Games

I started Indika the other day. I'm only about a half hour in, but even the opening seconds of the game are setting some wild expectations that make this game wholly unpredictable.

I've also been playing a lot of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. It's one of the best metroidvanias I've ever played so far. Giving the player the agency to take screenshots of different roadblocks is a very clever solution for the genre, and this game clearly learned from its contemporaries like Hollow Knight and Metroid Dread. One thing that really bummed me out about Hollow Knight was how much it wasted your time and introduced tedium, like how all of the fast travel was far away from points of interest that you visit frequently, like shops, so you'd have to fight through the same enemies over and over. There's none of that here, but as a metroidvania, this game is perhaps a bit too big. There may often be a lot of traversal and time between upgrades, where it may have been better if you got upgrades more frequently. It can also take the wind out of your sails when you find a new item and it ends up just being a useless lore collectable.

I'm hoping to finish my second playthrough of Wolfenstein: The New Order in the next couple of days. I played it about 10 years ago and loved it, but this time around, I'm playing it on the couch with a controller instead of at a desk with a mouse and keyboard. I think it's quite clear that they designed this game for the mouse and keyboard experience to the detriment of the controller experience. Enemies can move faster than you can turn to aim at them, the auto aim isn't very generous, and you have to look at armor and ammo pickups in order to collect them, which can be quite difficult to do mid-firefight on a controller and very easy to do on a mouse and keyboard. I ran into some hand and wrist issues in the past couple of years, and I can get by most of them with an ergonomic mouse, but a controller is still more comfortable, and unfortunately, this game doesn't play well with a Steam controller (it can't send simultaneous controller inputs and mouse aim). I've never played The New Colossus, but when I move on to it, I will probably power through the discomfort and play with keyboard and mouse if the Steam controller has the same issues again.