That’s a motto to live by!
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Recently picked up the narrative game Scarlet Hollow, started with the first chapter (which is free) and then went on to pick up the full game, which has four out of seven chapters released so far.
Definitely not my usual kind of game, but I did get drawn into it. Essentially a choose-your-own-adventure book with lots of animated illustrations, and the character animations during conversations do a good job of conveying the character reactions to your choices and what’s happening. There’s a “creeping doom” theme that’s a bit like if H.P. Lovecraft wrote about crumbling southern mining towns instead of crumbling New England fishing towns. There are romance paths, but the options that fully start them are clearly marked and following them isn’t required.
One interesting facet is that you’re allowed to pick two “traits” out of a set of seven, and your picks can give both minor and major changes to the dialog options you have available. I’ve been having fun choosing pairs of traits to fit with fictional characters, and trying to choose dialog that fits as closely as I can - for instance one with “hot” and “talks with animals” that I named “Snow White”, and when, at one point, she’s asked where she lives I was able to choose “in an apartment with 10 roomates”, which, well… close enough 
.
Sadly, it looks like the next chapter won’t be out until next year, and there’s two more planned after, so it will be a while before the full story is available.
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That looks right up my alley. I like southern gothic / dark Appalachia. Added it to my list.
Have you played The Cat Lady? It’s more of a point-and-click adventure, but the graphics and sound and text really set a mood on the horror theme.
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Wow. I can’t imagine why would they even say that out loud, posted publicly and connected to their product? Maybe if they were talking about hiring a new designer for their KKK newsletter or something. But for literally anything else?
They clearly think that they’re in the majority and that will be a well-received diatribe. Which is sad on multiple levels.
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This browser-based game (which works on both mobile and desktop browsers) is a different kind of trust & safety simulator from the last game. While that game was about being a front line content moderator, this game is about actually running a trust & safety team for a rapidly scaling social media startup. You have to set policies, deal with various dilemmas, face internal and external pressures, weigh tradeoffs, determine resource allocation and more, all while trying to keep your website from descending into a cesspit of hate, driving away users and advertisers.
This is tangentially related to Elon Musk’s misadventures with Twitter. Interesting little game, the decisions can start to get complex pretty quick. My first attempt at a playthrough died early on “due to slow moderation speed” as I put too much load on the moderation team.
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I want to solo a steampunk campaign, starting with “The City at the Center of the Earth,” and continuing with “Red Sands.”
“City” starts in Germany, and I’m wondering if anyone knows of German science-fiction authors from the 19th century.
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I can’t handle music, but I’ like to see a Buffyverse campaign where El Diablo Robotico threatens to release a Chatbot, Imagebot, or Christmasmusicbot unless someone can teach him to play the violin.
“As we approach the winter long-- let us share our Christmas songs-- for a trillion years of joy!”
And it turns out El Diablo Robotico is not a robot built by the Devil, and is The Robot Devil.
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I’ve been playing this game Carmageddon: Max Damage, and got stuck on this one event, “Speed Skates”, a death race on icy ledges and broken ice around the ocean complete with some ramps and jumps. Whoever is in the lead after 5 minutes wins.
I had my fast hot car and kept trying and trying, but kept sliding off into the water or missing a jump, or sliding up into the boulders and getting passed. For about a week I’ve been trying to win this race, and failing.
Also in the race is a big rig, which, if you wreck it, you get to add it to your garage and use it in other races. Really cool, but I had little hope of wrecking it in my little hot rod.
Then I switched to driving the tow truck. Slower and heavier, maybe that would do on the ice? Up to the last minute, I’m way behind in 4th or 5th place, realize the big rig is right behind me. I can’t win the race, so I spin around and start smashing into the rig, hoping to demolish it and capture it. And I succeeded!
But now the timer was ticking down, 10 seconds left. I looked up and saw that I was in 2nd place. Everyone else had slid off into the ocean or something. Spun around and jammed the throttle full speed and just managed to take the lead in the last 2 seconds of the race!
Got a score about 10x what I normally get, and then the leaderboard popped up and shows me in 4th place, right behind the people with over a billion points, which you can only get via a cheat.
So I hit the top of a leaderboard in a game!
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Another year, another Steam year in Review. And…
And this time, it seems to think I largely play pinball, or at least almost as much as turn-based and point-and-click. 
