Marathon: this game can subsume your identity. Hours can slip by like water in flow around your fingers. You forget who you are. You're nameless. Somewhere far from other people. Maybe all the people are gone. I don't know if even I'm human.
But yeah, it's a brutal experience but it's very enthralling. You need to be a multi-player shooter sicko to enjoy this. Solos is a multi-player horror game that I found fun for the first couple weeks. But now it's just 100% stress, so I only play squads now. Squads can have some apex highs. Off the charts highs. Adding gambling to a multi-player game will do that I suppose. It's a great shooter, but it's extremely niche. Very glad I bought it, as I had misgivings after the open beta. Again, don't recommend it, but it's some fire in your veins.
It's the little things: My teammate was downed by sniper fire. I slide-dashed in to the room at an odd angle to avoid a follow-up shot. I pressed the button to close the armored curtains, so I could revive my teammate in cover. Other guy did overwatch.
Absolum: Finished the post-game "ordeals" the devs added this year. It's annoying at first, but once you get used to it, it rounds out the experience and gives you a longer unlock pathway along which to grind through. More "excuses" to play, that maybe the base game didn't quite provide a whole lot of. But after 70 hours of runs since it came out, I'm still seeing upgrades and learning little nuances I'd never seen before. I just learned that Karl's aerial blast attack/movement is 8-directional; previously, I thought it was just 2-directional. That opened up some funny looking butt-stomping lookin' aerial combos.
Deck of Haunts: the haunted house theme is carrying this game. It's an alright deck builder. Not as svelte as Slay the Spire and co. But it's charming and fun enough. They're still updating it. That's nice. I did a 20-tile room build and my ludicrous haunted mansion spanned the entire map. Every room was 20 tiles. And I had cards that just hit every human and hexed them too if they were in a 20-tile room. Yes, the game does counter this play-style with "Destined" people, but it's very easy to deal with in the standard play mode.
