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.
June 9, 2023 - Day 160 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 178
Game: Remnant: From the Ashes
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 20, 2019
Library Date: Jun 7, 2023
Unplayed: 2d (2d)
Playtime: 40m
Remnant: From the Ashes is a third-person souls-like ARPG, & game #5 from the June Humble Choice bundle.
The game opens with an avatar designer; while not overly complex, it was enough to be able to create a female character & make her feel like "me".
You then find yourself in a boat for a cinematic intro, while a voiceover sets the scene; after a final shipwreck, you're washed up on a post-apocalyptic shore, with a palette of mostly dark muted colours, armed only with a sword.
So... souls-like.
There's an integrated training section of the game where you're introduced to the main bads, "the Root". Creepy AF spike-shooting black & red trees can spawn out of nowhere, or drop from platforms above you where they're ...rooted... in defiance of gravity, hanging there in exactly the way bricks don't.
Once you're rescued by the inhabitants of "Ward 13", you get a couple of guns (less souls-like), and start exploring this horrifying world in which you're part of the titular remnant of humanity.
The atmosphere is incredibly creepy, and I'll probably spend some more time killing evil trees.
June 10, 2023 - Day 161 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 179
Game: Turbo Golf Racing
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 4, 2022
Library Date: Jun 7, 2023
Unplayed: 3d (3d)
Playtime: 16m
Turbo Golf Racing is game #6 from the June 2023 Humble Choice bundle and answers the question "What if Rocket League, but mini golf?"
I really don't know what else there is I can say about it.
Take away the stadium, give all 8 players their own ball, three competitive rounds to get your ball from one end of the green to the hole as fast as possible.
Powerups, weapons, wildly differing greens.
This is a multiplayer game, and I can understand why they were willing to put it into a bundle less than a year after release.
As with any multiplayer game, no players = no game, so by putting it into a bundle, the devs are obviously hoping to goose the playerbase.
I did find a match, and it was kind of fun, but I suspect this will end up being another also-run game that will get shut down in a year or two, just through not having enough players to support ongoing development.
Meeple Station is game #7 from June 2023's Humble Choice, the last of my unplayed games from the bundle, and answers the question "How do we fill out the bundle to 8 games?"
I actually picked it up in a bundle last year, so I have a free key.
Meeple Station is an isometric pixel-art colony builder/management sim. You build and control a space station.
In this case, build and control are very loosely defined. When I looked at this game, I was expecting to find it was still in Early Access, but no, apparently this bug-ridden disaster area is the release version. Patch 1.0.7 was released in Jan 2022, 1.0.8 was released in July 2022, and nothing else since.
Some nice ideas, but very poorly executed. After 63 mins, I hadn't even completed the 5 tutorials.
For example: You assign crew members to a task, then you have to wait for them to complete that task to move on in the tutorial.
There's no way to force them to do it, you just have to wait... and they just won't do it. I restarted two tutorials, one of them at (as it turned out) the final step. When it happened again mid-tutorial #5, I was done.
First cab off the rank, is The Outer Worlds "Spacer's Choice Edition". The Outer Worlds is a first-person ARPG that answers the question "What would the love child of Fallout: New Vegas and Firefly look like?"
The "Spacer's Choice Edition" includes all of the DLCs and some graphical spit-and-polish to the original release from October 2019.
As it turns out, after turning to Google, I suspect the main reason it feels like that is because it was developed by Obsidian who also developed... Fallout: New Vegas.
Once I reached the ship ("The Unreliable") that apparently serves as the main hub of the game, and completed the first quest onboard, I turned around and started exploring the ship.
Entering the hold, was an immediate raised-eyebrow moment, as it could have all but been the Serenity. Up the stairs, and further exploring lead me into the galley/dining area, which - once again - could have been lifted straight from Firefly.
There are differences, of course; it's obviously a homage, rather than a straight-up lift. With Disney owning Fox, I'm sure the Microsoft-owned Obsidian wasn't looking for a lawsuit.
Still, it provides some nice sans-Whedon warm-and-fuzzies.
