It’s Monday morning, and that can only mean one thing. Yup, time to work on that get-rich-quick scheme you’ve been cooking up talk about the games you’ve been playing over the last seven days.
I’ll kick us off with…Hollow Knight
Yeah, this is literally the only game I’ve played all week. It’s absolutely dominating my free time in a way that very few games do and every single time I think about taking an evening off it draws me back in. I’m absolutely loving it.
That said, I’m starting to wonder if I have the sheer ability to get through the game. I’m not all that good at the combat, and unlike games like Elden Ring or Sekiro there’s only so much I can do to mitigate my own failings by increasing my health gauge or improving at one specific part of combat. In short, I’ve got to git gud.
I’ve been playing CrossCode, an indie action RPG that’s basically a love letter to 2D retro games.
I’ve found it incredibly engaging, almost addictive. I’ll sit down to play, and multiple hours will pass in what feels like no time at all. There are parts where the difficulty gets high enough to become genuinely frustrating (mostly in the puzzles, not the combat), but the game feels so good to play that I’ve never been tempted to quit. It does an incredible job of evoking the feeling of a retro game without compromising on modern quality-of-life features or polish.
I’ve found lately that polish is the single thing that most makes a game stand out in my mind, and perhaps surprisingly, some of the most polished experiences I’ve had have been with indie games. Hollow Knight was one of them, and from what I’ve seen so far, I’d rank CrossCode in the same league. Very excited to see how the story ends, and check out the DLC.