I'm just enamored by it and it's presentation over the other games

I think BotW will stand the test of time, it's very much an evolution of the Wind Waker in visual style, and I think its story leans close to the mythology/fairy tale elements of story than the others.

Kentucky Route Zero.  No yet convinced, but we'll see...

Cities skylines finally. It's a bit good, and the missus loves it.

The other day me and my friend played some pretty epic Borderlands co-op on PC, using this little tool. We both had two full 1080p screens each, happily running at 60FPS or more, and connected with LAN mode, running on one PC. Was really good fun, only a few judders now and then, but that mostly cleared up after a while, and it's still pretty good considering the game is quite unoptimised anyway and not really designed for that. The tool also apparently works with the Pre Sequel, Resi Evil 5, and maybe Left 4 Dead 2.

If you have a dual monitor setup it's definitely worth a try, I really want to see some games including that as a feature built in.

As I have been moving flat I grabbed some steam sale games to tide me over. Just a tenner both Steam World Heist (on Moot's recommendation) and also Hollow Knight. After getting vaguely moved in and fixed up, I stuck Hollow Knight on expecting it to be a breezy pleasant experience.

Oh man. It is not what I expected. It's a metroidvania title that was kickstarted a few years back off the bag of a GameJam prototype. It's... kind of brilliant. It's what I'd wankily call a "post-souls" metroidvania. It's ironic given Metroid and Symphony of the night clearly influenced Souls in a huge way, but this is the first time I think I've seen a game take ideas from Miyazaki's series and retrofit them into a classic Metroid style explore-a-thon.

Mildly Spoilerific re: enviroments etc, but to be honest if you've played a Souls game or a Metroid Game you've probably seen it all before, but not with cute little bugs

You, perhaps the Hollow Knight, the story isn't clear, are a little bug armed with a nail. You start the game by coming across a tiny village, largely abandoned bar an Elderly Bug and a little Iron Bench (these are you bonfires, essentially) and you go down the well into a cavernous expanse that eventually sprawls out massively into various different biomes: fungal caves, verdant underground forests, a dilapidated city, a crystal mine, and so on. 

Progression is as expected: rummage around areas for bosses and new abilities and keys that give you access to other areas. There's a lot of freedom here, and you can 'sequence break' quite easily, allowing you to skip to harder or easier areas given if you are skillful or tenacious enough. It's largely much of a muchness in that regard, though you can unlock a few means of fast travel as you play, and it has a penchant for shortcut unlocks to and from various Benches, though there really aren't enough of them given the difficulty of the game. Interestingly as well, there is no default map. You have to find (and buy) maps off a little bug who explores the caves, and once you've got them, you can only expand on his information by resting at a bench once you've brought a quill (so you can fill it in). There's also no compass early on either, and you have to buy one as a charm (more on that later) meaning you can find yourself properly, dauntingly lost in some of the environments. Finding the cartographer is sometimes the biggest relief in the game. As you progress, other folks you find take up residence in the little village, and have their own little quests (one bug keeps biting off more than he can chew, though I've not figured out how to free him from his latest predicament.

The difficulty mostly comes from the combat. You only start off with a simple slash, and you get typical abilities later on (projectile, charge, ground pound). Forgoing a roll or dodge, you need to shimmy around to stay out of weapon ranges. The twist comes from jhe fact that you have two resources: simple health pips (5 masks) and a container for souls. If you kill enemies they fill up your soul container, and you can then hold the spell button to 'focus' and heal one mask (keep it held to keep on healing). This resource is also eaten for your projectiles and a few other abilities, which makes an resource pull. When you die, you lose your currency, and part of your soul container, and can only get it back by finding an killing your shade - though later on there is a way of circumventing that - which adds an edge to exploring when you've got a chunk of cash hanging around on your corpse.

Now where it sets itself apart from most other Metroid style titles is its bosses. Because of its health mechanic, there is no real brute force way of dealing with enemies. Like Souls bosses they hit fast and hard, and they're nearly all bigger or faster than you. Finding gaps in combat to Focus becomes your main goal, as they nearly all have a little too much health than feels comfortable to deal with. The way your abilities stack to give you breathing room in later fights is amazing, and like Bloodborne the decision to take a second slash to get more soul so you can squeeze in a heal later is a risky but exciting element to add. As with the Souls games, dying to bosses to trudge back is something you'll do, and finding the best bench to rest at beforehand is often a decent time investment. In combat, the default heal takes too long, and overall your weapon is kind of weak, but there is a Charm system that lets you equip various costed charms to do various things, but it restricted by slots you have to find or buy in the world. An odd system, but it lets you tinker with setups for bosses and so on.

I've gone on for ages now, so the lats bit will just be about how fucking Soulsian it feels. It's pretty much flat out a Souls narrative. There's dreamers blocking an ancient evil, all the enemies are mad husks or vicious predators, and all the world is in ruin. Hallownest, the core of the world you explore, s like Lordran, and it even has its own Anor Londo style metropolis that has a tower full of failed experiments and a hidden archive, and bellow the lowest, most forgotten part of the world there is even an Abyss - heh. As you explore you get a real sense of the world... but its a world of bugs rather than men. There are lost tribes of mantises, a distant village covered in webs, a valley sheltered by the rotting shell of a giant worm... it isn't that far removed from the Souls games but it's a neat twist. The bugs are all designed really well, Quirrel being a favourite - a little samurai type who you meet along the way at various benches. Like Metroid and Souls, there are tons of optional areas, and some are ingeniously hidden, most of them full of really devious bosses and challenges. 

Visually it's great as well. A lush Burton-esque world of bugs wearing masks and wielding pins and nails as weapons. The art style isn't overly busy, but it is quite muted in greys, purples and blues, but it makes it all feel really consistent. The world is designed well, even though its Metroid roots make it feel more arbitrary than the more naturalistic 3D worlds of the Souls games. It's definitely interesting seeing that sombre, portentous story telling come back to roost in the genre that arguably wove it into world building and exploration so well. I am nearly finished with the main game I think, at about 18-20 hours in, with a whole host of optional stuff to do (some of it incredibly tough). 

I should have probably waited for the finish line before writing all this, but my only complain so far is that it is often a little too difficult when you're fighting near environmental hazards against flyers, as you can take a lot of chained damage without any way of avoiding it. Bosses can be very hard until you've figured them out, and I'd have preferred them to take about 25% less damage. I know some people got by without weapon upgrades but I would never have managed.

It's currently PC only, but coming to Switch soon, and I think there are a lot of folks here who will really like it, especially those into Souls games or Metroid games or vice versa. It's not twisting the genre like Ori did with its lethal challenge sections, but on the whole I far prefer it sense of exploration, the coherency of its world, its vicious combat, and its hazy storytelling far more than Ori, which I felt was more of a glorified platformer than a traditional metroid style game. Also, the bug dude is way cute: 

Never played it, not a big fan of Ska Studios art style.

Tempy wrote:

Never played it, not a big fan of Ska Studios art style.

Shame to let that put you off. It's decent, think you'd enjoy well enough.

Tempy wrote:

Aye I know, it also was never cheap enough to risk the punt. Also it looked like it was just Bloodborne/Dark Souls but 2D. Was it more than that?

Nope.

Civ5 on new laptop and cities on bone. Time sinks the pair of them!

What's your steam Id temp?

Join the B&B steam group, there's loads of us there

Done and done.

Welcome to the club face!

Kororinpa 2 (aka Marble Balance Challenge) on Wii. Hard mode.

They aren't kidding.

I read it anyway.  I've recently seen two of my least favourite genres turn into potential favourites, Metroidvania is one of them, so although some of that sounds quite daunting (finding the cartographer in particular), I'm definitely in for day one.