The only thing I can think of that it may be basing that on is Roundguard , which is sort of a Peggle-style game. But that only had 6% of my play time, so it still seems out of place. And I guess the puzzle/logic games I’ve been playing are getting classified under “point and click”, or I just played them for too short a time per game.
(https://store.steampowered.com/yearinreview for your own)
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The “For Science!” update for Kerbal Space Program 2 was released yesterday, so I gave it a try. I haven’t really tried playing the game since shortly after the early access release, and there have definitely been fixes since then. For the most part, they’re still playing catch-up with KSP1, but they went a long way towards that with the new version:
- Last time I played, the ship editor went crazy on me multiple times while I was trying to build a simple ship. None of that this time.
- The ship editor shows delta-v for the whole ship and for individual stages, which helps a lot. The numbers did keep jumping around a bit on me, though, so I’m not sure how far to trust it.
- Rockets don’t wobble around like floppy noodles any more, and are much more controllable
- Fuel feeding between stages seems to be working properly now, last time I played I eventually quit mainly because any time I built multiple stages, they would all drain their fuel into the first stage no matter what I did.
- Atmospheric heating is now a thing, so you can’t just plow in from high orbit and expect to survive… just felt silly without that.
- The “Science” is a re-working of the KSP1 science mode that lets you progressively unlock a tech tree as you reach new goals. And, they’ve added backstory and flavor text that rounds things out. It’s a little cleaner in places than KSP1 was, and guides things a little better.
Overall… much more playable. I have one big remaining issue: maneuver nodes for planning a burn. Unlike in KSP1, KSP2 plans your maneuver as though you are starting the burn at the node, rather than with the node halfway through. The result is that instead of focusing primarily on acceleration and fine-tuning with direction changes, you instead must juggle both variables in order to plan any new orbit. It’s made more difficult due to needing to zoom in to reliably grab the node’s handles, but zoom out to see the actual results of changes. And you can’t do it while paused, so juggle fast!
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Yeah, Kerbal seems really interesting, but I think I’d get motion sickness, like with 1st-person shooters, and I don’t think I’d be able to handle the timing and coordination.
Here’s what mine looks like, although it is influenced somewhat by my daughter’s playtime:
I’m guessing the Action Roguelike spike is primarily due to Vampire Survivors and the Investigation spike is due to Murder by Numbers
That graph is almost definitely built on tags, so here’s what my library looks like if I filter for Action Roguelike and Played:
I’m only showing back to January, since that’s all that should be relevant for the graph.
That confirms what I suspected. From that list, I’ve spent the most time on Vampire Survivors, followed far behind by Time Wasters, and then it’s probably a toss-up between the rest. I don’t think I can filter playtime by year, or even sort by playtime at all, so that might be difficult to rank them accurately.
For fun, here are the rest, in descending order based on that graph:
Investigation
Again, this supports my guess. I probably played The Case of the Golden Idol the second most of that list, and Contradiction is an anomaly because I’ve never actually played it, I just accidentally launched it the other day.
Wholesome
This one is almost entirely my daughter. I played some of A Little to the Left, but she finished it out and there’s only one save game…
Dog
There’s a fair bit of overlap with the previous results. Again, it’s mostly not me, with the exception of Retro Game Crunch which I have essentially no playtime in since it won’t run on my Steam Deck, and Grapple Dog, which is great, and I highly recommend it if you want to play a game that is essentially the puzzle platformer version of Bionic Commando.
I don’t know why the icon for Dogs Organized Neatly appears to be a cat…
Loot
This is probably 99% Borderlands 2 which I spent a few hours in on the Steam Deck. I’ve played maybe an hour of Deep Rock Galactic total. It seems neat, but also seems like something that only really works well in a group.
Pinball
Demon’s Tilt is great. Peglin is technically pinball, just not flipper pinball, so it’s a lot more like Peggle than something like Demon’s Tilt.
Senran Kagura Peach Ball is a surprisingly decent pinball experience in much the same way that the Dead or Alive games are surprisingly good fighting games. The primary appeal is not entirely in the quality of the gameplay, however.
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I’m glad you broke things down, because I was looking at the category of “Dog” and wondering what the heck kind of game(s) that was. 
And, yep, looks like if I look for the “Pinball” tag Roundguard is the only game with recent activity.
“Point & Click” in my library has a spread of games that I’m not sure I’d classify all as that. II definitely think Scarlet Hollow doesn’t fit, and Escape Simulator is a stretch for the category as well:
And “Turn-Based” has Roundguard in it again, so if it’s counting twice in mine then that’s kinda cheating.
