I only longingly looked at the screenshots of Sam&Max in some gaming magazine at the time, managed to get the game waaayyy later. But man was it worth the wait :)

You’re welcome! Also, there are still some more-or-less indie devs who keep the point&click adventures alive, afaik most, if not all from Wadjet Eye’s catalog are great, eg: The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, Strangeland, Primordia… worth checking out!

point & click adventure games? Some older ones can be aquired for cheap, or even free as some of them have been released as freeware.

some suggestions in no particular order, some are older (like, DOS old, but still good today, imo), some are 2010’s or so:

• TellTale Sam & Max -episodic games (3d, cartoony, comedy)
• Monkey Island -series, parts 1-3. (2d, cartoony, comedy, pirates, yarharhar) (Later games in the series are pretty finicky to get running/stay running.)
• Sam & Max: Hit the road (2d, cartoony, comedy)
• The Dig (2d, scifi)
• Full Throttle (has a modernized remaster) (2d, “scifi”, biker-theme)
• Flight of the Amazon Queen (freeware) (2d, ~40’s vibe, “retro-scifi”)
• Beneath a steel sky (freeware) (2d, scifi, comedy, some gore)

Ones that have some keyboard usage, but are mainly mouse driven (or can be mouse driven)

• Grim Fandango (modernised remaster, original doesn’t do mouse) (3d, latin-american land of the dead, comedy)
• Indiana Jones & The Fate of Atlantis (some occasional fights where keyboard would be preferred, most of these can be circumvented though) (2d, some comedy, ww2, I mean, it’s indiana jones)

The older ones can be played via Scummvm (https://scummvm.org/) - it’s basically a simplified launcher/runner just for adventure games.

I’m a bit two minds about Content Warning - on one hand, it’s simple to pick up and it’s definitely goofy and, fun? But lack of meaningful permanent progress kinda brings it down for me.

Essentially, you can do “fine” with the basic gear (camera, flashlights), but you get more views (ie. money) with better gear - assuming you actually can capture some footage the game-logic deems worthy. Lost items can occasionally be found in the spoopy-place later on, but not guaranteed. Also replacing/buying new gear is kinda expensive, and dead teammates cost money to bring back (but you can’t go to debt because of it, iirc, so that’s nice).

The runs, at least for us, are usually VERY short, like few minutes in and out. Your runs are limited by oxygen, health and amount of footage you can record - which is 30s. so make it count. So basically how the runs go:

1. find the first monster
2. goof with it and try not to die
3. okay steve died while goofing with the monster, but I got it on film!
4. RUN AWAAAY with camera set in selfie-mode and try not to die

Usually monsters can be found very quickly, sometimes it takes a while. But usually run is over in few minutes, the prepwork before taking a dive tends to take longer :D

AFAIK There are some “hidden puzzles”, like combine some bones or whatever to summon a spoopy secret monster or such, but I haven’t seen them myself, just seen some mentions about them occasionally.

Also, It has mod support too. We tried a few:

• longer/infinite film - initially we thought this would be great, but that just defeated the whole point, recorded footage started to drag on and on and on… Short film forces you to really asses the situation and only record peak footage, instead of meandering nonsense.
• More/infinite money - While it was dope to finally test the equipment we were usually too stupid drunk bad to be able to afford them, the items range from useless single use toy to needlessly expensive for what they are.
• More days - same, kinda defeats the point.
• free hospital bills - a good one, imo. The game is punishing enough as is.

Maybe a bit more durable dudes or longer/infinite oxygen tanks would do, dunno.

Doesn’t sound like a glowing recommendation, but in general I’ve never had bad time in the game. The runs are just over bit too quickly, but then again starting a new doesn’t take long either. It’s decent at minimum.

are you using some app to use fsr in older games, or is that just baked into the amd drivers/software now?

Our group got Lethal Company - and promptly refunded, none of us really felt it. Later “Content Warning” was given free, which we got and still occasionally play, it’s okay - if a bit jank. We’ve been discussing about this one, but it just screams streamer/youtuber-bait to me, and while it is exceptionally fun to watch good streamers having a banter and laughs. I dunno if it holds as well for us, it kinda feels like we’d play it once or twice and then drop it entirely.

Visually the game is on point, though. The southpark-esque “canadian” way the robot-characters talk is hilarious, and the slight eye movements really sell it.

oh I wasn’t going to go on a rampage about fake pixels or anything, honest question about performance. Kinda wild it tanks that hard beyond 1440p. There’s few games where I run DLSS even if performance-wise it isn’t neede - just because it does better job with antialiasing than whatever TXAA/TAA/FXAA/whatever postprocess AA there usually is. A lot less crawling pixel edges in fine details etc.

Also, just heads up if you ever intend to go for Arkham Knight - IIRC the good ending requires finishing all joker stuff (incl. the collectible trophies). I got no time for that nonsense so just watched the ending on youtube after getting bad ending. :D

Arkham City is great! Plays well, sounds dope, looks still pretty darn good. The artstyle is still a nice balance between realistic and stylistic, which doesn’t age as hard as realistic, imo.

Got to ask, FSR really needed? Shouldn’t this run at 4k even at fairly modest/toaster-ish pc now? Or does FSR provide better antialiasing results than whatever the game does without it?

Once upon a time I did 100%'d Arkham Asylum, but bailed out of that plan on Arkham City - the amount of collectibles, challenges and secrets was just too much. (And then Arkham Knight came along and turned it way past 11, didn’t bother to finish the game because screw those Joker races.)

oh DERP, how did I even forget that one.

and the hand kinda is reminiscent of the sausagedog from it too, different devs though.

edit: aww poo. there apparently was a demo but it doesn’t seem to exist anymore. :/

haven’t forked, no children. will neighbour’s do?

word. some devices just have angry machine spirits which just can’t be pleased.

unless you use cutting edge distro

yea well, “arch btw”. Haven’t had issues really, been running it for years on other systems but my gaming pc with nvidia is the only one with issues… because of course it does. :D

the penguin migration was going just fine, until nvidia 570.124.04 dropped, which is when the misery started. :|

Got to check if I can roll back to earlier version.