It's always fun to go through my library of unplayed games after completing a game, to decide what to finish next. I spent a nice quiet evening installing and testing out a dozen games, and here's what I've settled on:
West of Loathing
This is a "joke" game (complete with black & white stickman graphics) that's actually a surprisingly solid RPG, complete with a large open world, many quests with several solutions, simple but interesting combat, choices that have actual consequences throughout the game, and actual character builds that affect how you play the game and solve quests.
The game auto saves as you play (you cannot manually save), but it's set up so that you'll never get stuck or get a game over; for example, losing a fight might just kick you out of the dungeon (with all the progress you've made kept) or lock you out of one of the solutions to the quest. This makes it a perfect game to just play for a few minutes and see what you can find as you explore around the world.
It's a really funny game, but the constant jokes do get a bit tiresome after a while (absolutely nothing is taken seriously). So far, I really like, but it's almost a bit of a shame that the developer does not try creating a serious RPG with the same system, because I think that would be awesome.
Arcania (aka Gothic 4)
This is an infamously bad game, as it was basically a cynical attempt at hoodwinking Gothic fans into buying a game that really has absolutely nothing to do with that (mostly) legendary series. It jettisons the carefully designed open worlds, addictive character development, tough but satisfying combat, interesting quests, and grim atmosphere of the series... leaving you with a completely generic action game with light RPG elements. It's honestly hard to come up with anything to say about the game; it's like something an AI came up with when asked to design a basic open world action RPG. Quests are all boring fetch quests, every single battle can be easily won by simply smashing the attack button over and over, NPCs are merely quest dispensers, every piece of equipment you find is either slightly better or far worse than what you already have, and the world consists of a bunch of tiny open areas that you unlock one after another.
It's too bad, because it starts out with a cool hook, in which you control the antagonist who is haunted by the ghosts of the people he's slain during his rise to power (he's also the hero from the Gothic games, which is both cool but also insulting, like Stephen Hawking telling you you're the least stupid person he's ever met). After that, though, the game devolves into running around grasslands and forest slaying giant mosquitoes and goblins while swinging your sword around or shooting arrows or fireballs or whatever, to collect five squirrel nuts for Farmer or five wolf pelts for Townsperson.
But you know what? Sometimes it's fun to play some easy trash while listening to podcasts, and so that's why I'm playing this game.
