Assessed Unoriginal

I'm back in my own house again and back to work during the day. I've been spending a lot of free time on my own development projects, and shockingly other media like "books" or "non-sport moving images." Still a lot of games though. A lot of habitual Bombe and MC Eternal of course.

I'm still moving forward in In Stars and Time on most days. Generally an hour or so at a time. The plot continues to move forward in a gripping way, and makes the timeloop aspect quite interesting. The part of the game I'm at has some quests that require quite a substantial commitment to complete before looping back, but I've found them to be rewarding after the fact, so it's not a complaint. I do have a minor complaint that the mysteries revealed by the timeloop tend to be very Deus-Ex Machina'ish and impossible to discover 'organically'. But the game is still a strong recommendation.

I started playing Kingsvein the latest game from the developer of Horizon's Gate. It has tactics'ish RPG gameplay similar to Horizon's Gate, but with a more traditional storyline rather than a giant open world. I'm enjoying it a lot so far and plan to keep playing it, though I said the same about Horizon's Gate and soon lost the thread on that. My biggest complaint with Kingsvein is that there are a huge variety of classes and skills you can use to build you character. But the unlock tree always starts with the same two classes and requires you to 'throw away' a lot of progress to access the more interesting builds.

Tonight I started playing Shipwrecked 64 a faux-retro platformer that is also supposedly haunted or something like that. The premise is compelling, but the game annoyed me immediately by having no way to invert the y-axis on the controls (Incidentally, it's now quite easy to fix this in a lot of games with Steam's controller config tool.) But even beyond this the controls are terrible, somehow the dialog control is the worst of all. Dialog slowly appears on the screen and then must be skipped manually, but skipping the dialog also cuts it off before all the words appear. I didn't get far enough to engage with the meaningful layers of the game, but I don't know if I will at this point. Also no "64" game would have this much FMV

Annoyed at the previous game, I also started Corn Kids 64. It's a much better rendition of a late 90s 3D platformer from the creator of Lyle in Cube Sector (At the time of writing the 60th best game of all time. ). It allows you to invert the y-axis, which is a good start, but you can't invert it without also inverting the x-axis, so Steam's help is required again. I've had a lot of fun running around the first area. Though the controls have all the same problems with cameras and imprecision that the actual games of the time had, and seems to think this is a good thing for some reason. I think I will power through this one though.

I also played a bunch of old DOS games from my childhood to remind myself of them. None of them are worth mentioning though.

One exception though, is that I actually played NIOSA (which I have mentioned before after discovering it from an excellent Timberwolf Video). The game is a silly joke where you play as a visitor to NIOSA, a street festival in San Antonio, and try various foods, or get drunk, or lose your wallet. The gameplay is sort of a hybrid between Sierra AGI adventure games and weirdly specific job simulation games. There's very little depth to the game, but there is surprising amount of stuff in the game, and a lot of mechanical complexity to what is there (You start the game with $25. But you need tickets to buy food. You buy tickets with money. But you'll need to keep some money to pay fines for pissing yourself or buy bandages when a mariachi band tramples you.) It feels a bit like walking around in the world of Leisure Larry 1 without the main narrative, but with the bad jokes. I'm not sure which game's casual racism has aged more poorly though.

JANUARY GAME OF THE MONTH

Swollen to Bursting Until I am Disappearing on Purpose

It's really good. Equal parts compelling, mysterious and unsettling. I don't think any game I've played this year has stuck in my brain so effectively.

All Games Played

• MC Eternal: Good
• Bombe: GREAT (Notable)
• In Stars and Time: GREAT (Notable)
• Kingsvein: Great
• Shipwrecked 64: Disappointing
• Corn Kidz 64: Good
• NIOSA: OK

More travel and family commitments this week, and I've been working on a project and rereading House of Leaves in my spare time. But I've still played a fair few games. Still a lot of dicking around on the MC Eternal server too.

I've caught the Bombe bug like many here. It's a game with thousands of hexcells/minesweeper puzzles and it automatically solves them according to rules (eg. if a region of 3 squares with two bombs overlaps with two squares of a region with one bomb then you know the remaining square in the first region is definitely a bomb) you've written, until it can't solve anymore, at which point you have to write new rules. Despite the weird premise, it's incredibly addictive and very satisfying to watch your solver fly through the puzzles. Recommended for Zachtronics fans.

Quasimorph is a promising roguelike (actual) with elements from the popular extraction shooter genre. It's a bit complex and cumbersome, but the mouse-driven interface makes it quite playable. There's still a few occasions where the game interprets "Click on the item to find out about it" as "Walk to the square the item is on and stand there in the open and get shot to death", but I look forward to playing some more.

I started The Night is Grey. A point-and-click adventure about a man lost in a forest who stumbles on a young girl abandoned in her home. The premise is interesting, but the games dialog (unvoiced) is interminably slow and the interface is terrible. Maybe the worst thing about it is that the game is letterboxed even in 16:9 and you control the mouse pointer across the entire IRL screen like normal, but the icon of the mouse will only travel up to the edge of the letterbox and stay there until you can work the mouse back onto screen via dead reckoning or something. I'll try to struggle through it a bit more.

Arthur and Susan - Almost Detectives is another point-and-click. it's a light-hearted twee mystery-solving adventure game, which I normally wouldn't be able to stand, but I'm giving this one a go. It also completely eschews any movement and most animation. Characters stand still while you click around, moving into cutscenes made of multiple static poses whenever anything happens. It's a bit jarring, but I suspect the art quality would be significantly lower without this. I haven't played much yet, but it's neither grabbed me nor repelled me so far.

Swollen to Bursting Until I am Disappearing on Purpose is maybe the best game I've played in 2024 so far. The protagonist of the game is a postal worker in the town of "Vomit", where a UFO has crash landed. It's an excellent RPG Maker game with simple 3D graphics and even simpler combat (if your level is greater than the enemy level, you win). But combat is rare, and the mysterious setting and storyline of the game is the main draw. There seems to be a decent Petscop influence on the game, and it's probably the best any actual game has come to capturing a similar vibe. It's also free, so go play it.

I've barely started Home Safety Hotline. But it has a great retro PC interface. So it's probably going to be good

All Games Played

• MC Eternal: Good
• Talented: OK
• Bombe: GREAT
• Swollen to Bursting Until I am Disappearing on Purpose: GREAT (Notable)
• Quasimorph: Good
• The Night is Grey: Disappointing
• Home Safety Hotline: Good
• Arthur and Susan - Almost Detectives: OK

I picked up the game SWOLLEN TO BURSTING UNTIL I AM DISAPPEARING ON PURPOSE (which is free) on Steam, after reading about it in Dominic Tarason's "Post a game with under 100 steam reviews" post on Twitter.

It's a superlatively weird and intriguing mystery game set in the town of "Vomit". The gameplay is roughly a mix between the early stages of Earthbound, an actual real videogame version of Petscop, and the uneasy sense of a failing facade you get from Lenna's Inception.

I'm looking forward to playing more of it.

This week I've been busy with work, travel and family commitments. But I've continued to play a lot on the MC Eternal. I worry I'm just doing this out of habit while in a low mood. But I'm still enjoying progressing my in game projects and seeing the work of others

The other large amount of time I spent this week was playing the new additions to Corru.Observer, which are incredible. This seems to be the first large amount of new content outside the REDACTED sections for a while, which brings back a lot of the surreal quality of the early game.

All Games Played

• MC Eternal: Good
• Talented: OK
• Vampire Survivors: GREAT
• Corru Observer: GREAT (Notable)
• Swollen To Bursting Until I am Disappearing on Purpose: Good