orcawolfe

Solasta is an incredibly faithful recreation of the 5th edition rule set. And I absolutely love it. I’ve played the main campaign, all the DLC, and a fan made recreation of the temple of elemental evil.

The rule implementation is fairly strict, especially when compared with BG3. Can’t be casting somatic component spells with something in your off hand. Your wizard spell book is something that you can accidentally sell (oops). Need to attune those magic items. But I find it all pretty fun and I felt like I actually learned more of the D&D rules.

The cutscenes and dialogue animations are… actually comically bad. But I like the idea behind the way scenes work. Basically you set your character’s personality at the start of the game and then they automatically speak according to that. Some of dialogue is hilarious. Some of it is even internally hilarious.

But what really shines are the encounters and campaign design. The encounters are all very fun and well designed, there’s a fair amount of verticality and environment interaction. Each encounter feels like it could plausibly be part of an an actual tabletop adventure. And the overall story also feels like something that your friend would come up for his homebrew world. It lacks the style and polish of BG3 but makes up for it with authenticity and heart.

Assist
Solasta is the closest I’ve ever felt to playing dungeons and dragons in a video game and I would highly recommend checking out the base game at least.

They got the Skyrim voice actor (wes Johnson) back for old Herma Mora for the new expansion in Apocrypha. And they had him go back and rerecord the old voice lines as well. I think they did that with Dagon as well.

Whenever I hear of a game I might like, or buy one on a whim I add it to a list. I do something similar with books and movies. The purpose of the lists aren’t to put pressure on myself, but to remind myself of all the things I’m interested in and to avoid the feeling of “I have nothing to play/read/watch”. If I’m not enjoying something, I just won’t finish it and I check it off the list so I know I tried. For me, deciding what to do with my limited time can give me analysis paralysis. I don’t see the list and backlog as a chore, but more of an easy menu of options that I’ve already considered.

I enjoy being able to set my own goals and rules in games. If a game tells me to kill 15 bears just to check off a box, I’m probably not going to want to. But if I decide that I need 15 bear pelts to make myself special armor so I can RP being a barbarian or just look cool then I’m all over it. For me, planning what and how I’m going to do in the game is as fun as actually doing it.

Try Everspace. It’s a roguelike space shooter. Controls feel very free and intuitive. There’s also a sequel that’s out now that’s more of an open world space RPG (same shooting mechanics but not a roguelike). But you can try the first game for only 4 dollars and see if you like the combat.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/396750/EVERSPACE/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1128920/EVERSPACE_2/