cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/43285035

What a time to announce all 4 horseman of the apocalypse (Is that now GenAI, Climate Change, Genocide and Technofacism?) are coming in the close future.

From the companies press release:

_“The legendary saga of the Four Horsemen continues in Darksiders 4, an all-new action-adventure set in an apocalyptic version of earth and continues where the original Darksiders game left off.

Darksiders 4 is a 3rd person action adventure game featuring combat, traversal and puzzle solving in a lore rich post apocalyptic world.”_

Steam Page

Editorial

I have some level of excitement for this. Darksiders ability to never fully die is a sign of industry health to me. I have made multiple attempts to jump in to the first 2 from PS3 to PC to the remasters on X Series, PS4 and Switch (also stadia in keeping with my post history). The most recent switch attempt lasted the longest.

Not exactly sure what my completion percent was when I finally wandered off to something else that sparkled and caught my eye (probably a stressful day at work and whatever CoD was on the Xbox front page) but I remember feeling like it had finally clicked. The puzzles seemed engaging enough, I was vibing with the upgrade grind and the whole thing was ridiculous enough I’d give it a recommend finally.

Darksiders is a video game ass video game and it sort of knows it. It also has a side that feels like someone had a vhs of the Dolph Lundgren Masters of the Universe movie they watched a little too much growing up and that was their embodiment of dark fantasy. Mike Mignolas artwork was great as always and it just kind of worked. The series is straight B grade gaming and that’s my sweet spot. I also had a problem with the Beastmaster and the USA channel growing up so take my opinion with that context.

All that aside, it’s a goddamn miracle we’re getting the (hopefully) final game in a series that never really stood a chance of a 3rd mainline release not far after it was initially launched.

Best of luck Gunfire, let’s hope you can fight the tide of the live service, post game content, line goes up dev cycle and put out something you’re all proud of.

Today's game is Prey. It's not my first go with this game, but last time i played i got right to the end and stopped. That was on Xbox Gamepass. I saw it was on sale on PC and decided to scoop it up and finally finish it. We'll see if i end up sticking through this, but i'd like too.

The game has a fun Physics engine where you can pick things up and just chuck them, which is the part i'm sure both myself and many others probably remember this game for. I spent the first 10 minutes ish of the games just chucking things at a NPC in the opening and at random stuff around the room.

Then there's also the hints the game provides towards the story at the very beginning. Now that i now the story it's a lot easier to pick up on these at the beginning, and it's cool seeing it hinted at. Though, if memory serves the game doesn't hold these secrets for very long. Nonetheless i think it's cool the game does this.

The game also has a little "alternate history" spin too it that i think is cool. I must have not picked up on this the first time, despite the huge ass painting in the museum of JFK in 2035. Speaking of the Museum, the game gives you a little one to explore that explains the alternate history which i think is cool.

Enough about the cool things this game does, there's also the combat. The game gives you a bunch of cool combat abilities. But the two core ones i enjoy is the Physics and Way the enemies interact with weapons.

Firstly, physics is awesome because in a pinch you can chuck things at enemies, and secondly, and this is the cheap ass strategy i use a lot, you can pick up Turrets and reposition them. I always keep a mental note of where all the turrets are so if i encounter an enemy i can grab the turret and basically mow it down.

Then the way the enemies interact with weapons, namely the main one which is the mimics, is really cool. The game gives you this cool Gloo gun which you can use to freeze the mimics for a bit and let you do extra damage. On top of that the Gloo Gun let's you use it for parkour, so i used it to skip a few sections.

One thing i will say is this game can be harsh at times, at least for me. Maybe i'm not playing right but i feel like i'm in a constant struggle for health. I ended up getting soft locked so i stepped back for a bit and stopped after getting into Morgan's office. I really want to finally finish this game though so i'm hoping i don't get bored and hop to something else like i usually do.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.ca/post/122407

Hello. I got a walkpad a month or so ago (it's a small treadmill) and I try to walk 1hr per day daily for health.

As far as making the most of this otherwise boring workout I have found it helps to play relaxing games on my CRT. I have a PC but lean more towards pre 2005 games (it's not a limit though).

I mention the treadmill because the games have to be engaging but not require 100% of your attention. For example I finished Resident Evil 1 the other day. It was a wonderful game although it had a lot of backtracking which was annoying.

A bad example would be Megaman 1 (too strenuous and attention requiring, also brutal)

A good example would be civ2 on the PS1.

In terms of what games I can play, I can pretty much play everything up to 2005 either handheld or console up to that time. I have a PC/ 3DS/ Analogue Pocket.

