Agreed, Horizon: Zero Dawn is a genuinely excellent game. It’s saddled with the usual Ubisoft design elements (map full of things to tick off, towers to unlock areas, etc), but none of that gets in the way of how fun the gameplay is and how good the story is.

It’s one of the few video game stories that has really, really stuck with me. Some moments in that game are genuine gut punches that will leave you reeling.

I really enjoyed Sable. It’s not the biggest or most complicated game, but it’s beautiful, thoughtfully written, and really pulls you into its world. I loved just zooming across the wastes on my bike wondering what I would explore next. Incredibly chill.

When you accidentally reinvent corporate taxes.

that i have to quit after spending 100 hours on it unable to finish the main story,

Look, no offense, but I’ve watched a player who plays on controller because her RSI is too bad for mouse and keyboard, who has no idea how to use the modding system and who plays the same frame all the time without even using their powers because she likes the drip complete the main story despite only playing when she’s on stream and only streaming the game for about two hours a week.

I’m not questioning your truthfulness here, everyone is different. But if you genuinely couldn’t complete Warframe’s main story, you are such an extreme example as to almost be unique. I’m sorry to hear that, but I want to stress to anyone else reading this how wildly unusual your experience of the game is.

Personally, I’d argue that Warframe is “grindy”, but that’s OK because the grind is the game. You’re always grinding for something, always working your way up one of the various progression treadmills, but that works because a) the gameplay itself is fun, so you’re not just clicking buttons to fill bars, and b) there’s such a huge variety of different things to progress and different ways to progress them that you can never get bored or feel like you’re being forced into certain content to move forward. You always have the option to just switch to something else. Warframe is a massive all you can eat buffet of gameplay and you get to decide exactly what you want to take from it.

I’ve played a fair bit of the beta, and I do absolutely recommend checking this out. More than anything else the thing that stuck out to me was how absolutely frictionless everything feels. I don’t really know a good way to describe it other than to say that a lot of thought has clearly been put into making every single interaction feel good. Like… There’s a button to summon a little guide, and your character snaps their fingers when they do it. The sound design on the snap is just… Satisfying. It feels good, every time you do it. Every part of the game is like that.

Combat is great. There’s a real feeling of flow, and you get a lot of tools to play with. You can throw your weapon and then summon it back like Mjolnir. You can stagger enemies and then rip mana out of them. You can parry into a finisher in one smooth motion and it feels so good when you pull it off. And all of that is without even using your class abilities.

The setting is weird in a good way. I’m curious to see where they’re going with the story. Like Warframe (and this is really one of the very few ways it is at all like Warframe) you can seamlessly switch classes and weapon loadouts whenever you like, so there’s tonnes of gameplay variety just in trying out different builds.

Most importantly though, the game has a big theme of protecting nature, and the animators more than rose to the challenge. There are a lot of adorable little critters in this game for you to give hugs and scritches to, and the animations are top notch every time. If you want to pet every critter you meet in a game, this game is for you. Despite the soulsborne nods, the biggest Japanese influence here is definitely Studio Ghibli.

Calling it soulframe was the worst decision they could have made. I’ve played both and they are very, very different games in almost every respect. I genuinely suggest you actually give it a try before writing it off. Like Warframe it’ll be free to play, so what do you have to lose?

Zen is also really nice (based on Firefox like Librewolf).

You name a fair point here. I think the part where they’re using an LLM for natural language processing makes a lot of sense. Being able to describe something you don’t know the name of is a genuinely helpful feature. But you’re right that a better implementation would drop the wasteful image generation in place of searching up real images from their product library (which they’re still doing anyway because at some point they have to find a real product to sell you). It feels like that step was maybe added to make it “more AI”, probably at a manager’s insistence.

OK, yeah, this is awesome. I will definitely be making use of these tricks in future.

Good call, honestly.

They were the start of it, but they didn’t account for all of it. And, to be clear, it’s very much an over-correction. As usual they’re going to swing too hard in the opposite direction figuring that everyone else is doing it too, so if they have to hire people back, well they’ll be doing it in a flooded labour market so they can probably just re-hire the same people for less money.

