🧵 Going to start a little thread of games I'm looking forward to this year that are ALLEDGEDLY going to be playable in some state (including early access/alpha). I typically go for #sandbox#survival and #mmorpg#EarlyAccess Maybe I'll be able to revisit this later and see which ones actually came out or that I was able to try!
Enshrouded is a survival/crafting co-op (16 players). I'm excited about the voxel building. It reminds me of Everquest Landmark (RIP). It also reminds me of a more magic-ey Valheim (which I also enjoyed) This video pretty much sold me on it because I love being able to do detailed builds in these types of games.
The {ggsurvfit} package made its v1.0 release! 🕺🏻🕺🏻
Check it out for your survival/time-to-event visualization needs! The plots are fully ggplot and integrate seamlessly with all the ggplot functions you you already know 📈
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/ancestors-1.jpgThe last few weeks I have been unduly fascinated by Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, a 2019 game that was supposed to make the whole of human evolution playable in a breathtaking journey.
You might think that’s promising a bit much, and it is. The game released to rather critical reviews and never made the impact it was supposed to.
And I see why. The game is intentionally impenetrable. It seems in the beginning it didn’t even have the visual cues for the actions I came to rely on, and even with those barely anything is explained. The tutorial is brief and drops you directly into an intensely dangerous world, and the game delights in telling you it won’t give you further hints.
You start as a tribe of hominids about 10 million years ago (the missing link) and have to make your way to about 2.5 million years ago.
In between you have to steer your hominids, start figuring out the world (horsetail good, mushrooms uuugh but filling), invent the first tools like “stick” and “mud” (a truly versatile tool!), and, well, die a lot.
Everything seems made to kill you. Go too high up the tree and an eagle gets you, go through grass a python gets you, walk through water a crocodile eats you. And then there’s the stalker cat which often comes unannounced and pounces you. And unlike the others the cats will stalk you until they can kill you. I had one follow me from one side of one biome to the other.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/ancestors-2.jpgIn between you carry kids with you, because it’s not important what you do with your current character, unless kids see you do it and learn from it. If you do enough of a particular action neural energy will grow and new neurons will activate. In the end its a skill tree system, even if developing it needs generations, or hundreds of thousands of years and a single character will never survive it. From one generation to the next a limited amount of newly learned skills can be kept, but what you really need to get is mutations. These come randomly with new kids, but they won’t become apparent until you do an evolutionary leap. But you need them because some skills are gated by them, and you won’t be able to progress unless you have them.
It’s all very complicated and worse, barely explained.
Unlike many other games this game has nearly no fantastic elements at all. Everything is based on scientific research, there is no story at all, outside of the story of how humans start becoming bipedal and omnivorous… and start killing everything else I guess. The only element I would term fantastical are the meteors.
Danger, here be spoilers: Every once in a while you discover a new landmark and it triggers a cut scene where meteors rain down on the landscape. These will smoke for a while (multiple generations and even generational leaps), but in the end they stop. If your hominid finds them they will gain further unity with the universe, and they will get a free skill, and all kids present get a mutation. It becomes a convenient shortcut to organize an expedition to a meteor site with as many kids as possible to lock down as many mutations as possible over one or two generations. Of course it turns out all these meteor sites have some rather dangerous wildlife nearby, or are in rather inconvenient sites.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/ancestors-3.jpgEven the actual goal of the game is barely communicated: you have to reach the last evolutionary step in the game, reaching the genus homo ergaster, and then the closing animation plays. I guess it was planned that the next part of the series show the further development, alas I don’t think the game was successful enough. It is rather niche, and the only reason I even got it was because it was part of my Humble subscription at one point. Still. It is an interesting game, and one that I spent a lot of time on. It gives you an appreciation of how far we’ve come, and how dangerous cats used to be. Or still are.
The incredible story of #survival after a plane crash in the freezing blizzards if the #Andes mountains 51 years ago told in an interview with one of the two men who walked out of there and saved their friends.
look i #understand#survival so you put the claim on #me that i never did, as i will #happily chop you up for such a fraud false claim! :antifa_100: :anonymous: :heart_cyber:
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.
CryoFall is a sci-fi themed 2D top-down survival game.
Realising that I'd not made a dent in my unused Steam keys this year, I picked an interesting sounding game at random, and installed CryoFall.