I lean towards pre 2005 games but not limited to that. I don't really have any specific genres in mind so you can recommend whatever you want and enjoy.

Steam is having a Racing Fest sale until August 4th and I thought I might like to try. I used to play a lot of Gran Turismo 2 and 3 back in the day, especially the rally modes.

Any recommendations for me? Prefer anything under $10, no EA games, no Ubisoft games, and realistic although it's not as important.

I'm also interested in Garfield Kart - Furious Racing if anyone has an opinion on that.

Well that came out of nowhere, but I'm hyped

Supposedly, they're rolling back the price increase for all holiday releases.

"We’re focused on bringing players incredible worlds to explore, and will keep our full priced holiday releases, including The Outer Worlds 2, at $69.99 – in line with current market conditions," an Xbox spokesperson explained in a statement to Windows Central.

If you've already pre-ordered The Outer Worlds 2 at the $79.99 price point, you will have to grab refunds at the point of purchase if you've already paid up. Microsoft says some retailers will light up with refunds today, but some will start accepting refunds from tomorrow. Then, you can pre-order again at the new $69.99 price tier.

Looks great. The world could use more first-person fantasy games.

2025 on Steam is turning into a pretty solid year for co-op games. Lots of big names, some smaller teams, and a few surprises making waves.

It all began with a copy of Animal Crossing Wild World, and it’s a collection of memories I’m sure I’ll never, ever, forget. Let’s discover them together, and visit my old towns too!

Welcome back! Today we're going to be doing an in-depth look at the first game I ever posted here: Enshrouded. Now that I do long-form blog discussions instead of just screenshot posts, I figured it was time to revisit this game and give it a solid overview.

This is the third most-played game in my Steam library, which says a lot considering I have over 4,000 games. My friends and I have put about 532 hours into this game so far.

Enshrouded has been in early access for about a year and a half and the developers are still actively working on it. I'm kind of glad I waited until now to give it a full review because it's received tons of new content in the past year, and it's only getting better.

Enshrouded is unique in that it's a third-person open-world fantasy game, but it's also a crafting/survival game where you can dig/mine anywhere there is terrain and destroy almost everything placed in the world.

You can travel the world, discovering new quests and lore and improving your weapons, armor, and skills. Or, you can pick a place to settle down and build your own fantasy home, literally from the ground up. By the current endgame, you can have up to ten city-wide bases established anywhere in the world, where you can build to your heart's content.

You can also host your own public or private server and invite up to 16 people to quest in your custom world. You can fine-tune the settings of your server, so players or NPCs are stronger or weaker, determine how quickly weapons and tools break (or set them to never break), adjust how long daylight and nighttime is, and a ton more detailed customizations. Not needing food and water to survive is a default setting, although you can turn it on if you want the true survival feeling. You can also lock down your builds so strangers joining your game can't just destroy your cities and loot your resources.

I just started a new character to get screenshots for this post and I was surprised to see an opening cutscene explaining the lore of the game! That's a new addition.

Long ago, a stranger traveled to the lands of Embervale and presented the humans and Ancients with "The Elixir," a potent drug that boosted one's natural abilities. It was highly addicting and humans, of course, went a little nuts over this miracle drug, attempting to harvest their own elixir straight out of the earth themselves.

But like the Mines of Moria, humans delved too greedily and too deep, and they awoke The Shroud - a terrible fog that poisons the land and turns people into a sort of mindless undead creature called The Fell.

As The Shroud overtook the lands, humans and the Ancients worked together to create "The Flameborn," a type of person attuned to the power of fire, who is more resistant to The Shroud. This is your character.

It's never really explained, but Flameborn are essentially immortal. If you die, you just respawn from the last Flame Altar or Return Beacon you visited, so you can't ever truly have a game over. Also, you're resistant to fire.

By the way, if you find vials of the elixir in-game, it'll give a 30-minute buff of 30% damage increase and let you stay in The Shroud for up to a minute longer while it's active.

After you've built your custom Flameborn character, the game opens with you awakening within a Cinder Vessel. You climb out to find yourself in a long-forgotten Ancient Vault. Society has basically collapsed long ago and despite some scattered "Scavengers" (humans driven mad by elixir consumption) who roam the lands, there's no sign of people.

Traveling through the halls of the vault, you find a Flame Shrine, which ignites in your presence. (All sources of light in the world - even extinguished flames - will automatically flare up when you approach them.) The flame whispers to you, urging you to create a Flame Altar in the world to shelter yourself from the dark. The vault doors open, allowing you to explore the ruins of the world.

