Game of the Week

infinitymdm

mbevks My friends and I have enjoyed Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead quite a bit. It's a bit complex, but if you enjoy the post-apocalyptic RPG genre it's a lot of fun.

presianbg

Staudey

I haven't really done any gaming this week because we've been busy with Solus stuff, but I can talk about what I played recently instead.

When I play with my two buddies, and both are available, then it often happens to be a Windows game. However, when one of the two is gone, the other one and I have played a lot of "Core Keeper". It's a nice little RPG with a cute art style, pretty rapid development for a small-ish indie studio, and great in-game music. There is crafting, farming, cooking, and you can even have some automated machinery (think Minecraft redstone, but less capable atm); plus fights with huge boss monsters on the combat side.

infinitymdm

New week, new post! Over the past week (mostly over the weekend) my friends and I played quite a bit of Spiderheck. It's a great couch brawler that asks (and answers) the question "what if spiders had lightsabers?"

ReillyBrogan

I was playing Resident Evil 4 Remake when I was briefly on Fedora 38. Unfortunately the Solus mesa is too old currently for me to get back to it (needs Mesa 23.0 to resolve some black artifacting on AMD GPUs). Game is amazing, probably my GOTY.

Besides that I recently started Ys: Memories of Celceta (I've been working my way through the franchise) and I really like that as well.

infinitymdm

Another week, another game! This time it's Valheim, an up-and-coming indie survival game with with a Viking theme. We've just started playing it, but so far it's been a lot of fun.

The combat in this game feels slow and methodical, a lot like Dark Souls. You're rewarded for learning enemy attack patterns, timing your attacks and parries well, and dodging through large attacks. It's pretty satisfying, and works really well with groups of 4+ players taking on huge enemies. It seems like there's a ton of stuff to discover, too.

Fanmion

I highly recommend this game, especially for us linux user who are constantly looking for solutions of several problems! Be warned, hours feel like minutes during play!

[deleted]

Fanmion

I highly recommend this game, especially for us linux user who are constantly looking for solutions of several problems

I have Linux for that

infinitymdm

I was pretty busy last week wrapping up projects for school, but I did make a bit of time to play games with friends. The star of this week is Ultimate Chicken Horse, a party platformer where you and friends build the stage together. You place traps, platforms, and obstacles in an attempt to make the stage difficult enough that no one else can make it through, but not so difficult that you can't complete the stage yourself. It's a great casual game for up to 4 players. Excellent for unwinding after a long day of working on challenging projects.

synth-ruiner

infinitymdm I played this one with some friends once, very fun 🙂

infinitymdm

This week I've been playing a lot of Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed. If you've been around the forum for a while, you may have seen me posting about the Xenoblade series before; they're some of my favorite games. Future Redeemed is a DLC for XC3, but Xenoblade DLCs are full RPGs in their own right. (Case in point: howlongtobeat reports that the main story of Future Redeemed is about 18 hours long if you rush through it). The series digs deep into philosophical themes, with XC3 in particular focusing on the purpose of life in a world that is fueled by conflict.

This game is much more niche than what I've posted in the past few weeks. The trailer is packed with interesting stuff if you've played some of the previous games, but I have no reference frame for what it must look like for someone not into the series. Either way, here's the launch trailer:

As far as how I run this game on Solus, I'm using the Yuzu emulator. There are mods out there that let you upscale Switch games to higher resolutions and/or higher framerates. I'm using a few of those to get a much better experience than running it on the original Switch hardware.

kaktuspalme

infinitymdm
I played Xenoblade Chronicles 1 back then when it was not remastered in Dolphin. It's a very good game. I tried XC2 on the Switch, but somehow it didn't catch me. Maybe I should have given it more time.
Have you played XC2? For XC3 I only heard positive things so far, so will probably sooner or later also try it. Though I have a Switch I think I will also play it in Yuzu.

Staudey

My two gaming buddies and I have started playing State of Decay 2 again. We played for a bit some years ago, but then dropped it for unknown reasons. I can't remember if we got bored or there was just some new cool game that diverted our attention. Our first new session yesterday was very enjoyable in any case.
Basically: kill zombies, collect loot, improve your base and take care of your survivors.

