June 11, 2023 - Day 162 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 180

Game: Meeple Station

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Apr 11, 2020
Library Date: Jun 2, 2022
Unplayed: 374d (1y9d)
Playtime: 63m

Meeple Station is game #7 from June 2023's Humble Choice, the last of my unplayed games from the bundle, and answers the question "How do we fill out the bundle to 8 games?"

I actually picked it up in a bundle last year, so I have a free key.

Meeple Station is an isometric pixel-art colony builder/management sim. You build and control a space station.

In this case, build and control are very loosely defined. When I looked at this game, I was expecting to find it was still in Early Access, but no, apparently this bug-ridden disaster area is the release version. Patch 1.0.7 was released in Jan 2022, 1.0.8 was released in July 2022, and nothing else since.

Some nice ideas, but very poorly executed. After 63 mins, I hadn't even completed the 5 tutorials.

For example: You assign crew members to a task, then you have to wait for them to complete that task to move on in the tutorial.

There's no way to force them to do it, you just have to wait... and they just won't do it. I restarted two tutorials, one of them at (as it turned out) the final step. When it happened again mid-tutorial #5, I was done.

Meeple Station has some nice ideas, but:

1: Nope

#MeepleStation #PixelArt #ColonyBuilder #Isometric #HumbleChoice #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 12, 2023 - Day 163 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 181

Game: Styx: Master of Shadows

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Oct 8, 2014
Library Date: Jan 23, 2023
Unplayed: 137d (4m17d)
Playtime: 19m

Styx: Master of Shadows is a third-person-ish* stealth RPG game. You play as the titular Styx, a 200 year old goblin, who's been captured and locked up while trying to obtain the game's MacGuffin. This may be intentional.

Before I decided that reviewing sequels if I didn't own previous games in the series was OK, I kept skipping over the sequel to this (thanks Humble Monthly Bundle June 2018!). When this came up for sale for $1.65 in January, I added it to my pile of shame.

It's a stealth & assassinate game. There's a storyline about elves and humans and something called amber, but it's basically just an fairly middling framing for a stealth game.

While it IS a third-person game, Styx's stealth method is to crouch, meaning that sometimes the camera breaks to first-person instead, which is somewhat disorienting.

At this point it's not bad, it's not dragging me back to play it again, it's just something that was fine to kill some time on and knock off my list for today's review while waiting for one of my poor decisions to finish downloading. I wouldn't pay full price for it, but AUD$1.65? It was worth it.

Styx: Master of Shadows is:

3: OK

#StyxMasterOfShadows #ThirdPerson #Stealth #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 13, 2023 - Day 164 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 182

Game: Styx: Shards of Darkness

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Mar 15, 2017
Library Date: Jun 6, 2018
Unplayed: 137d (4m17d)
Playtime: 19m

Just like it's predecessor, Styx: Shards of Darkness is a third-person-ish* stealth RPG game.

While the graphics are better, I found Shards of Darkness somehow more frustrating and difficult than Master of Shadows.

I don't think I died during my run yesterday. I died *constantly* while playing tonight.

As far as I can tell, it feels like the grab/grapple mechanic is a little less certain in Shards of Darkness; that for whatever reason, Styx doesn't always grab onto an object in the same way as Master of Shadows.

Consequently, there was a lot of dropping to my death, whether it be to the ocean underneath the village where the first part of the game takes place, or straight into the path of a roaming guard.

In any case, I spent longer playing it, tonight, but only made it about as far into the game as I did last night (due to all the deaths, and effective restarts).

Styx: Shards of Darkness is, barely:

3: OK

#StyxShardsOfDarkness #ThirdPerson #Stealth #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 14, 2023 - Day 165 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 183

Game: Tinylands

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jan 22, 2021
Library Date: Dec 25, 2022
Unplayed: 171d (5m20d)
Playtime: 37m

Tiny Lands is a cozy isometric puzzle game. It's those old "compare these two images and find the differences", but with tiny little low-poly side-by-side dioramas that you can rotate and zoom.

They're very pretty, with an almost tilt-shift style, and a wonderful away of sound effects intermittently plays in the background while a very chill & laid back soundtrack accompanies you.

Set up my new WQHD work monitor tonight to test it, and this was the perfect game for it.

However, it is possible to, in a word, cheat.

If you've ever deliberately gone cross-eyed to trigger a 3D illusion, that some technique works almost flawlessly here. The differences in the images suddenly pop out at you as you rotate the tableaux, but it defeats the purpose of just chilling out and letting your mind wander.

Tiny Lands is:

4: Good

#TinyLands #Cozy #Isometric #Puzzle #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 15, 2023 - Day 166 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 184

Game: Dustforce DX

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jan 18, 2012
Library Date: Aug 13, 2022
Unplayed: 306d (10m2d)
Playtime: 17m

It's not often a game pisses me off, but Dustforce DX managed it. It is, of course, a platformer.

The music isn't bad. The semi-transparent spiky vector graphics fit the Indie feel of the game.

As there's no obvious way to to use a controller with the game, I played it with the default keyboard setup.

This was the part where I got cranky. I managed to complete the first two tutorial levels with an increasing amount of frustration, which peaked when trying to wall-jump up to the final tutorial.

Trying to press three keys at a time, at exactly the right time, almost completely eluded me.

Again, it's the fine motor control thing, and this is a game designed for practicing moves repeatedly to tune that fine motor control to a fine art.

This made the game an exercise in frustration.

As it turns out, there is a non-obvious way to set up a controller... you just assign the keys. I've never seen that done before, and it literally took me Googling it to find that out.

It didn't help.

If you enjoy that "needs perfect timing" kind of platformer, this might be right up your alley. Not mine, though.

Dustforce DX is a big:

1: Nope

#DustforceDX #Platformer #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 16, 2023 - Day 167 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 185

Game: Bleed 2

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Feb 19, 2017
Library Date: Feb 2, 2019
Unplayed: 1595d (4y4m14d)
Playtime: 19m

Bleed 2 is a 2D twin-stick sideways scrolling pixel-art arcade shoot-em-up.

It feels very much like a 80's arcade game, both sonically and visually.

Lots of frantic button mashing, which would be great if I could mash the right buttons in the right order, but as I can't, I spent a lot of time dying.

The most frustrating thing is that every platformer / sideways scroller I've played uses the A button on the controller to jump, while Bleed 2 uses the right trigger, and uses A to taunt.

As the right thumbstick is used for shooting, it makes sense, but I found myself taunting instead of jumping far too many times (and then, of course, dying).

It's not that Bleed 2 isn't a good game, it's just that I'm not good at it.

Bleed 2 is just:

2: Meh

#Bleed2 #SidewaysScroller #PixelArt #TwinStick #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 17, 2023 - Day 168 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 186

Game: Weird West: Definitive Edition

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Apr 1, 2022
Library Date: Jun 5, 2023
Unplayed: 12d (12d)
Playtime: 1h45m

Oops.

Weird West is a top-down twin-stick immersive sim set in an alternative wild west full of monsters bad juju.

The whole point of this endeavour was to reduce the number of unplayed games in my pile of shame, not add to the pile, and yet here we are with Weird West.

I assume part of it is my ADHD, and the "ooh, shiny" dopamine hit when something grabs my interest. A couple of weeks ago I saw the demo for Weird West and grabbed it. I also (and I have no recollection of doing so) wishlisted it.

Running on 2.5 hours sleep this morning, and I get an email saying "Weird West is on special!"

Fired up the demo, bought the game. Between Weird West, and Evil West, I guess the old west crossed with the supernatural is a thing now.

The cross between top-down and immersive sim makes for some interesting gameplay, however there were times when I felt like I wanted to zoom right in to a third-person perspective when in fights, but the fixed camera position made it a little bit frustrating.