So far -and in 39 minutes, I really didn't get very far, what with the character conversations and all, it seems like a capable ARPG that want to give a bit more time to.
It's very polished, and is gently tugging at me to come back and play a bit more, but... alas, the incessant coughing means I really need to try and sleep.
The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition pretty much justifies the cost of this month's Humble Bundle; it's:
The second review for this month's Humble Choice bundle is, a little confusingly, the eighth game in the list. Every month there are eight games, and the AAA game is the first, and the eighth game is, often, pretty much the bundleware of the game.
I figured I'd get Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate out of the way early. The download clocking in at a storage-crushing 63Mb didn't improve my opinion at all.
Then I started the game. Low-res. Pixel art. It even has a "CRT effect" with levels of curvature and scanlines. If only the developers had put as much work into the gameplay.
Once again, these kind of effects have no attraction to me. I don't look at indie games like this with affection. If you want to pull the nostalgia strings, it has to be worth it.
Then I start the game. There's a series of static screens telling the story of the game, and I realise that it feels a lot like a Cinemaware game (ask your grandparent).
The evil Black King has lost all of his pawns, bishops, knights, rooks, and even his queen, to the White King (who's offered better job conditions), and now the Black King is out for vengeance, armed with his trusty shotgun.
...then up comes a chessboard.
It's chess, if chess was... a roguelike‽
Your king appears on the board, armed with said shotgun, facing a collection of pieces. Each piece moves as their traditional chess counterpart, which means a basic knowledge of chess, while not necessarily required, is certainly going to help.
Initially, you can move one square or fire. As you're on the back row, and the shotgun has a firing arc, you want to get closer; getting closer decreases your firing arc, which equals more damage.
Then white moves. After you've emptied both barrels, you need to move once to reload, then you can fire again.
If you clear the board, or kill the white king, as per chess, it's round over. At the end of each round, you get a choice between two cards, but for each card, there's a card that boosts the white side.
Which is where the roguelike strategy comes in.
As it turns out, the developers ABSOLUTELY did the work. There are (apparently) 12 rounds to win. I've made it to round 5 twice, and round 4 once. The game will allow you to move into check, and there's a certain level of shame in walking straight into the diagonal path of a pawn, given I've been playing chess for over 40 years.
It is with genuine surprise that the eight game in this month's bundle, Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate is actually:
The third review for this month's Humble Choice bundle is the fourth game in the bundle, because I wanted something low impact, and Roadwarden looked like it might fit the bill.
Another pixel-art based game, but also a mash-up between an RPG, and adventure game, and interactive fiction?
Roadwarden is set in a fantasy kingdom of some kind, where you find yourself as the newly appointed "roadwarden". Shocking twist, right there.
As far as I can tell, a roadwarden is kind of a jack-of-all-trades who travels between locations in the peninsula, carrying communications, doing odd jobs, killing monsters, and completing the quests the game hands you.
It's all rendered in pixel-art shades of brown, but (thankfully) the pages of text you need to read through a rendered in a clean serif typeface (although you can choose a pixel-font if that suits you).
It hasn't really grabbed me. It was definitely low-impact, but I'm a bit too tired to read through pages and pages of text.
I'll let it sit for a few days, see if it tickles my brain (as some games do), or if I forget about it.
The fourth review for this month's Humble Choice bundle is the second game in the bundle, "Temtem".
It's a cutesy MMO... Pokémon clone. Pokémon are Temtem, Pokéballs are Temcards, the Pokédex is now a Tempedia, etc etc. Not sure how Nintendo didn't sue (cf. Dinkum & ACNH).
The closest I ever got to a Nintendo handheld of my own is a dual-screen Donkey Kong, so I never really got into the Pokémon thing.
The closest I got was Pokémon Go, which was OK for a while, but the fun wore off relatively quickly.
The thing that worked for me was the real-world aspect of Pokémon Go.
Put that into a setting where I have to wander around in a game-world and capture creatures to make them fight other creatures, and it's just really not my thing. I didn't really enjoy it when WoW added it, it's worse when it's the point of the game.
