So, I’ll just go through my Steam favourites and list the ones that fit the bill.

I recently played I Am Your Beast and absolutely loved it. Not really a story focused game, but it’s it has some of it, the voice actors are better than you would expect and the gameplay is top notch.

Pretty much all Call of Juarez games (well, maybe not The Cartel), but start with Gunslinger. The others are old and clunky, but Gunslinger still holds up and is one of my favourite arcady shooters.

Mirror’s Edge is a classic, if you haven’t played it, you definitely should. You can skip the sequel, Catalyst. That one added open world and was mediocre at best anyway.

Speaking of classics, Dishonored is probably one of the best stealth games out there, in my opinion at least. I would consider the first one fairly linear, altho the game does expect you to explore the individual levels quite a bit.

Mafia 2 (I honestly recommend you play the classic edition, you get it when you buy the definitive. It just runs better and isn’t as buggy. The remaster barely improves anything anyway) and the remake of Mafia 1. Yes, they are open world, but only by technicality. The story is very linear and you barely need to interact with said open world. The games never expect you to explore or collect stuff and there’s fuckall to do on the map besides drive around anyway.

If you like Ace combat, Project Wingman would be right up your alley. I’m not sure if I would call it simple per se, but it’s linear, level based and great.

Tactical Breach Wizards is another recent favourite of mine. It’s slightly x-com-y altho more of a puzzle than a strategy game with some pretty decent humour.

Gunpoint is another indie puzzle game with great humour. It’s by the same guy as Tactical Breach Wizards.

Since you said you like Uncharted, I imagine you might enjoy the older Tomb Raider games, before the 2013 reboot when they went open world. Legend is my favourite of them altho I know it’s a bit clunky by modern standards.

Last but not least, SUPERHOT. You probably know it, but in case you don’t, play it. It’s short, it’s simple and it’s great.

Some people believe the earth is flat, I don’t think whether the definition is scientific or not matters much lmao

That plus being an ass in general I’d say. I’m 25, haven’t ever gotten laid and struggle with loneliness all the time, but still don’t think all women are sluts and are obligated to fuck me.

The map looks and feels amazing, one of my favourite worlds in a game, and the main story missions are really, really good

BUT

To unlock said story missions you have to do multiple hours of open world tasks, most of which consist of going to an area and mindlessly killing everybody. If you enjoy grinding, you will probably like it, I have a friend who does, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish it because I found unlocking the story missions mind-numbing.

Hmm, I do have tap to wake and that is giving me an idea. You can pull down the status bar while the phone is locked and in the bottom right corner there’s a power button. So theoretically my leg can double tap the screen, pull down the status bar, tap the power button and confirm. Feels like a bit of a stretch but who knows. I’ve never had it randomly turn off while I was using it or while sitting on my desk after all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, I’d say 4 is about right. And the power button is a bit recessed (it doubles as the fingerprint reader), so it’s really hard to press it accidentally. I genuinely have no idea how it could randomly turn off in my pocket. As for the battery, I’m pretty confident it’s a software issue. It’s only happened twice in the 4 months I’ve owned the phone and a restart fixed it both times.

Keep in mind that my basis for comparison is a Galaxy S9. The Fairphone feels smoother and more responsive most of the time, but you do occasionally get freezes and lag spikes, mostly when you try to minimise an app that is currently loading something from my experience. Particularly heavy websites also slow it down sometimes, but pretty rarely.

And I wouldn’t really call the design “that bad”, I was listing off my issues with it, so it might have come across that way, but the majority of the time it works completely fine.

Never happened on my old phone. Might be some issue with the stock Android then, idk

I have a Fairphone 5 and it’s… ok. It’s definitely overpriced for its specs but you can’t really expect a cheap phone while cutting down on slave labour at the same time. It’s also quite buggy. Not unusably so, but coming from a Galaxy S9 (yes, Samsung bad, that’s why I switched), it’s a bit jarring. For example, sometimes I’ll pull it out of my pocket and it’s mysteriously off. I turn it back on and there doesn’t appear to be a reason for it and it works fine. A few times I’ve had the battery drain insanely fast for some reason, despite the phone reporting no apps having high battery usage. Some apps also have issues on occasion, Discord for example tends to get stuck in the gallery view after you send a picture and it doesn’t allow you to open the keyboard again. It’s also missing some minor, but neat things, like the ability to snooze alarms by turning over the phone (Edit: tbh that’s probably a stock Android thing and not really fair to hold against the phone, but I still miss it) and the fingerprint reader is nowhere near as reliable as the one in my old phone.

The vast majority of the time it works just fine and if you don’t expect the polish you’ll get out of a Samsung flagship, you’ll probably be ok with it. But you are very much paying a premium for the sustainability and repairability, not the overall experience. I don’t regret supporting Fairphone, vote with your wallet and all that, but I definitely recognise the device itself has issues and when looked at purely on specs and software quality, it isn’t really worth the money.

The map and gameplay of WD2 are great, but I absolutely hated the story-gameplay dissonance. “Oh, we are just a bunch of nice, happy hacker kids, we want to get more social media followers… Let’s murder half of the San Francisco police force and literally thousands of criminals”. I am aware the game has non-lethal options, but they make playing much more of a slog and unlike WD1, this game does nothing to encourage using them. Ubisoft removed the morality system because everybody hated it in the first game, but ironically it would have fit much better in WD2 imo.

https://xkcd.com/927/

I am partial to “code monkey”

On a serious note, I usually refer to myself as a developer or a software engineer when I wanna sound a bit more important.

Skull and Bones made me want to play a pirate game, but everything points to it being just a worse Black Flag. That’s why last week I bought Sea of Thieves and have been enjoying it quite a bit.

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It’s not, this pic is many years old, way before ai-generation became popular. My guess is it’s just shit photoshop by somebody who isn’t paid nearly enough to care

Install Better YouTube Shorts. You can thank me later.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/better-youtube-shorts/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/better-youtube-shorts/pehohlhkhbcfdneocgnfbnilppmfncdg