Given that if you ask me to choose between western and sci-fi, I'm going to choose sci-fi, I was a little surprised at the way Weird West hooked me.

Weird West is:

4: Good

#WeirdWest #TopDown #ImmersiveSim #TwinStick #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 18, 2023 - Day 169 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 187

Game: Table Top Racing: World Tour

Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 26, 2016
Library Date: Mar 13, 2018
Unplayed: 1923d (5y3m5d)
Playtime: 24m

Table Top Racing: World Tour takes iconic cars, shrinks them down to matchbox-sized caricatures, and sets you racing around landscapes built in kitchens and... something else, I guess. I never got out of the sushi kitchen.

If it sounds like I've played this game before, it's because it's fundamentally the same conceit as Toybox Turbos that I reviewed back in March.

To me, the most important thing about arcade racing games is that the cars handle well. Unfortunately the cars in TTR:WT handle like a bar of soap.

However, if you grind away for a few races, you can pick up some coin, which will allow you to fully upgrade the car, at which point it handles like a faster bar of soap.

The game design is cute, the track I raced on repeatedly was fun (a sushi kitchen), the soundtrack was banging, but the racing itself wasn't.

Maybe as you grind through, later cars you can buy might handle better, but there's just not enough to keep me pushing through to find out.

I spent an hour watching John Romero play a Doom 2 custom WAD this afternoon, and it was more fun than this.

Table Top Racing: World Tour is:

2: Meh

#TableTopRacingWorldTour #Arcade #Racing #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 19, 2023 - Day 170 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 188

Game: Bioshock Remastered

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Sep 16, 2016
Library Date: Sep 16, 2016
Unplayed: 2467d (6y9m3d)
Playtime: 41m

"Wait... you've never played Bioshock?"

Well... yes and no.

I got Bioshock Remastered & Bioshock 2 Remastered for free because I already owned Bioshock & Bioshock 2.

Once I got past the intro (which seemed completely new to me), and into the game proper, I started to feel a sense of deja vu.

As it turns out, I played the original Bioshock for a total of 3.1 hours, last played July 26, 2014. I don't remember any of it; since I've never played Remastered, so I'm counting it as technically unplayed (particularly as I'm too tired to start something else at 10:30pm)

Bioshock (if you've been living under a rock) is an FPS/immersive sim set in a Libertarian utopia called "Rapture" that... isn't.

I'm not far enough into the game to understand why Rapture has collapsed, but I'm pretty sure that it's something to do with the "Plasmids" that effectively give the character super powers.

The visual and audio design of Bioshock Remastered is incredible, giving the game an oppressive & claustrophobic feel.

I doubt I would have grasped much of the Libertarian subtext in 2014; in post-Brexit/COVID/Musk 2023, that subtext sits very uncomfortably.

Bioshock Remastered is:

4: Good

#BioshockRemastered #FPS #ImmersiveSim #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 21, 2023 - Day 172 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 190

Game: Stray

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jul 20, 2022
Library Date: Oct 15, 2022
Unplayed: 249d (8m6d)
Playtime: 40m

This review is going to contain minor spoilers for the early part of the game.

Stray is a third-person game about a cat.

I count any game where I've played less than 15 minutes of the game as "unplayed".

Due to a mix-up around the release date, I missed out on the discounted purchase price, so left it on my wishlist, until it got discounted 3 months later.

As soon as it finished installing on October 15, I started playing.

The graphics are gorgeous. The cat is adorable, and amazingly cat-like. I feel like I'm controlling an almost-real cat... which turns out to be a problem.

As per the title, you're a stray cat; the game opens to find you snuggling with your siblings, high up on the wall of the city, before the intro takes you on all on a little adventure to teach you the controls.

***Spoiler Alert***

At the end of the intro, you jump across a gap in a pipe. The pipe you land on gives way, and you find yourself scrabbling to hold on as your siblings look down on you helplessly... as you lose your grip and fall into the city below.

You finally come to rest at the bottom of a pile of rubble. Gingerly (pun intended) you attempt to stand up, only to find that you cannot stand on your hind leg, and limp for a couple of steps, before collapsing.

It was at this point, at the end of the intro, after 13 minutes of playtime that I logged out of the game, sobbing inconsolably.

This tiny digital cat purrs, and trills, and meows, and looks around, and cleans itself, and feels utterly too real for me to see it get hurt like that.

I was overwhelmed by a sense of grief and loss as I watched this ball of fluff get separated from their siblings, and seeing them get hurt, limping and then collapsing was entirely too much for me (our furball is fine after having a sleep, but still).

I finally started it up again tonight; even 8 months later, I still feel that pain and sadness as I try to play.

The game itself is beautiful, rendering the post-apocalyptic environment full of dead robots in a gorgeous way. There were some fun "cat" moments, just jumping off things, or solving environmental challenges by knocking paint cans off the edges of a building.

The sounds made by this little ball of fur are wonderfully realistic, and everything within me wants to protect this little gem.

On paper, the idea of playing a cat exploring a "cybercity", and solving a mystery seemed like it was the perfect fit for me, as someone who loves cats, but in practice it seems to hurt too much to play.

If you love cats, and cyberpunk, and can disassociate yourself enough, then you might really enjoy Stray.

However it seems that I cannot, which is unfortunate, because Stray is:

4: Good

#Stray #ThirdPerson #Cats #Exploration #Cyberpunk #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 22, 2023 - Day 173 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 191

Game: ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove!

Platform: Epic Games Store
Release Date: Mar 1, 2019
Library Date: Oct 14, 2022
Unplayed: 251d (8m8d)
Playtime: 34m

Way back on the 1st of January when I set out on this misbegotten journey, I wrote in my toot that I was open to suggestions.

Today, on day 173, a friend suggested "Have you played ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove!"

I had not, however, I did not have a copy of the game in my Steam library, nor do I have an unused Steam key.

"I'll buy it for you!"

Friendo, adding to my pile of unplayed games does not reduce the size of the pile. However, I considered the offer, and took a look at GG.Deals, because the last thing I wanted was for friendo to pay full price.

It was at this point I made a terrible discovery. The game had been given away free on the Epic Games Store last October. As I have collected most of the games given away by Epic, the chance was... yeah. I do own a copy of the game.

EGS is the anti-Steam. It takes anything that's good about Steam, and does it in the worst possible way.

Steam handles a large library well? EGS handles a small library terribly.

Steam makes moving a game to a different drive incredibly simple? EGS requires 15 years experience in tech support.

Steam makes buying a new game almost dangerously easy? EGS makes it laborious enough to question whether you even want the *free* game in your cart.

The free games given away on Steam have literally become little more than demo versions, to see if I like the game enough to either use the Steam key I might already have, or buy the game on Steam.

Yes, I despise using EGS so much that I've bought games on Steam that I already received for free on EGS. I resent the exclusivity arrangements that force me to use EGS for Tony Hawk 1/2 and Alan Wake Remastered.

Of course, collecting all these free games on EGS means I have *multiple* piles of shame, across different launchers (I won't even get into GOG).

However, this is a review of TJ&E:BITG!, not EGS, and now that I've gotten my EGS rant out of the way on Mastodon (as seen in less detail on ) this is the first game from my EGS pile of shame this year.

TJ&E:BITG! is an isometric platformer, that has you searching islands, & shaking trees looking for bits of an exploded ship.

The main thing I'm looking for in a game is fun; maybe it was in one of the trees I didn't shake.

Having never played any of the previous three(!) games, I felt utterly bewildered for most of my playtime.

I understand that people love this game, I just don't understand why. Respect, though. If it's your cup of tea, more power to you. It's most definitely not mine.

