A Whole Wolfrush on Steam
Four friends battle their way across space to claim a once-in-a-lifetime wish. Their lives are in your hands.
【Game Log: Post-February 2025】
A lot of work and repeatedly hot days and nights have sapped my creative energies. Also still too much Caves of Qud.
I played a bit more Strange Horticulture, which continued to be fine. But didn't grab me enough to want to dig deep into the storyline. Also it seems like half the customers are just randos, while half get a weird "profile" but don't actually act any different. Maybe I'll get back to it at some point.
I started on A Whole Wolfrush, a free game which is kind of a shmup (with a clumsy but poweful kick) where you control a voltron-esque mech. In between combat missions you have a small "chill in the base with your buddies" section that is neat. Looking forward to playing more of this when I get the chance.
FISH FEAR ME is a tank-control shooter in the guise of a fishing game. It's similar to the developer's previous work SNAKE FARM. It's a pretty simple and fun premise, with a relatively deep upgrade system to help manage the difficulty curve. The initial controls are servicable but awkward. Fortunately they can be rebound. Unfortunately rebinding does not function correctly, so I put the game down for now. Great menu song though.
Bent Oak Island is an extremely low-resolution point and click adventure. One of the strange modern takes where the characters don't move at all. It's simultaneously stripped right down, but also requires cycling through one too many interaction modes. I didn't play much, but I found the aethetic a bit grating. Maybe when I'm in a better mood...
No-Skin is a run based game about No-Skin Man, the man who wants skin. This is a horror game where you play as as some sort of rowdy teen/young adult who is trapped in some sort of nightmare horror version of reality. The game plays as a series of choices, each one giving a displayed percentage chance of 3 or 4 pseudo-random outcomes. This works really well when combined with the visuals and dialogue. I really enjoyed creeping through the options slowly learning the features and plot of the game. My only real negative is that the runs are a bit too slow and long for the amount of repeatition it wants, which is itself too much (judging by the speed of persistant post-run upgrades).
OMEGA 6 The Triangle Stars is a Japanese adventure game made by Takaya Imamura and Shinobu Amayake (both ex-Nintendo). It has a light hearted plot about a pair of androids and their robot buddies sent to scout planets for human habitation. It has a look reminiscent of Super Metroid or the 2D graphics from Star Fox, and a fairly decent sense of humour. Having played through the prologue, I can say that it's biggest flaw is that it takes too long to do anything (even on the fasted setting), particularly advancing text. I can see myself playing more of a smoother version of this game, but not it's current form.
The main non-Qud game I have been playing is the early-access Old School Rally. Unsurprisingly it's an old-school vaguely PS1-esque rally game, that plays more like an arcade racer of the time, and has some nebulously N64 aesthetics on top of it. The physics are kind of awkward, neither fully realistic, nor arcadey. Often the counter-momentum from turning exceeds the amgnitude of the actual input, while other times turning into a spin results in more effective charity braking than actually using the brake pedal does. The maps are kind of bland and frequently don't match their alleged setting very well, most notably Finland is identical to Australia. You can almost feel the iterative-design in some of the corners, where forces suddenly kick in because the default physics felt like they permitted a speed that was too fast/slow compared to the designers intent. Then there is the menu (which hides half a dozen fun events behind multiple pages of locked events) which is confusing and seemingly in the wrong order.
That said... Old School Rally is actually a very fun and addictive game. There's a wide variety of cars, all legally-distinct simulacra of famous real vehicles, and thanks to the game's tenous commitment to reality they all handle drastically differently. The tracks, though bland, all vary greatly, and there is more than enough 3D variation in the terrain to make every corner a different experience. I've played a hell of a lot of this game in the last week, and plan to play more. By eschewing the obvious ingredients to a good game, the developers, Frozen Lake Games, have somehow made an excellent one.
January Game of the Month
Old School Rally
If you like to have fun driving a car. You might enjoy this
All Games Played
Caves of Qud: GREAT (Notable)
Proverbs: Good
Strange Horticulture: Good
A Whole Wolfrush: Good
Fish Fear Me: OK
Bent Oak Island: OK
No-Skin: Good
OMEGA 6 The Triangle Star: Disappointing
Old School Rally: GREAT (Notable)
Space draws scalies 🐲
Unoriginal and Uncreative