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.