I'm sorry, friendo, but I'm glad I saved you the purchase price, because for me ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove! is a big:

1: Nope

#ToeJamAndEarlBackInTheGroove #Isometric #Platformer #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 23, 2023 - Day 174 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 192

Game: Breakneck

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Dec 8, 2017
Library Date: Aug 24, 2022
Unplayed: 303d (9m30d)
Playtime: 17m

Breakneck is an endless runner, where you fly a ship that feels like a cross between a pod-racer and a landspeeder.

It is, quite obviously, a mobile game ported to PC.

The visual design and landscapes of the game are very well done, with a post-apocalyptic sci-fi feel.

That's pretty much the only good thing I have to say about it.

Avoid obstacles, but fly close to them to charge up the ship boost, collect coins, try to reach the end of the level without being "caught" by a pursuing ship, or hitting something.

There is no reverse on this ship, so sometimes you just get stuck, and wait to die.

This game is a just pure grind, with no reason to keep playing, and very much a clock-watcher.

I hoped I hadn't paid for it, but turns out I bought it on a discount for $3.99. For reference, the Steam refund policy is less than two hours playtime, within *14 days* of purchase, so at least something of value came out of playing this game.

Breakneck?

1: Nope

#Breakneck #EndlessRunner #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 24, 2023 - Day 175 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 193

Game: Lego Builder's Journey

Platform: Epic Games Store
Release Date: Jun 23, 2021
Library Date: Dec 22, 2022
Unplayed: 184d (6m2d)
Playtime: 35m

Lego Builder's Journey is a cozy 3D isometric puzzle game, featuring (almost) everyone's favourite plastic bricks. It answers the question "What if Monument Valley, but Lego?"

The game opens to a Lego beach diorama, suspended in tilt-shifted space. You're prompted to pick up a block, placing it on the handful of visible studs to build a sandcastle.

Once completed, a wave of translucent bricks sweeps in, washing the sandcastle away.

An atmospheric dreamlike soundtrack accompanies the most gorgeous game I've played this year.

This (Lego!) game is visually stunning. The raytracing and lighting makes it feel like I'm interacting with real Lego; some bricks have scratches and fingerprints. One early level, set at night with a fire, had me sitting and staring at the screen in wonder (you will, however, need a raytracing capable card for the full experience).

The most obvious point of comparison is the TT series of Lego games and they could not be more different.

In Lego Builder's Journey, there's not a minifig in sight. The two main characters, a parent and child, are each represented by a stack of 1-stud bricks.

Without a single line of dialogue the game still communicates emotions, without the beloved mugging and goofiness of the TT games.

The diorama can be rotated with a right-click and hold, as you find the best place to place blocks; the blocks are picked up, & rotated with a left-click, or a left-click & hold to place or drop, which leads to my main criticism.

Unfortunately, the controls do not reflect the same care and attention to detail as the rest of the game; if you've ever played any other game that uses right-click to rotate, left-click to place (& there are a lot of them), the UX design choices here present an exercise in frustration.

At some points in the game, I was frantically trying to drop a block to pick up another one about to disappear off the edge of the diorama, only to repeatedly rotate or place the block I'm holding, instead of dropping it. Having to stop and think about what I'm trying to do with a piece rather than being able to click instinctively (without even providing the possibility of reconfiguring the controls) adds an ongoing subtle level of frustration to what is almost a perfect puzzle experience.

However: I got this free on EGS, but it was 66% off on Steam, so I bought it. When I loaded it up to check something, I found my EGS save file was just... there.

Having experienced the frustration of migrating save games previously, I've never seen this before, and it was delightful & unexpected.

Lego Builder's Journey is a wonderful way to while away an afternoon, and is:

5: Excellent

#LegoBuildersJourney #CozyGaming #Puzzle #Lego #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 24, 2023 - Day 175 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 194

Game: Century: Age of Ashes

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Dec 3, 2021
Library Date: Jun 24, 2023
Unplayed: 0d (0d)
Playtime: 25m

Oops, I did it again.

While my chances of playing through all of my unplayed Steam games & keys by the end of 2023 were slim to begin with, adding new games to the pile does not help in the slightest.

Why would I do this to myself?

Century: Age of Ashes is a free to play multiplayer third-person aerial combat game. By aerial combat, it means dogfighting with dragons.

The visuals are gorgeous, as you dodge and weave between castle in a mountainous Nordic landscape, shooting fireballs and spears at the other dragoneers.

I'm not sure on the long-term viability of the game, given the whole "free-to-play multiplayer" thing, and I've only played a couple of matches. It does the whole battle pass thing, and I'm not paying for a battle pass, which means grinding, and I have no idea what the grind is like.

Century: Age of Ashes may well go the way of so many other F2P PVP games this year, but it's free, and did I mention how cool it is to dogfight on fricking dragons?!?

Century: Age of Ashes seems:

4: Good

#CenturyAgeOfAshes #ThirdPerson #AerialCombat #Dragons #F2P #PvP #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 25, 2023 - Day 176 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 195

Game: Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Feb 13, 2018
Library Date: Sep 7, 2019
Unplayed: 1387d (3y9m18d)
Playtime: 1h34m

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a first-person open world RPG set in medieval Bohemia. You play Henry, a young man set on a mission of vengeance.

This was a game that I really knew nothing about, that was part of the August 2019 Humble Bundle. After I disappointed @bluntelk by not enjoying ToeJam & Earl, he asked if I'd played this.

I had not, and since I owned this on one Steam, away I went.

Once again, going into the game without knowing anything about it proved somewhat beneficial to the setup of the story. RPGs often follow the pattern of the Hero's Journey.

Henry's life in this bucolic village in Bohemia was obviously not going to be the whole of the game. Had I read the logline for the game on the Steam page, it gives away the catalysing event that sets Henry on his journey, so it was devastating to experience it first-hand, but also gave me a fire in my bones that I might have lacked knowing what I was in for.

In terms of gameplay, it's a good looking game for a game released five years ago, & built in Crytek's CryEngine.

Will I complete it? I'm not sure. Statistically, it's unlikely. I've started multiple Assassin's Creed games, and haven't completed any of them. I was hours into Cyberpunk 2077 before discovering I hadn't even completed the prologue. In all my time gaming, the only open-world game I've even completed is FarCry 5.

There's also the issue of playing a male protagonist. When I play a game with a female protagonist I feel a sense of connection that's noticeably absent with male protagonists; in fact, recognising this was another small piece in understanding the puzzle that is myself.

However, the story did pique my interest, and it might be one of those games that draws me back, so I'm going to sit with it for a while.

Overall, (and this should make @bluntelk happy), I think Kingdom Come: Deliverance is:

4: Good

#KingdomComeDeliverance #FirstPerson #OpenWorld #RPG #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 26, 2023 - Day 177 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 196

Game: Before We Leave

Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 14, 2021
Library Date: Aug 21, 2022
Unplayed: 309d (10m5d)
Playtime: 38m

Before We Leave is a cozy city-building strategy sim. Set on a post-apocalyptic planet, your "peeps" have come up from underground to a newly green planet to repopulate & rebuild civilisation.

In some ways, it's not unlike Timberborn, which I reviewed earlier this month, which is unfortunate.

Even with the post-apocalyptic, "mine the remains of the previous civilisation" thematic similarities, it feels very different.

Before we leave, in keeping with the "cozy" idea, uses big cutesy hex tiles, on a round planet that you can explore to find other island and settle.

The downside is that unlike other city-builders, the use of hex-tiles with the big graphics makes everything feel cramped. I found myself getting frustrated with the game early on, because virtually everything needs to be connected to a road, but with large hex tiles in a relatively small space, I felt like most of the space was taken up with roads.

