According to Steam, I spent most hours this year playing Book of Hours. (The word “Hours” is in the name of the game, so what choice did I have?) It is an amazing game, and I recommend it to anyone who likes cozy games with lots of lore to explore.

However, there is one game that I must confess I had even more fun with, even though it’s relatively short: The Pristine Cut of Slay the Princess.
I can’t really say much about it other than that it’s a horror visual novel with excellent voice acting and incredibly good writing, as almost any detail of the game’s story would be a spoiler.

(Edit: I know, both of those games released last year, but the question was about which Steam Replay and which games one had fun with this year - not about games that released this year.)

I did play a lot of of HoMaM back in the days - and also just recently installed VCMI on my PC, in order to re-play HoMaM 3. I didn’t start with that though - too many other games to play in my backlog… I never tried any mods - I don’t even know if the modding scene already existed back in the 90s, when I originally played it. I must confess that I prefer HoMaM 4 over HoMaM 3 - it feels a bit more complex.

There is one game series that is quite similar to Heroes of Might and Magic, that I personally love, and that gets the “fun all the times” and “100 hours play time” easily for me, but I didn’t mention it before because the current iterations are way above $10: Dominions. I haven’t bought Dominions 6 yet because of the size of my gaming backlog, but I have had a lot of fun with Dominions 4 and 5.

The way I understood it was that she did not loose her ability to use magic, but rather decided not to use it any more after what happened when she had to draw power from fire.

Even if it would be a bit disappointing, I think an explanation as simple as “she grew older, and had a lot more time to deal with the trauma of what happened in the desert” would be sufficient to explain why she is OK with using magic again.

Tough question.

Of all the games I have played, only few have 100 hours playtime, and all of them are over $10 except for

• Dwarf Fortress. However, I would have to lie if I said that it is constantly fun. There are gameplay mechanics that are boring, like the labour management (though that got vastly improved in version 50.x).

I do have one game suggestion though that is consistently fun all the time, and costs less than $10 - however I have less than 100 hours on it, because I never looked into the user-generated levels:

• TIS-100. It’s a puzzle/programming game by Zachtronics (so it’s in the Zach-like genre by definition), and it is amazing. Also, as said, there are user-generated levels, so even after you finish the main campaign, there’s a vast selection of puzzles to solve.
• Baba is You would go in a similar direction, but misses the $10 price point (by a tiny bit).

As someone who is curious about how they are going to explain the lore (in case you haven’t read the books: Ciri forswore magic after she had to draw power from fire in an emergency situation and that nearly escalated - also, you are missing out, the books are great), I feel offended by your statement.

I just finished The Pristine Cut of Slay the Princess, and I fully agree that it should be the GOTY.

It’s amazing how different it feels when you play a really excellent game. With most games I regularly pause and tab out, to browse the web. With Slay the Princess I did not. It completely absorbed me, even though it was my second play-through.

• OpenTTD: Open Source and available for free.
• Settlers 2 via some DosBOX version. Back when I still used Android I used Dosbox Turbo, but it seems to have been removed from the Play Store. No clue which DosBOX build for Anrdoid is good nowadays…
• 2048: Open Source and free puzzle game
• Threes: Puzzle game similar to 2048
• Cogs: Puzzle game. No clue how to find it on the play store, but it’s available at humblebundle.
• Slay the Spire: Deck Builder roguelike.
• Space Chem: Zachlike puzzle game. (Actually not only zachlike - it’s form zachtronics)

and basically any Android game that ever was part of a Humble Mobile Bundle. Those happened before Humble Bundle was sold and consequently became boring.

It was there for certain.

In WoW it disappeared when the Dungeon Finder was added, which made social interaction and therefore being nice to each other optional. Before that feature, you had to chat with people in order to form groups for clearing dungeons - a step that the Dungeon Finder conveniently allowed to skip…

Don’t get me wrong, the Dungeon Finder wasn’t the start of it, but it is what accelerated it greatly. Before that social interaction had already been in decline, mostly because everything except for the end-game had been slowly turning into essentially a single-player experience. However, everyone (who stuck to the game) sooner or later reached the end-game content, and had to interact with other players. With the Dungone Finder, this incentive was lost too…

(I am maybe a bit too harsh on the Dungeon Finder - some end-game content was difficult, so you had much higher chances of success if you played with a team you knew well - and therefore had to form/join a guild.)