Honestly, I'm surprised I even managed to write this much about the game, because I found Temtem to be:
The fifth review for this month's Humble Choice bundle is the fifth game in the bundle; this was unintentional, but I'm not making this mistake again. I'll come back to the third game at the end of the bundle, because I'm still trying to decide what to do about it.
Kraken Academy is a... oh no, yet another retro pixel-art top-down adventure game.
I'm not going to fill up another review complaining about how retro games don't do anything for me, unless the gameplay hooks me and gets me past the visual design.
I did not get past the visual design.
The game has a lot of high-res well designed characters. They pop up in voiceover scenes to move the "action" along, but then the gameplay is back to a pixel sprites.
Kraken Academy!! is set in the titular private school, which is so run-down, it justs feels like it's missing Rick yelling at Carl about walkers.
You and your sister have been sent there, she hates you, you're there for music, one of the other students is a girl made of broccoli, named Broccoli Girl.
Smash bins to collect plastic bottles to trade in for in-game currency. Pick up quests, complete quests, which just feels like a grind to fill up the time. Apparently there's a magical kraken a little bit further into the game, but it was pretty much an exercise in clock-watching.
Kraken Academy!! feels like the filler for this month's bundle; for me it's a:
I played yesterday, but due to some unexpected surprises, the review is super-late today.
The sixth review for this month's Humble Choice bundle is Merchant of the Skies. It has airships! It has floating sky islands! It has trading! It has pixel-art... again?
This time, your in-game avatar is literally Lemming-sized pixels (ask your great-grandparent).
I was initially frustrated by encountering another pixel-art game, but Merchant of the Skies had other frustrations in store.
This is not a game that teaches you how to play it; when I was as exhausted as I was feeling last night, poking around at things trying to understand what it was I was supposed to do did not spark joy.
Oddly enough, as I kept poking away at it, trying to run down the clock, the underlying gameplay mechanics began to reveal themselves, and the gameplay was enough to keep me playing for 45 minutes.
This is the kind of thing I was talking about in my Kraken Academy!! review. Pixel art isn't a bad thing, per se, if the gameplay supports it, and in the case of Merchant of the Skies, it works.
To the game itself. You have inherited an airship, and your job is to fly from island to island, on a top-down map, buying and selling things, and trading your way to untold riches.
It's basically a capitalism/work simulator. At first, unlocking the map and finding different islands felt interesting, but it became monotonous fairly quickly.
There are no enemies to attack you in the air, no air piracy. The only real challenges are trying not to run out of gold, and trying to make it to the nearest island without running out of energy, because if your airship runs out of energy, you're doomed!
Actually, you're not. You just get towed to the nearest energy station to buy a refill.
Unfortunately for Merchant of the Skies, there are other capitalism simulators that are more fun.
But kudos for rising above the pixel art, in any case.
I'm on call this week, which means that it's a little bit trickier to fit in a game and a review, and I had to write yesterday's review. I had enough time to squeeze in 15mins of the second last game in the Humble Bundle.
74 minutes later, yeah...
After the last two games, I didn't have a lot of hope for Ozymandias. At least it wasn't pixel art?
Turns out that Ozymandias is a "stripped down 4X". The first 4X game I tried to play (and failed at) was Reach for the Stars, and I just haven't had a lot of luck since then.
Generally, I find there are too many moving parts to keep track of, and I end up stressed out instead of relaxing. Not the good kind of stressed out where I get to through the stress to a win state.
The bad kind where I hate every minute of it.
Herein lies the surprise with Ozymandias: I had no idea it was a 4X until after I finished playing it, and read the precis for the game on Steam.
They've stripped out the bit I dislike, and left me with something that got me hooked and kept me playing far later than I should have.
The framing is an early 20th century expedition, where you're introduced to the "world" of Ozymandias. The game introduces you to each piece of the gameplay in a single level, and it all comes together into something very playable.
It's a top-down strategy game, and the graphics work for the playstyle. Not too simplistic, not overly complex.
I just have to make sure I don't start playing again now, because I have somewhere I need to be for dinner.
This is how July's Humble Choice Bundle ends, not with a bang, but a deep sigh.
