I have been playing Stardew Valley, which admittedly took me many years and many attempts to get into. I am now on year 3, birthdays and events no longer stress me out, but at the same time I keep discovering new things and most importantly I am still enjoying myself a lot. I think I finally understand the acclaim.

I started my third playthrough of dragonage inquisition this week. I'm playing a male Inquisitor for the first time so I can romance Dorian. I really really enjoy DA:I, I never played any of the earlier games but even without context the gameplay loop and getting to know the characters is always fun. I do feel like I make the same choices every time I play though. I struggle to have video game characters make choices I wouldn't personally make.

Dead Space 1, the original. I recently realized I own it on the EA account I forgot having made and figured I'd take a look. I'm partway through chapter 3 now. The game really shows its age graphically, the ragdoll physics on the many corpses lying around keeps glitching out, and if the game is actually trying to be horrifying I feel a touch more subtlety would have been called for. It often feels more like a haunted house than something that's supposed to seem like a real place.

That being said, the combat is satisfyingly visceral (the gimmick of focusing on cutting off limbs was a very good idea), and tech limitations aside both the art direction and sound design are very solid. The times the game actually manages to be unnerving is almost always due to the tension of hearing the monsters in the walls but not being able to pinpoint its location.

Overall, I'm not exactly in love with it but I'll probably play it all the way through.