You step out onto a crumbling and overgrown terrace, where you get your first glance at the outside world and its various ruins. There are weather events in this game and it happened to be overcast at this point of my gameplay, but you'll see random sunny days and rainy days as well. Even snowfall if you're high enough up in the mountains!

The plains below are marked with a tall red flame, showing the general area for you to build your first Flame Altar. But to get there, you have to travel through a Shroud-filled cavern down the mountain.

This is your first experience in dealing with The Shroud. When you step into it, a timer bar appears at the top of the screen, counting down to your end if you don't escape The Shroud. You start with about 5 minutes of time, but as you strengthen the flame at your Flame Altar, you'll improve the amount of time you can spend in The Shroud.

When you make it to the plains, you'll need to pull up your crafting menu to make a Flame Altar. Make sure you have the proper materials to make it! In this case, you need 5 stones, which you can literally pick up off the ground.

Once you have made your Flame Altar, you need to place it in the world. See the faint yellow square around the borders of the plains? That designates the build area near the Flame Altar. Anywhere within that square, you can build whatever you want. As you level up your Flame Altar, that square will get exponentially larger, until you have space for a small city!

It's actually a cube space; you also have a limit to how high and how low you can build from that shrine. But as with the sides, that space will grow as you level up the Flame Altar. You can eventually build a massive tower to the heavens! Or a dungeon deep into hell...

Put multiple Flame Altars within range of each other to expand a single base's build region, or place them randomly around the world. Flame Altars are not only build areas, but also fast-travel points, so scattering them in hard-to-reach areas saves you on travel time around the massive map.

Remember that you can only place two Flame Altars when you start the game, so don't make a bunch of them. As you strengthen the flame at your Flame Altar, you will be able to use more. Ten is the current max number of Flame Altars you can have in the world, so place them wisely. You can always deactivate them and re-place them somewhere else, but anything you've built in their region will eventually disappear if you walk away for 30 minutes.

The flame at your new Flame Altar whispers to you, telling you to seek out more survivors who are slumbering in other nearby Ancient Vaults. At this point, you can either dedicate your time to crafting a base, or going out to find other survivors in the world. I chose to track down the first survivor - a blacksmith.

There are currently nine craftspeople, five assistants to the craftspeople, and ten villagers to find in the world. The craftspeople have specialized skills that will expand your crafting capabilities, the assistants have duplicate skills of specific craftspeople, so you can have two people with the same crafting skills scattered around your base, and the villagers are just NPCs to make your bases look more lived in.

Now that I have a blacksmith, I need a shelter for him. I guess I should at least build a house. You need to craft a workbench first, which will give you more advanced crafting abilities than what you can access from your crafting menu.

Once you've placed a workbench, accessing its menu will give you blocks of building materials you can craft. As you discover new materials in the world, this menu will expand with new types of building blocks.

I know the numbers don't add up - 100 stone blocks from 2 stones?! But hey, if I have to mine 100 stones to craft 100 stone blocks, I'll be mining all day! And 100 blocks don't go very far when building. So I'm glad I can craft more materials with limited resources. It keeps the gameplay moving forward without bogging you down with (excessively) repetitive tasks.

Once you have blocks crafted, ensure you have a construction hammer on your toolbar. (You can craft one from your crafting menu or from the workbench menu). Switch to your construction hammer, open the building mode (Tab button on PC), then select the shape and material you want to construct.

You can lay one individual brick at a time, or select a custom shape to build a platform, wall, giant block, ramp, roof, etc. If you have dirt or stones in your inventory, you can also create various shapes and sizes of terrain and edit the shape of the land around you.

You can also craft an axe and pickaxe to cut down trees and dig up the terrain. Everything is destructible around the world and will restore to their original setting if you leave the area for about 30 minutes. Except for anything within the build area of your Flame Altar; those changes are permanent until you remove the Flame Altar and leave the area for 30 minutes. So don't go mining in your backyard unless you want to destroy the natural terrain. Although you can always manually fill it back in with the construction hammer and some stones or dirt.

I found some flint to mine on a cliff side here, which is one of my favorite building blocks. There are dozens of different materials to be found around the world, so you can customize the look of your bases however you want.

I finished building a small rough stone house with plant fiber roof just as it started raining. Which was good, as the blacksmith was starting to complain about not having a roof over his head.

Then the blacksmith informed me of a nearby Elixir Well that needed to be cleared out. Yeah, yeah, as soon as I'm done taking a nap.

The Elixir Wells are home to Shroud Roots: giant red fungus-looking things which are the cause of The Shroud. Chopping them down with an axe will clear the area around the Elixir Well of any Shroud. Although if you leave the area for 30 minutes, it will revert to its original state and the Shroud will come back.