Yakuza 4 Remastered, is the ... fourth... game in the Yakuza/Like A Dragon franchise. Yakuza has a complicated history. There's a release order, and a chronological order, and this was kind of what I was worried when trying to decide whether to play Yakuza 4.
Apparently, the generally agreed-upon "best" way to play the Yakuza games is according to the chronological story starting with Yakuza 0, and being dropped straight into Yakuza 4 without the backstory did make it a bit... "Huh?"
I have trouble categorising this game, due to a lack of experience to this style of game. Even though my playtime was 44 minutes, I feel like most of that was cutscenes telling the story. It feels a lot like a playable movie, although it seems like technically it's a third-person action-adventure.
Seeing that I have Yakuza 0, looks like I might need to head back to the start.
Samudra is a sideways scrolling platformer-puzzler set in an underwater world that's riven by pollution.
As the game opens, a young child dressed in a Kruegeresque oversized jumper, shorts, sneakers, and... a diving bell... is sinking to the bottom of the ocean. The further they fall, the worse the pollution becomes, until they finally hit the seabed.
This is a gorgeous game. The graphics look hand-drawn. The lighting effects are wonderful.
Unfortunately, Samudra is beautifully boring with a side-order of frustrating.
The controls are simple: WASD (or controller thumbstick), and space (or button A) for actions.
As you slowly run across the ocean floor -because you're underwater, wearing a diving bell, without any oxygen hose- you will encounter things that trigger a speech bubble containing an icon above your head. There are literally no instructions. Even the "Controls" in the menu says "You have one button. This action button."
Your job is to work out exactly what the hell you're supposed to do, and how... because most of the time, the action button does nothing. Until it does. There's no real indication that it's become usable, so I spent a lot of time just mashing it hoping it might suddenly do something.
You can't jump... unless you can. You can't interact with things... unless you can. The game is rendered in a lot of dark, underseas tones, with much of the junk littering the ocean floor rendered in various shades of white.
It turns out there are indicators built into the environment for when actions are available... and they're also white.
Unless they're not available yet, in which case they're a slightly different shade of white.
But it's a 2D sideways-scrolling platformer, so at least that's not confusing. Except when it is.
I found myself standing on top of a crate; jumping down from the crate triggers a quick time event. You have to jump down. There's nowhere else to go. As you land on top of the slope built out of shipping containers, one hurtles down the slope towards you from the right of the screen.
You can't outrun it. You can't jump out of the way. Splat. Splat. Splat. Splat. I couldn't find any way to avoid it. In frustration I alt-tabbed out to find a walkthrough.
It turns out that you need to run towards the shipping container, and then use the action button to step into a shadowed nook... in the Z axis.
I have no idea what I'm meant to be doing, but worse still, no idea why. Unfortunately, the beautiful atmosphere and look of this game does not compensate for the lack of fun.
August 6, 2023 - Day 218 - RePlay Review
Total RePlays: 6
Game: Disco Elysium - The Final Cut
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Oct 16, 2019
Library Date: Nov 9, 2021
Playtime: 1h12m (Total: 3h)
Disco Elysium - The Final Cut is an upgraded version of the original Disco Elysium, a detective RPG. It's one of those games that seemingly everyone raves about. Reviews all give it a 9 or 10 out of 10.
It's the first game in the August Humble Choice bundle, and a curious choice for a AAA game, as most people who would be interested in it would already own it.
I've tried to get into it twice previously, and it just didn't click for me. I'd racked up 108 minutes of playtime, and just sat there in my library, taking up space.
The necessity to review it meant starting over again, and turns out to be third-time lucky. This time it clicked. Not sure what the difference is, but I "get" it now.
It's a largely text-driven affair, and I now understand that the dice-role checks are taken from tabletop RPGs, which makes a little more sense of what's going on.
You play a cop who wakes up drunk and with amnesia in a wrecked apartment. You, the as-yet nameless cop are in a pretty bad way, and your mission is to find out who murdered the man hanging in the tree behind the hotel where you woke up, and who you are.
It seems like you're not a very nice guy.
I paid more attention to the dialogue choices this time around, and nobody (including yourself) respects you, and as it turns out, you're on the verge of resigning.
