Okami

Where do I apply for my “I beat Radahn before he was nerfed” badge?

Wildermyth is an awesome indie RPG that I’ve had a lot of fun with as a two-player coop game. It’s a turn-based dungeon crawler with a strong focus on role play and party dynamics.

I hear great praise for Across the Obelisk as a coop game from my friends, although I personally bounced off of it. It’s a roguelite deck builder like Slay the Spire, but with multi-player, lots of meta progression, and a heftier time commitment for each run.

Gunfire Reborn is a roguelite looter shooter that’s a blast in coop. I think it’s still in Early Access, but what’s already there is enough for me to be happy with it as a full game. To me it’s a spiritual successor to Borderlands in combat and gamefeel, but without the grinding.

Thank you. That’s a flawless description.

This. They were indeed called Skill Points, and Insomniac loved to tie cheats and bonus material to completing them. I played the shit out of Spyro and Ratchet and Clank back in the day.

Rogue was the originator, but NetHack and ADOM did more to popularize Roguelikes than Rogue itself ever managed. NetHack was the first one I ever heard of, and it’s the only reason I know Rogue existed in the first place.

Hades, yes. That’s a premier Roguelite with meaningful meta progression.

Slay the Spire is fuzzy on that point. I would not recommend it to someone looking for a Roguelite. It straddles the line in that it has very limited meta progression which is quickly exhausted and basically works as a tutorial. Once you’ve maxed out the card unlocks for each character it plays with the same feel as a Roguelike game. It’s still not a pure a Roguelike since the starting boon choice and the card swap event allow some minor meta-influence between runs, but there’s no more meta-progression.

And Rene Descarte was a drunken fart, “I drink, therefore I am.”

Psychonauts (the original, not the sequel, though the sequel is also good) is a Summer Camp themed 3D platformer. It doesn’t quite meet your “low stakes/chill gameplay” criteria as it does have combat and mildly challenging boss fights and platforming, but it nails the rest. It’s easier than Tunic. Maybe worth checking out.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons strictly meets all the criteria listed, but it’s ultimately a tragic story. If “some kind of impact” includes leaving you in tears, check it out.

Okami is a Zelda style adventure set in feudal Japan with immaculate vibes. You play as the sun goddess Amaterasu in the form of a wolf bringing light and life to a land ravaged by demons. The world is cold and dark at first, but you bring spring and summer on your heels.

Finally, two favorites from my childhood are the Spyro series and the Ty the Tasmanian Tiger series. These are 3D Platformer collectathons and neither of these series are even close to any of the examples you provided, but they are bright and colorful and in my heart they have feelings of Summer Vacation and staying home all day to play video games.

You guessed correctly.

I was pulling an all-nighter reading fan fiction serials while drinking Kraken mixed with Orange Juice and had also eaten a whole frozen pizza around midnight. I was not ok. The incident happened around 3am.

First time I’d ever vomited while drunk. I know my limits better now.

My Laptop will be 15 years old this year.

It was running Vista when I bought it, then upgraded to Win 7, and now runs whatever flavor of Linux I feel like installing.

Battery is shot. Screen connection is iffy, but works if you wiggle it. Several keys stopped working after I accidentally threw up on it, but I can use an onscreen keyboard for those.

Still runs fine. She’s a trooper.

Nope. I can’t even tell the difference between 30Hz and 60Hz unless they’re actually running side by side.

The price.

Bought a used '96 Mazda Protégé off a coworker for $700. Ran it into the ground. Scrapped it for $300 when I could finally afford a better car. Definitely got my money’s worth.

I got to learn what driving without power steering felt like after the compressor locked up and the drive belt shredded. Ended up replacing it with a smaller belt just for the power steering since I couldn’t afford to replace the A/C. Drove with the windows down for a few months. Good times.

Yes. I check the organ donor box when I renew my driver’s license. If I’m in an accident then I don’t need 'em anymore. Let someone else use 'em.

CHLOE YES!

Saving for reference. You’ve got a good thing going here. I need to steal some of your ideas for my own collection.

I have three categories:

• Completed
• In Progress
• Uncategorized

They go into In Progress when they’re installed.

They go into completed when I’ve finished them. Either 100% achievements or completed to my own satisfaction if no achievements.

If I lose interest and uninstall they drop back into Uncategorized until I’m ready to pick them up again.

I really like how the web serial Sideways in Hyperspace handles this problem.

In short, the faster ships catch up with the slower generation ships, facilitating trade, arranging transport for those who want to leave, and allowing them to become extrasolar cities and stepping stones to the wider galaxy.

So far I’ve picked up:

• Dead Cells
• Signalis
• Owlboy
• Starship Titanic
• Balatro
• BORE BLASTERS
• Melvor Idle
• Night in the Woods
• Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - Ultimate Edition
• Dome Keeper
• Pentiment
• Blackshift
• Ouroboros

Having a blast with Balatro to the exclusion of all else.

You should be able to play Flushes, Straights, or Full Houses and win in the first Ante without any buffs. Does the -1 hand size from Gold Stake really hurt that much?

Abzu fell kinda flat for me after Journey, but The Pathless more than makes up for it. It seems to be set in the same world as both prior games and has several references to each, so playing the first two does make it more rewarding to play.

I definitely recommend it since you liked Journey. The movement and combat feels great. It’s refreshingly short and focused for an open world exploration game, so it respects your time, and it also has some excellent storytelling with plenty of nice emotional highs and lows. It’s a worthy successor.