Lately I’ve been playing a ton of Don’t Starve and Don’t Starve Together (the multiplayer version). If you like open world, no hand-holding survival games, check it out. You will die over and over again and you’ll keep wanting to give it just one more try. To quote one of the reviews:

You will die.

Spiders will murder you.
Hounds will murder you.
Bunnymen will murder you.
Trees will murder you.
Tentacles will murder you.
Shadows will murder you.
Giants will murder you.
Penguins will obliterate you.
Bees will f**king destroy you.

And that’s only if you don’t starve first.

On the less frustrating side, the art is adorable. All of the creatures that will try (and usually succeed) to murder you are really cute.

Another game you should try if you like dying repeatedly is Dungeons of Dredmor. It’s basically an old-school roguelike with nice graphics, friendly controls, and a sense of humour. You’ll die a lot, but the little obituaries the game gives you are so good you can’t even really be mad about it. Plus you can worship Inconsequentia, Goddess of Pointless Sidequests and sacrifice lutefisk to the Lutefisk God. Dungeons of Dredmor is also quite a good deal these days because it came out in 2011.

A friend also introduced me to Space Team a little while ago, that game is amazing at parties. It’s a cooperative multiplayer mobile game where you yell incomprehensible technobabble at each other – everyone gets a set of controls on their screen and a console where you get instructions, but the instruction you get might not apply to the controls on your screen. That’s where the yelling comes in 🙂 If you like Space Team, there’s a kickstarter to support the developer to release more games. It can be a bit of a pain to get everyone’s devices connected, but it’s well worth the hassle.

On the book side of things, Richard Morgan’s A Land Fit For Heroes trilogy is a) awesome, and b) complete, for those of you who hate waiting for the next book in a series to come out. A land fit for heroes is a noir fantasy, which totally works for me but may not be everyone’s cup of tea. The characters are interestingly flawed, the world building is fantastic (I find books that let things be mysterious much more interesting than books that insist on spoonfeeding you every little detail), and if you’re going to read it I recommend getting all three books at once because you will want to know what happens next right now.