What have you been playing recently?

I rebought Sea of Thieves on steam as soon as it started working in proton (requires a fix or Proton-GE) and have close to 60 hours in the game. It’s been a blast with friends. Once voice chat is fixed in game it’ll be much easier to play/communicate with larger random crews that can’t join a discord server.

"Just" Reassembly while at coronona-office... Would love to play X4 and Kohan, though.


Last edited by logge on 21 June 2020 at 6:09 pm UTC

After a lot of Civ6 and quite some Cold Waters (Proton), I finally began to play Divinity Original Sin 2, which seems to work perfectly ootb with custom Proton-5.8-GE-2-MF.
Have to be ready before Baldurs Gate 3 arrives! :)

Oh, yes, and of course there's a testrun of Attentat 1942 native Linux version planned! It's an important documentary game to make sure we never forget history.

Played the demos of Pendragon and Haven on Steam with Proton (latter requiring a prefix with Windows Media Foundation installed, former running out of the box).

Pendragon seems a bit casual and slow at first. But the demo was brief and so far everything made by inkle was good, so I hope this will be no exception. They are probably the best when it comes to emergent narratives in video games, and I'm quite thrilled to see that paired with a bit of turn based strategy.

Haven not only looks gorgeous, it also has an interesting angle by having a couple as the two main characters. I was a bit worried since it's more of an action adventure, but even I could beat the first boss with relative ease, so I'm looking forward to this more than before. The relation between the two is a bit less harmonic than I thought, though, especially when picking the wrong dialogue choices. Just like real life, I guess ... ;-).

I have played lot of demos:

Good

• Sail Forth
  Pretty nice cute sailing simulator with little bit of FTL style area progression thrown in there
  
• Midnight protocol
  Surprisingly fun hacking game. It expands bit on what could be a minigame in some other game and cyberpunk flavor works quite nicely.
  
• Hadean tactics
  Very Slay the Spire inspired autobattler. Once I got over that and concentrated on just enjoying the game, game mechanics actually seem to work. I'm not sure if it's actually better than Slay the Spire though.
  
• Ray's The Dead
  This one was bit of surprise. Beginning of the game felt like a generic beat'em up game, but there's a twist in the plot that makes it more tactical and more fun game.
  

Pretty good

• Patrick's Parabox
  Unique twist on the puzzle genre. I got bit stuck, but I guess I should have another try.
  
• The Long Gate
  Somewhat frustrating at first as it really doesn't instruct at all what the game wants you to do. Once you figure out what you actually need to do it gets actually bit fun. It takes bit of risk as puzzles are quite nerdy.
  
• DRAG
  Quite challenging racing game. I had quite fun failing though, so basics are quite right.
  
• HyperCore
  Pretty challenging bullet hell inspired rhythm game. I'm not sure if it would be still fun in longer sessions though
  
• Deathbulge - Battle of the Bands
  Music themed game with quite clear JRPG influences. World is quite wacky and there's plenty of humor.
  
• Protomancer
  Pretty interesting space base builder. Hopefully final game has enough content so it doesn't end up as another Spacebase DS-9
  
• Nine Noir Lives
  Comedy point and click adventure with cats. Demo has just so much exposition that it gets slightly tiresome, even when it's funny at times. Developers hinted that they are going to change the pacing for the better, so final game might be even better (though you need to be bit of a cat person get all the jokes).
  

Dunno, maybe

• Growbot
  Cute point and click adventure with bit more original backstory, demo is just so short that it's hard to say if it's good or not.
  
• Fragment's Moonrise
  Seems to be old fashioned RTS, I'll have to play some more to figure out if it has still something surprising
  
• ASYLUM
  Keeps crashing, hard to enjoy at the moment as it is
  
• Port Valley
  Somewhat charming old fashioned adventure game. I got pretty stuck in it, so let's see if I have time to finish the demo on time
  
• Monster Camp
  Maybe this one is better if you have played the first one. For me there was some funny moments, but everything seemed too random to feel like a game.
  
• Mutropolis
  Interesting background story about future archaeologists. Characters could have been more intriguing if they had voice acting
  
• Learning Factory
  Idea might be good, but demo was somewhat too simplistic. It's kind of Factorio inspired game with machine learning and cats.
  

Nope, not for me.

• art of rally
  Almost had fun with this one. DRAG looks much better.
  
• Beat Beat
  Some kind of rhythm game. I didn't get past tutorial. Maybe I'll should try to finish 140 and Bit Trip Runner instead.
  
• ProtoCorgi
  Shmup with dogs. Maybe it was too hard or I just don't like corgis...
  
• Tenderfoot Tactics.
  I couldn't get excited after losing training match. I didn't have any sound, which made the game even less fun.
  

I have a good friend in another country without a decent PC. He picked up an ancient Xbox360 and I dusted my 360 off too. We have been playing old co-op shooters like Gears of War, Halo, and Borderlands. Remarkably fun. I was surprised how solid GoW 2 and 3 were.

It does remind me how thankful I am that they ported Borderlands 2 & TPS to Linux. The old 360 does OK but I so prefer playing on my Linux Box with the Steam Controller.

Just finished Hero of the Kingdom: The Lost Tales 1, a point and click adventure with some light hidden object and resource management. This has a native client.

I'm playing a lot of Megaquarium. I'm still working through the main campaign and plan on picking up the DLC after. Megaquarium really clicked with me because it lets me pause time at any point and rework and upgrade my aquarium. Save games can also be at any point so if I am interrupted and have to quit my progress isn't lost. This offers a native client.

Also, LotRO. I've played since launch and still hop in to mow down the forces of Sauron and Melkor. This title is Proton Platinum for me. It actually runs better in DX11, for me, than the Windows client does.

Farm Together - Another chill casual builder/sim. Farm Together has a native build.

Quoting: omicron-bFinally finishing Pillars of Eternity. Switched to "Easy", this is clearly not my genre.

With the release of OpenMW 0.46, started my second playthrough of TES III: Morrowind with just about 7 mods. It looks gorgeous!

My personal opinion is that PoE really drags in the third act. When I see a lot of praise for it I always wonder if they actually finished the game or even tried to get through the third act. If this is your only foray into the genre I'd recommend giving other titles a spin (Pathfinder: Kingmaker, NWN 1, Icewind Dale EE, Baldur's Gate EE, etc). PoE is not a bad title, but the combat system progressively got less fun and more constrictive as the game progressed for me.

Quoting: Anza

• Port Valley
  Somewhat charming old fashioned adventure game. I got pretty stuck in it, so let's see if I have time to finish the demo on time
  

I expect that I can keep the demos running when I go to offline mode.

The "original" demo of Port Valley was very good IMHO. The developer will put it back after the festival, so you could also (stay online and) try this one later on. It's even a bit more old fashioned though, AFAIR.

Quoting: Anza

• Growbot
  Cute point and click adventure with bit more original backstory, demo is just so short that it's hard to say if it's good or not.
  
• Mutropolis
  Interesting background story about future archaeologists. Characters could have been more intriguing if they had voice acting
  

I had missed these, so thanks for pointing out!


Last edited by Eike on 21 June 2020 at 8:59 pm UTC

Quoting: randylMy personal opinion is that PoE really drags in the third act. When I see a lot of praise for it I always wonder if they actually finished the game or even tried to get through the third act.

Played through the whole game and enjoyed it.