While the whole "mining the bones of the past" enables skipping over several steps that would be involved in getting from ore to metal in other games, in Before We Leave, mining the remains creates areas of pollution that, once again, suffers because of the "large hex tiles in a small area". The areas of pollution easily end up overlapping areas I'd rather they not, and given the fixed location of the ruins, it then becomes a question of whether I rip up all my buildings and start again, or just start the level over.

There's still something there that kept me playing beyond my initial 15 minutes; it remains to be seen as to whether that's sustainable long-term.

Before We Leave is:

3: OK

#BeforeWeLeave #CityBuilder #Strategy #Cozy #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 27, 2023 - Day 178 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 197

Game: Flashout 3D: Enhanced Edition

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Sep 3, 2022
Library Date: Sep 9, 2022
Unplayed: 291d (9m18d)
Playtime: 18m

Flashout 3D: Enhanced Edition is a third-person Wipeout-style track racer. Race hover-ships, upgrade them, win races, etc.

After getting out of the game and checking the release date, I had to double-check the details, and then hit Google.

This does not play like a game released in 2022. Per the game description it's a free re-release to celebrate the developer's release of Flashout 3.

The reason I didn't recall the original Flashout is because it was released in 2012, and it was mobile-only.

That makes more sense of the "Enhanced Edition", but the gameplay is very much 2012, and there's just not a lot to offer here, even for free, that isn't bettered by more recent games.

They didn't put any energy into even providing mapping information for the controller buttons, let alone configuration, and I had to quit the game and turn off Steam input for it to even register any buttons other than the left control stick.

If you've got a gaming budget of zero, or want a free game for your kids' PC, it's not terrible, but it's not great either.

Flashout 3D: Enhanced Edition is just:

2: Meh

#Flashout3D #Racing #Wipeout #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 28, 2023 - Day 179 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 198

Game: Recursive Ruin

Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 18, 2022
Library Date: Jun 8, 2023
Unplayed: 20d
Playtime: 29m

Recursive Ruin is a first person narrative-based puzzle game about grief.

I read about this game last year, and added it to my wishlist; when it popped up on sale three weeks ago, and so I added another game to the pile of shame.

The game's conceit is in the title, because a large chunk of the game's environments are recursive. This is deeply disorienting, and feels like the diametric opposite of a cozy game.

It's standard WASD keyboard and mouse navigation, and with the addition of what is, effectively, a companion cube, it's a bit like "What would it be like to play Portal on psychedelic drugs?"

This is an interesting, but disquieting game; I'm genuinely not sure if I like it, or just solving puzzles.

Recursive Ruin is:

3: OK

#RecursiveRuin #FirstPerson #Puzzle #Trippy #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 29, 2023 - Day 180 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 199

Game: Tower of Time

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Apr 12, 2018
Library Date: Dec 21, 2022
Unplayed: 191d (6m9d)
Playtime: 43m

Tower of Time is a... I guess top-down tactical RPG? It's a squad-based dungeon crawler that has some very nice, polished aspects, and some "we used interns for this" design decisions that feel a little jarring.

And so much text to wade through.

I'm not sure how much actual *playtime* was in that 43 minutes, because this is a game in love with telling its own narrative, in grandiose text screen after text screen that you need to get through to actually play the damn thing.

The actual dungeon-crawling aspect isn't too bad. The squad-based strategy is this odd mix of tactical & real-time strategy.

You can pause the action and go semi-tactical, or you can slow down time by clicking on one of the squad members action keys which is almost like bullet-time.

Live switching between the different squad members in play and trying to synergise their skills feels a little bit like the aspects of character synergy in Honkai Starrail.

The first level dungeons are quite pretty, but I'm not sure if the slowdowns during the game were due to the graphics settings, or that it was running off spinning rust.

Tower of Time is:

3: OK

#TowerOfTime #TopDown #RPG #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

June 30, 2023 - Day 181 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 200

Game: Everything

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Apr 22, 2017
Library Date: Oct 28, 2017
Unplayed: 2071d (5y8m2d)
Playtime: 35m

Everything is... look, I genuinely don't know quite how to describe this "game". I just wanted something simple to knock over in 15 minutes, and I chose Everything.

If nothing else, the name of the game lends itself to all kinds of wordplay I'd love to engage if I wasn't so exhausted.

I guess I can stop doing these reviews, now that I've played Everything.

See?

Anyway, Everything is, apparently, a simulation.

In Everything you can become... everything. Anything. Everything in Everything becomes a playable character.

Other things talk to you. There are also snippets of lectures from a "philosophical entertainer" named Alan Watts.

This is the weirdest game I've played this year, and I'm not even entirely sure it IS a game.

There are things that really annoyed me about the control scheme, but then there are surreal, trippy visuals that did my head in.

I have a nice neat spectrum that I've been able to fit every game I've played so far this year into, and then this.

I'm going to take the easy way out, because thinking is hard right now.

Everything is:

3: OK

#Everything #Simulation #DoYouSeeWhatIDidThere #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 1, 2023 - Day 182 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 201

Game: A Little to the Left

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Nov 9, 2022
Library Date: Jun 30, 2023
Unplayed: 1d
Playtime: 33m

A Little to the Left isn't about becoming increasingly progressive, but rather a cozy puzzle game about organizing household items.

I'd had it on my wishlist for a while, and Steam seasonal sales are my kryptonite.

To be honest, after the last week, it was really kind of what I needed last night.

Also, there's a cat.

The cat likes to reach in at infrequent intervals and mess up the pile of things I'd just organised, and to be honest, I didn't mind at all.

There's a lovely, whimsical feel to the design of the game. The puzzles (so far) aren't terribly complex, but there's a wonderful feeling of satisfaction with each solved puzzle.

It's not just the satisfaction of solving the puzzle itself (and one does love a good puzzle game), but the solutions themselves are usually deeply satisfying to my autistic brain, that wants to organise & systematise everything.

I think the only other game that's really scratched that itch for me is the delightful (and LGBTQ+) Unpacking.

A Little to the Left is:

4: Good

#ALittleToTheLeft #Puzzle #Organising #CozyGaming #Cozy #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

(A Little to the Left is still available on sale until July 14th.)

July 2, 2023 - Day 183 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 202

Game: Elden Ring

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Feb 25, 2022
Library Date: Jul 2, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 33m

Here we are, at the half-way mark. There are 182 days ahead, and 182 days behind. For today, I decided on something special

Turns out, in return for my upgrading my son's computer last night, he bought me the game of my choice today... which was Elden Ring. Again.

Technically, this is not an "unplayed" game. My kids bought me Elden Ring for my birthday last year, and I attempted to play it, got intensely frustrated with it, and quit out after 80 minutes and got a refund.

I simply didn't understand that death is part of a soulslike.

However, in the process of playing through this project, I grasped the play style of a soulslike, which brings me back to Elden Ring.

In case you've been living under all of the rocks, Elden Ring is a third-person open-world soulslike action-RPG.

It's dark, and brooding, almost devoid of colour. As with other soulslikes, there are points within the game that you can return to either when resurrecting, or to (effectively) save your progress.

However, do that, and it resurrects all the mobs you just killed, doesn't it? (Yes. It does.)

There's a constant trade-off between returning to these points to restore your energy, and effective save your inventory, and upgrade, or to keep moving forward, in the hope of finding what Elden Ring calls a "Site of Grace".

Starting over from the beginning on a fresh save, I learned something that I missed first time around... when I quit out after 80 minutes in March 2022, I hadn't even completed the tutorial. The final tutorial boss frustrated me so badly, I gave up.

Probably should have gone in with a character base far less squishy too.

This time, as a Vagabond, I died twice, and I enjoyed myself.

It's still not "I MUST PLAY THIS UNTIL I AM FINISHED!", but it's definitely "I'm going to willingly spend some time in this game."

