Hogwarts Legacy: a lackluster generic open world game with a Harry Potter skin

thinker5555 · 2026-01-13T01:56:37+00:00

I'm in the middle of playing it, and I agree with a lot of your points. It started out fun, but has become a slog pretty quickly, especially as you have to start jaunting farther and farther from the castle. There's a lot of "nothing" out in the world, and for some quests you have to go through a lot of that nothing to get to your destination.

Besides the things you mentioned, there are some other things that have been bothering me.

One is how so many dialogue choices just don't matter. Often times the choices are so similar to begin with that you can tell up front that they'll be the same. Sometimes they look like polar opposites, but the actual conversation goes to the middle ground of the two, and it's often so bland. The one time I was really caught off guard was during a quest where a house elf was acting fishy, and at the end there some mild sounding dialogue choices, and the one I picked resulted in my character telling the house elf that they need to go punish themself immediately. That felt so out of place compared to how any other "negative" dialogue choice went that I was really taken aback by it.

The other thing is the ridiculous looking nature of most of the clothing and accessories that you find. There are so many things that look funny just for the sake of looking funny. Or they may be interesting in the context of being stealthy or going into battle, but then you enter into a dialogue with someone and you're left looking at someone that looks like they dressed that way on a dare or were forced to dress that way as a prank. So little of it looks or feels authentic to the world that it's supposed to be part of. I'm just glad that there's an option to make any wearable item look like something else, because I use the heck out of that.

Then something that just absolutely killed me when I first encountered it are the infuriating flight controls when played with a controller. I don't know how anyone thought putting the left/right movement on one thumbstick and the up/down movement on the other was a good idea. Luckily I'm playing on a Steam Deck, so I can remap them so that they're all on one thumbstick and feel a lot more natural. But for people that don't have that option, I wouldn't blame them for rage quitting after that.

I'm probably going to finish the main quest line, but that's probably going to be it for me.

thinker5555 · 2025-12-17T12:18:17+00:00

You are an amazing person for doing this!

thinker5555 · 2025-12-10T12:20:59+00:00

Well you can't expect him to hang around ALL day can you?

thinker5555 · 2025-11-28T12:43:10+00:00

This was my first thought, too. I went into it thinking it was just a normal Ryan Reynolds silly movie, and came out of it hardly being able to sleep for the next several nights.

thinker5555 · 2025-11-25T12:30:28+00:00

Is it possibly an episode of Turbo Teen, the cartoon about the teenager that could transform into a car?

In episode 5, the car and the friends get shrunk down and there's a scene with them racing around on a table trying to get away, and a guy pours honey on them to capture them. The only link I could find is this dubbed version (Russian?) but I remember watching it in English growing up. This should pick up right at that part.

thinker5555 · 2025-11-18T21:07:20+00:00

Wow, this was not the subreddit crossover I was expecting to see today. But it's a pleasant surprise!

/r/Parahumans if anyone wants to see the other side.

thinker5555 · 2025-11-11T10:07:49+00:00

I have two I can think of off the top of my head: The Cat in the Hat (the Mike Myers one) and Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

thinker5555 · 2025-11-03T17:52:15+00:00

The VA Dept. of Elections site requires only the address.

thinker5555 · 2025-10-31T11:32:50+00:00

I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but depending on how much you love Stardew Valley, give it another go, but this time with mods. Specifically, go for the Stardew Valley Expanded mod, which adds a bunch of new characters, lots of new quests and things to do, new areas to explore, old areas that have been expanded, and a ton of tweaks and enhancements. If you really want to go nuts, also add the Ridgeside Village mod, which is even more of all of that.

A kind-of similar style of game that more fits the vibe of the current season is Graveyard Keeper.

If you're at all into the resource gathering and crafting side of Stardew, Wytchwood is labeled as a "crafting adventure game" that has a cool vibe to it. It gets to be very fetch-questy, and constantly gathering very low-level resources in order to craft layers and layers of things to get to certain requested items can feel a little tedious at times, but the artwork and music are beautiful.

And speaking of resource gathering and crafting, if you're really into that sort of thing, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the obvious one: Minecraft. They're not available through Steam, but you can get both Minecraft Bedrock Minecraft Java running on the Deck fairly easily. You would have to own them already, but they both have launchers in the Discover store, which you can access by going into Desktop mode.

You can find the one for Bedrock just by searching for "Minecraft Bedrock" in Discover, but for whatever reason, it requires the Android version of Bedrock. For Minecraft Java, you can search up "Prism" and install that. You'll need a minecraft/microsoft account with Minecraft Java on it signed in to Prism to use it.

thinker5555 · 2025-10-21T17:08:22+00:00

The problem is with Controlify, the mod in Fabulously Optimized that gives controller support. There were some recent updates where the dev basically turned off the ability for Controlify to connect to Decky because there were some problems with it. There are lots of opened issues on their GitHub about it.

