I played a few hours of Palworld, and it's serving the role of a podcast or second-screen game quite well. It's still early goings, and I'm around level 10 or so, but it's doing for me what Pokemon hasn't done in decades while simultaneously combining it with aspects I really enjoy from Factorio.

I'm also coming close to the end of Pillars of Eternity, I think. I'm in the second DLC, and I hit a huge difficulty spike, as quests available around my level have seemingly started to dry up, but I ended up grinding a few bounties and got to level 14, which got me over one difficulty spike and hopefully paved the way to keep me moving.

Besides that, I picked up Tekken 8. This is the most I've enjoyed Tekken since the third game, and I also think I'm done with it. A lot of the game makes sense to me in a way that Tekken 7 didn't, and I've come to respect it more than its predecessor for that and other reasons, but I don't think it's for me as far as being a fighting game I'd like to compete in. I can see the path to improving from here, and it looks like a lot of memorization rather than application, where I just need to know what each move or string looks like to be ready to defend it, and until I reach that point, it's just a lot of frustration. So instead, I choose to avoid that frustration and go back to fighters that I enjoy more. It's a lot of fun at a casual level and in single player mode though.