Thus, at the halfway point of #Project365ONG, I'm happy to say, having given it another shot, Elden Ring is:

4: Good

#EldenRing #Soulslike #OpenWorld #ThirdPerson #ARPG #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 3, 2023 - Day 184 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 203

Game: Broken Pieces

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Sep 10, 2022
Library Date: Jun 21, 2023
Unplayed: 12d
Playtime: 89m

Broken Pieces is a third-person puzzle adventure game. You play Elise, a woman stranded alone in a French town called Saint-Exil, trying to work out why everyone else in town has vanished.

It's largely puzzle-solving, with the occasional combat encounter thrown in.

Which is one of my two major issues with the game.

The first, however, is the script. Broken Pieces is set in France, and was built by a French dev team.

I suspect the script was better in French, and then it was just run through Google Translate or something, because it's really clunky.

Because Elise is the only character in the game, she's commentating things constantly. She doesn't use contractions, and some of her phrasing is like nails on a blackboard. This is not a game where you can get lost in the well designed environments, because as soon as Elise starts narrating something, you're pulled out of the game with "wait, what?"

The only thing clunkier than the dialogue is the combat; the "bad guys" suddenly appear out of a swirl of dark mist that will suddenly surround you. For whatever reason, in spite of the fact they seem multidimensional, a very normal gun will kill them. If you can manage to target them.

You can't hit a key to unholster your gun, and begin to target them. You have to wait until the game does it for you, and then start shooting. There's a combination of keys to dodge, which I have yet to successfully manage.

Sadly, while the game is atmospheric, and it has some nice ideas, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. I kept plugging away for almost 90 minutes, drawn in by the puzzles, and repelled by the user interface and how little you can actually do.

Broken Pieces feels like an appropriate name; it's just:

2: Meh

#BrokenPieces #ThirdPerson #Adventure #Mystery #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 4, 2023 - Day 185 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 204

Game: Split/Second

Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 18, 2010
Library Date: Jun 28, 2022
Unplayed: 371d (1y6d)
Playtime: 19m

Split/Second is an arcade racing game that answers the question "What if Michael Bay made a racing game?"

The game is set in a reality TV show, apparently, and there are explosions. A lot of explosions.

You can trigger the explosions to take out your competitors, or vice versa.

This is another game that's only *technically* unplayed. I spent 9 minutes in-game last year, trying -and failing- to get it to recognise my Xbox One S Controller.

I first tried playing a racing game with a keyboard on an MS-DOS PC clone with a CGA monitor in the late 1980's. I didn't like it then, and nothing has changed.

It wasn't until I played Forza Horizon 4, in 2019, over thirty years later, that I understood the fun of arcade racing games, and how the controller made that possible.

I bought Split/Second on special last year, and was deeply frustrated by the apparent impossibility of getting it to recognise the controller. So I gave up.

Last week, I was trying to get a different racing game working, and had the same problem. Once again, I went to the discussions on Steam, to see if I was missing something, and as it turns out, due to the age of that game, disabling Steam input meant it would recognise the controller.

When I saw Split/Second in the list tonight, I wondered whether that would fix it... and it did!

Which means that I can tell you that Split/Second is a thirteen year old racing game, in an post-Forza Horizon & post-The Crew era.

It's a good game for its age, but it doesn't hold up so well against more recent games.

There are small irritations throughout. You can map the controller (yay!) but there are only a handful of things to map. Brake, accelerator, steering, and the "Power Play(s)" that trigger the Bayesque explosions that target the other cars.

But to navigate the menus, put down the controller & use the keyboard.

The driving itself feels a little bit like everything is a fraction of a second behind the controller, particularly braking.

Even so, the game is still more fun than the table-top racing game I reviewed recently.

All things considered, given the age of the game Split/Second is:

3: OK

#SplitSecond #Arcade #Racing #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 5, 2023 - Day 186 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 205

Game: Hollow Knight

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Feb 25, 2017
Library Date: Dec 4, 2018
Unplayed: 1674d (4y7m1d)
Playtime: 32m

Hollow Knight is a 2D Soulslike Metroidvania. I find it wryly amusing that six months ago, that was word salad to me.

Now I know I'm dealing with a 2D platformer that will have me traveling backwards and forwards through different zones, with parts of levels inaccessible to me until I find MacGuffins or character upgrades that will allow me to access those areas.

It's also going to be hard, and I'm going to die a lot; I'm going to be faced with the option of trying to get back to a save point to redeem the stuff I've picked up and upgrade, or risk it all to collect more stuff. If I do go back to the save point, all of the stuff I killed will have respawned.

That's the game play; the relevance of all of that to this review is that this isn't a game I could have appreciated six months ago.

It's one of the unexpected discoveries of this project, that in pushing myself to play all of these games has given me a new appreciation for the mechanics underlying many of them, that were opaque to me before.

Hollow Knight has a melancholy feel to it, both with the soundtrack, but also with a muted, stark palette that reinforces the Soulslike feeling.

There's not a lot of explaining what's going on, so when an NPC does have something to say, it's slowly opening up the world around me.

I still feel like there's a lot to put together to make sense of what's happening, but Hollow Knight seems:

4: Good

#HollowKnight #2D #Metroidvania #Soulslike #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 6, 2023 - Day 187 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 206

Game: Drizzlepath: Deja Vu

Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 25, 2018
Library Date: Jun 2, 2022
Unplayed: 398d (1y1m3d)
Playtime: 32m

Drizzlepath: Deja Vu is a walking simulator. There are games that are referred to derisively as "Walking Simulators"; in this case, there's no derision at all.

Drizzlepath: Deja Vu is a pure walking sim.

This makes it somewhat difficult to review as a game; most walking sims have puzzles that need to be solved, or interactive elements to the gameplay.

Drizzlepath: Deja Vu has no gameplay elements at all. You can walk in any direction, or jog, if you prefer. That's all.

There's a lovely ambient soundtrack; occasionally, a honey-voiced English woman speaks some philosophical musings about our journey in life.

It's quite beautiful; the conceit of the story is about a journey to the top of a mountain, and thus you find yourself walking through natural environments filled with butterflies and animals, surrounded by mountains, trees & grass, with occasional ruined buildings; interspersed with oddly juxtaposed Unreal Engine assets that may or may not be part of the underlying story.

There's an option for autowalk, which meant that I could nurse my morning coffee in one hand and control the viewport with the mouse.

It can be strangely meditative; for the first 10-ish minutes of playtime, I was thinking of things to say in this review, but the further I got into the walk, the more I found myself actually focussing on what was happening around me in-game, my mind eventually drifting to deeper thoughts about the nature of gender.

It's unfortunate that I read the description before starting the game, as it begins with "A man embarks..."; within the game you're entirely disembodied, and voiceless. There are no NPCs that verbally interact with you, and the voiceover is by a woman; the male framing is unnecessary.

It lead to an initial sense of discomfort and disconnection; in spite of the disembodiment, I felt forced into the role of a man. My experience of most of my life has been that of a passenger in someone else's male body. His body is mine, but not mine; observing the world, but never quite part of it.

As I continued, and realised that there was nothing physical or gendered within the game, I relaxed into experiencing the game world, instead watching it as a disconnected observer. What started out as a walking sim became a meditation of my own experience of life as a trans woman.

I often struggle to write these reviews, having made a rod for my own back. I usually spend more time writing a review than I spent playing the game in question.

This one was a struggle to stop writing, and to edit down to less than aus.social's 3000 character limit.

All of this for a "walking sim" with no gameplay.

Drizzlepath: Deja Vu is an incredibly subjective:

4: Good

#DrizzlepathDejaVu #WalkingSimulator #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 7, 2023 - Day 188 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 207

Game: Neon White

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jun 17, 2022
Library Date: May 13, 2023
Unplayed: 55d (1m24d)
Playtime: 19m

Neon White is... um.

OK, let me try this a different way.

