Ashtear

87 on OpenCritic. If I’m being honest, that’s quite a bit higher than I was expecting after playing the demo. The gameplay felt novel for about three fights before it quickly started to feel like extruded third-person shooter product.

Unless I start hearing really strong things about the story, I’ll probably be waiting for a sale.

I have never understood this. Heard it with Undertale, too. One can always just ignore the weirdos in the fanbase?

I got absolutely sucked into Mewgenics the past month, still playing that. It doesn’t help that no other recent releases have caught my eye, and there aren’t really any on the horizon other than Mina the Hollower, which still doesn’t even have a release date.

Cinematic style as in it’s heavy on cutscenes, or that you didn’t like the art direction? If it’s the former, that’s been the general orientation of the genre for a little while now.

You could try something more gameplay-oriented, like Octopath Traveler, Shin Megami Tensei V, or Rune Factory.

This feels like cope a bit, honestly. The thing about the current push for system requirements these days is it’s less about visual fidelity and more about saving development time. This is especially the case with ray tracing, with setups that are far easier to get passable lighting on. Not that there’s ever a fortunate time for exploding hardware prices, but it’s especially unfortunate that they hit while the most popular GPUs right now are 3060 and 4060s. Not exactly RT powerhouses. It would have been better for everyone involved if RT hardware was a generation ahead, and the “we want to spend less time on optimization” part of the push isn’t going to stop.

I don’t know if the AAA devs will hit the brakes a bit on visual fidelity in response to the hardware situation slowing down, but that and the gradual rise of handheld PCs will certainly create an opportunity for lower-spec games to find a market.

Could be? I know Beehaw is defederated from a lot but I haven’t kept up. The community is definitely active.

It’s not explicitly 30+, but I think !retrogaming@lemmy.world is one of the best active gaming communities on the Fediverse with a good mix of links and discussion, and the nature of the content certainly attracts older gamers.