Yep. In addition, there is now a free build of version 50.xx on the official website, which uses the same code as the Steam version, but does not include the tileset and the soundtrack.

I tried that free build on the weekend (because I didn’t want to bother with installing Steam on my ARM64 laptop), and it still looks as amazing as always. Now I just need to learn the keybindings for the Steam version - because using a mouse with ASCII graphics feels just wrong 😉.

This, sadly, is no longer true for the Steam version of the game. It comes with a (pretty good) tile-set, which is enabled by default.

I still think, the old ASCII art and keyboard-centric UI was better, but well…

You can’t say “Losing is fun!” without linking the comic!

(Source: Dwarf Fortress Wiki article on Fun)

I am now at the point where I think there are two things happening.

• Actual technological progress.
• Marketing bullshit pushed by dazzlers.

Examples for the first one would be new battery tech for electric vehicles, new ways to harvest renewable energy, new tools that allow to make software more stable,… Examples for the second would be NTFs, Crypto-Currencies, “AI”, e-Fuels,…

Revisionist? I am old, I was there. But if you don’t believe me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian

(And while I didn’t own a Symbian phone myself, a good friend did. Oh, but what I owned was a tablet computer. Way back in 2002. And now you will likely call me a Revisionist again, because I owned a device before Apple invented it…)

It’s funny that you mention the iPhone - a device that had zero innovation compared to its competitors, and just managed to take the market because of marketing.

While Visual Novels are not my favourite genre, there are a few entries that I would like to highlight, because I enjoyed playing them quite a lot:

• Pyre: While it isn’t marketed as Visual Novel, it pretty much is one. To be precise, it is a Visual Novel with sports-game elements. The world-building in this one is excellent, as is the art. The visuals alone would make this game worth playing, but there is also the soundtrack, and the gameplay of the sports events is pretty fun too. Oh, and the story. This game really requires tough choices. It’s from the same studio that made Hades, Transistor and Bastion, and it shows.
• Griftlands: Again, not marketed as Visual Novel, despite very clearly being one. This one is a Visual Novel with card battles and deck-building. Just as with Pyre, the world-building in this one is outstanding. The card battles are well done. It’s no Slay the Spire, but it’s still pretty good. Also, it has some of the best jokes I have seen in games recently.
• Loren the Amazon Princess: Again a Visual Novel that is primarily marketed as something else - this time Role Playing Game. And to be honest, it has everything you would expect from an RPG: inventory management, character stats, JRPG-style turn-based battles, trading, a world map,… But it’s still pretty much a Visual Novel with RPG elements. It has a massive scope for an indie game, and is overall pretty well done. To be blatantly honest, I played this mainly for the RPG parts, but the story isn’t bad either, once one gets past the initial “I see your party has no rogue, mind if I join?” part. The setting is still being actively developed by the studio behind it, who have released several other visual novels (with and without RPG elements) set in the same world, with recurring characters.

Yes. That’s why I was utterly confused when big companies dug out hat dead horse (yet) again.

And they are still trying to ride it.

It’s not “either side”. One “side” is making games, the other is screaming slurs.

Yep. And the worst part is the Fear-of-Missing-Out when disabling them.

Like, there is nothing stopping you from just not doing the kingdom management mini-game, except that nagging feeling that you might actually miss out on some content…

Currently? Potionomics. I just wanted something that I can finish quickly, because of the upcoming release of House of Light, but now I am still not done with my play-through, so I kinda cannot start House of Light just yet.

But in a couple of days, as soon as I am done with Potionomics?

House of Light. And that for quite some time, I expect.

And the predecessor, Pathfinder: Kingmaker is amazing too.