This is a charming little throwback MUD! And it's surprisingly lengthy; I had expected something more miniature.

I'm still fairly early with a character at level 10 just after reaching Bigtown, collecting new quests, and starting to figure out my next steps.

Population is sadly very low. I chose to play today because Sokpop suggested a communal return to the game so that everyone interested could benefit from a boost in player count at the same time. I caught the tail end of that event and never saw more than 3 players online. However, the multiplayer element seems like it can just be ignored; I'm treating this as a single-player text-based RPG for now and not worrying about whether anyone else is around.

In addition to being a satisfying (albeit grindy) little RPG, Chatventures has some sharp ideas at play. You can act as quickly as you can type, so you'll get attacks off more frequently than enemies if you're fast. After an early quest, you get an ability called Repeat that, for a mana cost, lets you just type "repeat" to--obviously--repeat your last command, which can be simpler and faster than typing out commands in full. When you fight slimes, you'll find your text input field obscured when they attack you, so you have to type blindly without being able to see typos. Also, I wandered into an area that is currently too advanced for me and fought a pair of harpies that seemed to hit me with a confusion effect, and everything I typed just turned into a random string of characters. This willingness to play with text and limit (or enhance!) the player's ability to make input infuses the game with cleverness and whimsy, leaving me intrigued to press on and see what other tricks it has in store.

Right now I'm feeling a 3.5 stars out of 5.

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I kind of rewrote some of the above more concisely for Twitter, and I'm going to leave it here in case it comes in handy when I go to write a review:

I started playing Chatventures by
@sokpopco. I'd expected a throwback mini-MUD, but it seems to have more length on it than that. There was a short planned event today, a call for its community to return, but population is still very low. That's okay! It's fun as a solo RPG.

On top of being a satisfying lite RPG, it has some clever ideas going for it. Action occurs in real time, so you can attack as quickly as you can type. You can learn an ability early on that lets you type "repeat" and spend a bit of mana so you don't have to retype full commands.

When you fight slimes, their attacks obscure the text input field (pictured above), leaving you typing blind, unaware of typos until after you hit enter. And I ran into some harpies that inflicted confusion on me, which caused my inputs to result in random character strings.

This willingness to play with text and limit (or enhance!) the player's ability to make inputs infuses the game with whimsy and pushes you to keep playing, curious to discover what other tricks it has in store.

It's a $3 game, by the way, and will probably get a 40% discount in a few days when the Steam sale begins.

At least at the start, this seems to be exactly what I wanted from the more random and arcade-like Dots, with specific puzzles and specific goals of escalating complexity and difficulty. Time will tell whether the core idea can keep my interest for the duration, but it looks like there are a bunch of additional mechanics (such as 'traps' in place of dots) yet to be revealed, which should keep things varied.

I played through a very slow (even for me) 10-turn session of Humankind, examining everything in the interface and following the tutorial (to whom I fibbed and said I had never played historical strategy before in order to get the fullest guide). It's quite appealing and moreish, which shouldn't come as a surprise, although I confess I was not nearly as interested in playing it as I was in Amplitude's Endless offerings (the Endless Space games in particular). I thought that the Civilization-like theming was dull in comparison and found the idea of shedding your entire cultural identity and choosing a new one at each era arbitrarily, without historical causality, to be a bizarre one. However, while I still think that it is, I'm enjoying the emphasis on causality. For example, once you reach the Neolithic era and leave behind nomadic ways of life, you gain access to the tech tree, and the description for the calendar explains that people began wanting to keep track of changes in the seasons once they stopped roaming and found themselves living in permanent settlements, which makes sense. I'm not suggesting that this is an incredible insight, but I like the Big History angle of Humankind—hell, the game starts by mentioning that the story of most of the universe is a dull progression of space rocks and that the first 4 billion years of our history just involves a soup of amino acids. It doesn't feel like edutainment, god forbid, but I appreciate this promise of causal substance, which goes a long way towards justifying Amplitude's choice to make this historical strategy game rather than, say, Engless Legend 2.

So far it's certainly fun just to explore the world, make discoveries, see what resources are about, and make plans. I went with the expansionist Assyrians when I reached the Ancient era because I had a convenient hex of horses right by my capital city that can fuel raiders once I learn domestication. I'm just hoping to stake as much claim to territory as I can before bumping into anyone else, which will surely cause a halt in my progress (war is always a waste of resources). The only thing that's a sticking point for me so far is that I felt encouraged to graduate from the Neolithic era to the Ancient era as soon as I completed an era growth star, but I can't help wondering whether I should have stayed at that level of growth and worked on more stars, like a pokémon declining to evolve. Turns out there's some debate about this; you can create huge population gains by milking the Neolithic opportunities for a while, although I'm not sure yet whether this is strategy or cheese.

