Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week?

Started playing "The Binding of Isaac"

I picked up portal 1 again, one of my favorite games. And then i also tried frostpunk a little. Seems cool but so far i suck at keeping the people warm
I also picked up a bunch of games on gog and might finally get around to play mirrors edge if it plays nice with proton.
- Now I want to replay Portal 1 & 2 again. I have all the puzzles memorized a thousand times over at this point. Such good games.
  Mirror’s Edge is also really fun. I’ve only played it once but think about it frequently. I’d like to play it again sometime.
  
  I first got mirrors edge around the time it came out, but didnt play it much, think it was because of stability issues. Then ive always meant to play through it but never got around to.
  And while you can only ever experience portal for the first time once, it is still fun to play thorugh again, especially if its some time ago and you dont remember how to solve everything.

Og oblivion with a modified layout that works fairly well for steam deck. I just got lvl 17 and ran across my first glitch (land dreugh in the ceiling of a cave) and maybe my tenth crash. Soooo glad to say it's running better than it ever did on my 360!

I got sucked back into Warframe.

Total War: Empire. I've previously played Rome 1/2, Medieval 1/2, and Atilla. For anyone who's played other total war games, there are a couple of game mechanics that are new in Empire.
There are actual naval battles, where you put ships into a battle line, and you can board enemy ships. It's cool but hard (for me) to control. Also many of the buildings in a territory aren't located in the capital because it's meant to represent colonial holdings, so you can have a sugar plantation or something outside the protection of a city, and a lot of the warfare ends up being small skirmishes sacking outlying buildings.

Recently modded my gba to have a laminated ips screen and over the past week I’ve dove into fire emblem advance wars and ff4

Concerned ape said he wouldn't be updating SDV any more, or at least until haunted chocolatier was out, so I thought it'd be a good idea to dust off the old mod collection and start a new farm
- I just fell back into it a month or two ago. Be prepared for some interesting updates of you've been out of it for like a year.
- Hes actually said the opposite. He doesn't want to make a new SDV because adding onto it is addicting for him.

Planning to finish Dragon age 1 this week. I'm really looking forward to Clair Obscure but I'll try to finish one RPG first
- Do you plan on finishing expansion as well? How do you like the game so far?
  
  I'm planning on playing the whole series including the expansion for the first one. But my fingers are really itching for the other RPG and I don't want to pressure me into playing the expansion. Better to play Clair Obscure in between and enjoy the expansion afterwards.
  So far I'm liking the game a lot. I've not played any in the series before but I have to say that Baldurs gate 3 seems to be the best part on the series. It's brilliant how many great parallels can be drawn between the games and im glad for both of them

Streets of Rage on my little handheld emulator that I bought last week. I'd forgotten how long it's been since I last played!
- If you haven't tried four yet, it is a fantastic revisit to the roots of the game.

I've managed to stall starting Act 3 of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for an entire week. I'm in this position I get into sometimes with games where I completely avoid starting the final stretch of the story because I love the game so much that I just don't want it to end. I've probably done every bit of side content at this point, vacuumed every optional area and explored every inch of the map - besides the last one I unlocked that starts Act 3 proper. I'm now grossly overleveled and overpowered for the main story, so much so that I need to work out ways to gimp myself to make the story bosses more impactful.
Anyway, the game is absolutely amazing and you should play it. It will make a very compelling case for Game of the Year, and it is certainly one of the best games I've played. I run out of superlatives when talking about this game, from the art direction to the story to the music and the voice acting (in both English and French, both are stellar!) to the combat and gameplay design, every piece that matters hits it out of the park.
Yes, you are some AA-jank every now and then. The lip syncing isn't great. But you know what? None of it actually matters.
It's a wonderful, wonderful game.
- I will probably play it, but this is not patient at all.
  
  I have confessed my sins previous weeks so I forgot about adding a disclaimer about the same game this week. You can't be patient all the time, sometimes it's fun to participate in the zeitgeist. This game is good enough to merit it, it's not even a full price game to begin with and they even had a release week sale.
  I'll be back to the regularly scheduled programming soon enough. I have my Mankind Divided playthrough to return to and I have already installed F.E.A.R. as my next game.
- I've had the soundtrack on loop for weeks. It is so damn good. Lorien Testard really captured the feel of the world.
  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lJbuSXw4Bfo2tDlP6s_CNznTfYGe0GEBM
  
  Probably the best soundtrack I've heard in a video game, period. He talks about composing for the game here (and likely in many other outlets).

