Gambler’s Table (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

It’s another clicker game! How rare.

This one is themed around flipping coins. You click on a coin, and if it’s tails (or heads? I genuinely can’t remember and it makes no difference anyway) you get money. You spend the money on having more coins on the table, and higher value coins, and little helper people to flip coins for you, or upgrades where you just have to move the pointer vaguely near coins to flip them, or coins that flip themselves randomly, or coins that flip other coins, or coins that flip more than once per flip. Flip! Flip! FLIP. And you unlock different tables, which, like the seasons in Trees Inc, have special modifiers for that run.

Like some of these games you get to a point where progressing further is really slow, but you can reset everything and gain some permanent upgrades to make the next run faster and get you a bit further. Oh, and you can unlock pointless hats for your helpers to wear.

It’s nothing new, but it’s well put together and if you’re in the mood for brainless gaming it, like many of the other clicker games I’ve played recently, is perfect.

#completed #steam #steamDeck

Stoke Space completes Nova Stage 1 structural verification
https://atlas.whatip.xyz/post.php?slug=stoke-space-completes-nova-stage-1-structural-verification
<p>Stoke Space completed proto-qualification of the first stage of its Nova rocket at its testing&amp;#8230
#verification #structural #completes #completed

Trees Inc (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

If I were to describe this game it would sound very much like it was the same as Timber Rush, which I also played recently. And, I suppose it is. Trees Inc is a cookie clicker type game where you chop trees, get money for chopping trees, and spend that money to chop faster, get more money, and buy helpers to chop on your behalf. So yes, it’s the same game.

Well, not quite. It looks a lot more basic, and you grow different types of trees rather than just have one tree, and you have to wait for them to re-grow (although helpers and upgrades can speed that up). Oh, and you unlock different seasons that have different modifiers (like things grow slower or there are lightning storms) that you can swap between. But it’s still a clicker game about trees. And it was pretty good.

#completed #steam #steamDeck

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

I tend to claim every single free Epic and Amazon game each time they come up, but it’s not often one catches my eye enough to play. Arrangers, though, looked somewhat different and just happened to arrive when I was between games, and so here we are.

It’s a puzzle game, mostly, where you move by sliding the floor as if it is made of tiles. You know, like those slidey jigsawy picture puzzles you can get. Some items and characters on the same row or column as you also slide with you, and others don’t. Things sometimes “loop” left/right or up/down as well. Initially, most puzzles are just simple navigate-the-room-like-this type, but as you progress you have to move things around, fight baddies, and trigger switches using the same mechanics.

The plot for the game involves you finally plucking up courage to leave the village you have lived in since being found as a baby to try and track down your people. Your only real clue being the symbol on your clothing and, well, your weird movement. Leaving the village means braving the outside world and the “static” – a force which causes things to… get stuck – which becomes increasingly pertinent to the story as the games goes on.

In some ways, the puzzling is a bit like sokoban, only instead of moving the crates you effectively move everything else. I found that when I got stuck, which wasn’t that often, it was because I’d temporarily forgotten one of the core, simple, rules of how the game works, like you can move off the left of a row to appear on the right, or that you can essentially “drag” items behind you from a distance. Other than that, there wasn’t anything too tricky to deal with, although a couple of boss fights were a bit fiddly.

#completed #epicGames #steamDeck

Canadians yet to complete census can expect phone calls, in-person visits
According to a Statistics Canada press release, 'census enumerators will begin contacting households from which a completed questionnaire has not yet been received.'
#Canada #Consumer #Census #StatisticsCanada
https://globalnews.ca/news/11887156/canada-census-2026-follow-up/

Inspector Waffles Early Days (Evercade): COMPLETED!

A while back I played the Playdate game Chance’s Lucky Escape, which was pretty good. This game, is set in the same universe and is a Game Boy title (albeit on the Evercade). As the name suggests, it’s a prequel to another game in the series – Inspector Waffles. Which I didn’t know existed and have just discovered it has a cameo from Lord Winklebottom. Blimey.

But never mind those games, what about this game? Well, it’s an adventure game where the eponymous inspector solves his first few (linked) cases. A robbery, some arson, and so on. There’s nothing too difficult to deal with, but I did have to play through the whole game twice as I missed completing the (optional) side quests involving “Maffles”, so if you play this, keep an eye out!

Of course, now I have to buy the “main” game in the series to complete the set.

#completed #evercade #waffles

Timber Rush (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

See, Idle Slayer? This is how you make an interaction-necessary incremental clicker type game. It doesn’t outstay its welcome, you make constant progress, and (after a certain point) you don’t need to touch anything most of the time.

In Timber Rush, you are a lumberjack. You chop down trees, wear high heels, suspenders and uh, make lots of money. On Wednesdays you also go shopping, probably. Chopping wood nets you money, and money can be spent on better axes, helpers, and other upgrades to get more money faster. Soon enough, you’ll have thousands of logs flying everywhere, automatically collected and turned into cash.

Unlike other clicker games, you have a limited amount of “chopping time”, so each “run” is only a few minutes during which you try to improve your chopping skills on the fly, much like you would in something like Vampire Survivors. You gain XP, and each level you get to choose a random upgrade that only applies to that run, like a multiplier or a speed increase or a higher chance of getting two logs for a single chop. Get the right combinations of these upgrades (like an increased chance of doing critical damage, and an increase in the amount of critical damage) and you can get a huge payout. After your run, you get buy permanent upgrades and skills.