You’re correct and I have no idea why idiots are downvoting you for saying this. Obviously, yes, to some degree companies are testing the waters on using “AI labour” in place of people - Klarna, etc - but for the most part AI is a useful excuse for these companies to dump a bunch of headcount that they warehoused for years just to keep everyone else from getting there first. In large part this is also because investors have finally started to wise up to layoffs not actually being an automatic good for a company. Used to be the word layoffs instantly jacked your share price, but now it’s more of a wait and see attitude, if not outright concern, so they have to wrap up the layoffs in a big AI coat to make them look good.

Edit: To clarify this a little, it’s not just overhiring. It’s that these companies were in a massively over-hired position - many still are to varying degrees - and they’re being pushed to show “growth”. There aren’t really a lot of ways left to do that (capitalism is basically eating itself), but reducing headcount gives you at least a temporary bump in profit, since your overheads go down right away, while any loss of revenue takes a while to hit. The combination of bloated headcounts and a need to show higher profits is the toxic swamp water here, while AI is the packet of kool-aid powder they’re adding to make it look good.

2nd Edit, to previous poster: You should read the article though, it has far less to do with “AI layoffs” than it does with Jensen Huang desperately trying to put out fires, which is very telling.

Transformer model AI has atrocious unit economics. The only way it really works is in some kind of post-scarcity environment where we simply don’t care how much it costs to run.

Crypto only solves problems it creates, or creates new problems out of the ones it solves. It’s a horrendously complicated way of wasting compute power to ultimately achieve nothing.

“How is it possible that AI became productive and useful only six months ago, and they were somehow laying people off two years ago because of AI?” he added. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

This is very telling. Jensen is pulling this “6 months” figure completely out of his ass here, but the reason why he wants that number to be true is because it moves the goalposts. If AI hasn’t actually, really, been here for even a single fiscal year then it explains away everything. Suddenly the fact that it’s made zero impact on productivity, that no one is making any profit on it, all of that becomes justified. “It’s still early.” You’ll recall that this was the narrative around crypto too. Every time anyone criticized anything about it a herd of sheep would bleat “It’s still early” even over a decade into the technology existing.

Investors are starting to ask serious questions about when these tools are actually going to start delivering greater productivity to their companies. Managers are starting to get the screws put to them about why their budgets are ballooning to cover subscription and token costs with nothing to show for it. Jensen can’t have that, because AI is the whole reason why his company is on top of the world, so he’s trying to reset the clock.

For the record, there’s absolutely no evidence to suggest that AI has ever become productive and useful, but that wouldn’t fit Jensen’s narrative either. So instead he has to invent a world where AI is totally productive, 100% useful, just trust me! When did that happen? Oh, just now. That’s, um… Yeah, that’s why you didn’t notice. It just happened, right before you walked in.

“…and live with its consequences.”

That’s why they’re booing, you moron.

As someone who still plays it in 2026, yes, absolutely. It’s a really fun game, with some of the best gunplay and movement out there. Of particular note though is the sound design. I honestly think Insurgency might be one of the best games ever made in terms of sound design. The dialogue, especially, is fantastic; your characters don’t sound like cool badass tough guy heroes, they sound like they’re shitting bricks. It’s a really believable take on warfare that genuinely conveys the panic and urgency of a firefight. No one in this game is a badass, even when they’re trying really hard to come off like a badass.

This approach to realism extends to other parts of the game as well. Insurgency is depicting the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan and your character options reflect that, with a wealth of middle eastern performances and cosmetic options, as well as the usual American stuff (and a Russian voice option for the insurgent side, because that was a thing that was actually happening). A detail I really appreciate is that you can have a female character, but only on the security side, because the insurgents are meant to be ISIL and their precursors, and the creators didn’t want to whitewash how deeply misogynist those groups are.

Fun fact by the way, the studio was founded by Canadian veterans who actually served in Afghanistan. This is why so much of the game actually feels believable, rather than just wearing the aesthetics of realism.

My one big criticism would be that they’ve made some very dubious choices about cosmetic DLC since the game launched. They’ve pulled back on the more egregious stuff in response to feedback from the community though, so they are listening.

Start with the Cooperative mode if you want an easier time getting a handle on the gunplay and movement. I strugglee for a while, but once it clicks it feels amazing. There’s nothing else quite like it.

The game is still very active, and continues to get regular updates with maps, weapons and cosmetics.