Thank goodness for autosaves, because I've twice triggered an unintentional resignation from the police force, and ended the game unexpectedly.
August 7, 2023 - Day 219 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 239
Game: Chivalry II
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jun 12, 2022
Library Date: Aug 4, 2023
Unplayed: 3d
Playtime: 28m
Sometimes the reveal of the Humble Bundle on the first Tuesday of the month is a pleasant surprise. Sometimes, it's a case of finding I already have the AAA game in the bundle.
Then there's months like this, where I was overjoyed* to see the second game in the bundle.
Chivalry II.
On December 28th last year, in what was the predecessor to this project, my personal rating on the predecessor, Chivalry: Medieval Warfare was "Meh".
It was DirectX 9, laggy as hell, and I didn't even complete the tutorial.
Does Chivalry II turn me into a fan?
First up, like Temtem last month, Chivalry II is primarily a multiplayer game. If I were a cynical woman, I might infer that there are some devs looking to the Humble Bundle there trying to goose the player base on their games.
Chivalry II is a first-person OR third-person medieval battle simulator.
There's no single-player campaign, just a somewhat frustrating tutorial to go through before being thrust onto a multiplayer battlefield.
It's said that trying to create art with a mouse is like trying to draw with a bar of soap, and trying to swing a sword with a bar of soap is worse.
On the off hand that it worked better with a controller, I tried the tutorial with a controller instead.
It was not better.
There were points during the tutorial where I was doing exactly as instructed, and not succeeding.
At one point, I had to block two opponents, and then move the mouse to the left to slash left.
The sword slashed right. I tried repeatedly, eventually figuring I was moving the mouse to the wrong left. I moved it to my other left.
The sword slashed right.
Eventually, mercifully, I made it through the tutorial, and onto the battlefield. At least I could show my mettle, and my metal, against a field full of human opponents.
Ah, no.
That would be a field full of bots. 63 bots and me.
But it was fun, right?
Nope. It was not even that.
Frantically trying to remember all the different ways to block and riposte, and heavy attack and light attack, and it was a lot easier to die than to fight.
I dropped my weapon, and walked away from the battlefield, with no desire to return. I'll cash in the trading cards, and then get 25Gb of NVMe space back.
August 7, 2023 - Day 219 - RePlay Review
Total RePlays: 7
Game: Road 96
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 16, 2021
Library Date: Nov 16, 2021
Playtime: 40m (Total: 3h)
Road 96 is a cel-shaded procedurally generated first-person adventure RPG set in a vaguely midwest alt-American quasi-dictatorship in the summer of 1996.
It is the third game in the August Humble Choice bundle, and the second of the games that I already owned, having bought it three months after it came out.
You play a succession of teenaged runaways attempting to escape cross-country by whatever means possible to reach the titular Road 96, the one route out of the country.
As you make each journey, you encounter a cast of characters, slowly piecing together their backstories as you make each journey.
Each journey can end in arrest, or (apparently) death, or escape.
So far, my first two chapters have resulted in being arrested each time, so at least I'm not dead?
The soundtrack is quite wonderful, and I find the storyline quite moving.
Between this and Disco Elysium, I think either game justifies this month's bundle, but if you don't have either, it's a definite buy. Even if you do end up with Chivalry II as well.
August 8, 2023 - Day 220 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 240
Game: Trek to Yomi
Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 5, 2022
Library Date: Aug 4, 2023
Unplayed: 4d
Playtime: 29m
Trek to Yomi is a side-scrolling action game, where you play as a samurai set on vengeance.
Two days in a row, two sword-based action games, and they could not be more different.
There is an elegance to a katana that's just not there with a broadsword, and comparing these two games side by side is eye-opening.
The look of Trek to Yomi took me by surprise. It's set in black and white, as if it was a Kurosawa film (with film effects and everything). While it's technically side-scrolling, the opening tutorial of the game has you walking towards and away from the camera in the Z-axis as well, giving the game a beautiful sense of three dimensions.
