Alexia Unplugged

I’ve had more spare time than usual to play games lately! With summer here in the Netherlands suddenly turning back into fall, I have more incentive to stay inside and get comfy discovering some new games. Here are some of the games I’ve played the most the past few weeks.

Coral Island

I bought Coral Island in the last Steam sale. It’s an early access game, yes, but I have been absolutely obsessed, and I ended up playing over 30 hours in the first couple weeks of owning it. I already wrote a long article about why I think Coral Island is one of the best new farming sims this year. It is the perfect mix of familiarity and novelty!

Starbound

I’ve been trying to get more speaking practice in to get more comfortable actually saying words in Dutch. My favorite way to do this is to pick a game to play with my boyfriend and designate that game as Dutch Time. We used to use Minecraft for these purposes because it allows for a wide range of conversation and new vocabulary. However, somehow my boyfriend gets a little bored by Minecraft, so we decided to try Starbound.

It’s much like Terraria in the graphics and building mechanics, and there is also an overarching story that is very interesting! You are a newly graduated space cadet, but your graduation ended in disaster and you have to flee on a broken ship. From there, you need to gather resources to fix your ship, and then explore the stars! It’s an older game, but I’ve been having lots of fun with it (and with figuring out how to describe all these alien things in Dutch), and there are three difficulty levels for varying degrees of coziness and challenge.

Baldur’s Gate 3

I am a big tabletop role playing game (TTRPG) fan, so I’ve been anticipating this game for a while now. I bought it on release a few days ago, and have been playing a campaign with my friends every day since then. It’s basically Divinity: Original Sin 2 (which I have around 200 hours of playtime on), but with better funding and bigger systems. I cannot recommend this game enough. The story is engaging, and the adventures I’ve been having with my friends to deal with the little guy in my brain have been worth every penny.

Baldur’s Gate 3 gives you so much choice, and it will be fun to replay dozens of times over. There are seven premade characters with beautifully written stories. If you don’t want to play a premade character, you have plenty of options to make your own with any number of combinations of the 12 classes and 46 subclasses and 11 races (with some subraces too!). It’s also a great way to explore the Dungeons and Dragons world and maybe even ease into TTRPGs in an exciting way, especially since you can play with up to 4 friends!