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.
January 23, 2024 - Day 388 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 424
Game: Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition
Platform: Steam
Released: Feb 1, 2019
Installed: Jan 23, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 24m
Rating: 3 - OK
Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition is a 2D top-down "Gothic Horror" RPG, that's part visual novel and part "what the hell did I just play?"
You start the game as the first mate of a space-faring Victorian steam locomotive that sails through the aether unmoored from such frailties as railway tracks.
It only gets weirder from there.
I genuinely don't know how to review this game, or quite honestly, how I feel about it.
There's something here that I can't quite put my finger on; Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition is:
Yuppie Psycho is a 2D pixel-art survival horror game.
I gave it a shot, when it seemed like a point-and-click adventure (although it's more move-and-press 'E' constantly); I was a Kings/Police/Space Quest girl when I was younger, and maybe... but then it turned into survival horror.
January 25, 2024 - Day 390 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 426
Game: Fae Tactics
Platform: Steam
Released: Aug 1, 2020
Installed: Jan 25, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 15m
Rating: 1 - Nope
Fae Tactics is a JRPG-inspired isometric pixel-art tactics game.
For a tactics strategy game to work for me, I need to feel some connection to the story.
Unfortunately for Fae Tactics, the clash between the human world and the fae world, with a human capable of magic, a bird, and a dog, trying to reach some destination did absolutely nothing for me.
January 26, 2024 - Day 391 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 427
Game: Elderborn
Platform: Steam
Released: Jan 31, 2020
Installed: Jan 26, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 22m
Rating: 1 - Nope
Elderborn is a first-person Soulslike slasher melee-combat game.
The game opens with a bombastic monologue from the lead character (at least you can choose their gender), who lays out a brief history of how you got to the point of entering the locked-down city of doom, but there was nothing unique about it that grabbed me. It was just... filler.
(Sidenote: If your game supports 3440x1440 ultrawide, you need a FOV slider. Playing a first-person game through a fisheye lens is not fun.)
The graphics and design feel average. It feels like they forgot the narrative part of a Soulslike that gives you a reason to press on.
Ultimately, the biggest problem with the game is that it's just boring. Run to room. Cut down undead. Run to next room that looks like previous room. Cut down undead. Rinse and repeat.
January 27, 2024 - Day 392 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 428
Game: Palworld
Platform: Xbox Game Pass for PC
Released: Jan 19, 2024
Installed: Jan 27, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 4.9h
Rating: 4 - Good
Palworld is a third-person tree-punching survival game with a new game mechanic of seeking to be sued out of existence by The Pokemon Company.
If you haven't heard of the game that sold 8 million copies in a week on Steam, and is currently sitting at #2 behind PUBG on the Steam chart for record number of concurrent players, the elevator pitch for Palworld is "Pokemon with guns"
I didn't expect it to be quite so literal.
I'd read a piece about survival games by Zack Zwiezen a few days ago, in which he referred to them as "tree punchers" (which I've stolen from him), and he touched on Palworld in the review; so I had no intention of buying it.
However, after rebooting my PC yesterday, I found myself staring at the Xbox app and an install button for Palworld via Game Pass, which meant I didn't need to buy it, and the die was cast.
The gameplay loop is certainly addictive; I can understand why so many folks are playing it.
It starts out like most survival games; wake up in a random location with no idea how you got there, and start punching trees. It's the same gathering-and-crafting loop we've been doing since Minecraft (and probably even before).
Then there's the Pokemon... sorry, "Pals". I'm not a Nintendo girl. I didn't have any Nintendo stuff growing up, and the first Nintendo console I owned was the N64 I bought for our kids for Christmas 2000 (Christmas 2000 sounds like an awesome B-grade movie).
My first encounter with Pokemon was Pokemon GO. I lack the encyclopaedic memory of all the different Pokemon I encountered in PoGo, but upon encountering -and killing- Pals in Palword, they were definitely giving off Pokemon vibes.
You can also collect the Pals, by attacking them with a weapon until they're weakened enough to capture in a Pokeball... erm, Palsphere.
Once captured, you can put them to work in your base, or, uhh... butcher the cute little PokePals, to feed the other PokePals working in your base.
Best not to think too deeply about a game that is also apparently survival horror.
The Pokemon vibes ceased to be vibes and became "you're going to get sued for IP infringement" when I encountered Gumoss.
Gumoss is a grass-type Pal (yes, they've snarfed the 'type' concept too), which feels unarguably like Ditto in an acorn cap.