The sound is lush and gorgeous, and the controls are intuitive. There aren't a dozen different combinations to remember, just a few, which makes the swordplay come to life. I very quickly found myself instinctively weaving and blocking, rotating to face another enemy and seeing him off.
I'd seen Trek to Yomi mentioned a few times since it was released, but the idea of playing a game in black and white as an Edo period samurai didn't grab me at all.
Yet as soon as I'm finished writing this review, I'm going back to play some more.
August 9, 2023 - Day 221 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 241
Game: Arcade Paradise
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 11, 2022
Library Date: Aug 4, 2023
Unplayed: 5d
Playtime: 54m
There comes a time in every monthly Humble Bundle where you hit the cruft. The games they chose to pad out the bundle to eight games.
...and so we come to Arcade Paradise, game number five.
This is not that game.
I really didn't expect much of this from the title. The apparent love of retro games by indie devs is lost on me, and going on the name and the artwork, I made the assumption that this was going to be something a la Capcom's "Arcade Stadium" with a bunch of retro-styled games, and maybe some vague narrative thread to string them together.
Having just finished re-assembling my PC at 11:45pm, I figured I'd put in my 15 minutes and write the review later.
The game intro didn't do much to assuage my fears. A bunch of hand-drawn animated graphics. Not badly done, but I've been burned before.
The intro ends, and the screen morphs into... full first-person high resolution 3D.
blink wut.
This is a pleasant surprise.
As it turns out, Arcade Paradise is a love letter to retro arcade games, wrapped in a business sim.
As 19yo college dropout Ashley, you've been handed the keys to one of your father's run-down laundromats, in the hope that you'll "make something" of yourself.
The game opens with you dropped off by the bus in front of said laundromat, with a series of answering machine messages from your father telling you each step of managing the laundromat.
Hope you don't mind doing laundry, kid. There's a lot of it to do. There's also cleaning, garbage collection, maintenance, and emptying coin hoppers.
Oh, and there are a couple of arcade machines in the back room.
This is the heart of the narrative. Yes, you need to do all that stuff in the laundromat, working long days, to earn money... so that you can afford to buy more arcade machines, and prove to dad that there's more to life than just the grind of doing laundry.
I was hooked, and am tired this morning as a result.
There are some things that frustrate me about the gameplay. The "opening the safe" process gets old very quickly. The inability to interact with the garbage piled outside the laundromat just annoys me.
I WANT TO CLEAN IT UP. There are empty vending machines that I want to fill, and cannot interact with. I don't just want to build the arcade, I also want to clean up and renovate the laundromat, but that's a "me" thing.
Ironically, you can also play the arcade games themselves, something that just doesn't grab me at all, but that's OK by me.
In a completely unexpected twist, Arcade Paradise is:
August 10, 2023 - Day 222 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 242
Game: SuchART
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 14, 2022
Library Date: Aug 4, 2023
Unplayed: 6d
Playtime: 1h44m
Game number six: SuchART.
I figured this might be the game where I sigh, and force myself to 15 minutes and write my little review.
Almost two hours later...
Conceptually, this game is much like Passpartout: The Starving Artist that really surprised me back in January.
Instead of a humble garage in Paris, you find yourself in a future where all art is created by robots, and realising the dead end of this, real live artists are being sponsored to create real art, with real paints and canvases...
...based on a space station.
It's a cute twist. You're supplied with everything required to make basic art, and you can paint commissions or just create paintings and sell them in the "marketplace" (no other players required).
My first commission was a request for a unicorn from my sister.
It was a very bad unicorn. She loved it. Of course.
You can pretty much grind out anything, and it will be accepted and loved by those who commissioned it.
White polar bear in a snowstorm doesn't cut it though.
You have to put something on the canvas.
I kept painting, and churning out crap to complete quests and level up. It was kind of fun, and a chill way to kill some time.
Then... I saw something. An idea. An actual idea. In fiddling around with the in-game tools, something unlocked, and I found myself frantically grabbing paints and rollers and brushes, and a water pistol filled with paint, and creating.
When I was done, I sat back in my chair, and just loved that thing I'd created.
