I'm not one for "New Year's resolutions", but I am one for overly ambitious projects.
For 2023, Project365 is "One New Game Per Day".
Given that I have 634 unplayed games in my Steam account and {mumble} unredeemed bundle Steam keys, there's a reason my unplayed collection is tagged "Pile of Shame".
I'll pin this to my profile, and give a brief summary here each day (or x, if I miss x days due to work or stuff).
I'll play 15-30 minutes of (at least) one new game I've never played before (or played less than 15 minutes of). I'll give every game at least 15 minutes, even if I hate every minute of it.
I'm also open to suggestions; if you reply to this thread with a game, I'll schedule it, or tell you what I thought of it.
One of the things that's come up is that I have a bunch of games that I've played once, and not touched again.
The Gunk is a third-person action-adventure platformer, with some puzzle elements thrown in. It's game number five in this month's Humble Choice bundle, and honestly, was not a game I was looking forward to playing.
The game title, and the thumbnail on Humble's website really put me off; had I stumbled across this game, with a name like "The Gunk"? Ew. No thank you.
But here I am, forcing myself to play through each of the games each month, so I installed The Gunk and loaded it up.
The game opens with an external shot of a workhorse ship, in space. This is a no Starship Enterprise, more of a yellow brick.
From inside the ship, a conversation between Rani (a crew member) and Becks (the captain) ensues.
They're low on funds, and space hauling is no way to make money. They've found a barren planet, which set off an alert on the ship for an energy source, but as Rani disembarks from the low-flying ship, her "power glove" barely holding together, all they find is a few worthless crystals, and a bubbling mass of "gunk".
We're off on an adventure... and what an adventure it is.
The gunk, as it turns out, is drawn to the energy pools that triggered the ship's alarms, and Rani's power glove has a build in "vacuum" that can suck up the gunk (don't think too hard about this). Once the area is freed of the gunk, it springs back to life.
Gorgeous, colourful, life. As you move through the various tunnels and platforms, they're rendered beautifully, but watching the bubble of life expanding outwards from your position as you remove the last piece of gunk, is wonderful.
Built into Rani's power glove is a scanner that can scan the various resources you encounter as you can explore, and you can extract them in much the same way as the gunk.
You'll need them, too, because scanning every new thing you come across is how you unlock upgrades to the power glove.
The platforming and puzzles are not too complex, and the laid-back accompanying score is fantastic, and suits the game perfectly.
The best thing for me about The Gunk, though, is the narrative; the back and forth between Becks as she waits back at the ship, and Rani as she explores further afield is fun, and it's this that genuinely kept me exploring for more than an hour, only quitthing because I was going to be late to start work if I didn't.
As they say, "Never judge a book by its cover", and missing out on The Gunk would have been a terrible shame. For me, this game alone makes this month's bundle entirely worth the money, because The Gunk is:
December 13, 2023 - Day 346 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 367
Game: The Pale Beyond
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Feb 25, 2023
Installation Date: Dec 13, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 22m
The Pale Beyond is a survival RPG which appears to be set in the late 19th century; it's the sixth game in the December Humble Choice bundle.
You play as the first mate on a ship that's setting out to try and find what became of its sister ship after it went missing five years earlier on an Arctic expedition.
At first I thought it was a graphic novel. A lot of flat, hand-drawn graphics, and clicking to read text.
One line at a time. My frustration levels started to grow at this point. Eventually after clicking through all that text, and setting my character traits in the process (a "Muttwash criminal"), I found myself at the docks.
Well, more like found everyone else. My character is nowhere to be seen, which feels vaguely disorienting for a game that is split between barely animated isometric views, and first-person perspective interactions with paintings of characters and text boxes.
It has a touch of Frostpunk to it, without any of the things that kept me engaged, and ultimately I felt no desire to keep going.
An added point of frustration was that the game only saves at particular points, which meant that when I decided to quit, but changed my mind, I was actually back at the start of the "level", which would have meant clicking through all of the previous ten minutes of interactions again, which completely took the wind out of my sails (pun intended).
The Pale Beyond might be more suited to someone with an interest in survival games and/or 19th century nautical adventures, but I found it a bit:
December 14, 2023 - Day 347 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 368
Game: From Space
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Nov 4, 2022
Installation Date: Dec 14, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 16m
From Space is a post-apocalyptic (alien invasion!) isometric action twin-stick shooter; it's the eighth game in the December Humble Choice bundle.
The game opens with a short exposition to set the game world, then gives you the option to pick a "specialist" from an extensive range of options.
The characters look like Fortnite avatars run though a chibi filter, but they work well enough with the games stylised graphics.