Neon White answers the question... nope. Got nothing. I'm unable to imagine the question to which Neon White would be the answer.

I played this at 11:45pm last night, after a long work day, and then a concert.

I spent most of today trying to work out how to review the game, because it's not really like anything I've played before.

It's part-FPS, part-puzzle game, part-3D-platformer, part-parkour, part-card battler, part-manga-visual-novel?

This is genuinely the hardest time I've had reviewing a game.

You enter the game as a character that has just died; with no memory of your past, you find yourself in ... heaven?

As a visitor, or a "Neon". You've been put into a competition; while you should be in hell, you've been tasked with earning a spot in heaven by killing the most demons who are trying to invade heaven.

You do this through the power of parkour... and guns. Lots of... cards?

Instead of guns, as you parkour around the place (thus the platforming part), you find cards. Each card represents a different weapon, and discarding the card has a secondary effect.

One card, for instance, is a handgun with thirty bullets. Run towards a demon, shoot it in the face, run past where it was, around the corner, jump and discard the card mid-jump for double-jump to allow you to reach the next platform.

Time it wrong, and you're stuck, and have to restart the level. Restarting is quick, which is good, because you'll be doing it a lot; you need to chain all of these different moves together, because traversing the level is timed, and the faster you complete it, the better the rewards.

The better the rewards, the better the chance that you'll win first place, and the place in heaven.

Neon White is weird and frantic and challenging and...

4: Good...?

#NeonWhite #Parkour #FPS #Platformer #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 8, 2023 - Day 189 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 208

Game: Brink

Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 10, 2011
Library Date: Apr 28, 2023
Unplayed: 71d (2m10d)
Playtime: 33m

Brink was an online multiplayer squad-based FPS. It's still most of that, but the online aspect is all but dead.

I saw this game in April; IIRC, it was "Oh! A Bethesda game I don't own. Why have I never heard of this? It's free?"

You get what you pay for, I guess.

Brink was developed by Splash Damage and published by Bethesda.

Splash Damage? Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time. A long time.

After developing some third-party maps for Return to Castle Wolfenstein in the early aughts, Splash Damaged released a free standalone multiplayer-only expansion for RtCW called "Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory".

I sank dozens, if not hundreds of hours into ET. It was the first online multiplayer game that really hooked me. I knew the maps like the back of my hand.

In Brink, I can feel the echoes of ET, but with none of the hook. Apart from the near-dead multiplayer experience, the single player campaign is just drudgery.

The first, and absolute killer, is that all of the avatars are male. All of the in-game characters are male. All of the characters in the cut-scenes are male, even in the crowds.

This post-global-warming-sea-rise-ecological-disaster world apparently has no women. You can customise the hell out of your avatar, Henry Ford style. Anything you want, as long as it's a dude.

This is not a critique, so much as a statement about where I am in life. Playing as a male avatar is discomforting, because of the decades of having to exist in the real world feeling like I was desperately trying to play the role of a man.

It just totals my inability to form a connection to the game world.

It doesn't mean I can't play a game where the avatar is male, it's just that the game has to excel in enough other areas that I can lose myself.

Brink is 12 years old, and exists in a world of games with better single-player campaigns, better gameplay, and with actual humans to play with (or against) in multiplayer.

The only thing that Brink can contribute moving forwards is freeing up 5Gb of space on my PC's hard drive.

Brink is:

2: Meh

#FPS #Platformer #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 9, 2023 - Day 190 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 209

Game: Hard Reset Redux

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jun 3, 2016
Library Date: Dec 4, 2018
Unplayed: 1678d (4y7m5d)
Playtime: 27m

Hard Reset Redux is something unexpected: a cyberpunk-themed pure FPS.

I've encountered so many genre-mashing games over the past few weeks, that it broke my brain a little trying to categorise this game, until it clicked that it's simply a classic FPS, with hidden areas, linear staged levels, and almost all.

The game is titled "Redux" because it's effectively a remaster of the original Hard Reset released in 2012 (which I also own, but haven't ever played).

I say "almost all" because unlike something like Doom or Quake, there aren't scads of different types of weapons strewn about. You get two weapons, and in-game credit caches, which allow you to purchase upgrades for those weapons along the way.

There was... something... about the gameplay that I couldn't quite put my finger on. The developer (Flying Hog Games) rang a bell.

Back in March I played another linear FPS -Evil West- for the first time. When I looked up Flying Hog Games after playing, I found that they were the dev team behind Evil West as well.

Much like yesterday's game, it feels like the dev team's DNA is comes through in the gameplay.

Unfortunately, much like Brink, Hard Reset is a 7 year old game (which is a remaster of a 12 year old game), and suffers in comparison to newer games.

However, it feels much less grindy than Brink, and being a single-player FPS rather than a multi-player FPS with a single-player campaign with bots shoehorned into the game, gives it just enough juice that it becomes one of those "I'll play this if I'm in the mood for something cyberpunk and shooty that's not Cyberpunk 2077."

Hard Reset Redux is (only just):

3: OK

#FPS #Cyberpunk #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 9, 2023 - Day 190 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 210

Game: The Surge 2

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Sep 24, 2019
Library Date: Apr 30, 2023
Unplayed: 70d (2m9d)
Playtime: 79m

The Surge was one of the earliest reviews I did in this project, and the game that gave me an understanding of the mechanics of Soulslike gameplay.

In April I found that I had a Steam Key for The Surge 2, from the Humble Choice July 2021 bundle, and so I loaded it up.

For the last few days, it's been bugging me that the gap between play days and new plays was 19 days. It feels... unordered. Threw in a bonus newplay to round it up to 20.

The Surge 2, like its predecessor, is a sci-fi themed third-person Soulslike action-RPG.

It's also the game I've sworn more at than any other since January 1.

I've gotten frustrated with some games, but my frustration with The Surge 2 was on a whole different level.

After a cut-scene intro, followed by a character creator, you wake up on a hospital table in a prison.

Unlike the first game, you don't have an exo-suit, just a couple of defibrillator gauntlets. Yeah, I have no idea why.

The game does the same thing as the first one, too. Throws you up against larger enemies to teach you the movesets, and then suddenly throws you up against an armored boss.

Clad only in a hospital gownsuit (no bare bums here), and a pair of defibrillator gauntlets.

I died.
And died.
And died, and died, and died some more.

For the first 45 minutes I couldn't even land a single hit on him before he took me out.

The swearing became increasingly copious, eventually quitting out in frustration, and looking up a Google video on how to kill the boss.

It didn't help.

I went back in, and locked on, targeting the one exposed part of his body (his head).

Died.

Died some more.

Eventually I got a single hit in.

Died a few more times, ragequit and went grocery shopping.

Came back from the shopping, sat down at the PC and tried again.

I died.

I honestly don't understand what people see in Soulslikes. The sheer frustration of dying over and over again.

Eventually, I was managing to avoid him, so I was still dying, just slower.

Then I noticed he was telegraphing his attacks, and there were... gaps. I might be able to land a punch and retreat.

I did.

Then two attacks in a row.

I started to feel the pattern. I still died, but I was doing increasing damage.

Then suddenly... I didn't die. He did.

I won the fight.

It was then, that I understood what it is that people see in Soulslikes. Breaking through that frustration to clarity.

The satisfaction of taking down a boss that seemed impossible to kill, or even hit. Not by coming back with bigger guns, but by recognising the patterns, and countering them.

The Surge 2 is the Soulslike that gave me an understanding of the satisfaction to be found in Soulslikes, and is:

4: Good

#ThirdPerson #SciFi #ActionRPG #Soulslike #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 10, 2023 - Day 191 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 211

Game: Neon Abyss

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jul 15, 2020
Library Date: Jan 28, 2022
Unplayed: 528d (1y5m12d)
Playtime: 19m

Neon Abyss is a bright pixel-art-based twin-stick roguelite platformer. This is another (technically) unplayed game. I actually took a couple of shots at it in 2022, totalling less than ten minutes of playtime (less than 15m = unplayed).

