General Game Discussion thread for April 2026

[Zed Clampet]

UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

I need better reading skills. I got this game called the Bus, which was supposed to include a 1 to 1 recreation of Berlin. I thought that was really cool. So I immediately set off in free play hoping to pick up passengers and never take them where they wanted to go. I'm staying on the same road, and I'm not seeing any bus stops, so I decide to turn at the next light and try my luck on a different street. I turn right and immediately slam into an invisible wall. "I must be on the edge of town," I think, so I slam into the cars behind me because there's no other way to turn around, and head back down the original road, but I still don't see any bus stops, so I think, "Maybe it's because I'm on the edge of town," so this time I turn left...and immediately slam into an invisible wall. "Wow, Berlin is much smaller than I thought." So I go back to the store page and it says, "1 to 1 recreation of Berlin BUS LINES". Oh.

 

[Johnway]

Path of exile - i decided to knuckle down and complete the last 12 maps i needed. So we dinged 28 challenges and i'm cashing out. theres no point playing any more as it's unlikely i'll reach 36 and as mentioned before i have idea for head cosmetic.

So after getting it, mixed feelings. Its alright, but meh i think after the amount of effort and time i spent playing it i think its time to avoid the next league. Considering the connection issues, i think its not worth playing the next league.

What next? well, i'll play an RTS game and finish some indies games before going back to an action game proper. As promised i'll play Homeworld remastered and see how thats like. Although i do have a taste for total annihilation which i never played (played supreme commander series and found it meh tbh).

 

[Frindis]

Dark Souls 3 boss fight, only first phase, I got scared, mind melted, somehow I managed to avoid a heart attack and hit something...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRCDU0nxYMQ

 

[Johnway]

So i fired up Homeworld remastered edition and i'm intrigued and very intimidated by the complexities of the game. its the 360 environments, understanding the controls, the formulations/complex tactics and lack of a pause option. The SP campaign seems to be quite interesting and fingers crossed it eases me into it. i might need to read up on some guides and videos to understand the mechanics etc.

 

[Zloth]

Yeah, the melee thing is in the main game, too, though I still don't understand why it affects all angles of attack when just one is blocked. <shrug>

It does also say that the game automatically picks the type of melee attack for you but you can pick it manually as well. Maybe the game sometimes picks a kick automatically even if it can't hit where a punch might be able to land or vice versa.

It has changed since that writing and automatically picks 'kick' most of the time now.

Also, mechs with no arms and 4 legs kick with both front legs at the same time, doubling damage! My 55 ton Scorpion kicks harder than an AC/20!

 

[Zed Clampet]

I just thought of something that might be kind of funny, maybe.

I made a brief opening cinematic for a game I'm probably never going to make. I'm using pictures of my game characters. So the thing is, the AI video generator is extremely conservative. That's either an intentional attempt to keep it on the rails or maybe I'm doing it wrong, not sure. But if I type "the woman looks left. Her expression immediately changes to joyous surprise," then I'm lucky if the character in the video does much of anything, and if it does, it often does the whole thing in slow motion.

What I have to do is tell it a very descriptive story filled with very good and dramatic reasons for the movement I'm asking for. To make matters even funnier, I've found the only way to insure strong facial expressions is to use a training that someone made to solve this problem and is triggered, for some reason, by prompts indicating a mental breakdown. Also, I've found it often necessary to repeat parts of the prompts where I'm telling the AI not to do something that I know it's going to want to do.

Me being me, I've just been telling it whatever, and it's occurred to me that it might be funny for me to actually narrate the videos in a deadpan voice. For instance, here's my prompt for the woman looking left and being happily surprised:

Immediately, instantly, she jerks her head ultra very quickly to the left because she hears the explosive sound of a commercial airliner crashing in her backyard. A penny! She sees a penny! It's a penny that is out of the picture and invisible! There is not a penny in the picture at all! The invisible penny is in the direction that she is looking. Immediately, instantly upon turning her head, she sees the invisible penny that is not in the picture. What an amazing surprise! She is an obsessive-compulsive neurotic coin collector and she loves pennies more than anything! Instantly, immediately upon seeing the invisible penny she has a nervous breakdown and is overcome with joyous wonder. She holds this pose of joyous wonder persistently forever.

