While we here at Operation Rainfall love covering the latest in gaming news and sharing our reviews of titles new and classic, we also just enjoy playing games in our downtime. So with that, sit back, relax, and check out what the oprainfall gaming crew have been up to this week!
I spent most of this week playing NIS America’s newest release Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook. This is a unique release that combines traits of a rogue-lite with SRPG elements for combat. Taking on monsters for materials and food is pretty fun, but the RNG here will screw you over at every turn. Lots of times things you need to make food or repair you gear will not spawn for many floors, or they will throw you into one filled with tons of monsters. The easy difficulty here lets you keep more stuff when you die and the monsters don’t grow as fast, but I have to tell you it’s still pretty difficult. I wouldn’t subject myself to horrors of the other ones with stupid growth rates and losing everything on a death. That said I don’t think this is a bad game, and I hope to have a full review out sometime this week. – Steve
I’m still making slow but steady progress in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I’m currently making my way toward the Rito village and getting distracted by every shiny object and deep cave along the way. I also took an extended detour into the Depths for funsies, where I found the above gentleman who wasn’t creepy at all, nope not one bit. Honestly I keep meaning to actually play the story but more often than not I find myself hauling ass halfway across Hyrule toward some random point of interest I happened to spy. The exploration in this game just feels so good. I’m still rubbish at building things and I dislike the spongier enemies, but I am here for all the exciting discoveries.
When I haven’t been in Hyrule, I’ve been in Eorzea with the release of Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker Patch 6.4. Not only did we get a really good main story quest this go around, with a genuinely fun trial fight (I still need to run the EX version), but it’s also the culmination of the Pandaemonium raid series, and ohmygosh it was everything I wanted. Pandaemonium is by far my favorite of XIV‘s eight-man raids (before now, it was Omega for story and Eden for mechanics), but Pandy managed to combine both into something really special. Getting to revisit Erichthonios and Themis was a joy, and I had a lot of fun with each of the fights. The highlights were definitely P11 and P12, but I won’t spoil why. This patch made me incredibly happy and sad at the same time and I am a sucker for a story that can elicit a nice range of emotions from me.
I also finished Leon A in Resident Evil 2 Remake, and man that was super fun. Having unlimited ammo helped, but it was just genuinely such a good update from the original PS1 title. I had a love/hate relationship with the changes to the sewers — loved the new alligator fight, was less thrilled about Hell Hallway and the giant postule monster things, I definitely could have done without that whole sequence Capcom why did you do that?!?!?! — and really liked the updated Lab. The atmosphere and sound design were definitely the MVPs of this remake, but all the weapons just felt really good to use, too, and it was incredibly satisfying taking down Mr X in his final fight (I launched a rocket at his face). Also the zombies being absolutely buggy will never stop being hilarious. I still can’t imagine having played this without unlimited ammunition, and I will be playing the Resident Evil 3 Remake with unlimited ammo, too, because I am here for fun and not to stress over resources, thank you very much. So look forward to those reactions when I finally get to sit down and start it! – Leah
What games have you been playing this week? Let us know in the comments!
You can read previous Week in Gaming entries here!