August 11, 2023 - Day 223 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 243
Game: Tin Can
Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 13, 2022
Library Date: Aug 4, 2023
Unplayed: 7d
Playtime: 25m
Tin Can is game number seven in this month's Humble Choice bundle, and answers the question, "What if Breathedge, but serious?"
Tin Can is a first-person space survival sim. Your goal is to survive as long as possible in real time.
The tutorial walks you (an on-board janitor) through the basic systems of the escape pod through a set of cute over-the-radio interactions with an on-board engineer who has to be in two places at once, and seconds you a few times to run through some repairs, then diagnostics, then troubleshooting.
Then the ship starts to explode, and suddenly you need to be in that escape pod.
You have a handful of spare parts, a technical manual, and a few minutes to solve whatever problem the escape pod is experiencing before that problem kills you.
The game tells you upfront that you will die. A lot.
I wouldn't describe it as fun, per se; it's stressful, but very engaging.
With only one game left in this month's bundle, I'm genuinely surprised at the number of bangers this time around.
If you don't already own the games I reckon you can't go wrong dropping AUD$17 on the bundle, even if the final game turns out to be a fizzer.
August 12, 2023 - Day 224 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 244
Game: Hot Brass
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Feb 17, 2021
Library Date: Aug 4, 2023
Unplayed: 8d
Playtime: 16m
Hot Brass is the final game in this month's Humble Choice bundle, and answers the question, "What if Rainbow Six Siege was a top-down game about SWAT cops?"
I'll start out with saying I'm wary about reviewing this, purely on the basis of it being by a local Melbourne developer, and if I rip it to shreds, I feel like there's a chance that I probably know someone who knows someone.
However, I need to get this out of the way. I cognitively understand why "ACAB" is a thing, yet I still struggle to reconcile it personally with some people I know who are very much C, but very much not B.
However, one cannot get away from the fact that SWAT teams are militarised police, and Hot Brass is a SWAT team simulator, so TCAB.
On a purely gameplay front, I wasn't quite sure how to make sense of the game, but a couple of minutes of the tutorial and I was ready to jump ahead and into the game.
It's much the same as most first or third-person shooters: WASD movement, CTRL to crouch, point weapons with mouse. Space to sprint is an odd choice, though. 1 & 2 to switch between primary & secondary, 3 & 4 for flashbang & door breach charge.
Right-click to yell at a non-compliant suspect... F to tase a suspect into compliance, E to handcuff a compliant suspect...
...it got ugly quickly.
I tried to just play without thinking about it too much, but I couldn't compartmentalise.
I've lived with depression and anxiety for most of my adult life, and my late Dx for autism explained a lot of that. I'm trans.
I'm now painfully aware in a way that I wasn't when I was younger that there are several different aspects of my identity in which an encounter with police could end badly for me, and I still have the privilege that comes from being white and educated.
I'm not Breonna Taylor, or Elijah McClain, or Eric Parsa, or Maddie Hoffman, or Clare Nowland. These names and more are burned into my brain, countering the lifelong messaging that the police are there to protect me.
As I breach the door in the first mission, then start yelling at someone expressing thanks that the police have arrived, followed by handcuffing them, it's all a bit too visceral, even as a top-down game with my character represented by a circle with a MP5 icon. I'm not having fun.
The mechanics of the game are well executed, and on a purely technical level, it seems like a good game. Some of the illustrations in the loading screens are... I can see a lot of effort and love went into them, and I'll leave it there.
Unfortunately, I can't enjoy playing as a cop; Hot Brass is:
The Forgotten City is a first-person narrative-driven adventure involving time loops, and an ancient Roman city.
It's the third game in this month's Humble Bundle, and if you're a fan of narrative adventures (eg. Firewatch) or time travel gameplay, this might be the game for you.
It was a bit slow at first; I was 10 minutes in, and I was thinking it wasn't really a game for me.
...and that was three and a half hours ago.
The graphics are pretty good, the sound design is great, but the narrative is excellent.
However, I'm not going to write a longer review. The problem with this game, and it's highlighted upfront by the devs is that to say too much about it spoils the game for those who haven't played it.