Shroud Roots are guarded by large bosses; in this particular case, a Fell Thunderbrute. When you take down these boss-level characters, you can claim their heads, which you can later mount on your wall in your home. I've been meaning to build a trophy room in my original game's castle...

Destroying the Shroud Root will give you a skill point, which you can spend in a skill tree to further spec your character. There are twelve categories to build out. By the endgame, you will have enough skill points to have nearly maxed out three of them, so you're not locked into one specific category of gameplay. I personally chose Battlemage, Wizard, and Healer. (Since my teammates are always jumping head-first into fights they can't handle, ha!)

As you play on, you'll find more enemies around the world, plenty of quests, materials, and cosmetics to discover, and tons of lore hidden in books and scrolls.

There are varying climates, like desert wastelands, freezing winter mountainscapes, forests, plains, and of course, Shroud valleys and mines everywhere. Or you can get to work building a cozy hobbit hole deep underground, a castle way up in the mountains, or a fairy home deep in the woods.

Don't forget to craft a glider, so you can coast quickly across the various regions. Besides fast travel between Flame Altars, gliding is the best way to travel between places. I like to place my Flame Altars high up on mountains so I can fast-travel there and then jump and glide to my nearby destination.

Just keep an eye on your stamina gauge while you're gliding. Nothing worse than being a mile up in the sky and all of a sudden falling to your doom. If you're about to run out of stamina, the best thing to do is just drop, which will stop consuming stamina, then glide again when you're just about to hit the ground. You'll tuck and roll and take no damage.

Here's my first attempt at building a small castle in the starting zone prairie. You can garden and plant pretty much anything that grows in the game, which is where that massive perfectly-aligned forest came from in the background. You can also build farms and raise animals, or find dogs and cats in the world to keep as pets in your base.

Here's a shot of the main floor inside the castle. The back wall inside the giant fireplace is a secret door, with steps leading down into an underground cavern where my alchemist and blacksmith hang out.

Here's my first attempt at building a castle wall near the top of a mountain. I used glowing blue blocks to create the impression of a moat, which looks fantastic all lit up at night. Water is the one resource you can't build with in this game. (Yet!) The developers have mentioned that it's something they'd like to do, but it's on the back burner for now.

Oh, and that dragon in the first screenshot? My buddies and I took it down. That was a rough fight.

This "Fell Dragon Youngling" is currently the endgame boss. I dunno how big an adult one of these will be, but there are dragon skeletal remains scattered around the world that are bigger than cities! I hope the developers incorporate an adult Fell Dragon in a later update, because that would be an epic endgame challenge!

The map is only about 1/3rd open for exploration, and since early access dropped, two new regions have opened up with new content, including several non-Shroud dungeons with rewards for completion. So there's tons more to come with this game. It's so much fun, no matter whether you enjoy questing, base building, crafting, or just exploring. I highly recommend you check out Enshrouded!

I'm mixed on the combat system, but I guess it's par for the course for Silent Hill to have very awkward combat.

Today's game is Zomboid. We only had an hour today so we decided to make the best of it and have a Cookout in our little group of 3. We wanted to make Burgers, but we lacked the bread. So we decided "Maybe there's some fresh bread somewhere?" and we go searching. My two friends go off together to search the houses while i search the Strip Mall. I got lucky and found 3 buildings with Raw bread in it in a fridge. Of course though, the game had other plans.

While i was heading to the last building the Helicopter Came. I was lucky to have it distracted by my friends for a bit and had some planks in my car and bag from Barricading. So i got them out and boarded up all the doors and windows. To hunkerdown. Remember that part where i said i only had an hour to play? That's where it went. it was like when a show has a low budget episode too fund the bigger season finale. Like Breaking Bad's Fly episode i hear so much about. The entire time was spent in hear trying to keep from being seen by zombies and staying alive. To make matters worse had sliced my hand open on accident on one of the windows while boarding it up, so i had to take care of that.

I ripped some clothes off a zombie in the back and used that to bandage it, then I had to take care of my hunger. Luckily there was some non rotten cookies on the table i could eat. In the back i also managed to find some tea i could drink which helped. I used the time i was making the tea to also make the raw bread i had gathered, so i did manage to find the bread.

At around 4 PM the Helicopter finally fucked off and i was able to sneak out the front door of the Hair Salon next door mostly unseen. I did have to sneak around a bit because there was a ton of zombies covering the area, but i got home safe and with the bread delivered. Since my time was up though i had too save the cookout for next time.