You load into a training area, then you're off on your first mission. You start with a weapon slot (plus melee weapon via right-click), with more slots unlocking as you progress.
There's also a cache for your weapons at each destination location.
The game (at least as far as I played) seems to be set entirely at night, and makes excellent use of lighting and sound effects.
It's a perfectly serviceable twin-stick shooter. Whether it will draw me back, I don't know.
December 14, 2023 - Day 347 - RePlay Review
Total RePlays: 11
Game: Last Call BBS
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 4, 2022
Library Date: Aug 14, 2023
Playtime: 30m (2h48m)
Last Call BBS is a Zachtronics game, and is the seventh game in this month's Humble Choice bundle, and the final bundle game this month.
I'm going to broadly group the folks reading this into folks who saw "Zachtronics" and went "huh?" and folks who saw it and went "ohhhh".
Most (but not all) of the Zachtronics games are variants of programming games.
Last Call BBS however, is a final labour of love for Zachtronics fans. The name is a double entendre, for this was also the last game by Zachtronics before Zach Barth closed the studio, and left programming (at least temporarily).
It's difficult for me to describe Last Call BBS, because it's a callback to an earlier time, before the web, before the internet was everywhere.
It's a pixel-art simulation of a computer from the late 80's-early 90's, that comes with its own simulation of a PDA ("Kids, when we were younger, we didn't have fandangled smartphones, we had "Personal Digital Assistants" with monochrome pressure-sensitive screens, and we had to learn a whole new way to write the alphabet, and we LIKED it! Well... we accepted it."
The game sets you up with a modem, allowing you dial into a BBS (Bulletin Board System), modem screeches and all, and download 8 different "pirated" 'warez'. Last Call BBS even simulates the download process, making you wait for up to 15 minutes for the "download" to complete, and then forcibly logging you off, in much the style of real world BBSes of the time.
There's almost a sense in which Last Call BBS feels like a Roman à clef, and that some of the stories in the game are Zach taking an introspective stock how how he "got here".
For all of the pixel art games I encountered (and complained about) this year, Last Call BBS is the one game that actually DID give me a sense of nostalgia for that era. It feels... earned, I guess.
As for the "mini-games" themselves, they appear to be inspired by many of Zachtronics hit games. In keeping with tradition for Zachtronics games, Last Call BBS contains two different solitaire variants.
I don't know how old Zach is, but I get the feeling that we lived at opposite ends of a particular era in computing that all but disappeared in the wake of the internet becoming omni-present.
There's a layer to Last Call BBS that may only be appreciated by those of us who lived through that period of time, yet still provides the kind of challenges that lead to an entire subgenre named for Zach Barth: "Zachlikes".
Life Is Strange: True Colors is a third person adventure game, and is the first game in February's Humble Choice bundle. I actually owned it already; in my head, I pictured it as a sequel, so I hadn't actually played it.
You play as 18yo Alex Chen, who has a psychic ability and can see the emotions of others as coloured auras, and hear their thoughts.
Beyond that, I'm not sure, as the pacing of the game means that even after 35 minutes, I'm not terribly far into the storyline.
However, based on the previous games, and my experience so far, Life Is Strange: True Colors seems to be:
February 8, 2024 - Day 404 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 440
Game: Scorn
Platform: Steam
Released: Nov 4, 2021
Installed: Feb 8, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 17m
Rating: 1 - Nope
Scorn is a first person horror survival adventure puzzle game. It's the second game in February's Humble Choice bundle.
This was in my "never playing that" list, and seeing it show up in the bundle was a moment of "suck it up, princess."
However, for day 404, it was definitely a case of fun not found.
The game is viscerally disturbing, with the environment being all flesh, bone, and metal; a Gigeresque fusion that just had my brain screaming "GET OUT, QUIT, NOW!"
After exploring the tunnels of the first level, and sticking my avatar's hand into far too many squelching control interfaces, I was glad when my 15 minutes were up.
February 9, 2024 - Day 405 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 441
Game: Destroy All Humans! 2 - Reprobed
Platform: Steam
Released: Aug 31, 2022
Installed: Feb 9, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 24m
Rating: 3 - OK
Destroy All Humans! 2 - Reprobed is a third person open world adventure game. It's the third game in February's Humble Choice bundle.
Unlike Scorn, I actually had DAH!2-R on my wishlist. However, what I didn't know is that while it's a sequel to 2020's Destroy All Humans!, it turns out that Destroy All Humans! was a remake of Destroy All Humans! released in 2005, and DAH!2-R is a remake of the sequel Destroy All Humans! 2.
DAH!2-R is set in 1969, and you're playing as a clone of the original Furon invader, Cryptosporidium-137.
