Project Zomboid

Project Zomboid is early access despite first releasing over 10 years ago - it's a 3/4 view zombie survival game that has a surprising amount of depth for the relatively simple interface and gameplay.

You spawn in a house, gear up with what you find, and try to reclaim the world.   Everything is important to keep your character alive, do not stay wet for too long or you might get sick, be careful what foods you eat, make sure you have tweezers in your kit to pull out shards of glass if you climb through a window that you haven't cleared.

There is base building and barricading, there are multiple cities to visit including many fun POIs like prisons and malls and military encampments, it's really a game that you can lose hours with and never ever get to that point of "safe".  The jump scares make sense and they will still shock you when clearing unknown buildings.

I have hundreds of hours invested in this game, not all of it idling time like some ... 

Dredge

 Dredge is a simple game that has you take the role of a fisherman/delivery person, upgrading your ship and town and avoiding hazards (especially at night) as you do so.  

This game seems like one designed for playing on a phone or tablet, it has a good amount of content though -- about 5 different areas that you travel through as you upgrade your boat and fishing supplies and work your way through the quests from the various townsfolk.

This effort is all for a mysterious person in a shack who you are looking to retrieve for magical trinkets.  (each of which enhance the power of your ship)  I am writing this a bit after my playthrough but I believe that if you end up returning all of the trinkets it's not a good thing ... more of a world ender IIRC.  I remember restoring my game and then going and doing something other mission that I was midway on. 

This is a toilet reader of a game, fun to play if you have time to waste.

Disco Elysium

Disco Elysium is a game that I avoided playing for a long while.  It is a dialog heavy RPG where you are a down and out detective trying to solve the mysteries of a sleepy seaside town.  (I might get specific details wrong as I'm writing this well after playing...)

What hooked me is the writing for the intro, it was brilliant - and the way they carry the storytelling technique forward in the story adds to the hilarity of it all.   Effectively you have voices in your head that represent archetypes of your personality (or pretty much anything, you're obviously crazy) that are not necessarily to be trusted ... your cop intuition might be great, but your confidence might coax you into hitting on the suspect, or fleeing from paying for your room rent.   It's done brilliantly.

I got to a point in this game where I feel like I did a few choice wrong things, you only get so many dialog options and I expended them before I had the skills that validated some choices.  In the end I couldn't find someone to talk to that would allow my story to progress and I felt like I was just wandering looking for the one thing that would link me back up with some sort of chain of events.

Fun, but I'm not going to try and find the thread ....

The Director's Disorder

The Director's Disorder was another recent free single-player psychological horror game I tried recently.

You are Coal, an actor that has gone to your grandma's house and are tormented by someone as you try to sleep through the night.  It's a terrible "director" making you do terrible things, like desecrate your mothers grave or cut off your finger -- logically you resist but I couldn't figure out a way to progress without leaving into the woods and eventually dying.

On a restore game I just did everything the director wanted me to do so he wouldn't shoot my grandmas dog (asshole), including burn down her house.  There was a montage at the end that tells you what an asshole you really were, hating your sick mother, cheating on your pregnant wife, stealing from needy children, your drunkenness creating unsafe situations for everyone - and killing someone in a hit and run.  You were at your grandmothers house to hide out.

Kind of decent "shocking" twist I suppose ... I had to fight through the denial in much the same way someone this messed up might have to.

I Won't Forget Hue

This was a free game that was suppose to have a bit of a scare element.  I'm really not a big fan of scary games, so I shocked myself by adding a few to the cart recently.  

The scare in this was mild enough for me, effectively you are trapped but by wearing different glass lenses, you can see doors that weren't there, planks that span gaps, etc.  But you also uncover some demons chasing you as you wear these.  They can only get you while you wear their colored glasses, but the level design is such that you will have to sneak/run past with or just be in the room with them.

The collectibles along the way are bits of a torn up photograph, the big reveal is that the torn up photograph is your family, with the end being turning around and seeing the demons, who I guess were your family "look, he sees us now" ... perhaps there was a story somewhere that I missed in audio cues as to why they would be demons ... dementia maybe?

Hellpoint

Hellpoint is another Dark Souls clone set in the far future.

It's also parallels Dark Souls in that the various stories are a bit tough to track and I could really use a VaatiVidya deep dive ASMR explanation, but the gist of it is this -- you're in a space station in the far future after some cataclysmic event has destroyed humanity at least in some form.   

You meet "The Author" who is suss immediately and everything is a bit meta in regards to him as the controller of it all.   Effectively you are one of his constructs, sent about to gather all sorts of information and fight creatures and bosses that are now resident in the realm.   Along the way you encounter another construct (like yourself?) -- and discover that the Author is the avatar of some  massive AI.   

I think you are being set up to fight it, as if being AI was the terrible bit.   But this "AI" was my creator, not my antagonist from what I saw.  So when the decision tree presented me with fight it or pay obeisance, I took a knee and let it absorb my knowledge like a good construct.  That's the way I role ... credits.

 Everything was very Japanese in style for the adversaries, especially the bosses.  The game was well done but had a few frustrating bugs but nothing you couldn't deal with once anticipated (projectiles going through cover means dodge all projectiles).   The worst was a couple boss fights in a small enough room that the camera angle was the biggest battle.

There is an expansion pack -- Blue Sun.  I'll probably play, but I'll follow a guide from the beginning -- the game hid important items, so backtracking to get them was a bit tedious once I was lost enough to look up where they were.

  

Space Crew

Space Crew has you as commander of a team of astronauts defending the Earth by pressing the attack to the alien Plasmids.  As your characters complete missions, they gain experience/skills in their particular ship role, credits for you to upgrade your ship with and research points which are the games gate to tech advances.

The default mode for this game is super tedious and chaotic as you have to tag every incoming ship or your gunners won't even fire on them.  Thankfully there is a setting to disable that and also one to allow enough crewmembers for someone at every station.  This removed a lot of the tediousness of the game and let me focus on the missions and using the skills of the various stations more effectively.  The additional skills you unlock are fairly overpowered, and technically usable just about every jump.

Not sure I would want to suffer though it the default way...

I am a little bummed that the final mission had me sacrifice all my crew, but I did enjoy seeing the montage of the changes to my boys (and girls!)  (and ... things!)  at the end when they showed the people/outfits as they were at the point of certain significant game missions.  Kind of like watching your little digital babies grow up .. then hyper jump inside an alien queen to overload the warp core killing themselves but saving all of humanity.

Satisfactory

Satisfactory is an early access game that has you harvesting resources from a planet in order to create bigger, better factories for harvesting and building more gear to build bigger and better factories for harvesting and building more gear to build bigger and better factories for harvesting and building more ...

But dang it's fun to create massive factories with the ease this lets you do it.  At first I tried to keep everything looking clean, but as you advance - the scale of what you started just doesn't meet the requirements for the new factory so what was once beautiful .... becomes spaghetti, in a real bad way.

If I ever replay this, pre-planning for scale would be the key - the factories or foundations do not cost much to build, so building with more space than I ever think I might need and considering a more "modular" approach to the factories for expandability.

I hope they add more to it so I replay it actually .... 

In the end, I had a number of bases set up around a train circuit that delivered most of the resources where my main base assembled the parts I needed to advance the missions.   The various power stations and resource centers were fairly organized -- my base (pictured) was a nightmare tangle of christmas light wires.