Edit: Since writing that prompt, I've discovered that telling it that things are invisible doesn't actually do anything. I'm guessing that's because when captioning its training videos you would never mention something that couldn't be seen in the picture. Or maybe you need to give an explanation for why something is invisible. Don't know.

Also, that's a terrible prompt that only the truest of morons would use. Probably no one else prompts that way. It just works for me.

 

[Pifanjr]

My friend and I continued our Barotrauma game yesterday. We reached the start of the last biome last time, which is completely empty of outposts, so we need to go around activating beacon stations and defeating abyss creatures so new outposts can be established.

We decided to go for a 4 hop journey to an abandoned outpost, which led us past an abyss creature and beacon station as well. I was a bit worried about our supplies, but it all went really smoothly.

When we left the abandoned outpost we saw a new outpost had spawned on the very first hop we did, but it belongs to the rebels who hate us and will shoot on sight, which was a bit of a shame. However, after the next hop back another outpost spawned on the second hop from the Coalition, the other faction that we're allied with, so that worked out really well for us.

We spent all of our money on upgrades and supplies, accepted a couple of missions and set out and this is where it all went wrong.
Our sub has 5 guns, 3 on the bottom and 2 on the top. 4 of those are always manned by bots, but the top right one is a railgun and the ammo for that is quite expensive and the bots don't distinguish between ammo types and enemies, so that one is usually unmanned.
Which is not usually a problem, but on this specific occasion we happened to be in a narrow cave going to the top right when we ran right into a swarm of spinelings. Since I had no room to maneuver and no one was on the railgun, we smacked right into the full swarm and they obliterated our hull in seconds, leaving us stranded with all bottom guns stuck on the floor of the cave.

We eventually managed to kill them, but not before losing well over half of our crew and requiring me to swim outside to shoot the last one with my newly crafted handgun. Since we just spent all our money it's going to take a while to buy replacements too, which is really not ideal when we just reached the most dangerous biome.

 

[neogunhero]

@Pifanjr @neogunhero You know, the other thing about that review on Vampire Crawlers is that the game bills itself as "The Turbo Wildcard..." It's the ascending order bonus that makes it "turbo". Of course, that doesn't mean you have to like it, but the farther I go, the more interesting deckbuilding strategies there are, so there's absolutely no lack of strategy. That's just crazy. It's kind of like American football. You strategize and then you perform.

edit: I finally read the review. She's mostly got it right. She just didn't like it. Based only on her screenshots, though, she doesn't know how to build a deck or understand/know the color bonus or the things you should level up first. All her cards are red, she drew very few cards, she hardly had any mana, and she was much farther in the game than I am. Honestly, if that's the way she played, I'm a little doubtful that she was able to finish the game, which could make you frustrated enough to give the game a 50.

That's the funny thing about this game. Seemingly you can play the entire game with a bad deck. It won't be easy, and you'll be missing out on tons, but it is possible. I just did a gold run where I cashed out every single chest I opened and didn't level up a single thing. I was able to beat the level, but it was very difficult whereas it would have been much easier had I been grabbing the upgrades. This game doesn't give you one single way to play, but there is technically a correct way to play it, and that is using a good variety of cards to unleash better synergies and combos.

---

---

Reloaded my previous Deus Ex: Revision save from October last year. I was still sneaking around LaGuardia Airport on Chapter 3 when I booted it back up. Immediately I remembered where I was. Just outside the door were three security bots patrolling the area who would spot me the instant I stepped foot out that door. I had to come up with a plan. I had a good couple of EMP grenades and LAMs, so I figured I could lure them around the corner of this shack, hit them with an EMP then blow them up with the LAM.