If I, with my limited recall of Pokemon, can recognise this, I've no doubt the Pokemon fans calling Pocket Pair out are on the money, and it makes sense that the notoriously laid-back-and-not-at-all-protective-of-their-IP, The Pokemon Company, are "investigating".
Which is primarily why I didn't buy it on Steam; I don't want to lose A$44 when they get sued out of existence for IP infringement.
Etherborn is a third-person 3D platform puzzle game that seems to have been designed on the principle "What if we remade Monument Valley without understanding what made it tick, and then adding a vaguely philosophical voiceover?"
Unfortunately, it means that Etherborn feels like a knock-off version of Monument Valley, just somewhat annoying.
The same kind of 3D puzzles, now with the added ability to fall off the structure, and get placed right back where you were.
A disembodied voice speaking over the top of the initial level, then at the end of the next level doesn't really add anything to the game, other than making you wait until it finishes speaking. What it has to say seems to have little to do with the actual game.
While you can navigate from any surface to any other surface that is joined by a curve, sometimes you'll jump and suddenly find yourself plummeting to your doom.
The follow camera wanders around all over the place, with some minor adjustments possible with the right thumbstick, often leading to falling to my death because of the angle of view.
More than once I found the avatar obscured from view by parts of the level itself, which just added to the frustration.
I played through the intro level, then the first level, and after that I saved and quit, because it just felt like a chore.
January 30, 2024 - Day 395 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 431
Game: Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition
Platform: Steam
Released: Nov 28, 2012
Installed: Jan 30, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 15m
Rating: 2 - Meh...?
Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition is a remastered version of the original Baldur's Gate released on Dec 21, 1998. It's an isometric RPG, and I've made a terrible mistake.
The original purpose of this little project was to play through games that were in my unredeemed keys spreadsheet, or already installed in Steam, which I've stuck to most of the time.
I've been enjoying BG3, and last night got an email for a Fanatical Star Deal for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, and Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition.
Only A$5.98? Download, installed, start playing after knocking off at 11:30pm.
Here's the thing: I know Baldur's Gate is considered to be a classic RPG.
Even though The Enhanced Edition runs natively on a 3440x1440 resolution monitor, it's not in a good way. The UI, which was originally designed to sit close to the centre of the screen, is now sitting out at the very edges of the monitor, with the play area a relatively small area in the middle of the screen, dwarfed by two huge black voids on either side. Then the UI.
If that wasn't enough, after 15 minutes of playtime, I was still in the tutorial. I hadn't skipped it, and it's good thing I hadn't, because the idea of pausing mid-battle and making moves is considerably different to both BG3, and any other game I recall.
At the end of the day (not a cliche, literally), after more than twelve work hours, I don't think I was in the right mindset to either take the game in, or to work around the technical limitations.
With that said, I'm not sure it will grab me, but I've put it into the "replay" category to give it a second chance.
For now, Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition is a bit:
Cyber Hook is a retrowave-themed first-person parkour-with-grappling-hook 3D platformer.
Another game pulled randomly from the spreadsheet of doom.
Love the aesthetic, found the game somewhat frustrating due to the default key assignments, and my lack of general coordination.
In Just Cause, the grapple is deployed with the right mouse button, and shooting with the left.
In Cyber Hook, this is inverted. I swapped them around, which helped, but the mechanic feels just different enough to be frustrating; I have to think instead of just reacting.
The shift key is assigned slow down time, instead of speeding things up (most games assign it to run).
Speedrunning is not really my thing, so Cyber Hook just feels a bit:
February 3, 2024 - Day 399 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 435
Game: Hammerting
Platform: Steam
Released: Nov 17, 2021
Installed: Feb 2, 2024
Unplayed: 1d
Playtime: 25m
Rating: 1 - Nope
Hammerting is a 2.5D Dwarven mining colony sim.
I know this, because after 25 minutes of playing, I quit, and searched the web to find out what it was I was trying to play.
It feels like there's actually a reasonable game in there somewhere, but it didn't click with me, because of the way it introduced the game mechanics.
Hammerting starts by pausing the game during the "tutorial", and lighting up a bit of the screen with a popup that says "This does [x]". You then hit Next, and it repeats until it runs out of things to tell you. Sometimes it tells you quite a lot of things one after the other.
Presented like this, these things are abstracted away from their purpose, and with ADHD and not taking my meds on a weekend, it was a lot to try and fail to take in.
