try, and it only takes a few hours to fully unlock a class. No, your progression is via treasure cards that you pick up in a run, which occupy spaces in your deck and can be played, and you only get credit for them if you win/escape. I got 30 gold off my first run-- which was a winner. Cards on the first class range from 50 to 300.  New classes range from 100 to 300. It's also kind of expensive, clocking in at 15$ right now (I'd peg it at 7.50, or a T2 bundle). With that out of the way...

You draw 5 cards each turn, and can play as many cards as you can get your hands on. No energy system. Your deck is shuffled at the end of a turn when cards run out, but not when changing rooms. Deck changes are permanent-- 'one-use' cards are permanently removed, unless you get a fresh copy. Combat is fairly stock to the genre (I'm frankly not sure how many novel ways to iterate on this formula are left...); kill stuff with your cards, get new cards. People seem to be dinging it for graphics; you're staring at cards, not critters like StS. No 'artifact' system, though after every boss, you basically get to pick one bonus and either an HP restore or removing two cards from your deck; bonuses range from fairly interesting options like a +CritChance/DrawOnCrit passive to drawing a legendary-rarity card... or +2hp, yaaaay... (A sizeable increase, actually. First class has 18.)

This game is really about risk management and deck management: Since the loot you keep at the end is represented by loot cards that you only get if you keep the unplayed at the end of a run, they are deadweight, sucking up space in your deck. Or, even worse, the first class's specialty is cards that have bonus effects when it's the last card in your hand. The enemies towards the end get more interesting-- they'll banish(exhaust) cards on death or insert debuff cards. Which is a much bigger deal here, than in StS, since you keep your deck from battle to battle, not a fresh one each time.

It's also pretty easy, despite RNG complaints (and I've only gotten to Ascension 5... on the way OP Slimebound.), unless you do something downright stupid, like I did on my second run: "Hey, this card says 'Summon a dragon. Draw 5 cards.' Fun times!"

You can also 'break' your deck fairly readily, though some bosses are designed to counter that-- I managed to pare my deck down to two cards: Two "Deal 2 damage, draw one card from discard."... which worked out great, until I had a boss that dealt damage every time you played a card. That hurt.

[Frumple]

I'd, uh. Disagree pretty hard that it's particularly easy. If you come into the right cards/tarots you can steamroll, but if you don't you can play quite well and still ultimately get your shit pushed in, especially on higher levels (note that the first win is the easiest, and unlocks longer runs) and double especially on anything that's not the starting class (which is definitely the easiest and possibly the strongest, too, from what I've been able to tell). There's some damn nasty enemies in that game.

[Aoi]

Does it get harder past the second run? After the second Inquisitor run (which included the additional floor), I unlocked the Spy (won on the first try there too) and started kicking around on the Inquisitor on Hard mode.

Which lives up to its name, though some of the encounters go past the edge of 'hard' into downright ludicrous-- 3 2/12 goblin totems, 2 3/7 gobbos, and some shielded 1/2 that buffs +2/0 on death. And, I know it says that they spawn random goblins, but what was with spawning 2 3/7s and a 2/5 with +1/0 teamwide passive every single time? Thank goodness I managed to last until the reinforcements arrived because a single dragon is easier than that mess.