Ian's Backlog!
My terrible, terrible HTML site for talking about games I've played in the last month instead of doing actual work.
The only website where the rules are made up, and the formatting doesn't matter!
Cyberpunk 2077
Set in the dark future of 2077, this formerly-TTRPG shooter has quirky protagonist V and his tulpa, Keanu Reeves, attempt to fight back against their terminal plot-itis!
I first played the game on its launch roughly three years ago. While I was able to avoid any of the notorious gamebreaking bugs, I encountered a game with a great
story, but extremely unpolished mechanics. I feel in love with the denizens of Night City, but could never get over V's weird Mary Poppins pants that could hold
infinite grenades, or that unless you dumped your limited Attribute points into Tech, you could not craft the games' most powerful (and most interesting) weapons.
Since 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 has received a wide array of quality-of-life fixes. The most important patch, in my opinion, was 2.0. This update overhauled almost every
issue I had with the game, such as:
- The magic teleporting policemen
- Being screwed out of endgame weapons because you didn't spec into MacGuyver
- Completely rebalancing every attribute tree
- Getting rid of the tiny stat-bump skills. There was unironically a 10% fall damage reduction skill.
- Revamping the skill-bush into a skill tree.
Now, with the major technical issues patched and confusing design decisions squashed, I can comfortably recommend this game as one of the best RPGs of all time.
Lethal Company
This game has infected my YouTube feeds.
Lethal Company is a four player survival-horror game where the true monster was capitalism all along!
You're a scrapper working for the ambiguously-named Company, an intergalactic scrapping crew tasked with going
to spooky abandoned complexes and manors to find literal garbage. Put your life on the line as you're assaulted by:
- Terrifying flower people!
- Undead clones of your idiot teammates!
- Totally not a weeping angel!
- That one death path that your friend with the terrible keyboard can't get over.
- The lack of resolution scaling!
Jokes aside, this game is great. Despite being barely over a month old, and being developed by a single dude in a basement,
Lethal Company is the perfect sandbox game to mess around in. You can hear your friends scream over the mic because some spider
is twerking aggressively, while an eldritch Jack in the Box begins to ring. The mechanics aren't too intensive, mostly just to
keep your attention between hilariously watching the people around you die in increasingly outrageous circumstances. My favorite
thing to do is to aggressively ring the bell at the Capitalism HQ to piss off the tentacle monster, so that it drags anyone nearby
to the afterlife. 10/10.
Warframe
A perpetual mainstay of my backlog, Warframe is a chore simulator disguised as a co-op third person shooter.
You are a Tenno, a creature that pilots a meat-suit, and you've been freshly awoken to a post-post apocalyptic world.
Everyone's dead, there's freaky clones and robots running around, and you're a cool space ninja with a bow.
Explore all four levels, as you try to comprehend plot so convoluted it'd make Cloud Strife cry.
Experience an MMO where the endgame is freemium-style wait timers.
Yet still, in spite of glaring flaws, I can't put this game down after over a thousand hours.