I figured that with my improved controller skills, it might make more sense, and I was correct.

To describe it as "bright" is kind of an understatement. It really does lean into the titular "neon". The lighting effects are wonderful, and the EDM soundtrack really fits the feel of the game.

Rooms are procedurally generated, so you're not getting the same experience twice, which is interesting.

However, the controls feel a little bit counter-intuitive, as using the right stick for shooting means that a non-thumb button needs to be assigned to jumping, which is the left trigger on the controller.

While the buttons can be remapped (yay!), there's no sensible button to map it to. I keep instinctively going for the A button when I'm not shooting. I think I'll get used to it, though.

The more games I play, the more I find myself comparing a given game to others that are similar, which is becoming increasingly complicated, but also helps clarify which games really stick out to me.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and Grime, both stick out as comparisons, but also that make me feel like jumping back into one of them.

What it comes down to seems like "Is this a game that feels different enough to draw me back again?" I think that maybe the answer is "yes".

Neon Abyss is a brightly lit:

3: OK

#2D #PixelArt #Platformer #TwinStick #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 11, 2023 - Day 192 - PlayOn Bonus Review

Game: Insurmountable

Platform: Epic/Steam
Release Date: Apr 29, 2021
Library Date: Apr 14, 2022/Nov 22, 2022

Playtime: 8h43m (7h19m/34m)

Decided to throw in a little something for the games I've played a lot, and come back to. Welcome to "PlayOn".

Insurmountable is a hextile-based roguelike adventure about climbing mountains. This is not a game, in any way, that interested me. I hadn't even heard of it when Epic gave it away for free. On one particularly down day, I was looking for something laid back to play, and was sorting through the games I'd gotten free on Epic and I installed it just for the hell of it.

The reason for the split scores in the summary, is that despite my antipathy towards the Epic Games Store, Insurmountable kept me coming back.

When it came up on special on Steam in November, it was an instant buy. It then sat unplayed because I started this whole thing.

The game's storyline is that of a mountain climber who comes to a remote island for a bit of climbing, and find themselves caught in a time loop, with a stranger.

As you go on, you can unlock two other characters, a scientist, and a journalist.

There are three mountains to be scaled, with each mountain having a number of quests on procedurally generated maps.

Some of the quests are suited more to one specific character, with extra rewards if completed with that character.

As you go on, you level each of the characters, and pick up gear that can be used by all three characters.

Each map presents a number of challenges and terrains; with a limited carrying capacity, you must decide which gear to take with you.

All characters have a set of five stats: Sanity, Temperature, Energy, Oxygen, and Health.

Events on the mountain will affect each of these stats. Get caught in a crevasse? Might affect your sanity & health. The further you move without resting, the more energy you use.

Climbing during a blizzard, down goes your temperature. When you hit the "Death Zone", your energy & oxygen use increase.

Unexpected events can suddenly wipe out your energy, which means that while you can continue moving, the risk of further events shoots up exponentially.

When you run out of energy, if you have food in your pack, that might save you, but otherwise you need to rest.

Sleeping where you are can recover some energy, but out in the open? Temperature drop. You can carry a tent in your pack that takes up a lot of room, but gives you three safe sleeps before it crumbles to dust. Or you can hightail it towards a cave.

Make it to the summit, then to your destination, or fail and die; each time you're returned to the bunker, and "the stranger" to start another loop.

For a game I didn't think I'd like, Insurmountable is:

5: Excellent

#Insurmountable #Roguelike #Adventure #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #PlayOn

July 11, 2023 - Day 192 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 212

Game: Dark Future: Blood Red States

Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 17, 2019
Library Date: Jan 5, 2020
Unplayed: 1283d (3y6m6d)
Playtime: 15m

Dark Future: Blood Red States is a car-combat RTS based on a TTRPG. Set in an alt-history post-apocalyptic wasteland thanks to the corporations that took over the United States when Nixon beat Kennedy, you are a road warrior, tasked with...

Yeah, honestly, I just kind of gave up trying to follow everything after a while.

You're a brain in jar, controlling a car that has to fight other cars until a boss car shows up, and if you win, you get cash to upgrade your car and run another mission.

Except you do not actually "control" the car. Your brain-in-a-jar tells the AI what to do, and the AI changes lanes, and fires the guns.

I did not win the first mission. I did not feel any desire to give it another try. I just found it frustrating to try and manage all the moving parts, before being overwhelmed by other cars while trying to kill the "boss" car.

I did not care for it, and it was the first game in a while that I was thankful when I hit the 15 minute mark.

Dark Future: Blood Red States is a:

1: Nope

#RTS #CarCombat #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 12, 2023 - Day 193 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 213

Game: Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 22, 2014
Library Date: May 17, 2019
Unplayed: 1517d (4y1m25d)
Playtime: 20m

Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition (yeah, I'm not retyping that constantly) is not what I expected. It's one of those games I repeatedly skipped over, because I assumed it was a luchador-themed beat-em-up.

Turns out it's actually a 2D Día de los Muertos/luchador-themed Metroidvania brawler mashup.

For a game that's 9 years old, it doesn't play like a game that old. It feels like it could have been released in the last couple of years, and I think that's largely down to the art-style.

It's also multiplayer co-op playable, but I've not had the chance to test that yet.

Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition is:

4: Good

#Guacamelee! #Metroidvania #2D #Platformer #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 13, 2023 - Day 194 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 214

Game: Ghostrunner

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Oct 28, 2020
Library Date: Jul 18, 2022
Unplayed: 360d (11m25d)
Playtime: 15m

Ghostrunner is a first-person sword-slasher game. It is deeply, frustratingly fast.

I am deeply, frustratingly, exhausted. I spent most of the evening trying to troubleshoot my PC to find out why it had suddenly turned into a snail. It appears that one of my usual running apps has been "updated" in a way that means I now get 8-10 FPS in-game.

This was after the discovery that at some stage recently, Riot games started forcing their POS launcher to automatically run "in the background" if the Xbox app was running.

Except it appeared to somehow be triggering a subset of the Xbox app to run, even if the Xbox app wasn't actually running, meaning it was unkillable.

Long story short, what Riot began with Valorant's shitty DRM, they finished with this stunt. I still had LoL installed on my machine from when my son tried to convince me to start playing it, so every trace of every piece of Riot's garbage has been wiped off my system.

After two hours of this collective bullshit, I barely had enough time to actually play Ghostrunner before midnight.

I suspect that I'm just too exhausted at this point to coordinate my hands well enough to not die repeatedly (somewhere close to 60 deaths within 15 minutes). The game helpfully keeps count.

I'm going to give Ghostrunner the benefit of the doubt, mark it down for a RePlay, and rate it:

3: OK

#GhostRunner #FirstPersonSlasher #Parkour #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 14, 2023 - Day 195 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 215

Game: Going Under

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Sep 24, 2020
Library Date: Dec 25, 2022
Unplayed: 201d (6m19d)
Playtime: 82m

Going Under is a roguelite dungeon crawler set in a late-stage capitalist hellscape and I am absolutely here for it.

I got almost 4 hours sleep on Thursday night, and woke up feeling pretty ragged.

When I got home from work I was down to one cylinder, and went grocery shopping, then came home ready to crash.

I figured I could knock 15 minutes of a game out and then write the review today.

Almost an hour and a half later I dragged myself to bed.

Dungeon crawlers are traditionally darkly-lit demon-infested horror-crawls, not brightly-lit, cartoonish, horror-crawls. The horror in Going Under comes from the biting satire of late-stage tech-startup capitalism in a VC-funded world, with nods to anyone who's worked in a knowledge worker / IT-related role.