Even when I did manage to take something in, the UX was frequently inscrutable, with no system to give me any idea what I was looking at.
You start the game with three dwarves, and you can click on a button, and click on an item in the environment to get them to do something.
Click the mining button. Click on the copper ore. The dwarves mine the ore. The ore falls out of the wall.
The ore sits on the ground. The dwarves do nothing with it. It has a right click menu, but none of the options have anything to do with picking up the ore.
Then my hardy band of dwarves got attacked by a rampaging slime. They killed it in short order. Pieces of slime on the ground. They apparently have value, based on the tooltip.
No idea how to collect them.
The final straw was about 10 minutes later, when I thought I might be starting to get the hang of something, maybe, and the dwarves were attacked again by slimes.
The dwarves stood there, resolutely, being attacked.
I clicked on the attack button, and clicked the slimes.
The dwarves stood there, resolutely, being attacked.
I clicked to move the dwarves, they moved out of range of the slimes.
The slimes followed until they reached the dwarves.
The dwarves stood there, resolutely, being attacked.
February 4, 2024 - Day 400 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 436
Game: S.W.I.N.E. HD Remaster
Platform: Steam
Released: May 23, 2019
Installed: Feb 2, 2024
Unplayed: 2d
Playtime: 32m
Rating: 3 - OK
S.W.I.N.E. HD Remaster is an isometric real-time tactics (RTT) strategy game, about a war between armies of rabbits, and pigs.
It seems the universe has a sense of humour, because my complaints about the lack of tutorial in yesterday's game were met with a 16 minute tutorial in S.W.I.N.E. HD Remaster.
S.W.I.N.E. was originally released in 2001, and the remaster involved some of the original devs. It's a reasonably solid game (if somewhat basic), but it scratches a bit of an itch I wasn't aware of.
With that said, there are some rough edges to the game. Having never played the original, I'm unsure as to whether they've been left that way to maintain fidelity for fans of the original game, or if it's just some stylistic choices.
The most grating, though, is the voiceover work. Within the universe of the game (by way of spoken accents), the Rabbit army are presented as French, and the Pig army are presented as German.
The accents seem very much like someone trying to imitate the respective accents, rather than a native of those countries speaking English, and while not a gamebreaker, it does grate a little.
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.
February 15, 2024 - Day 411 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 447
Game: Fantasy Blacksmith
Platform: Steam
Released: Nov 16, 2019
Installed: Feb 1, 2024
Unplayed: 14d
Playtime: 33m
Rating: 1 - Nope
Fantasy Blacksmith is a first-person work simulator, where you get to play as a blacksmith in a fantasy setting, making swords for adventurers.
If it sounds like an interesting idea, that is correct. It's an interesting idea.
The execution, on the other hand, will push you to build your first sword so that you can immediately fall on it, and put yourself out of your misery.
It's like the devs on this game thought of the worst possible way they could do every single thing in this game, and then found a way to make it buggy as well.
Some games are so bad, they cycle through to being some kind of perverse pleasure.
This is not one of those games. This is a game that makes Snowtopia look like a masterpiece of UX design and user-friendliness.
This is a game that will have you longing for pixel art, just so the game is actually bright enough to see what you're doing.
It feels like something that was coded by a repurposed Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser, producing something which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a game.
Every single game element seems to be a psychological challenge to see how hard you can push a user before they break and throw their mouse across the room.
While it doesn't reach the nadir of Edge of Twilight - Return to Glory, it does put in one hell of an effort.
You do not play Fantasy Blacksmith. You suffer through Fantasy Blacksmith. It's a painfully obvious:
February 16, 2024 - Day 412 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 448
Game: Bee Simulator
Platform: Steam
Released: Nov 17, 2020
Installed: Feb 1, 2024
Unplayed: 15d
Playtime: 15m
Bee Simulator is a third-insect bee simulator. It's right there on the tin.
Back in 1991, Will Wright (creator of SimCity and The Sims) released SimAnt; unsurprisingly, this was an ant simulator.
This was among the first games I purchased, and I was very disappointed. While I learned a lot of information about ants (some of which still comes in useful), I didn't actually enjoy the game in the same way that I'd enjoyed SimCity.
Unlike the top-down nature of SimAnt, Bee Simulator is a fully 3D environment. It's a little more game-oriented compared to the po-faced SimAnt, but basically: if you're interested in bees, and/or want to experience life as a bee, Bee Simulator will be right up your alley.
It's not a bad game, just not that interesting to me. For me, Bee Simulator is just a bit: