ShreddieMercury

I agree with @TwinIon about giving the game a fair shot. It doesn't really reveal how deep it is for a few hours. I could be wrong, but I think that the game sort of nudges you towards a planet called Brittle Hollow at first. Either that or the Moon around Timber Hearth are good starting points. Just explore and see what you find! I will mention that towards the end I had to look up one or two things because I got stumped. For the most part, I would say be patient and if you get stuck, do something else. If you need specific help, I'm happy to give small hints to help you progress without hopefully tainting the experience.

I beat The Darkness 2, which has been on my backlog for quite some time now. It was great - really fun gameplay, interesting story, and a nice digestible length (6-7 hours). I never played the first one, but have heard that it's pretty good as well.

Hell yeah I do. @best3444 It's basically a first-person adventure/puzzle game with light survival elements. I'll try to explain without spoilers: you explore a small solar system with the goal of figuring out how to prevent a cataclysmic event. The game is completely self-guided, and there are no explicit objectives. That might sound overwhelming, but the game does a fantastic job of helping to guide you non-intrusively by using a log to record everything that you find and experience. This log takes the shape of a cloud-map or flow-chart of sorts that helps to link seemingly disconnected discoveries. As you explore more and more, you start to piece together what's happening, and slowly start to learn how all of the different pieces are connected. The sense of discovery, and sometimes terror and anxiety, that it provokes is unlike anything that I've experienced in a game. Once I started piecing things together, it became impossible to put down. It's the best game that I've played all year, and I would put it at the top of my generational best-of list. It's beautiful, moving, and brilliantly designed, and I really hope more people give it a shot. If you're at all interested in adventure or sci-fi games, I can't recommend it highly enough.

Throwing things at people looks extremely fun. I also really like the environmental destruction and particle effects on display in that video. Taking my birthday off of work to play this.

This is my most anticipated release since probably Mario Odyssey. Can't wait to play it next week.

Opinions seem pretty divisive. I thought it was mediocre to abysmal. It's competently made, but it has the generic, focus-grouped, shaved-off-edges feeling of a Ubisoft game, tied to the ubiquitous third-person action of a AAA PS exclusive. I struggled to find anything interesting about it, and I played through probably about 10 hours of the game and a good portion of the story. I should also note, since you mentioned the HUD, that it has probably the worst one that I've ever seen in a videogame. You can minimize what you see with a settings tweak, but it's still pretty awful. The graphics are frequently praised, and the models of the people and robo-saurs are certainly good, but I thought that the skies and vistas were very garish. I know that it's different, but I can't help but compare it to Zelda since they released a week apart. Where Zelda completely reinvents what an "open" world is, HZD goes in the opposite direction and refines the most basic and generic aspects of what this type of game used to be up to that point. Only one of these games will serve as an inspiration for the mechanics and vocabulary of open world games in the future.

Here's hoping that his reasons for departure were more personal than creative/political. Having just played through all of the campaigns and been reminded of how special these games were, I'd love to get another awe-inspiring experience in the mold of the first several entries. But that E3 trailer really didn't do much to generate excitement. I guess we'll know more next year?

Different shitty strokes I guess!

It pains me that it's being slept on, because I would put it among the best games I've ever played.

How is Castlevania? I'm not a huge fan of Metroidvanias in general, but it looks like Lords of Shadow a third person action-adventure game?

The simple act of flying off the surface of a planet and landing on another is amazing, but the problem that I've had with No Man's Sky is that the resource gathering and building is boring and uneventful. I understand why some people might like it, but I don't have the compulsion to build bases or colonies or interact with the game's systems. Outer Wilds proves, for me at least, that the "endless" nature of games like this has significantly less appeal than carefully crafted and meaningful experiences.

I ended up playing through Bastion, and I enjoyed it but didn't think it was great. Transistor is more appealing to me though, so I'll definitely give it a shot whenever it goes on sale.

I finished Ori and the Blind Forest last night. It's a magnificent game.

Tread carefully with Hollow Knight! Maybe it'll be right up your alley and you'll love it, but I found it overly frustrating and obtuse, even by confusing-metroidvania standards. It feels good to play, but I think generally that it's highly overrated and that people vastly undersell its learning curve.

It sounds like you might be burnt out on the homogenized open-world format, which I am too. There are tons of incredible single player games to choose from that don't employ the same mechanics. Recently I've enjoyed Outer Wilds, Resident Evil 2, and the Dishonored series. For indie stuff I recommend Inside, Hyper Light Drifter, Ape Out, and Into the Breach, if you haven't played them.

Words can't express how excited I am to play the exact same games except they load faster.

Interested to hear @SFLUFAN's thoughts about Quantum Break. I just finished it over the weekend, and while it's certainly not a great game, I nevertheless enjoyed my time with it. Not sure if this makes sense, but it's decidedly not more than the sum of it's parts, it's exactly the sum of its parts. The gameplay is probably the weakest that it's been in a Remedy game to date, and the story has some interesting turns but overall is absolute bargain-bin Syfy-channel pulp. That said, I still enjoyed it for what it is, and the television portions were much more competent than I initially expected. It's a unique Frankenstein's monster of a format that will likely never be replicated, but I found it fascinating and easy to consume. I'm extremely excited for Control though. Remedy makes very unique games, and even though all of them are flawed in some capacity, they have a strange alchemy that's rare in the industry.

This looks like an interesting curio, but maybe not that much fun to play.

I decided to keep working through Ori and the Blind Forest. I started it a while back and then went to something else. It's really beautiful and has some excellent platforming mechanics. I'll report back when it's finished.

I've had the last half of Quantum Break in my backlog for a few months. I just sat down this morning and powered through the last couple of chapters. Add it to the completion pile! Next up for me is Void Bastards or maybe SSX 3.

I haven't played a Gears of War game since the first one, which I found underwhelming. Is 4 worth it for the campaign?

I've completed the campaigns of CE, 2, 3, ODST, and Reach. Nothing will likely every top the first game's campaign for me due to my personal nostalgia and its monumental impact to console gaming, but I actually think upon replay that I would rank the campaigns like this: 3 > Reach > CE > 2 > ODST. I enjoyed all of them, and ODST has incredible atmosphere, but in 3 and Reach, Bungie really perfected the level designs and the moment-to-moment gameplay. Those games really move, and the gameplay varies multiple times per level. I'm not sure if I'll revisit 4, since I really disliked it upon release, and I've never played 5. Maybe Halo Infinite will bring back some of the early magic of the series, but I'm doubtful. My reverence for the series is as much about a time and place in the industry and in my life as much as it is about Halo being a phenomenal video game.

I have a tortured relationship with Tarantino. I find his scripting and direction to be generally brilliant, but his films don't ever fully come together for me. I find individual scenes and exchanges in some of his movies to be among the best and most entertaining that I've ever seen (the watch monologue in Pulp Fiction, or the tavern standoff in Inglourious Basterds for example), but they are often sandwiched between narrative beats and stylistic choices that I can't stand. I loved Kill Bill as a teenager, and I found it borderline unwatchable when I tried to revisit it recently. Inglourious Basterds, however, is a top-to-bottom masterpiece, and easily his crowning achievement in my eyes. I'm really looking forward to Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood, if only because his films are genuine events. Even if I don't enjoy the majority of his movies, it's hard to argue with his status as perhaps the most singular and exciting filmmaker of his generation.

Halo was a seminal series for me growing up. The first game is probably among my all-time favorites, and it's hard to overstate what a huge impact it had on games at the time. Halo 2 was probably my most anticipated video game release ever, and I still fondly remember getting it at midnight and playing a good portion of the campaign through the night. However, it seemed to lack some of the magic that the first game had. I felt the same about 3 when it came out in 2007 - as much as I anticipated the end of the trilogy, it failed to capture the elusive magic of the original. I finally bowed out when I played 4 and found it completely lacking. I recently got an Xbox One to take advantage of Game Pass, and the first thing that I downloaded is the Master Chief collection. I know that this package has had it's fair share of issues, but I've been utterly entranced by Halo again for the first time in over ten years. I am blown away by how well the gameplay has aged, and I can't think of a single FPS from this era that would still feel as immediate and engrossing as this does. Fast forward to a few weeks later, and I've completed the campaigns of CE, 2, 3, and ODST. I also picked up a second hand copy of Reach, and plan on getting to 4 and 5 after. I know that Halo has been eclipsed and left in the dust by bigger and more popular shooters, but there is something that is still very resonant about Bungie's vision. All of these years later, I'm having just as much fun in these emergent combat sandboxes as I did when I first played them. If anything, my opinion about 2 and 3 have improved greatly, and I found ODST to be a bold change of pace atmospherically and thematically. While it may be lacking in relevancy these days, Halo still represents one hell of a collection of video games.

Hell yes I knew it was coming out! Not sure if I'll get it immediately though, since I likely won't have somebody to play cooperatively with. I'll wait until I hear impressions about what it's like to play solo first.