Thus, please consider my three and three quarter hours of straight playtime, and having reached one of four endings my way of saying that The Forgotten City is:
Aces & Adventures is a fantasy RPG deckbuilding roguelite using poker mechanics.
It's the fourth game in this month's Humble Bundle, and the first where, in spite of a tutorial, I had no idea what was happening half the time.
I don't know. I'm still not sure exactly what happened.
You play as one of several classes, each of which (other than the first) you unlock by playing. I completed playing "Spring" as a dwarf warrior and unlocked the rogue class.
It's turn-based combat, in which you have three decks in play simultaneously. The attack deck which is a standard 52 card deck, a second deck of ability cards, and a third deck of upgrade cards.
At least I think that's what was happening. Admittedly, I'm very tired right now, which might have stunted my understanding of how to play, but I muddled my way through to completing the first... section? Quest?
In any case, I think I need to give Aces & Adventures a pass this time, and blame it on myself, so for now it's:
Patch Quest is a top-down 2D twin stick roguelike-metroidvania-monster catching bullet-hell mashup.
This is the fifth game in this month's Humble Choice bundle.
With cutesy cartoonish graphics, you run around a "patchwork land" armed with a lasso and a gun-that-is-not-a-gun-but-really-it-is-a-gun, to capture monsters and ride them while you shoot others with the not-gun that makes them "fall asleep" and disappear.
Unlike last night's game, it's not that I'm too tired too understand it, it's just that it just all feels kind of bland.
There's a basic story to try and provide a reason to want to care about this odd maze full of monsters and give me a reason to catch or not-kill them, but I was kind of glad when I was done.
Aces & Adventures is a fantasy RPG deckbuilding roguelite using poker mechanics.
Yeah, when I woke up this morning, I decided to give it another shot over coffee to see just how much of my ability to understand the game had been clouded by exhaustion.
Turns out, pretty much total.
When I played it this morning, it all made a hell of a lot more sense, both the way that the various kinds of cards work, and also the synergy between them.
In addition, I could actually remember a bunch of poker hands that evaded me last night.
Essentially, each round presents you with one or more cards with a bunch of hitpoints, health points, armor, etc etc. The cards also might have certain abilities.
You get one attack per round, but triggering abilities doesn't count as an attack, so if you can clear the board before your attack, you do that.
This morning's run had a card with first strike, and another set of three cards, that each time you kill one, the rest get stronger, so it helps if you have an ability card that synergises with your draw that enables you to hit all enemies for three damage at once.
Which I did, and required two spades to trigger.
During the attack round is when the poker hands come into play (pun intended); you play your hand and then the AI attempts to defend.
If you play a single Ace, for example, the best the AI can do is block that with an Ace. Play a King, and the AI can block it with a King, or trump it with an Ace, which means you take damage.
But a poker hand? Double or triple your damage, particularly if you've collected some upgrade cards that stay with you until the end of the round. Maybe you pick up a card that's +1 damage per spade played.
It's a nice damage addition when you drop a single spade, but when you drop a straight?
That won me the round against a boss mob.
So with some sleep under my belt, it's fair to bump Aces & Adventures up to:
Foretales is a card-based narrative adventure game. This is the sixth game in this month's Humble Choice bundle.
Once again, I'm exhausted and facing another card-based game.
You have two characters who are off on an adventure through your fairly typical anthropomorphic fantasy land. Vorelain is duckbill and a thief, Leo is a lion and an archer.
Each has attack points and defense points, and a set of cards that you can play as either character each turn to move through the narrative.
The quirky thing is that the game is designed in such a way that you can completely avoid combat and defeat your opponents by other means.
The game has a narrator, and it was all making sense until the audio suddenly went into overdrive and the output just became a wall of static. I was able to coax some vaguely useful sounds out of the speakers by turning all of the volume controls in the game (there are five!) down.
However, one of the casualties was the game's narrator, which made the rest of the level (a "region") a little uneven.
There's an option to save and exit, however this warns you that you'll be restarted at the beginning of the current region, and I was still in the start region, so... I muddled my way through to the next region.
It feels like there might be an interesting story there, but that audio bug was wild.