It would be more concerning if it wasn’t.

I hope the developer commentary is on.

The soundtrack of Within a Deep Forest. It’s an ambient gem from indie mid-00s gaming. Fun fact: it was made in Impulse Tracker.

The maps aren’t generated inch-by-inch, if that’s what you were hoping for. Each stage has a bucket of unique rooms it stitches together to create the level geometry. The devs did a clever thing and made rooms with multiple doorways, with two chosen at random to be part of the path, so you can traverse through the same room in a slightly different way each run. At this point, I’ve seen all the possible rooms, but the combination of character upgrades, surprise challenges the game springs on you, weapons, and enemies keeps it fresh. There’s a lot of replayability in just character builds alone, since you can find multiple ways to make each character effective, depending on what perks you got first and what risks you take.

The co-op works well. Gunfire Reborn is a lot easier in co-op because friends can revive each other with unlimited tries, whereas in singleplayer, you get only one revive by sacrificing the character-upgrading resource. Recently, they’ve added a Left 4 Dead-style bot co-op mode so you can have that experience instead of the pure solo one. I’ve actually ground myself into a weird corner where I’m way better than everyone else I play with and can carry a whole team, dealing like 80% of the entire team’s damage across the whole run. I’ve not actually tried public matchmaking, just playing solo or with friends.

In terms of DLCs, each comes with two new characters and a handful of weapons. Each DLC character has a different mechanical focus in case you’re getting bored of the characters you already have. The base game is just fine to start with. I have the first two packs, but the latest one, the third, I skipped during the Steam winter sale to buy more games. The character I was playing here, Zi Xiao, comes from the second pack, Artisan and Magician. His counterpart in that pack is Nona, who is pretty much the red panda version of Gaige from Borderlands 2 (no anarchy stacks, though), summoning and commanding a combat robot. The first pack, Spirit Realm, has a monkey who aggressively upgrades his guns and a fox who, with the right build, can just stop using guns and drop fireballs on enemies instead.

Okay, here’s my final pitch. The game is on sale as part of the launch of the new season. It’s not the all-time low, but it’s pretty close.

By the way, my main is Qing Yan, the other bird boy.

The WADF soundtrack sticks with me

First one isn’t even metal. But yes. Not doing that is why anyone even remembers Party Cannon.

Valve tried trackballs with the Steam Controller but ditched them for trackpads that emulate trackball physics. They found small ones felt bad but big ones were too bulky and heavy. Clearly they like that idea, since every controller-like thing they’ve designed since includes pads.

It’s powered by someone’s Raspberry Pi 5.

If you’re talking about not wanting to mess up the recommendations you get on YouTube, you can delete videos from your viewing history and they won’t count for recommendations anymore. A private browser window will also work.

Very big snooze

If you haven’t done so already, I suggest you start taking notes while playing the game. You’ll need to keep track of what you have to come back to a place for.

I completed Psychonauts recently on my PC. There’s a Linux native version as well, and both it and the Windows+proton versions seemed to work… adequately. It’s pretty janky, which I mainly attribute to it being an old PC game.

Too bad for you that HTML collapses all repeated whitespace, so double spacing after a period on the web does actual nothing.

Trying to finish Psychonauts after several years of playing it on and off

It’s actually spelled “chamberrr”

The blue one restores mana

I recommend you avoid games with continuous movement early on. Moving with joystick feels very bad until you get your VR legs. Also get the Lab, Valve’s free VR minigame collection.

I don’t think it has ever gone on sale.

This game is timeless. It was released in a time when the arena FPS was on its way out and server browsers were still the norm for PC online multiplayer, yet it has hardly aged.