As the now-President of The United States, you find yourself under attack by the KGB, having simultaneously destroyed your mothership in orbit, and waves of KGB agents launching a direct ground assault on you, while you're attending a music festival in San Francisco. Of course.
It's feels much like a pastiche of alien invasion movies of the 1950's & 1960's, and it's kind of goofy fun.
February 10, 2024 - Day 406 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 442
Game: Beacon Pines
Platform: Steam
Released: Aug 31, 2022
Installed: Feb 10, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 20m
Rating: 4 - Good
Beacon Pines is an isometric narrative adventure, in which you can go back and change the choices you've, and thus the outcomes that ensue. It's game number 4 in the February Humble Bundle.
Framed as a storybook, in which you're participating in creating the story, the story is about a anthropomorphic young deer, whose father died when he was six, and whose mother has now disappeared.
Luka and his best friend find themselves in the middle of investigating goings-on in their small town of Beacon Pines.
The game is bittersweet, and I'm interested to see where it goes from here.
Game number 5 is the February Humble Bundle is There Is No Light: Enhanced Edition. It is a top-down, pixel-art hack-and-slash action-RPG (ARPG).
It's set in a brutal, seemingly post-apocalyptic world, and opens with your wife being stolen away during childbirth, so that your newborn child can be sacrificed for the sake of the community.
This threw me off from the get-go, and it didn't improve from here on in.
Here's the thing: I'm on call this week. It's Wednesday morning. I'm three reviews down (have played, though) - four, if I pre-emptive count today's review. I'm running on three hours sleep, and today is going to be another long day.
The reviews this week are going to be perfunctory, but I've remembered the point of this whole thing: whether or not I enjoy a game, and want to play it again.
The answer to that question in regards to There Is No Light: Enhanced Edition is:
February 12, 2024 - Day 408 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 444
Game: Children of Silentown
Platform: Steam
Released: Jan 12, 2023
Installed: Feb 12, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 21m
Rating: 3 - OK
Children of Silentown is an isometric point-and-click adventure with a beautiful but haunting art style. It's game 6 in this month's Humble Choice Bundle.
Lucy is a 12 year old girl living in a town deep inside a forest, that's haunted by monsters, in which children have repeatedly gone missing.
The game is very atmospheric, and just a little creepy.
I think I might keep playing to find out what's happening in Children of Silentown, because it's:
Oaken is an isometric hex-based tactical roguelike deck-building strategy game. It's game 7 in this month's Humble Choice Bundle.
Oaken is very pretty, but I'm not sure I could explain the storyline, even if I tried. You're some kind of spirit making your way down an oak tree, through various battles, and building out your deck in the process.
February 14, 2024 - Day 410 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 446
Game: Snowtopia
Platform: Steam
Released: Dec 15, 2022
Installed: Feb 14, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 27m
Rating: 1 - Nope
Snowtopia is a top-down/third-person snow resort management sim. It's the last game in this month's Humble Choice Bundle.
You start out in the middle of nowhere in a snow-covered valley with the main buildings of a snow-resort in the centre, begging for you to build it out into a functional skiing paradise.
There's potential here for something interesting, but it's let down painfully by a tutorial that explains things in a way that still leaves you unsure of exactly what you're supposed to do.
However, the game's biggest failing is that it tells you to build ski runs on the vector-graphics hills, and then when you try to, it gives the cryptic error "Impossible to build on uphill slope."
It feels like it was designed by someone who understands exactly what that is supposed to mean, and since it's obvious to them, it should be obvious to everyone else.
However, having lived just south of the NSW snowfields for over a decade, one of the most important things required for ski runs is the uphill slope, so you have something to ski down.
Don't let the time played fool you; I became determined to at least complete the tutorial. I did not. I gave up in frustration.
March 8, 2024 - Day 433 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 468
Game: Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin
Platform: Steam
Released: Nov 18, 2023
Installed: Mar 8, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 24m
Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin is an isometric real-time strategy game, and it's first game off the rank in this month's Humble Bundle.
It's also got to be the quickest release-date-to-bundle-date I've seen.
It's good looking, but boring. There's some kind of storyline here, but it feels a lot like it relies on pre-existing knowledge of Warhammer, and much like Boltgun a few days ago, I suspect if you're a Warhammer fan you might get more out of this that I did.
Not a great start for the March Humble Choice bundle, Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin is just:
March 9, 2024 - Day 434 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 469
Game: Nioh 2
Platform: Steam
Released: Feb 5, 2021
Installed: Mar 9, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 32m
The second game in the March Humble Choice Bundle is Nioh 2; it's a third-person ARPG, which is described by the developers as "masocore".