I ran out the room, took a good chunk of damage, placed an EMP trap on the wall then hid behind some boxes. Two of the security bots were disabled, but I did not realize that the third was not. I was out in the open, so I ran to hide behind one of the security bots. Before I knew it, the third bot shot up the one I was hiding behind and blew it up, killing me in the process. At least I got a rare achievement for killing a bot with another bot! (The achievements are one of my favorite additions of Revision).

Second time, it worked perfectly. All three were disabled, I threw the LAM, and kaboom, they're all destroyed. However, this time a NSF solider spotted me and began running for the alarm. A quick gas grenade and tranquilizer dart later, he was taken care of. I seriously waste a lot of items in this game! A charger prod shock and hit with the crowbar would have sufficed.

 

[BeardyHat]

So i fired up Homeworld remastered edition and i'm intrigued and very intimidated by the complexities of the game. its the 360 environments, understanding the controls, the formulations/complex tactics and lack of a pause option. The SP campaign seems to be quite interesting and fingers crossed it eases me into it. i might need to read up on some guides and videos to understand the mechanics etc.

I played it a few years ago and it seems pretty neat, made it a good way through the game, but kind of stopped because I think I got sort of soft locked. But I think that's also because I'm not amazing at strategy games and lost a lot of my units.

It feels pretty important to stick around after a mission and collect resources, because that's all you're going to get as far as the game goes. Can't remember exactly, but I think you're limited on the amount of units you can get and you can only carry what you have forward into the next mission.

I'm still utterly addicted to Pillars. Ended-up having some periodic breaks this weekend in between all the busy-ness and so had a lot of time just to play; probably 3-4 hours worth and yeah, it's just good. I had a friend asked me what makes it that I'm able to drop it and come back to it without an issue, which is usually a problem for me. Realistically, Pillars should be a tough game to do that with, but I feel so immersed in the world, it's like reading a book. I don't typically get very into a games world like this, but I'm literally reading all the lore books I come across and making an earnest effort to commit a lot of the worldbuilding to memory.

 

[Zed Clampet]

That's the funny thing about this game. Seemingly you can play the entire game with a bad deck. It won't be easy, and you'll be missing out on tons, but it is possible. I just did a gold run where I cashed out every single chest I opened and didn't level up a single thing. I was able to beat the level, but it was very difficult whereas it would have been much easier had I been grabbing the upgrades. This game doesn't give you one single way to play, but there is technically a correct way to play it, and that is using a good variety of cards to unleash better synergies and combos.

I could very well be mistaken about which way is more efficient, but you can slam your way through a level 3 or 4 dungeon very quickly, in just a few minutes, not even really paying attention to which cards you play, and grab about 20k gold by doing the fights and picking the coin gems, rerolling the dice if needed. You can still cash out the chests, but this way you make decent money every time you attack.

And I don't think you've made it there yet or you would have mentioned it, but soon you should get a big red button you can push when you go into a dungeon that you've already been to, and it kills everything on that floor, you get all the experience and level-up awards, then you can just wander around and gather up all the treasure.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I bought a Chinese FMV dating sim. It was on very deep discount. It's a type of game that I've seen a lot in my Steam wandering, but never experienced. So far the story has been the same quality you would expect from a gooner fantasy at hour 4 of a long session of.... Another "positive" is that the store page includes the following sentence:

"you can find your own youthful throbbing in this game"

The English translation is practically serviceable. This is fine because for a narrative heavy game, the specifics don't actually seem to matter. You're here, there's a beautiful Chinese woman, and she's going to follow you around like an eager puppy. Anything else is just fluff.

In the first story, for instance, you were in a horrible car crash. Ridiculously, for reasons I refuse to even remember, the hospital allowed a beautiful woman to take you home, still unconscious and presumably with serious brain trauma. That's "blah, blah, blah" material if ever I've seen it, and no translation, no matter the competency level, is going to make it any better or any worse.

 

[BeardyHat]

Steam Controller page is up.

More expensive than I wanted, but I'm still buying one.

Steam Controller

Your games at your fingertips

store.steampowered.com