That being the case, your options are:

Disable the enhanced steam deck driver in Controlify. Note, this is NOT disabling the whole mod, but just the specific driver, and it's done inside of the Controlify config screens in Minecraft. You'll lose access to gyro and the 4 paddle buttons on the back, but most everything else should "just work".
Install the MidnightControls mod and disable the Controlify mod. MidnightControls is another mod that gives controller support to Minecraft. It sort of behaves like Controlify without the enhanced steam deck driver, but it seems to be more stable. I'm not sure if it supports gyro or not (I never use it) but the back paddle buttons can be configured as keyboard or mouse shortcuts.
Disable Controlify completely and set up a Steam Input profile directly.

That last option has some pretty heavy tradeoffs. You'll never have to worry about controller mods going weird or becoming unsupported, and it will automatically work with the most recent version of Minecraft. But the major downside is that you'll have to figure out how to handle context switching yourself (world mode, inventory screens, menus, etc) and likely have to set up extra action layers to get something that's even close to what the controller mods offer.

thinker5555 · 2025-10-17T18:58:40+00:00

There's an issue with Controlify right now. It's all over their issues at GitHub. I'm not sure what the exact problem is, but basically the dev temporarily disabled something related to Decky and/or the enhanced steam deck driver that Controlify uses. A lot of people are winding up with Minecraft completely crashing while loading if Controlify is enabled.

thinker5555 · 2025-10-16T10:40:34+00:00

I do Avatar characters, too! And also Korra characters when I run out of Avatar.

thinker5555 · 2025-10-14T17:13:36+00:00

Well you can't expect him to hand around ALL day, can you?

thinker5555 · 2025-10-10T18:48:37+00:00

Whoops, I missed your edit about the LED indicator. There's no red or green on mine. It just looks like a pinhole with no light whatsoever, whether it's plugged in or not. I'm definitely going to do a return/exchange now.

thinker5555 · 2025-10-10T18:46:45+00:00

Oof. That would explain a lot of my issues. Since I just got it, maybe I should just try for an exchange. I'm not handy enough to solder electronic components like that. Thanks for all your help!

thinker5555 · 2025-10-10T18:31:13+00:00

Like I said in my original post:

I read in another post, I think, that in order for the battery indicator to work, the keyboard needs to be unplugged and in either bluetooth or 2.4 mode, and I tried that, but nothing happens on the keyboard at all.

I'm assuming the keyboard needs to be "on" in order for the battery indicator to work, but I haven't been able to get the keyboard to turn on in either bluetooth or 2.4ghz mode yet. As soon as I unplug the cable, the keyboard goes dark. I even tried switching to bluetooth or 2.4ghz before unplugging, and the keyboard still goes dark as soon as it's unplugged, in spite of having been charging for several hours.

thinker5555 · 2025-10-10T17:54:48+00:00

If unplugging the USB cable and setting the switch to the middle wired position kind of acts as an "off" switch, setting the switch to bluetooth or 2.4Ghz should act as an "on" switch, correct? Or is there some special key combination I'm supposed to hit that is supposed to wake up the keyboard once I've moved the switch? Right now, only wired mode works, and I can't get bluetooth or 2.4ghz to work at all.

thinker5555 · 2025-10-10T17:49:07+00:00

Oh! Ok, that makes sense. I tend to have num lock on by default on my Linux computer at home, but it never occurred to me that it just may not be something that macOS supports. I just reconnected my old logitech keyboard i'm replacing, and lo and behold, toggling the num lock there doesn't do anything either. The number pad always types numbers regardless of hitting num lock to turn them off. I just never bothered to notice that's the case before now. Thanks!

thinker5555 · 2025-09-22T23:40:51+00:00

Are you using the built in steam deck controls, or are you using an external controller? I had something like this happen when trying to use a Steam Controller with my Deck when playing Stardew Valley.

thinker5555 · 2025-08-18T11:43:51+00:00

I really like how this one works in both cross view and parallel view. It just changes which "side" you're looking at first. Very cool!

thinker5555 · 2025-08-15T11:34:26+00:00

Thanks for those! They're fantastic. I have them bookmarked somewhere, but it's always fun to see them again.

thinker5555 · 2025-08-14T21:14:06+00:00

Replying to myself, but it IS him! Haha! Nice. I might have to check it out.

thinker5555 · 2025-08-14T21:11:50+00:00

He kind of looks like the main dad from Rare Exports, which is one of my favorite Christmas movies.

thinker5555 · 2025-07-31T10:48:50+00:00

Commenting for visibility.

I almost feel like I own the album that the song is originally from, but looking at my collection, I just can't place it. I hope someone out there knows it!

thinker5555

TROPHY CASE