It works without any issues on Linux using Steam Proton, including the multiplayer.

infinitymdm

This weekend some friends and I played quite a bit of Crawl. It's a competitive roguelite dungeon crawler where one player is the hero and the other players are ghosts summoning monsters to kill the hero. As the hero, your goal is to level up and get better gear so that you can challenge the boss and escape the dungeon. But as the hero becomes more powerful, the monsters also become much stronger. And if one of the monsters manage to land a killing blow on the hero, the player controlling that monster becomes the hero instead!

Warning: pixel-art blood, mild occult themes

infinitymdm

It's Monday, you know what that means!

Over the past week I started playing The Messenger, a 2D platformer very reminiscent of old-school ninja games. You play as The Messenger on a mission to deliver a scroll to the top of the mountain in order to prevent an army of demons from destroying humanity. I won't spoil what happens next, but this game has some awesome twists that I wasn't expecting out of a game in this genre. There's great platforming, fun boss fights, and excellent writing. Really enjoying it so far.

Staudey

So after not really finding any time for gaming (because either the weather was too nice to spend time inside, or I was otherwise occupied) I've recently finally started playing Red Dead Redemption 2 (Cowboy game by the GTA makers). This has been on my list for a loooooong time. I've heard before that it's slow moving, and oh boy, the introductory chapter really is like molasses (the visuals are stunning though, even in 2023 IMO). But now I've arrived at the free-roaming part of the game and so far it's amazing. The world really feels alive, NPCs seem to react somewhat realistically to your behaviour, you can spend a few days hunting game (incl. skinning and tying the animal to your saddle) instead of following the story. A very nice sandbox. Let's see if it holds up with more hours spent on it.

synth-ruiner

I'm completely obsessed with Oxygen Not Included after picking it up a week ago. it's like Minecraft crossed with The Sims crossed with Factorio or something. you basically have to create a self-sustaining ecosystem, like a terrarium full of little guys...

Chaussettes

Cold Waters on 4.4 Harmony, runs great even on low end hardware. More arcadey than other subsims I'm used to like Silent Hunter, but the cold war setting makes up for it to me. Very fun.

Staudey

Chaussettes This reminds me of my teenage years when I would also from time to time check out these submarine simulations. Never really got into them, but they always had a strange fascination for me.

zmaint

Steam summer sale... Been playing Tom Clancy Ghost Recon Breakpoint. Not as good as Wildlands but fun and super cheap. The only thing they did better than Wildlands was add squad customization. Also snagged Far Cry 5.

Outside of that, a lot of ESO lately.

Staudey

The Isle

My friends and I have been playing a lot of The Isle over the years, a dinosaur survival game, and recently we've been checking out the new updates. Gameplay is simple, run around, eat (veggies if you're a herbivore, other dinos if you're a carnivore) and try not to get eaten. There are also breeding/nesting mechanics.
The game has strong horror elements. Nights are extremely dark, other dinos can jump out of dense vegetation without warning, while drinking at a river a gigantic Deinosuchus might suddenly breach the water and drag you under, etc.
The focus is mostly on realism, there are few fancy arcade mechanics/skills/etc., just you surviving and growing (which provides benefits to attack strength, but often makes it harder to hide and your food requirements increase with growth). It's great fun with friends, but I also had a great time roaming around alone or forming groups with strangers (there is an ingame chat but it's even more fun to only use the various calls, grunts and screams to communicate)
If you were to download the game make sure to use the EVRIMA beta branch. The stable/default branch (i.e. what will be downloaded if you don't change anything) is basically the "old" game, that sees no more development (AFAIK). EVRIMA is a much improved version, even though it doesn't have all the dinosaurs of the old version (but some new ones). The screenshots/videos on the Steam page are the old game, which doesn't really represent the current status. For a taste of what it actually looks like these days I'll include a video from one of the recent updates below.
They're also working on including humans and human settlements into the game, and I think there already is a testing branch available for that (which I haven't tried yet). I also have to mention that the latest update, which ported the game to the new Unreal Engine version, seems to have introduced some graphical issues (especially when it comes to water, which looks much worse now) and the networking code seems laggier than before. Hopefully that will be fixed soon.

edit: forgot to mention that I play it on Windows currently (because I first installed it there and disk space constraints keep me from moving games to my Linux partition atm), and protonDB only gives it a Silver rating