malvasia bianca

Two more games this time that I started but didn’t finish; both played because of VGHVI discussions, both pleasant games that I might have finished in other circumstances, but also both games that wouldn’t have been at the top of my list otherwise and where that placement in my list was correct.

Lies of P was our December game. Part of me thinks that I should know better than to try another Soulslike, but hey, this one’s a Bloodbornelike, and I’ve never actually played Bloodborne. And podcasters seem to like Lies of P quite of bit; of course, game podcasters like Soulslikes a lot more than I do, but still.

Anyways, it was available on Game Pass, so I figured I’d give it a try. And it was fun, I probably enjoyed it more than any other Soulslike that I’ve played so far? I was only expecting to go through a couple of levels, but I enjoyed those just fine; and I was still waiting for Baldur’s Gate 3 to come out on Xbox, so I had some time to kill, so I kept on going.

Having said that, I eventually ran into a boss that I didn’t want to deal with. It wasn’t a horrible boss, but I did need to move on to the next VGHVI game, so I figured I’d let that boss be my excuse to stop playing. If I wanted to find something to complain about, I’d say that there’s a large enough gap between regular enemies and bosses that the regular enemies aren’t great training for bosses; that some items are still limited enough that I don’t feel great using them against bosses (charges for that cube thing in particular), and that there’s a curious lack of hilts in the game if you’re taking a balanced approach. And of course there’s all the Soulslike opaqueness in the systems; but I can deal with that okay these days.

So, if I were to want to make a push to finish a Soulslike, this would be a good candidate. But I still don’t see a reason why I should do that; clearly not the genre for me.

The January VGHVI game was Dave the Diver. That one I wasn’t worried about not enjoying; and indeed, it was a pleasant mixture of genres. I liked the core loop of fishing and running a restaurant; I liked the light plot bits mixed in; I liked the random challenges the game threw at you.

They started to throw more stuff at you, managing both a fish farm and a vegetable farm. I’m not sure what I think about that, but it also doesn’t seem to be something that will take up a huge amount of time. And I encountered a sea people village; seems like a source of minigames and fetch quests.

With all of that, the game was getting a little busy? I was in chapter 3 out of 7; I felt like the game was starting to lose the virtues of its core loop a bit, and honestly the core loop is fine but not super engrossing or anything. So I wasn’t sure that I would want to take the time to finish Dave the Diver; even setting Baldur’s Gate 3 aside, there are a handful of other games that I really would like to get around to. (Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Cocoon, Chants of Sennaar; and I missed doing my yearly play of a Yakuza game, and the next part of the Final Fantasy 7 remake is showing up soon! Hmm, maybe I should play Chants of Sennaar on the trip instead…)

And then Baldur’s Gate 3 finally got released for Xbox; that pushed me off the fence and had me stop Dave the Diver. I actually do expect to come back to it, though: I’m taking a trip in April, and I think Dave the Diver is probably my best choice for a game to play then. So I will pick it back up eventually; I might even finish it, we’ll see. Liesl is playing through it as well, so I should have a sense by then what the later levels are like so I can get an idea of how far I want to push into the game.

Part of me feels a little frazzled, jumping between games like this. But one of my hopes with Game Pass was that I’d be experimenting with more stuff? Though actually my issue isn’t really that I don’t have enough random games I want to play: it’s that VGHVI discussions are having me play games that are a little further down the list than I’d like, and that I expect Baldur’s Gate 3 to take up my time for way too long. But the next stretch of VGHVI games will have fewer that interrupt my other playing; and I’m enjoying Baldur’s Gate 3 fine but not necessarily so much that I feel compelled to do every single quest. So maybe I’ll be able to get through that game more quickly than I’d thought, we’ll see.

And also I’m just not feeling like playing games quite as much as I had been? Which is for good reasons: I’m wanting to spend more time doing Nei Gong and Tai Chi and playing piano, which are all things I feel good about doing!