Playing Oblivion. I don't remember liking it this much when I first played it way back when. And there's a lot I don't remember, so maybe I never got that far into it. I just discovered that the Daedra shrines give you crazy powerful magic items, so now I'm tracking all those down. Although I contacted vampirism during one of the missions, which is starting to suck.
- Do you want a hint about vampirism that doesn't give too much away?
  
  I ended up looking up how to cure it. I wasn't having that much fun chasing a cure.

Started Digimon World Next Order on a whim after it was on a big sale last week. Not sure I can recommend it, and definitively not at full price, but it's interesting to have a game that doesn't know if it wants to be a modern game or a 2000 era throwback game in exactly the right ways. And well, it's still about little critters that turn into big critters (and back), so I'm satisfied nonetheless.

I picked up the Definitive Edition of Age of Empires 2 on sale last week after they released a new dlc update. It was still a bit overpriced for a 25 year old game at like $(US)10, but I've definitely gotten my money's worth so far.
I'm definitely not an RTS gamer and I'm not really interested in the multiplayer but the campaigns have been a lot of fun. I really wasn't expecting there to hundreds of hours of just campaigns content so it's been a pleasant surprise.
- The new campaign missions seem a lot longer than what I remembered of the original campaigns. I like that they tutorials now give you some strategy, too.
  
  I only purchased the base DE so I don't have access to the DLC campaigns. I figured I'd pick them up down the line if I liked the game. Apparently I picked some harder campaigns first though because I just started with the African ones on the first page.
- Im down to playing that game against the comp, with liberal use of the pause button. Not the pvp of my younger days. But considering I borrowed and cracked it back then, and only paid for it the first time on steam some years ago, man that game has given me some great returns.

Ys X Nordics. Ys games really know how to craft adventures, definitely better than Ubisoft does, despite much smaller worlds these games are set in.
- Nordics combat has no heft to me. I started Memories of Celtica(sp?) and the combat seems better in that. I think a couple decisions you make in Memories carries over to ys9 so i think I'm gonna do that next.
- This one feels like a case of patient gaming backfiring on me. It took me a couple of years to finish Ys IX, but now that I've waited on this, I just want to hold out until Proud Nordics comes out.
  
  The wait might be worth it. Since OG is already good, I am sure Proud Nordics actually might be better.

They Bleed Pixels. Tough as nails precision platformer with combat, and a gothic Lovecraftian aesthetic. Came out in 2012, but for some reason didn't get as much attention as Super Meat Boy (2010)

I've been playing Planet Crafter quite a bit. It gives me the same vibes Subnautica did, just without any scary monsters. Love it to pieces

- I've been playing Bioshock Infinite lately and it's really fun! (Except for the crashes in loading screens. Then I have to play the last part again)

I‘ve been getting into Shadow of War.
I liked the first game more when I played it and I feel like I‘m constantly fighting the controls (don‘t jump there! don‘t drain that guy! what are you stuck on now?!), but it‘s fun regardless; and thanks to how bs gaming patents are, it‘s still very unique in the way it plays lol

I picked up Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (again, but I lost my save file, so I'm starting over).
It was that or Genealogy of the Holy War, but I'm going with the "easier" of the two first.

Space Engineers while my new steamdeck downloads games. Balatro and Valhiem play great on it. Looking forward to Nier Automata.

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, great old-school point and click in the English countryside.

Factorio snd Dead cells

Mostly Fabled Lands. It's fun exploration, but the dice roll mechanics get tiresome - especially when you need a particular dice roll to trigger or complete a quest, so you just end up triggering the dice roll over and over.
And sort of inspired by the remaster, I've been playing a bit of Oblivion lately. I have thousands of hours in the game, spread over about forty characters, but I haven't played it in a couple of years now. I toyed with the idea of getting the remaster, but my game is so extensively modded - mostly landscape and gameplay changes - that I don't think I could go back to the vanilla game, even remastered. But it did get me thinking about it...