Fragments from the Vault #035: Chaos Theory (Palimpsest)
"Sometimes," I tell my friend over coffee, "I travel in my sleep. It's late August, 1984. The heat should be shimmering off the canyon, but today is different. Today is the day the oasis comes alive."
#PhoenixSprings
https://www.fetchquestjourneys.com/2025/04/phoenix-springs-desolation.htmlDie aktuelle Folge Lost Levels mit
@chrissikills und mir ist nicht nur was für Alliterationsfans. Auch Leute, die nach Nichtempfehlungen suchen, werden mit Miniatures und Phoenix Springs fündig. Roots Of Yggdrasil und Sulfur hingegen: Geil. https://lostlevels.de/episode/biohacking-mit-bibi-blocksberg
#podcast #indiegames #videospiele #games #phoenixsprings #sulfur #miniaturesgame #rootsofyggdrasil
Biohacking mit Bibi Blocksberg
In dieser Folge sprechen Christina und Florian über Miniatures, Phoenix Springs, Roots Of Yggdrasil und Sulfur.
Phoenix Springs review
An incredibly stylish point-and-click adventure that uses a clue-collection system to tell a fascinating story
https://www.sidequesting.com/2024/11/phoenix-springs-review/#Reviews #adventure #CalligramStudio #PhoenixSprings #Review
Phoenix Springs review
An incredibly stylish point-and-click adventure that uses a clue-collection system to tell a fascinating story
Check out our walkthrough of Phoenix Springs to learn how to solve the puzzles the first time you visit the desert and the oasis.
#PhoenixSprings https://gamesense.co/game/phoenix-springs/news/discuss/phoenix-springs-walkthroughdesert-1-oasis/
Phoenix Springs Walkthrough - Desert 1, Oasis: Phoenix Springs : Gamesense.co
Check out our walkthrough of Phoenix Springs to learn how to solve the puzzles the first time you visit the desert and the oasis.
The SideQuest LIVE! October 20, 2024: We're Good Now, We Promise
This week: Bloober Team is done making bad things, the Analogue 3D looks DOPE, Exploding Kittens in VR is pretty neat, and more!
Weekly Game Log: 2024-10-21
A week of stress, post-PAX recovery, and trying out a shitload of games. So I'll keep it brief per game.
A went back to Grunn, and while it's still a great game. It's very definitely not as good as a speedrun-routing game as it is as a mystery timeloop game. It's biggest flaw here is the lack of an easy way to restart a run, and it's habit of autosaving immediately on exit. Meaning if you make an error early in the run, you waste energy finding a way to die and probably quit the game demotivated, rather than reseting and immediately trying again.
A game with the opposite problem is Envelope, another small independent timeloop game, but with much lower production values. This is a game in three parts. The first involves the player in a petrol station receiving a mission to murder some guy. The second or third part are the time loop components. The third involves sneaking into a mansion and hopefully fulfilling the goal. The second part is the main part of the game, which involves preparing for the assassination in a fucked up country town, trying to find ammunition for your bulletless gun buried in a backyard, gaining weird psychic powers from carrots, or defeating the "Peepcrawler". It's rough, but very good.
I finished off Phoenix Springs. The game unfortunately continues the mood it ended on last week for the entire second half. There's very little complexity to the end of the game, but a lot of repetitive motions (including one of the longest, and most montonous puzzles in adventure games). Which is a shame, because the imagery can be particularly vivid towards the end. Overall good, but a waste of a fantastic start.
Kill Knight is a dual-joystick shooter themed around entering hell and killing things, adding the distinct traits of Doom Eternal on top of the standard gameplay. In some ways its extremely long and convoluted tutorials is one of the best around, because it made me realise I did not want to play this game at all. Though it is unrealistic in some ways, if I'd gone straight into the game I would have not survived long enough to realise I would hate the game.
Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Role Playing Game has a reputation of being only for the most HARDCORE CRPG fan. I created a character and enjoyed what I played of it so far. The systems are definitely complex, but not insurmountable. And the act of actually playing the game is relatively streamlined. I'm guessing the hardcoreness comes from the fact that you can get into moments where you think "OK, so taking the worst-case scenario. Then X will happen which will trigger Y, meaning I'll have status Z. Which means worst case I'll take 20 hit points of damage and miss a turn" and then you take 80 hit points of damage and die.
