I played this during Next Fest. Best spreadsheet game.

Cassette Beasts is a creature collector with a substantial single-player campaign and a permadeath difficulty option.

You could also have permadeath as a house rule, which would let you play singleplayer games with traditional campaigns. For example, you could play Elden Ring or Borderlands 2 and commit to deleting the character upon death.

A weird suggestion: Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a co-op puzzle game about defusing a bomb. The player who’s streaming will have the bomb but stream only audio, not video, and everyone else will have to use the defusal manual to guide them to safely disarm the bomb. You’ll have to advance level by level.

You want us to sell fewer controllers?!

I clicked on this post because of the jazz in jazzstronauts.

There actually is something that could be called jazz, but you’ll have to finish the entire story for that.

How did you get all the images at once, upload beforehand (whether to Lemmy or somewhere else offsite) and that is how you have a link? Repeated editing so Lemmy accepts each new image upload?

I actually published a mini-site on yay.boo containing this post and all of the media. The pictures in this Lemmy post are hotlinked from yay.boo. The video is hotlinked from Imgur because yay.boo did not like it when I did that. In my previous posts, I did directly upload everything to sh.itjust.works, but I wanted to try a different way this time.

For my previous posts, like this one on Gunfire Reborn, I went to the “Create a post” form and used the “upload picture” button on the toolbar of the main body text field.

I have actually been playing multiple cat-themed games in recent months but have been too lazy/busy to bother writing about them.

Will you be waiting at the finish line to cheer for the 365th?

You’re buyer!

I was really impressed with the demo during a Steam Next Fest last year.

The plot of Mankind Divided ends oddly abruptly, which is a real

Denuvo. Shame.

I’d say it’s a step more “serious racing” than Kart. Transformed had more complex drifting and boosting mechanics to emphasize good racing skills. There are still powerups, but they’re relatively weak. The closest blue shell equivalent is the swarm, which summons a swarm of giant wasps to sit in front of the race leader, but it’s always dodgeable with good steering. The medium-level pickups require good aim or awareness of who’s near you. The Kart strategy of only caring about the last lap is still possible in Transformed, but trying to get ahead as far as possible is also a doable strategy.

Really hoping this can be a worthy successor to Transformed

I’m sure someone at Valve also had fond memories of that toilet.

Amazingly, I played this game when it came out and discovered it has Steam Controller binds out of the box!

At this point, the fact that Portal is in the Half-Life universe is just a fluke. The plots of Portal 2 singleplayer, co-op, and PTI are very “distant” from anything happening with Half-Life. The two series are tonally very mismatched. Their strongest connection is that Aperture bumbled their way into possessing Half-Life plot-critical stuff and then losing the boat that contained it.

I hope the developer commentary is on.

The maps aren’t generated inch-by-inch, if that’s what you were hoping for. Each stage has a bucket of unique rooms it stitches together to create the level geometry. The devs did a clever thing and made rooms with multiple doorways, with two chosen at random to be part of the path, so you can traverse through the same room in a slightly different way each run. At this point, I’ve seen all the possible rooms, but the combination of character upgrades, surprise challenges the game springs on you, weapons, and enemies keeps it fresh. There’s a lot of replayability in just character builds alone, since you can find multiple ways to make each character effective, depending on what perks you got first and what risks you take.

The co-op works well. Gunfire Reborn is a lot easier in co-op because friends can revive each other with unlimited tries, whereas in singleplayer, you get only one revive by sacrificing the character-upgrading resource. Recently, they’ve added a Left 4 Dead-style bot co-op mode so you can have that experience instead of the pure solo one. I’ve actually ground myself into a weird corner where I’m way better than everyone else I play with and can carry a whole team, dealing like 80% of the entire team’s damage across the whole run. I’ve not actually tried public matchmaking, just playing solo or with friends.

In terms of DLCs, each comes with two new characters and a handful of weapons. Each DLC character has a different mechanical focus in case you’re getting bored of the characters you already have. The base game is just fine to start with. I have the first two packs, but the latest one, the third, I skipped during the Steam winter sale to buy more games. The character I was playing here, Zi Xiao, comes from the second pack, Artisan and Magician. His counterpart in that pack is Nona, who is pretty much the red panda version of Gaige from Borderlands 2 (no anarchy stacks, though), summoning and commanding a combat robot. The first pack, Spirit Realm, has a monkey who aggressively upgrades his guns and a fox who, with the right build, can just stop using guns and drop fireballs on enemies instead.

Okay, here’s my final pitch. The game is on sale as part of the launch of the new season. It’s not the all-time low, but it’s pretty close.

By the way, my main is Qing Yan, the other bird boy.

The WADF soundtrack sticks with me

Valve tried trackballs with the Steam Controller but ditched them for trackpads that emulate trackball physics. They found small ones felt bad but big ones were too bulky and heavy. Clearly they like that idea, since every controller-like thing they’ve designed since includes pads.

If you haven’t done so already, I suggest you start taking notes while playing the game. You’ll need to keep track of what you have to come back to a place for.

I completed Psychonauts recently on my PC. There’s a Linux native version as well, and both it and the Windows+proton versions seemed to work… adequately. It’s pretty janky, which I mainly attribute to it being an old PC game.

Trying to finish Psychonauts after several years of playing it on and off