Next!

After a bit over 20 hours and reaching level 30, I uninstalled Starfield. If I had no other games, I probably could have played this for longer. There is an okay first/third person shooter game in here, and the quests aren't badly written. But a lot of game elements, like the lack of maps, the fiddliness of the inventory management, and the half-baked user interface tend to get into the way of really enjoying gameplay. At some point even just the demo version of The Lamplighters League looked more interesting than continuing to play Starfield. So I decided that I probably wouldn't come back to it, and uninstalled the game.

The good news is that The Lamplighters League is coming out Tuesday, and it will be on Game Pass, thus available at no extra cost to me. The demo was only available on Steam, so I played that for the duration of the tutorial, which is all there is in the demo. Again the user interface could be better: In a real-time / turn-based tactical game, the decision to not include a quick save, but require a longer series of clicks to save your game is incomprehensible. And I find it annoying that I have to switch to recon mode whenever I want to move the camera. But other than that, The Lamplighters League is far more my kind of game: The tactical combat is quite interesting, I do like the art style, and the setting, which is somewhere between Lovecraftian and Indiana Jones, is also rather fresh. I'm looking forward to playing the full version starting on Tuesday.