Up to Par is a simple procedural-generated mini-golf game where the goal is to keep playing holes without exceeding a net 3-over par. It has a very distinct "calls itself roguelike but exclusively limits itself to non-roguelike traits of modern aren't-actually-roguelikes" vibe. Most of the interesting parts of the game are behind unlocks. Fortunately the gates to unlock them are quite simple. Unfortunately you can only unlock one per game. Which basically behooves the player to play an inordinate amount of failed runs just to get a chance to experience the actual game that might be OK.
Murder on Space Station 52 is a point-and-click adventure that I was anticipating for a few months, but didn't notice actually came out 3 weeks ago. I've not played that much, but it's pretty standard adventure gaming so far. No actual murder yet, though there is a space station.
I played a few Noita runs on whim. Games still fantastic, though I've lost my touch and usually die in embarassing ways by electrocuting the water I'm standing in or something.
Novamundi is a roguelike-ish game (that really seems more like Mount and Blade so far) about managing an indigenous South American group that has encountered a Spanish raiding party. It has a really neat intro in the native language, and sets an excellent world before you, with villages full of interesting people to communicate, negotiate and trade with. Unfortunately I must be missing something about the combat. Which seems to be either, "all your party attack automatically in a semi-structured manner" or "you select a unit, they follow your order, then do nothing of their own volition ever again".
An adventure game I've started a couple of times on my laptop while travelling is Drawn Down. Normally I give up after 15 minutes. This time I played a 90 minutes or so, and found a fairly pleasant, but unspectacular, point and click game. The premise of the game is that the protagonist is a police sketch artist, and I've done that exactly once, at the very start of the game.
Visca's Earth Conquest is a fun short platformer, where you control a small alien robot woman. You smash things up and grow larger as a result. It's explicitly for giantess fetishists (not explicit), but is simple and silly fun. I finished it in like 40 minutes, but I had fun.
Amos Green's Final Repose sadly did not live up to the intriguingly bizarre impression it gave with its opening. 99% of the game is travel to a location, do exactly one thing, return. The locations are meticulously modeled with dozens of well composed IRL photographs that are filled with red-herrings and things to distract the eye, but these are meaningless given that there is; A - nothing to do, and B - a button that shows what is clickable. Occasionally a puzzle will show up, but these are undercut by the seemingly compulsory hint system which vacillates wildly between "provides necessary context" and "gives the puzzle solution before you even know its there". It's an impressive effort to make such a game, but it's kind of disappointing to play.
The interactive fishing-themed Animal Crossing-inspired chat-room WEBFISHING is fantastic. You connect to a server, and after an extremely brief tutorial, you are customising your cat or dog avatar and hanging out with pals/randos. The game is a small forested area with rivers and a beach to fish at, and a few secrets to explore and find. With a few progression/quest mechanics on top of that, it's exactly what it needs to be. Game of the Year (probably not actually).
All Games Played
Ostranauts: GREAT (Notable)
Grunn: GREAT
Din's Champion: Good
Peglin: Good
Cobalt Core: Good
Phoenix Springs: Good
Amos Green's Final Repose: OK
Envelope: GREAT
Kill Knight: Disappointing
Colony Ship - A Post-Earth Role Playing Game: Good
Up To Par: OK
Murder on Space Station 52: Good
Noita: GREAT
Novamundi: OK
Drawn Down: Good
Visca's Earth Conquest: GREAT
WEBFISHING: GREAT (Notable)
I recently played #PhoenixSprings and it made me write about games again. Maybe I'll bring back to life my blog again - as usual - as I do once every two years.
https://blog.alexcamilleri.com/go-to-phoenix-springs/
#indie #games
Go to Phoenix Springs
I originally wrote this article for the Italian website Outcast.it
Phoenix Springs is a liminal space, an oasis, a village shrouded in mystery. Where's the truth? How are bioethics, student protests, memories and family bonds connected? "Don't go to Phoenix Springs" you'll hear, repeatedly.