Lots of times this year I've had difficulty defining a game, CryoFall made it easy for me. If you've played Minecraft, Rust, Valheim, V Rising (grrr), ARK Survival Evolved, or Fallout 76 the game mechanics are fundamentally the same.
The main difference is that unlike those games, which are either first- or third-person, CryoFall is the first time I recall seeing this gameplay in a 2D environment.
I don't remember seeing the technology tree model laid out quite as clearly or extensively as CryoFall does it, which extended my playtime, but it actually helped crystallise my thinking regarding survival games.
Almost all of the games I listed above have less than three hours playtime, except for Minecraft, and Rust (neither of which I play now).
The gameplay model scratches an itch in my brain for a little while, then it doesn't. The game also has online PvE and PvP modes, but I played it solo to explore the game mechanics.
I generally lean more towards PvE multiplayer games; particularly when the game is a huge timesink like a survival game.
If the game is PvP-oriented, it's worse; returning to V Rising a day later to find everything I'd built completely destroyed? It ended any desire to play again.
What I realised is that if survival & base-building is part of the game, building towards a narrative end goal (eg. Fallout 4), or a win-state, I enjoy that element of the game; when it's the focal point of the game, without any further purpose, for me, it fundamentally becomes work, and loses purpose.
As a survival game, CryoFall's 2D environment offers something a little different to other survival games, but it's not a something I see any long-term playability in; as such, it's (just barely):
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 24, 2023 - Day 357 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 380
Game: Smoke and Sacrifice
Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 31, 2018
Installation Date: Dec 18, 2023
Unplayed: 6d
Playtime: 29m
Smoke and Sacrifice is an steampunk-themed isometric survival RPG.
You play as Sachi, a mother seemingly forced to sacrifice her first-born child to "the Sun-God", a machine that provides light and heat to Sachi's village, after "the freezing".
However, all is not lost; turns out that the children being "sacrificed" are not actually being sacrificed (killed), but transported to an underworld, and being sacrificed to a form of slavery, forcing them to work to feed the "Sun-God" and keep it running.
Sachi finds herself transported to the same underworld location, where she begins her survival journey to try and find her now-seven-year-old son.
Unfortunately, the story wasn't enough to overcome the frustrating survival mechanics that I encountered in the first 30 minutes of the game, with successive fetch quests required to slowly grind the story forward, by the time I hit save, I was hoping that I could find a recap of the storyline of the game somewhere, just to find out how it ends.
Sadly, for Smoke and Sacrifice, the last thing I was interested in sacrificing was any more of my time; it's a:
Niffelheim is a Norse-themed 2D survival crafting game with some RPG elements.
As part of my two remaining goals of attempting to review 400 new games by the end of the year, and to get my unredeemed keys list down to under 200 (current count: 201 left), I had no idea what this key was actually for.
At some stage I'd overtyped the title without noticing. Niffelheim it is.
The game opens up with a Viking funeral boat, aflame and disappearing into the mist, while a narrator intones about how my boat has been hijacked on the way to Valhalla.
I then found myself at a character selection screen with a choice between three burly male warriors, and a well-endowed Valkyrie.
My Valkyrie then found herself armed with some basic weapons, and a basic hut, and a series of quests delivered by a raven.
Other than that, you're in pretty standard survival game mechanics; kill things, cut down trees, gather food. The 2D aspect makes playing with a controller natural, and before I noticed, I'd been in-game for 45 minutes.
I found Niffelheim strangely compelling, so let's say that it's:
January 7, 2024 - Day 372 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 407
Game: The Red Lantern
Platform: Steam
Released: Dec 9, 2021
Installed: Jan 7, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 34m
Rating: 3 - OK
The Red Lantern is a first-person narrative-driven game about dog-sledding, with some roguelite & survival elements.
It's the sixth game in this month's Humble Choice bundle, and it's an interesting title, that I wouldn't have picked to play.
Making a snow-change, you open the game by meeting a series of dogs, needing to select 4 of them to build a dog-sledding team in Alaska.
Once you've picked your doggos, you reach your destination, and have to make a several-day sled trip to a remote cabin through a procedurally generated environment. The game is the story of that trip.
If you fail, you wake up again in your van, "from a nightmare", and start the sled-trip over, with more resources based on your previous experiences, with your ultimate goal to reach the cabin that's marked by the red lantern hanging outside.
If you're a dog person, this game might definitely be up your alley.