It's set in a fictionalised supernatural era of Japan in the 16th century, and I hope you like sharp weapons, because there are a lot of them to choose from.
Not that they did me much good, because I died pretty much straight away, and repeatedly.
Turns out that "masocore" is a portmanteau of "masochism" and "hardcore", and Nioh 2 is aimed at a subset of players for whom I guess soulslikes aren't frustrating enough?
It's a gorgeous-looking game, but I have low frustration levels to begin with, and this just didn't click with me.
I still want to give it another try though? So I'm going give it a (just barely):
March 10, 2024 - Day 435 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 470
Game: Black Skylands
Platform: Steam
Released: Aug 16, 2023
Installed: Mar 10, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 19m
Black Skylands is game number five in the March Humble Choice Bundle; it's a top-down pixel-art steampunk-themed... game. It's a category mash-up that's part-twin-stick shooter, part-open-world-action-adventure, part crafting-sandbox.
Within that mix of genres, I had trouble situating myself within the gameplay that I connected with it.
It's another game that I'm going to give another shot and see how I feel about it once I get a bit further into the game.
Soulstice is game six in the March Humble Choice Bundle.
It's a third-person fixed-path hack-and-slash adventure game, with a design aesthetic that I really like, a night-time post-apocalyptic fantasy steampunk mashup.
However, the biggest letdown is the semi-fixed camera, which makes this gorgeous game deeply frustrating to try and navigate.
What's worse is that the game allows you to unlock the camera during the intermittent NPC battles, which makes the design choice to leave it locked at other times all the more mystifying.
With four out of eight games in the bundle out of the way, this bundle isn't batting well.
The teeth-grindingly frustrating camera drags Soulstice down from what was potentially "good" to:
Afterimage is the seventh game six in the March Humble Choice Bundle; it's a 2D sideways-scrolling Metroidvania, with some Soulslike influences.
You play as a girl named Renee who wakes up with amnesia, and finds that her village has been destroyed. You set out to recover her memories and find out what happened.
I had to Google the details of the game, because writing this review four days later, it strikes me as not particularly memorable. Not bad, just... average.
March 13, 2024 - Day 438 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 473
Game: Destroyer: The U-Boat Hunter
Platform: Steam
Released: Dec 7, 2023
Installed: Mar 13, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 22m
Destroyer: The U-Boat Hunter is the eighth game in the March Humble Choice Bundle. It's a first-person simulation of a WWII U-Boat destroyer.
It started out with a series of cutscenes with some of the most wooden voice acting I've experienced since I started the project.
I then ended up in the campaign, and managed to skip the tutorial option completely.
After several minutes of frustration, I quit out of the campaign, found the tutorial, which was just a series of tutorial videos, and after the series of tutorial videos I experienced a profound sense of loss at the 22 minutes of my life I'd spent on this game.
There's absolutely nothing that could have gotten me to start over on the campaign with the fresh knowledge I'd managed barely managed scrape out of the tutorial videos.
For a WWII wargame fan, Destroyer: The U-Boat Hunter might scratch a very specific itch. Do I have that itch?
The Callisto Protocol is the second game in the April Humble Choice Bundle; it's a third-person narrative-driven survival horror game.
I went into it knowing it's classed as a survival horror game, and a great demonstration of why I try to go into these game without knowing what kind of game I'm getting into.
I don't like "survival horror" games as a category. But there are "SURVIVAL horror" games, and "survival HORROR" games. Outlast is an example of the former, The Callisto Protocol is an example of the latter (at least so far?).
Horror games take me places that feel too close to emotional spaces that aren't good for me; I'm not good with that kind of fear-based adrenaline. Occasionally, though, it's doable.
I found the first half hour relatively... OK. You play as Jacob Lee, a poor victim of "names pulled from a hat".
After the intro, the camera pans forward to the cockpit of a ship, and you come face to face with good old Kirkland-brand Timothy Olyphant, Josh Duhamel.
Voiceover and mocap work was done by Josh Duhamel, with the apparent antagonist played by Karen Fukuhara, best known as Kimiko Miyashiro from The Boys.
However, when Sam Witwer shows up soon after, it becomes clear who the real bad guy of the piece is. The fact your first interaction with him is him throwing your innocent character into a maximum security off-world prison is pretty much a "I don't know what I expected moment".
What these actors bring to the game is a sense of this being more than just another survival horror shooter, a game that might actually be serious about its narrative intentions. Whether they can pull it off, I have yet to find out.
In terms of gameplay so far, I was intrigued enough to keep playing, in spite of my nerves. There are a couple of things about the game that make me uneasy.
I don't mind a bit of gore, but The Callisto Protocol is a gorefest. Which brings me to the other thing. You don't just loot bodies in The Callisto Protocol (you little murder hobo), you actually need to perform a "corpse stomp" on them for them to give up their shinies.
That just feels a bit gratuitous.
The graphics and sound design create an incredible atmosphere, and if I'm in the right mood, I might end up trying to escape from Callisto.
Humble really decided to lean into the strategy games this month, with the third game in the bundle being HUMANKIND. It's a hex-tile based 4X strategy game.
It does a lot of things in a strategy game that Victoria 3 doesn't, which gave me a considerably easier on-ramp.
It purports to allow you to progress from a hunter-gatherer tribes, all the way to a space-faring society, but I didn't get that far in 23 minutes.
It could just have been because I was tired, I just didn't quite connect with it, and I don't really have much more to say about it.
I'll possibly poke it again, but it does feel a lot like Civilisation in some ways, and if I wanted to play a game that felt like Civilisation, I'd just play Civilisation.
The version of the game included in the bundle is the definitive edition, so you immediately have all of the DLC expansions right there, but I'm not sure I'll ever get that far.
Fashion Police Squad (FPS) is a retro 3D first person shooter (FPS) and marks a change in pace, for game four in the April Humble Choice Bundle
As Sergeant Des of the Fashion Police, you patrol the streets putting an end to fashion crimes.
I swear I am not making this up.
Initially armed only with your trusty 2DYE4 gun, you shoot the boring grey-scale 2D business-sprites, with fashion, taking them from drab to fab!
As you move through the game, you unlock more weapons; unlike most boomer shooters, you need to match the correct "weapon" to the fashion crime.
Overall, it's pretty goofy, but it plays the concept straight, and it's kind of fun. I'm incredibly amused that it's in the same bundle as The Callisto Protocol, but I'm glad that I didn't try to play them back to back, because the mood whiplash might have killed me.
Game number five in this month's Humble Choice Bundle is Terraformers. It's a "turn-based colony builder and resource management game with roguelike elements", built around an Earth expedition to terraform Mars.
You start with a single base, and need to explore and colonise various areas of the planet, gathering a whole load of different resources, which in turn pay for the various "research projects" that are delivered in a roguelike card-shuffle each turn.
Some turn-based games could be categorised as "just one more turn" games. Those games in which you're so deeply engrossed, that you look up, and the sun is coming up, and you need to call in sick so you can get some sleep, and then play for the rest of the day.
The key to those games is that they're scratching a particular itch, in an enjoyable and satisfying way. There's a constant series of build-ups then payoffs, and the effort->reward loop keeps those sweet dopamine hits coming at the right intervals.
I think this is why an integrated and well-planned narrative is so important; that's frequently the key to the payoffs.
Terraformers prods at the same territory, without delivering on the same satisfaction. I clocked out at just over 90 minutes, and just felt frustrated.
At the start of the game, you're presented with a choice of two leaders. Each leader has three skills, and a permanent buff. That bit's critical, because after each in-game year, you have to select a replacement leader.
I get why it's done from a gameplay mechanics perspective, but it feels like it repeatedly broke my sense of connection with the colony.
The game sets itself up as an "ancestors planting a tree" kind of story. It makes it clear that the colonists are doing this with the realisation that they'll never enjoy the fruits of their labour. I think that might be one of the key problems with the game.
I understand that the in-game population is building towards a long term goal with little short-term payoff, but the player needs some short-term payoffs, or else it feels more like a job than a game.
On top of everything else, Terraformers gives the population a hedonic adaptation loop. As they game goes on, it requires an increasing amount of effort to keep them happy, as they adapt to life on Mars.
With the repeated loop of disconnection, the cost of research projects grinding upwards and needing more resources, and the population becoming increasingly demanding, I eventually just tapped out.
Terraformers has some interesting ideas, but ultimately it felt like the gameplay was a lot of effort for little reward, and left me feeling pretty:
The Excavation of Hob's Barrow is the eighth and final game in April's Humble Choice Bundle. It's a 2.5D pixel-art point-and-click horror adventure set in Victorian England.
You play as Thomasina Bateman, a grave-robber... sorry, "barrow-digger", who's been asked to come to a small village in rural England to excavate a barrow (a large, round, ancient grave).
When she arrives by train in the village of Bewley, the man she's there to meet is nowhere to be found, and the locals claim to know nothing of the site known as "Hob's Barrow", with the mystery unfolding from there.
In this case, the narrative does lift the game above my resistance to pixel-art games, but it's definitely a game I'd need to be in the mood for.