Ideas for the inevitable Homeward Bound reboot.

Still working on Conan: Exiles, which got an update yesterday. My thoughts remain the same: good game, excellent base-building, but there’s not really much that I haven’t already seen a hundred times in other survival games. I’ll probably drop it soon.

I finished a co-op campaign of Abiotic Factor. We started our playthrough early in its Early Access period and had been returning to it every few months as new chapters were added. The game is every bit as great as everyone says, though the ending is incredibly abrupt. I’m wondering if they had to cut a bunch of content to make the release date. I hope they expand on things in a later update or future DLC, because it’s the only major flaw in an otherwise nearly perfect game.

Also played a bit of Gloomwood, a lo-fi immersive sim which comes very close to scratching that classic Thief itch. The stealth is great, the levels are well laid out and heavily intertwined so you always have multiple routes to achieve an objective, and the AI is the perfect balance between smart and dumb for shenanigans. There’s also an incredibly satisfying backstab with the canesword, though certain enemies wear armor that makes them immune so you sadly can’t clear out entire levels while ghosting.

I do have some minor complaints. As a packrat I’m not a fan of the Resident Evil-style grid inventory with limited space, especially since the game has a research mechanic where you need to chop up mutated corpses and bring one of every single body part to a specific point on the map to unlock crafting recipes and permanent character bonuses.

A single body’s various parts are enough to take up the entire inventory, necessitating either some very fiddly inventory juggling (items switch from grid-based paper dolls to physics-enabled models as you drag them to and from the world, causing all sorts of messes) or multiple trips across the entire open world map and back. The Goatman alone took nearly half an hour of combat-less hauling to research, and its boss arena isn’t even that far from the lab.

Enemies are also persistent. Once you kill someone they stay dead for the rest of the playthrough, which on one hand speeds up the backtracking, but on the other also makes it a boring chore if you’ve been thorough. There are a few points in the story where new enemies will spawn in old areas, at least.

All that said it’s an excellent game, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a good immersive sim. It’s still in Early Access, but what’s there is already incredibly satisfying despite my various gripes.

Please post your thoughts on Abiotic Factor when you get to it. It’s tied with Grounded as my favorite game of the past few years.

If they ever announce a new Kings Field game, people’s heads (mine included) will explode from sheer shock and excitement.

In addition, the company […] wants to be awarded all rights, title and interest in any intellectual property developed by Cleveland, McGuire, and Gill during their employment at Unknown Worlds, including “all movie scripts, movie footage, game design, game code, play tests, or other software development.”

Ugh.

See, he could have gone about things the smart way, but this was way funnier and made for a better story. It was also 100% in-character for him to do something like that - the guild he was a part of was commonly mocked in-universe for thinking with their swords rather than their brains.

Plus I was able to hold it over his head for years afterwards. I was a cleric and he didn’t even wait for me to do the bare minimum preparations that might have let us survive before summoning them.

In an online game I used to play, we were infiltrating deep in necromancer territory and encountered a rune on the floor that would summon an incredibly strong undead specter when a player touched it. One of the players wondered if there was a cooldown between summons, and decided to test this by pressing the rune several times in quick succession.

One total party kill later, I can confidently state that there was not in fact a cooldown, and that three nightshades will kill your entire group faster than you can run away.

Precisely. Getting people upset is the foremost technique to farm engagement on social media. Sites such as Facebook even deliberately altered their algorithms to show content that will anger readers because it works so well to keep them invested.

Engagement bait is omnipresent and really obvious once you learn to spot it - even something as innocuous as one or two “accidental” typos in a meme to get people into the comments section.

You say “wildly wrong”, they say “incentivizing engagement”.