None of the games I'd been playing regularly really grabbed me this week for some reason.
Life Eater came out last week. Due to being made by Xalavier Nelson Jr, its existence was acknowledged to a degree that most games aren't (thanks in part to some confected outrage, or rather confected predictions of outrage), but well below the level the 1 or 2 big publisher games get. It's a game where you stalk victims to kidnap and sacrifice them to prevent the end of the world at the hands of an evil god. The story is told pretty well through fully voiced cutscenes with the exception of one key plot point that is nonsense. While the gameplay is a weird weekly timeline (looking like a video editor) where you click on unlabelled sections and pick some variety of stalking options (rifle through rubbish, peer through windows, etc.) each of which has a different time and visibility cost. And then to sacrifice the victim you play the wors best minigame since saving souls with Hungry Hungry Hippos in Dante's Inferno.
I've only played the first few missions of Life Eater. But it really didn't grab me. Most of the stalking section is not to kidnap the victim, but rather to learn information about them for the sacrifice minigame questions (which are always the same.) The UI also constantly emphasises the risk of being seen, with many tutorial messages on top of that, and a 'three strikes' system to getting caught. the other half of this is the time limit, which is presented roughly along the line of "WATCH OUT DON'T GET SEEN IF YOU GET SEEN YOU MIGHT BE SLIGHTLY INCONVENIENCED IF IT HAPPENS MORE THAN ONC... oh the time ran out you lose." Not that it matters, because the game is the same every time. The game isn't as terrible as the length of this rant suggests, and I've heard it becomes more interesting in later stages, but I'm not feeling any motivation to continue. But I will likely give it one more shot given that I am a fan of the creator's previous games.
I've owned Tamashii multiple times over thanks to various itch.io bundles, but haven't played it to now. It's a very interesting horror platformer with themes from gnostic mythology, and assorted modern haunted/glitchy game aesthetics. The key gameplay mechanic is platforming with a double jump, and you have the ability to create short lived clones. As expected this makes spawning clones to hold down switches the main level design trick. Also as expected the main flaw of the game, like all double jump games, is that there is no visual difference between jumping of the edge of a platform with your first game and falling off the edge of a platform for 0.002482 frames and using your second jump 10 microns off the edge. I'm really enjoying it so far though.
I Frog-ot is a first person horror game about a wizard who is turned into a frog. You can't invert the y-axis so I stopped playing immediately.
Cookie Clicker is still cookie clicker. I don't know why I played it again, but the numbers went up.
If you like solitaire, then you should consider A Solitaire Mystery, which is a collection of 23 solitaire variants by the creator of Baba is You. The variants get much more creative than typical solitaire collections (eg, using time travel, or a variant that uses stacks of stacks that form numerical values in binary) and range from simple to extremely challenging. Unfortunately, due to the non-standard nature of the gameplay, this game needs decent documentation in the 'help' section, which is not all there yet. Despite this it's still very good and a great way to pass the time and keep your brain active.
Voir Dire is a short 15 minute game-jam game by Daniel Mullins (Inscryption et al). It's about rigging juries to get a guilty verdict. Which you achieve by 'buying' jurors with certain traits ('Sadist' always votes guilty, 'Contrarian' always votes the opposite of the current majority, etc) and shuffling them in the manner of Balatro Jokers. Very short but very good, check it out!
I solved a few Chip's Challenge 1 puzzles on a whim. That game still holds up 30 years later. Though the controls are a bit sticky, and the realtime + tile-based combo is more annoying than I remember.
Thrive is an early-access evolution simulator (from a youtube person of some level of notoriety) that is most similar to a less cartoony version of the first stage of Spore. But even that is a poor comparison. You start as the latest common ancestor of all life, and then evolve from there. Roughly it involves consuming enough resources to level up, then changing some things about your genome, possibly migrating to a neighbouring biome (eg. thermal vents to deep sea floor) and then repeating. Similar to Life Eater, the tutorial pop-ups explain things to avoid that will cause slightly sub-optimal outcomes in the medium-term future, but poorly explain the things that will kill you rapidly in the immediate term. I am looking forward to this games progression though.
On another whim I grabbed the new Rimworld DLC Anomaly. It adds haunted monoliths, tentacles and assorted fucked up Event Horizon shit to the game. It's a neat twist, but it also kind of dominates the game in a way that requires completely disabling it unless it's the only gameplay mechanic you want to interact with. Other than that Rimworld is still Rimworld, satisfying gameplay that isn't really challenging, until your colony's only doctor decides to voluntarily leave their bedroom unprompted to haul a single strawberry from the corner of the map, gets extremely upset at being unable to sleep, then snaps and murders everyone and you hit alt-f4 never to play the game again.
I also played more B3313 after an update was released. This meant I lost all progress when I repatched the ROM. I don't think this made a meaningful change to my experience. It's still weird and there's still a few too many actual bugs vs fake story bugs.
Loco-Motion for the Amstrad CPC is way less satisfying when you aren't playing it on a school computer to avoid actual work.
Rating System Update
This is the existing rating system:
In my 2024 log I'm experimenting with a weekly game rating system. My experiences with games are cautiously rated on this scale: GREAT -> Good -> OK -> Disappointing -> BAD
Important GREAT or BAD games will be marked as (Notable)
I will be adding the following rating: UNPLAYABLE
UNPLAYABLE games will have the reasons in parentheses
All Games Played
- Balatro: Good
- Dragon's Dogma - Dark Arisen: Good
- Maniac: Good
- Life Eater: OK
- Tamashii: GREAT
- I Frog-ot: UNPLAYABLE (No Invert Mouse)
- Rimworld Anomaly: OK
- Thrive: OK
- Chip's Challenge 1: Good
- A Solitaire Mystery: Good
- Cookie Clicker: OK
- Voir Dire: GREAT
- A Solitaire Mystery: GREAT
- Loco-Motion: Disappointing
- B3313: Good