I’m like you, I never replay games but I’ve made exceptions for BG3 and LoP last year, well worth it!

FFVII rebirth. It’s very good but still a bit of a letdown. I don’t get why they went for Ubisoft style copy paste open world. The main story content is quite low in many locations. For me the best parts of the remake are the brilliant characters, the interesting world and the story, rebirth doesn’t play to those strengths.

Tekken8 reignited my love of fighting games as I used to play tekken3 all those years ago. The rampant cheating effectively encouraged by the company behind it prompted me to buy street fighter 6 and what a great game it is

Dhalsim is amazing! It’s great how you zone your opponent, shoot them out of the air when they try to jump you and so on, then when they least expect it you teleport in their face and rush them down. Feels so good when it works. Anyone else here playing fighting games?

There are many strategies, the most obvious one it to

1. get orbs so cards like capacitor
2. get focus so orbs do more, cards like defragment(most important!)
3. get generate lightning orb cards to fill the orbs
4. ideally get electrodynamics that makes every orb hit every single target
5. get evoke cards for massive burst damage

You can also do the same with frost instead of lightning, you'll have so much block nothing will touch you, you can then use cards like claw for damage. Upgraded Buffer card might be my favourite in the game

The problem with defect is that the cards you get on a given run might screw you over, not fitting any strategy whereas the watcher always has a valid strategy based on switching between calm and wrath stances if he doesn't get something better like divinity or alpha.

God of war Ragnarök - kinda meh, unskippable cutscenes, pseudo cutscenes, mediocre story, worst/laziest difficulty design (enemies are damage sponges at higher difficulties), playable Atreus. Glad I got a used copy for relatively cheap and can regain most of my money.

Bloodborne - barely remember anything from the last time I played it. It’s still so good even with 30fps and meh graphics. The very first area (central yharnam) is better than anything in LotF, so good.

I've given another chance to Lords of the Fallen as I've realised I might have held it to the absurdly high standard of the masterpiece that is Lies of P and it's a fun game, I've just reached the last dungeon.

It has a ton of problems: the jump is terrible, the lock on mechanic is the worst I've ever seen, camera is bad, the only challenge the designers seem to know is to gank the player with 50 enemies all the time, quests can be failed by beating a boss too early, selling an item(no buy back) or opening doors, bosses are kind meh and so on BUT it somehow is still fun and good, it's like it's more than the sum of its parts. 8/10 and I actually would recommend it.

Steelrising - extremely interesting setting, brilliant even and a decent but not great game

Tried lords of the fallen - biggest disappointment of the year.

Miasma chronicles - reached the bottom of my game list, it’s pretty good. Don’t really know why I bounced off of it originally

BG3 - got to act 2 on an evil playthrough

I don't necessarily prefer the faster pace. It's just that LoP happens to be the first game in the genre, that I've played, without major downsides, at least for me.

Everything else has either time wasting, lengthy runbacks or game breaking bosses to artificially increase the difficulty (see Malenia), or is Sekiro.

A modern DS1 like game without the tedium and with some new ideas is very much something that appeals to me. If it has RPG mechanics then all the better, I liked how LoP had perks on top of the traditional, simplistic attribute system and at least some choices.

Everything you say makes me want to play it more 😀

To each their own 😀

Thanks for the detailed response! Temporary bonfires seem to be a real solution to my main concern about this game.

I liked ds1 when it was new, I'd hate it now for being grindy and the time wasting runbacks but the level design was top notch.

From your response I gather it has the good parts of DS1 with modern graphics and a solution to the bad part. I'll probably like it then and will definitely try it

How are the runbacks? Are they using the tedious=difficult mentality? DS2 was terrible because of that but on the other hand the recent lies of p is a masterpiece.