Garwoofoo

Play

Avowed - this feels almost like a remake of Morrowind, with its amiable NPCs and weird fixation with mushrooms, but it's very enjoyable. It's like it's pretending to be an open world game but actually you're quite carefully led through the story, it means it's very well paced and the characters have far more to say about events than they normally do in games of this type. It looks spectacular too. My only issue is that the horribly complex character and inventory screens seem to have come from a different game entirely to the breezy adventuring that makes up the bulk of Avowed.

Stardew Valley - I think this is meant to be a chilled, relaxing kind of game but my gamer brain can't stop aggressively trying to min/max everything and as such I'm finding it quite stressful, wondering if I'm doing it "right" or letting opportunities slip by with every passing day. Broadly I have no idea what I'm doing. I like it though, it's like someone took the hundreds of Harvest Moon games that are all slightly unsatisfying for various different reasons and simply made one really good one.

Want

Assassin's Creed: Shadows has been getting some actual decent feedback from players and doesn't appear to have launched in a totally broken state, so it's only the knowledge that these games always drop in price really fast that's preventing me from picking this up right now.

Bin

I managed to get 1000/1000 achievements for Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii which is the first game I've done that for in a long while (and the first Yakuza game too). Pleased with that, but there's nothing more to be done there.

Donald Trump - why won't he just fucking die already? Honestly.

Separate note on schools - sorry to hear about your woes, Bri, I really hope you get this sorted soon. My son was bullied to shit in the last couple of years of primary school (smart kid being picked on by the local knuckleheads, basically, plus a nice dose of racism thrown in) and we were actually glad that Covid lockdowns saved him from the last few months of what had become an entirely miserable experience. We were lucky enough to be able to put him into a private school, not something we'd ever thought we'd do and it's wiped us out financially but it's been exactly the supportive environment he needed. I appreciate that's probably not an option for you but do you have the opportunity to look at different schools? They do still vary enormously in terms of the support they provide, and a different environment may be good for your kid. Regardless, as MPH says, 13/14 is pretty much the peak of school misery years and it does get better, honestly.

I don't want to moan about the Switch because obviously it's Mart's baby and I know I'm in a tiny minority, here and elsewhere, but it's genuinely been one of the most disappointing consoles I've ever bought. Switch 2 will have to be spectacular for me to be even passingly interested.

(There, Mart, I've got my moaning and indifference out of the way a day early! I'll now retire from this thread and let you all enjoy New Console Day).

I saw Atomfall described as W.A.N.K.E.R. - Shadow of Cumbria which I thought was perfect.

I like this trend of very British games creeping back in. Games like this and Thank Goodness You're Here must be absolutely impenetrable for Americans. It reminds me of the 8-bit days where you'd routinely get games like Everyone's a Wally or Jack the Nipper and they'd be like they'd stepped off the pages of Viz or the Beano. And now they're almost time capsules for a very specific 1980s sort of humour.

In terms of other recent-ish games, I really liked Everybody's Gone to the Rapture which is set in a fictional (and deserted) English village but it's very evocative and gets the details exactly right. I think Fallout: London was quite well received recently but I haven't played it myself. Isn't Watch Dogs: Legion set in London too?

The Vita game (2048) was great but it was included in the Wipeout Omega Collection on PS4 so don't spend money buying it twice or anything.

Your best bet is to buy it from the Microsoft store, this will seamlessly pick up your existing save and let you carry on where you left off. You should get a discount on the game while it's still on Game Pass, if it hasn't already left. Assuming you're using the Xbox app on your ROG ally, the "buy" links are pretty prominent on the game pages.

MS/Gamepass, and Steam versions, of games are generally completely separate and transferring saves between them is a nightmare. I wouldn't even try.