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@therealturk: I get the trepidation about it, but honestly, once you level up a bit most encounters become pretty trivial to get through even with the level scaling. Aside from cyberpsycho and boss encounters, you're rarely in all that much danger - at least that's been my experience playing on hard, maybe it's different on very hard.

I played the game back at launch and thought it was pretty good, but I'm liking it a lot more now in the time that I've spent with 2.0. The skills and cyberware all feel much more impactful, and there are a lot of fun combat options to experiment with - I'm really enjoying stealth with the throwing knives (which were essentially useless in the original launch version) and aggressive amounts of combat hacks.

I'm not really having any issues with respect to difficulty or bullet-spongey enemies. It all feels pretty fair playing on the hard difficulty option.

Great to see a Paranormasight shout out. One of the best games of the year, and yet it's been criminally overlooked. Terrific vibes and art, and a great English localization of what was likely a very difficult script to localize.

As others have mentioned, Holocure is absolutely worth checking out. For a free thing, it's incredibly well made and enjoyable regardless of your interest in the associated HoloLive v-tubers.

I'll also second that Boneraiser Minions deserves consideration. In spite of some cringe "boner" humor, it's one of the better Survivor-like games that I've played.

Of the entries in this genre that I've played, Halls of Torment and 20 Minutes Till Dawn are probably my favorites alongside the OG Vampire Survivors.

Look, I still love this website, but not because of timely and relevant coverage of new video games. Grubb kills it on the news front and rarely misses anything of significance, but with respect to coverage of new games, most big releases get maybe a single mention on the Bombcast and that's it. With anything that isn't a big AAA sort of release, it's a toss up on if it gets mentioned at all.

This is one spambot necro bump that I think we can all wholeheartedly support.

I think Oppenheimer would be better suited to a format like Subsurface Circular or Paranormasight that focuses almost exclusively on dialogue.

But the real answer is that it's impossible to know. The bar is relatively low for video game writing, but it would still be highly dependent on how it was adapted to the medium.

I was always curious about this game as a fan of Vertigo and other Hitchcock thrillers, but it sounds like I really dodged a bullet by never giving this a try.

For the folks that are on team "FFXVI isn't a real Final Fantasy", I'm curious what your feelings are on Lightning Returns, FFXV, FF7R, and Strangers of Paradise. Do those meet your criteria?

I'm also curious if the perception of the very MMO-like sidequests in FFXVI might be colored by how much time people have spent with FFXIV.

To me, FFXVI feels like a pretty natural progression of the franchise and the direction it's been slowly headed in with everything since FFX, but I also don't necessarily disagree with the opinion that it's relatively RPG-lite.

Aside from a small handful of people that just love being contrarian, I don't think it's common for people to hate all good/popular/well-reviewed games. Even when people get distressed about not having enough time to play everything that they want, I can't recall ever seeing that situation lead to someone actually hating good games for simply existing.