The game starts with your first day as an -unpaid- intern (because of course it does), watching an introductory video about your new workplace, a recently acquired subsidiary ("Fizzer") of a multi-national conglomerate ("Cubicle").

You've been assigned to Fizzer by the company's AI (of course), and just as the video gets to the explanation of why no Cubicle employee should never enter the dungeons underneath the Fizzer office, your Project Manager boss assigns you to enter the dungeons underneath the Fizzer office to kill the "monsters" that are invading.

The dungeons themselves, and the monsters, are previously acquired start-ups, with names like "Joblin" (a gig worker app), and "Winkydink" (a dating app).

Between the roguelite elements and the quests to build up rep with your "mentors", Going Under really nails that "just one more run" feel.

Going Under is:

5: Excellent

#GoingUnder #Roguelite #DungeonCrawler #StartUp #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 15, 2023 - Day 196 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 216

Game: Vampyr

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jun 5, 2018
Library Date: Sep 25, 2022
Unplayed: 293d (9m20d)
Playtime: 27m

Vampyr (or "I don't vant to suck your blood, but I might have to), is an open-world third-person ARPG, set in London during the 1918 Spanish Flu.

Yesterday's "I feel like hot garbage due to lack of sleep" turned out to be "Actually, sick. Again." so a game set during the Spanish flu feels vaguely appropriate.

The setup of the game is interesting, but gameplay turned out to be a little more frustrating than expected. You're a doctor who wakes up in a mass grave to find he's been turned into a vampire.

However, for some reason that I would dig around and find if I was feeling a little less half-dead, any time I turned in game, the experience would make a whip-pan seem positively leisurely in comparison.

More than once while I was trying to escape the men pursuing me, and seeking to kill me... again?... in attempting to turn a corner, I'd find myself having turned so fast I was disoriented, or worse still, running TOWARD my pursuers.

It hasn't really grabbed me at this point; if I'm in the mood for a supernaturally themed ARPG, I'm more likely to load up Ghostwire: Tokyo than Vampyr, or for vampire-on-vampire violence, probably Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt (at least as long as the servers are live).

I'll probably give Vampyr another shot when my hearing isn't going wild, but for now it's:

3: OK

#Vampyr #ThirdPerson #ARPG #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 16, 2023 - Day 197 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 217

Game: Violations Will Be Punished

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Mar 4, 2023
Library Date: Apr 28, 2023
Unplayed: 80d (2m19d)
Playtime: 40m

Violations Will Be Punished is a dystopian-cyberpunk-themed top-down turn-based strategy game that was free until May, and then became paid.

I've been watching Marvel's Secret Invasion in fits and starts, and other than feeling pretty much burned out on cinematic universes, the most disturbing thing about it is the AI-generated content used in the opening credits.

It just feels... wrong. Much like doing a search for a technical issue on Google, and hitting a result that initially seems reasonable, and then quickly becomes obvious that the "article" is a vaguely coherent remix of something else, and resulting in frustration.

Which brings me back to Violations Will Be Punished, which feels like a dev had some great technical ideas, some great story ideas, and no idea what to do about the graphics, so hit up an off-brand Midjourney clone to generate a bunch of graphics to touch up and drop into their game.

The gameplay feels a bit like "what if you took Command and Conquer, stripped it down and turned it into a turn-based-strategy game, and wrapped it in a thick layer of anti-corporate irony. There's some dark humour in the game that I can appreciate, and the gameplay is OK, but the dead-eyed thousand-foot stare of the characters in the cover art and the in-game avatars, and the design inconsistency, definitely gives the impression that all of the characters were spat out by a GAN, and gives the whole thing a slightly unsettling vibe.

At the core of this game, it feels like there's something there that could be good, but the execution just makes it all feel a bit:

2: Meh

#ViolationsWillBePunished #TurnBasedStrategy #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 17, 2023 - Day 198 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 218

Game: The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Mar 8, 2023
Library Date: Jul 16, 2023
Unplayed: 1d
Playtime: 39m

Well, I'm back on my Humble Choice arc again.

First cab off the rank, is The Outer Worlds "Spacer's Choice Edition". The Outer Worlds is a first-person ARPG that answers the question "What would the love child of Fallout: New Vegas and Firefly look like?"

The "Spacer's Choice Edition" includes all of the DLCs and some graphical spit-and-polish to the original release from October 2019.

As it turns out, after turning to Google, I suspect the main reason it feels like that is because it was developed by Obsidian who also developed... Fallout: New Vegas.

Once I reached the ship ("The Unreliable") that apparently serves as the main hub of the game, and completed the first quest onboard, I turned around and started exploring the ship.

Entering the hold, was an immediate raised-eyebrow moment, as it could have all but been the Serenity. Up the stairs, and further exploring lead me into the galley/dining area, which - once again - could have been lifted straight from Firefly.

There are differences, of course; it's obviously a homage, rather than a straight-up lift. With Disney owning Fox, I'm sure the Microsoft-owned Obsidian wasn't looking for a lawsuit.

Still, it provides some nice sans-Whedon warm-and-fuzzies.

So far -and in 39 minutes, I really didn't get very far, what with the character conversations and all, it seems like a capable ARPG that want to give a bit more time to.

It's very polished, and is gently tugging at me to come back and play a bit more, but... alas, the incessant coughing means I really need to try and sleep.

The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition pretty much justifies the cost of this month's Humble Bundle; it's:

4: Good

#TheOuterWorlds #FirstPerson #ARPG #HumbleChoice #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay

July 18, 2023 - Day 199 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 219

Game: Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate

Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 12, 2022
Library Date: Jul 18, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 18m

The second review for this month's Humble Choice bundle is, a little confusingly, the eighth game in the list. Every month there are eight games, and the AAA game is the first, and the eighth game is, often, pretty much the bundleware of the game.

I figured I'd get Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate out of the way early. The download clocking in at a storage-crushing 63Mb didn't improve my opinion at all.

Then I started the game. Low-res. Pixel art. It even has a "CRT effect" with levels of curvature and scanlines. If only the developers had put as much work into the gameplay.

Once again, these kind of effects have no attraction to me. I don't look at indie games like this with affection. If you want to pull the nostalgia strings, it has to be worth it.

Then I start the game. There's a series of static screens telling the story of the game, and I realise that it feels a lot like a Cinemaware game (ask your grandparent).

The evil Black King has lost all of his pawns, bishops, knights, rooks, and even his queen, to the White King (who's offered better job conditions), and now the Black King is out for vengeance, armed with his trusty shotgun.

...then up comes a chessboard.

It's chess, if chess was... a roguelike‽

Your king appears on the board, armed with said shotgun, facing a collection of pieces. Each piece moves as their traditional chess counterpart, which means a basic knowledge of chess, while not necessarily required, is certainly going to help.

Initially, you can move one square or fire. As you're on the back row, and the shotgun has a firing arc, you want to get closer; getting closer decreases your firing arc, which equals more damage.

Then white moves. After you've emptied both barrels, you need to move once to reload, then you can fire again.

If you clear the board, or kill the white king, as per chess, it's round over. At the end of each round, you get a choice between two cards, but for each card, there's a card that boosts the white side.

Which is where the roguelike strategy comes in.

As it turns out, the developers ABSOLUTELY did the work. There are (apparently) 12 rounds to win. I've made it to round 5 twice, and round 4 once. The game will allow you to move into check, and there's a certain level of shame in walking straight into the diagonal path of a pawn, given I've been playing chess for over 40 years.

It is with genuine surprise that the eight game in this month's bundle, Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate is actually:

4: Good

#ShotgunKing #Chess #Roguelike #HumbleChoice #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay