I’m 100% for Ciri being the main character and I’m also complaining “what about the lore”. You can do both at the same time. There’s a vocal minority of people who’ll use the lore argument to be sexist assholes, but people who have actually read and understood the books can have some valid concerns (ie where and how did she go through the trials, why can she use magic again, where did she even find how to do the trials, and just… why? She didn’t need them and it’s a bit of a character regression. She was basically already a witcher by title.)

I’ve reinstalled Sims 3, because I wanted to play the Sims but just can’t deal with the broken cash machine that is the Sims 4. It took a decent amount of effort to get it to run, and it doesn’t run very well, but it mostly works. And… it’s so good. I forgot just how good it was.

I’m amazed at how much there is to do, and just how well my sims can take care of themselves - when playing 4 I always just made 1 or 2 sims, so that I could control their every move bc otherwise they’d be stuck doing something useless on a loop. Here I can have a family of 4 and actively play just one of them, and the rest will cook, clean, do homework, and generally look after themselves while I’m not there. It’s amazing how they had this figured out so many years ago, and regressed so horribly.

Recently released Wayfinder has been scratching that itch for me! It used to be a multiplayer live-service game, but during early access it got converted to a normal singleplayer/coop game with 0 microtransactions and it’s a lot of fun. My only issues are with performance, which isn’t great, and build variety, which doesn’t exist. There are 8 characters with limited customization (except visual, you can do a lot with all the dyes and trinkets) and you just gotta rotate between them to keep the playstyle fresh.

But the combat is fun, the graphics are great (they aren’t beautiful, but they have that timeless cartoonish high fantasy aesthetic, like early WoW), and there is a lot of stuff to do and reward chests to collect. It really is feeling like a new KoA to me - as you said, just a solid, mid-tier action RPG.

So considering that we’re in patientgamers… add to a wishlist and wait for a sale? :P

It is fun, but buggy + doesn’t have great performance in some areas. I’ve recently played it for a bit on 1.1 patch drop, and lasted for about 6 hours until I hit a brick wall of a progression blocking bug. There was a decently large thread about it on the forum, no dev response, no fix in the next 3 hotfixes, so I stopped playing. Might come back for 1.3 or something.

I’ll be a contrarian and throw in my vote for the second game - it’s rushed and flawed and the asset reuse is blatant to the point of being legendary, but the setting and story are the best and most original of these 3 games. Just being a hero of one single city instead of the entire world is surprisingly refreshing.

In general I’d say that 1 has the best combat/tone, 2 has the best setting/story, 3 has the best characters. I’ve heard that 3 can be quite enjoyable if you pretty much only do the main story and companion quests - but I wouldn’t know, I’m one of the poor fools who got stuck in the Hinterlands, and that mistake + the very underwhelming main story sapped my will to continue playing.

I had a N3DS, it was my first handheld and it was great! Really good selection of games. My most played were Monster Hunter Generations (which was my introduction to the series) and Fantasy Life - one of my absolute faves, a charming and colorful fantasy adventure with life sim elements. The story is a bit meh but the gameplay loop is incredibly satisfying and there’s nothing else quite like it. I’ve been replaying it on an emulator (rip Yuzu/Citra devs) recently and it’s still a blast.

Nothing quite like Hardspace: Shipbreaker, but farming games/life sims often fill this niche for me. The classic one to recommend is Stardew Valley, I also really like Graveyard Keeper, Slime Rancher and Fantasy Life (3ds, works well on emulators).

ARPGs (Diablo style, so kill stuff to get loot to get your numbers up to kill bigger stuff) can be nice zone out games too, I recommend Grim Dawn (going to get an expansion soon, quite complex), recently released Last Epoch (very enjoyable, but might want to hold off for a while if you want to play online - the servers are a mess right now), and Chronicon (most casual of these three, very cheap, colorful explosions across the screens).

Other games I’ve tagged as “Space Maintenance” : Planet Crafter (pretty chill number go up/building kind of game where you’re slowly making a planet livable), Deep Sixed (short roguelike, try to keep a ship together enough to get through the game, very hectic and no progression between runs so may not be what you’re looking for), Delta V Rings of Saturn (top down space mining).

I’ve finally decided to give Cyberpunk 2077 a shot, deciding that it has had enough time in the oven, and… yup. I’m happy to have waited all these years to play something that’s a finished product, runs well, looks beautiful and is engaging and fun to play. Honestly I spend half of my time in this game just walking around the city - it’s the first city in a game that feels realistic, with all the street markets, food stalls, drunk people wandering the streets at 4 am…

BG3 was overall the best game I’ve played this year though.

I would like Persona 5 Royal, never really had a chance to get into this series but I’ve heard good things!

Maybe Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente? Her Orphan’s Tales have some interesting cities too, but that’s a bit of a stretch.

Again, not just one city, but take a look at Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino - it was a direct inspiration for Fallen London.

China Miéville might be worth checking out - go for either the City and the City or for Perdido Street Station.

I grabbed Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Sleeping Dogs Definitive Editon, both of these are supposed to be great on the deck! Still stuck in Packaged purgatory though, so it’s going to be a while before I actually get the chance to play them. There were some other games I was considering, but I gotta stop spending so much money right after buying a new piece of hardware… One day Sekiro will be at 70+% off, and that is the day I’ll buy it.