If you told me that
I took a journey into the mysterious world of Phoenix Springs. What did we encounter? An intriguing game.
#PhoenixSprings https://thegamesletter.com/a-mysterious-journey-through-phoenix-springs
A mysterious journey through Phoenix Springs
“There’s forever a curious one asking about a lost one.”
【Weekly Game Log: 2024-10-14】
A fair chunk of this week was spent traveling to and attending PAX Australia. I checked out and played a lot of a promising new games that I'm way too exhausted to write about currently. Also playing Doom deathmatch with a DDR mat is a lot of fun, but completely tiring.
I found a few more endings for Grunn, and one that revealed a deeper mystery. It's an extremely good game for its scope, but at some point it shifts from mystery solving to speedrun routing, which is less fulfilling. With no easy reset when you know you've fucked up in the first minute, or extra reward for failure at this point it becomes too frustrating to go for the true ending.
Din's Champion is a procedural hack and slash RPG, with building. Extremely similar to Terraria, except with a weird WendyVainity'esque pre-rendered aesthetic. It's in early access and still very rudimentary in some parts, but a lot of crazy fun.
Peglin and Cobalt Core I've enjoyed while needing to kill time until some bullshit makes me Alt-F4 violently.
TEEFAX: Cold Case is a mystery game that presents itself as a fake 90s Teletext service, with little other context. The first couple of puzzles can be solved completely diegetically, and are extremely satisfying despite being simple. I was completely sold at this point, but all progress was soon blocked until one of the (apparently compulsory) helpful tips appeared and revealed the actual path involved a complete non-sequitir puzzle and totally ruing the mood for me.
Phoenix Springs is one of the latest attempts to revolutionise point and click adventure games by replacing items with conversation subjects. It's set in a future/alternate present/parallel universe under an oppressive authoritarian government, and concerns the protagonist seeking out her lost/estranged brother. It has a striking limited-palette painterly style, and also has a unique system where all dialogue is narrated by the protagonist as if they are recalling the events. I've played what I think it about 50% of the game, and I'm keen to see how it resolves.
The mood and vibe of Phoenix Springs are perfect, and the early game play is equally good. Collecting an array of subjects helps to elucidate the mystery at hand, and the way the game greys out and/or replaces some of them as the plot progresses works well. Unfortunately this is ultimately just a proxy for items, and the puzzles hit the exact same wall ("Talk to man about using spoon on cat" instead of "Use spoon on cat") as any other adventure game. And the game's second act has an inordinate about because the protagonist just doesn't see obvious shit until one person 20 screens away has mentioned it.
I also fired up Planescape: Torment, which I never played back in the day. But I was too tired to deal with its interface.
The Last Werewolf is a game I bought at PAX after enjoying what I saw from the developer's demo. It's a narrative game about a young woman who is also a werewolf. It's in early access and one act of three is complete, with another in a summary form. It's extremely rough around the edges currently, with some strange choices (eg it's basically point and click adventure, but you have to control with WASD + E to interact with things.) And the game seems to work on a schedule which controls where you are, rather than being able to walk freely between locations. But there's just enough there for me to want to see how the finished game turns out.
I also bought Amos Green's Final Repose purely because I heard the title on a podcast. I haven't played much, but it's an adventure game played purely from a first person perspective using real life photos taken by the developer. It's the 17th of 19 Carol Reed games by the developer and is not available on any storefront other than the MDNA Games website. I haven't played much, but I know I'll find time to finish it after being dropped in medias res into Carol's life and having to pick up her dirty clothes for some reason.
All Games Played
Ostranauts: GREAT (Notable)
Grunn: GREAT
Din's Champion: GOod
Peglin: Good
Cobalt Core: Good
TEEFAX - Cold Case: OK
Phoenix Springs: Good
Planescape Torment: ??????
The Last Werewolf: Good
Amos Green's Final Repose: Good
Fetch Quest Journeys
OverageGmngCom
Florian Zandt
SideQuesting
GameSense.co
Unoriginal and Uncreative
Alex Camilleri
TheD34n ☑️