SWORN if you like Hades. It's pretty transparent that they just said "What if Hades, but rip out any depth to the story, make it up to 4 player multiplayer, and change up the pantheon of gods" then made that, but it's still fun to play.

Esoteric Ebb is a self-described Disco-like (referring to Disco Elysium) where you play as a cleric investigating a local tea shop that exploded. You have the typical RPG stats that you distribute points into at the beginning (so you can basically make whatever class you want despite your job being a cleric at the beginning), and as you go through the game, the stats are represented by different parts of your psyche that will comment on and influence your actions. The writing is genuinely hilarious and the sheer amount of content could keep you coming back for many playthroughs with very different experiences each time. I've never played a video game RPG that captures the experience of playing a TTRPG as well as this one does.

I hadn't seen Mina the Hollower mentioned in this thread, and I really enjoyed that earlier this year too. It's a more modern take on 2D Zelda game with more focus on skill difficulty (harder enemies and some brutal platforming) than puzzles. It has some great pixel art in the style of a Game Boy Color game and is packed full of secrets to discover. It's got a really great soundtrack too!

1000xRESIST and Pathogenic

1000xRESIST was on a lot of underrated games lists last year when it came out, and I kept putting it off because the plot points I had heard about seemed very heavy, but it is a beautiful piece of art. It's a very cinematic game with a lot to say about identity, family, and the pain we inflict upon ourselves. Saying anything about the story would probably ruin it, but it's a walking sim with some light puzzle elements.

Pathogenic is a rougelite twinstick shooter where you play as an infection fighting through the human body and upgrading along the way by adding internal upgrades that power up external upgrades like tentacles that allow you to move or appendages that shoot/attack. It's almost the complete opposite of 1000xRESIST. Basically no story and all gameplay.

Just to give you an idea of what she thinks "success" for Xbox looks like, she said around the time of the last major layoff and studio culling that she wants the Xbox platform to hit a daily player count of one billion users. So literally enough unique user accounts to cover one in every eight people on Earth will need to play within the Xbox ecosystem within the same day for her to be satisfied. If you count mobile, I can see hitting north of 200 million, but executive expectations are detached from reality.

Fuck 'em. This far into Meta's descent into a capitalist surveillance platform, they should know what kind of company they work for. They only find it to be a problem if they aren't "finding meaning" in the "interesting technical challenges" of turning people into data points.

Or Mina the Hollower...

Please please please, fuck off Randy.

I feel like Worf would make for an excellent navigation voice. Just imagine:

"It would be most honorable to keep left at the fork."

"Today is a good day... to arrive at your destination on the right."

You know, I miss when 90% of the Internet was shit like this.

Unfortunately, no.

I saw a guy walking around town the other day with a sign that said, "Are we great yet?" and felt like that was a great little slogan that confronts Trump supporters with the fact that all of this was supposedly being done to restore whatever personally idealized version of "great" America once embodied to them. Pretty sure the majority of people who voted for Trump wouldn't even say that using federal agents to murder Americans in the street for exercising their constitutional right to protest is included in their own personal definition of the "greatness" that they feel America needs to get back to.

I'll agree that Star Trek at its best has always had a progressive stance that challenges societal expectations, but the problem with nuTrek (imo) is that the writing isn't challenging expectations reflecting society at large, or examining it's own biases, it's just performative and pandering. It doesn't seem to be written to encourage questioning as much as it appeals to nostalgia or engage in pleading the "right social perspective" that Hollywood happens to espouse that week. For God's sake Elon was one of the "innovators" used as an example in DISCO when SpaceX happened to be popular.

Silksong, but I put that on hold as I think I hit my skill ceiling in Act 3.

In the meantime, I'm playing The Seance at Blake Manor which has been really fun and is perfect for the Deck.

Son of A Liche by J Zachary Pike. It's the second book in the Dark Profit Saga. A friend of mine had recommended I read the first book (Orconomics) for years, and I finally got around to it. I'm enjoying the series so far, but I thought it was a standalone novel and was looking for a fun one-off read, so I probably wouldn't have started it if I knew it was a series. The series satirizes fantasy tropes in the context of an excessively capitalist society built around a "hero-for-hire" industry. It's got very tongue in cheek humor, and I think if you enjoy a lot of the more recent DnD media (Vox Machina and the like), you'd appreciate it.