There’s not a lot of depth, but playing with upgrade combos is fun and seeing numbers go up, especially exponentially, is always satisfying. However, there is a suggestion on the Steam forums that pretty much the whole game is AI generated. I don’t know if that’s actually the case, but you might want to check that out before you buy it.

#completed #steam #steamDeck

Idle Slayer (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

The title of this game is a bit of a lie. It implies it’s one of those cookie clicker type idler games where you kill things, but actually, there’s a lot of non-idle “gameplay” needed in order to actually progress.

The basic idea is you run left to right, automatically, and collect coins and kill baddies. Coins let you buy upgrades for your equipment which basically act as coins-per-second increases and multipliers, meaning more coins more quickly with which to buy more stuff to repeat the cycle with ever-increasing numbers going up.

So, it’s same as most of games like this. However, there’s a second currency – souls – which can only be earned by resetting all your progress. You collect them mainly from slaying foes, but can’t actually use them until you wipe out all your upgrades, coins and equipment and start again. The souls can then be spent on permanent upgrades and unlockables. This too I’ve seen in other games and is sometimes called “prestiging”. Later, there’s also a third type of currency which you can sort of “super prestige” with, which also wipes out your permanent upgrades but lets you buy other properly permanent upgrades. Oh, and there’s a gem currency which you can buy various thing with but requires Real Actual Money, so I never touched it.

The “idle” bit which isn’t though, is the auto-runner stuff. Sure, you can just leave the game running (or even not running, and coins and souls rack up when you’re not playing), but there are missions and requirements where you need to interact. Like, boost so many times, or collect boxes that require you to jump, or enter and complete bonus levels which are tricky (the first few times, but not when you’ve done them over 200 times) platforming timed-jump challenges with big money rewards. If you don’t do these hands-on bits, you progress much, much less quickly. And, since this game is months long (yes, I’ve been playing it for months, off and on) you have to take part or it’ll be years.

In terms of completing it, I bought everything. All upgrades, all items, all unlocks. There’s no “congraturation you sucsess” and there’s no credit roll, but I literally ran out of things to do, so as far as I’m concerned, I’m done. Should you play it? No. It might be free but it’s stupid and too time consuming and there are a few bits in your progress where it takes too long between improvements. Like, when you first hit Billions of coins, it takes hours to accumulate them and reach the next milestone. Same when you get to Octillions. But you skip over Trillions so fast you barely notice they exist. There’s a bit of a pacing issue, and I can’t help feel it’s intentional to get you to cave and spend Real Actual Money to skip these slow bits. I think I’d have prefered to pay a bit for the game and not have to deal with Crawl or Pay.

#completed #steam #steamDeck

The Mr Rabbit Magic Show (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

I do like Rusty Lake’s weird little point and click adventure games. What I hadn’t realised, is that I had this game, unplayed, in my library. Or that it even existed. I saw an article about it and looked it up on Steam and lo – I already had it. It’s also free, just in case you haven’t.

It’s actually a meta game, being set in the Rusty Lake offices as they prepare for a company birthday celebration (which, cyclically, this game was released to celebrate), but it starts as you playing the Mr Rabbit game within the game, where you help said bunny perform various magic tricks, mostly by clicking on things in the right order or spotting patterns. These tricks do get a bit… weird.

After a while you “break out” of the game and have some tasks to perform in the studio offices, and this bit plays out like, and references many of, the other Rusty Lake games. Unhinged dark macabre humour included. Those wacky Dutch, eh? Must be something in the water. Or the brownies.

It’s short, has a few clever bits and is well worth playing, especially if you’ve played others by the studio.

#completed #steam #steamDeck

This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker! (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

What if Balatro was a cookie clicker card battler? Well, this, it seems.

Like Balatro, you have a deck of cards that – over time – you can modify to add or remove cards, and have special cards that add extra points or multipliers to hands you play. Unlike Balatro, hands played are automatic – you just click the deck and a hand is dealt. Quickly, you get the ability to autodeal hands on a timer, just like in cookie clicker games.

As you score points based on poker hands played, you spend those points on upgrades, like more decks, cards, multipliers for different hand types, and so on. Eventually you get loads of decks running at the same time, with seven cards in a dealt, and extra poker hands like five of a kind or a 7 card straight. Numbers go up, you get bonuses for “resetting” the game and permanent upgrades that persist (and can only be obtained by) resets. Just like any number of “modern” incremental clicker type games.

Only, there’s more. Because the plot is that Jester, the clown on the artwork, has actually trapped you and you have to make money to pay for your release. Naturally, he reneges this deal and you have to actually fight him. It’s here the card battling, albeit automated, comes into play.

It’s a surprisingly deep, and short (which works in its favour), game of the genre. It’s a bit fiddly to play on the Steam Deck because some of the text is impossible to read even when zoomed in, but luckily there’s nothing that important you miss. If the devs could just scale everything up a bit for the Deck, it would be amazing.

#completed #steam #steamDeck