The reason why I began playing Humankind now instead of waiting for 3 years of expansions is the Dia de los Muertos event with its time-limited rewards. It's not clear to me yet how difficult the event's challenges will be for me, but I have to say that the built-in event interface is slick. I'm so used to events only being announced as game news in Steam, with nothing in-game to show what's happening or how much long it's happening for, that I was surprised by this. Of course, while I really am trying not to be biased against Humankind, it's hard for me to see this and not want an Endless Space 3 with shiny event UI and other account-wide progression features. Despite my thematic leanings, I'm looking forward to playing more of this.

I have now collected every item and defeated Ridley again. (It's still strange that the credits shows your completion time but not your item rate. Isn't that tradition?) I'd like to play Dread this weekend, but first I hope I can pull together a review from all of these impressions.

I just meant to try the game out briefly and get the Halloween event skin unlock, but I was blown away and wound up playing up to halfway through Chapter 3. I was already into the concept of turning Snake into a sort of persistent rhythmic puzzle crawl, but the execution is so good. Puzzles are clever, the continuously evolving music is excellent, and the way you progress through the temple/dungeon is very cool, with loops and new paths contingent upon increases in length and even later chapters passing back through earlier spaces from a different perspective. There's even a story being told here? I had no idea! This is ambitious, and it's solid; what's here so far is playable and strong despite being in Early Access. But I think I like it too much to play any more before it's done! I'll wait for this meal to reach its full length before I chow down.

As a staunch advocate for the original Metroid 2, I was expecting to hate MercurySteam's 2.5D remake—and maybe I still will!—but for now I am very pleasantly surprised. The melee counter, at least so far, exists less as a means to insert unwelcome stylistic flair and more as a logical solve for the discomfort of playing with the unwieldy analog mini-stick offered by the 3DS. Careful aiming feels like so much work that it's a relief to instead be able to anticipate the enemy's attack, time your counter, and auto-aim it to death. Similarly, the Aeion scan function, which is given to Samus before she even sees the game's first metroid, anticipates the player's desire to test every rock wall on the planet. It doesn't so much take the fun out of secret hunting as it provides a much less exhausting alternative method.

I have to explain: I've spent very little time ever actually playing 3DS games despite owning an XL for years. So from the very start I kept marveling at the 3D. The art slides accompanying the intro story are layered for the effect, and somehow they seem to have more detail than should be possible at the screen's resolution. When I actually started playing, I was surprised by how good the backgrounds look! I generally have a preference for pixel art over polygons, so I'm averse to 2.5D visuals because, broadly, they use polygons within a play perspective that is instead obviously well suited to sprites and tiles, in my opinion. I often feel that 2.5D games look cheaper and uglier than they would have with 2D pixel art. But Samus Returns is actually pulling it off! The diversity and layout of visual elements largely make environments feel believable and organic rather than stiff and plastic. I'm really taking my time as I play because I'm looking at both foreground and background and watching how rooms flow together to define the space. I enjoy the way caverns and ruins blend into each other, and it's remarkable to see how much an open or confined background develops the character of the area that you actually move through.

Some assorted observations:

It's a smart touch to have the Surface theme kick in only after Samus comes across the Aeion scan pulse. I appreciate the quiet of your first minutes on SR388, and when the music does pick up right after finding this exploration tool it's like kicking off the rust and stretching after a warm-up. Time to go to work.

In the temples of Area 1, the music does a good job of incorporating the tinkling little organic machine sounds from "Caverns 1" into a new ambient piece. It's not nearly as boldly willing to embrace uncomfortable silence as Return of Samus was (I suspect this will be my refrain for the remake overall), but that's okay; I am open to a different approach as long as the original isn't erased (the other half of my refrain).

There's this sexy lens flare when a charge beam shot fully powers up; that's a fun effect at the 3DS's low resolution.

I really like the click sound for when Samus unrolls from her morph ball form to a crouch. The ball's movement has a good sense of weight, too, and a heavy clang when it drops from a ledge and lands on a lower level. Doors also make a good sound when shot and activated, and I like how they light up—and how they struggle to, in the case of the charge beam doors.

Speaking of doors, I was excited the first time I opened one and it broke and stayed open. I love when familiar elements of a game world are subverted and made unique, like the save point in Super Metroid's Wrecked Ship that doesn't work because Phantoon is sucking up all the power or like the item-bearing Chozo statue buried under a collapsed wall in this game. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that this broken door is a 'type' rather than a unique event. It's just the other side of the doors that can't be opened; they can only be opened one way at first but then stay open. That's fine, but it's not as cool as the one-off I initially took it for.

Another thing about doors: I think I've come across three different kinds of organisms attached to them and preventing my access until I find various power-ups, and it seems a bit lazy to extract so many instances of progress gating from the same idea. It also damages the believability of the concept when you see so many different creatures sucking on doors. One is fine, but three wildly different species doing it just feels like Game Design™.

Right now, the only thing that's bothering me all that much is those Chozo seals draining the purple liquid after receiving enough metroid DNA. Why would anyone build a mechanism with such a bizarre requirement? Insert x many dead animals to redirect this poison river... It's utterly bizarre and draws attention to the 'gaminess' of the overall progression structure. I was perfectly fine with the original's earthquakes! There, the player understands the causal link between killing all of the metroids in an area and the liquid draining as a matter of programming, but the game left it canonically as coincidence—because establishing a connection between those two wildly unrelated things is bound to seem silly! But maybe this odd conceit in Samus Returns will be explained later as part of a warrior training ground or something.

I've only played through the Surface region and Area 1, but so far I'm having a great time and feeling optimistic about what lies ahead. The most vital points of comparison to the original will come towards the end, so, now that I can see that the foundation is solid, I can relax and just enjoy for quite a while. Above all else, it's just wonderful to be playing a Metroid game—and this does feel like a Metroid game. The world is mysterious and hostile, ability gates funnel you through neat loops of level design, and Samus is alone but confident and capable. It's more 'gamey' than the original, but that's okay. The elements I had been dreading—the 2.5D polygonal art, the melee counter, the scan pulse—are turning out to be well executed and appropriate for the platform. I feel like an idiot for waiting so long to play Samus Returns... but, on the other hand, I'm in for a glorious double feature with Metroid 5 already waiting in my Switch's cartridge slot.

I was reluctant to buy this at full price, but my main Left 4 Dead squad did, so I felt I had to as well. I've heard some things that have put me off, and I can't verify them yet after such a short time, but I did enjoy myself for our first session, which was just an easy-difficulty run through the first finale (effectively 4 stages, I guess, for the first segment of Act 1).

My biggest impressions right now are how nice the guns feel, especially compared to the arcade-like weapons in L4D that don't even have ADS, and that I like the roguelike element of weapons, attachments, and cards that you find during a run coming together to form a build and a play style, as well as the increased incentive versus L4D that they provide to scavenging around even when well supplied and healthy.

Tried Jackbox 8 out with my friends for our regular multiplayer evening. Job Job emerged as the clear favorite with many funny results. And the type of creativity-under-pressure it requires doesn't cause as much stress for me as some other Jackbox games because the competitive part involves assembling a response from given words; the limitation and provision stop me from grasping at the open air as I would if I had to come up with something with total freedom.

As a backer, I wanted to try out Book of Travels while it was still in beta before it opened up as an Early Access release. What I wasn't expecting was that I'd play it for around 16 hours across 2 days.

Despite its very relaxing vibe (I haven't gotten into a single fight!), I find the focus on trade and exploration engrossing. Bartering without a standardized currency in an economy that actually makes you work for what you want sets up a satisfying adventure through goods and equipment, and every location is unique and home to people and events that appear at different times or even at random. It's a gentle play of meeting friendly folks throughout your travels, quietly watching for cryptic opportunities to be of service, and interacting with the environment in a way that feels more like special, bespoke experiences than quantitative busywork. That's all bathed in a disposition towards nature and practical mysticism due to the knots, teas, winds, forms, painterly art style, and emphasis on wandering. You spend a lot of time walking, not running—just Being in the world. The game mechanics incentivize watchful stillness.

I don't know how hard I want to burn with Book of Travels as it seems like it'd be best to savor it, but right now I suspect it's a game that will be a regular part of my life over the next few years at least, judging by the development plan.

I just started the game up for about an hour to gain some basic familiarity before playing with friends, but I was quite flummoxed by the overwhelming menu options and systems. I haven't played Smash since it was the go-to in my high school's senior lounge twenty years ago, and Ultimate does a terrible job of onboarding new players who haven't kept up with every entry in the series. There's so much going on, and the only direction it seems to give you is to start with the ordinary 1v1 match mode, which teaches you nothing. I also found the controls bizarre. A couple of hours with helpful friends made me feel better, but only slightly. I was still rather down on the game until I saw an incredible Kirby's Dream Land scrolling stage.

I'll only be playing this with a group of friends that is more specific than my usual Friday-night multiplayer get-together, so sessions will be sporadic and it will likely remain under "currently playing" status for a long time.