One very interesting thing… my most-played game for the year, with far more time than Roundguard: The Zachtronics Solitaire Collection, which doesn’t seem to be part of any of the tags in my spider graph at all. I suppose maybe it clamps the highs and lows to make a more interesting-looking graph.
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I’m guessing it’s either that or it’s only showing in the graph if there is more than one game with that tag in the playtime. Here are the tags for The Zachtronics Solitaire Collection:
I have no idea what these graphs would look like for someone who only plays one game all year. I’m sure they’re an edge case, but I guarantee they totally exist.
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They’ll still show it if there’s only 1. I only played 8 Steam games this year.
‘Automation’ is Last Call BBS, 1 session in July.
‘Racing’ is just Rocket League (3 sessions in May - which is also counted as ‘Football/Soccer’) and Burnout Paradise (1 session in January).
‘Fighting’ and ‘2D Fighter’ is just Skullgirls, 1 session in May.
‘Roguelike Deckbuilder’ is just Slay the Spire.
It’d be more interesting if it could also count my Epic and GOG games, as well as others that I got directly without one of the launcher companies.
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I have loads of played games for the year in the “Singleplayer”, “Casual”, and “2D” categories, so I’m not sure it could be that either. Though maybe those are filtered out for whatever reason? 
With differing levels on the graph? Yeah, these things are weird.
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https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/ghostwire-tokyo
Free on Epic today for the next 20 or so hours. Highly recommended if you’re into Japanese culture and/or light horror-based games. I spent about 40 hours with it on Xbox. It’s really really good.
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I’ve been working around this issue primarily by eyeballing my circularization burns, and otherwise fiddling with things. There is a mod (Flight Plan) that can help with those, though it relies on another mod that was just fixed for the new version of KSP2 today… that can be installed with ckan, and I haven’t played in so long I hadn’t realized ckan supports KSP2 now
So far, I’ve visited the Mun and Minmus… though not gracefully, and I’ve only technically landed on Minmus (partway there I realized my lander legs had somehow not made it on the lander, so I ended up “landing” with my “transfer stage” and then immediately detaching and taking off with the lander to head home, in the True Kerbal Way.) There’s the beginnings of an actual “storyline” that sent me to specific places on the two moons and next wants me to go to Duna, which is an interesting addition and I hope it goes somewhere.
In order to (hopefully) make things easier for myself, I’ve also established a space station/refueling platform. And docked one ferry to take Kerbals back to the planet below. Doing an orbital rendezvous entirely from vague memories of the method (I refused to hunt down a tutorial again) was interesting, and I don’t want to talk about the clownshow fumbling when 1) I couldn’t entirely remember what I needed to do, and 2) I’d forgotten to put RCS thrusters close to the ferry’s center of mass, so every attempt to move sent things twisting all over the place.
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I soloed The City at the Center of the Earth for Savage Worlds. I felt lost at times. I also hadn’t created any combat-oriented characters, so I didn’t use many of the possible combat encounters. I felt like I reached a satisfying conclusion anyway.
Elke Egger has a giant Mole Machine and wants to explore below the surface. Klaus Weiss hates her. Elke Egger leads an expedition including her servant-coworkers Waltrun and Petr, as well as (my additions) the physician Antonio, biology student Katrin, and aspiring reporter Anna. They reach the lost underground city of Phar. It’s in ruins due to damage from earthquakes and due to plague from their last contact with the surface. Klaus also reaches there. They rescue a wounded local, and find out that everything is in ruins and the cult of Lor is taking people for sacrifice. Elke has an amulet from her grandfather, and Antonio has medical skills, which earn trust from the other people. Eventually they have to rescue someone from the cult, and repair the artificial sun which sustains the city. They split up. (I decided) Klaus captured 2 of them. He reaches the cult’s stockade and threatens to have them sacrificed if Elke doesn’t surrender to him. But while everyone’s debating what to do, (I decided) since one of them really likes fire, the stockade eventually erupts in flame. Klaus escapes and the cultists surrender the prisoners since the sun is back, they’re not sure what to believe, and they blame Klaus for the fire.
Elke decides she finally feels at home, and wants to stay. Antonio feels he’s needed. The others prepare to return home when Klaus ambushes them, looking for Elke. He finally decides to disable their mole machine, and return to the surface in his. “A fitting punishment. To live with those primitives you love so much.” Which gives them time to explore while Elke, with occasional help, repairs the mole machine.
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