Assessed Unoriginal

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

This week I played a lot MC Eternal on a friend's server. Minecraft is still a lot of fun in the right circumstances, and this mod (or collection of mods) adds a lot of new interesting things to the game. It's extremely rough around the edges though. It crashes a lot and literally takes 10-15 minutes to load. Some of the custom enemies also just kill you before you can work out what happened, or if anything happened.

I started playing Ugly, a puzzle platformer loosely in the style of Braid. It has fantastic art and a great gimmick themed around swapping with a ghostly clone that moves in opposite directions. The plot seems very good, but it has a nasty tendency to crash after every boss fight (which themselves are spectacular but not enjoyable).

I picked up Sunless Skies. It's an enjoyable take on the gameplay first game in the series, Sunless Seas. Except instead of piloting a ship around a haunted underground sea, you are driving a ship around haunted space. Very good writing, and the trading mechanics are compelling. The collision detection annoys me a bit.

Talented is a "roguelite" game where you attack enemies coming down lanes in the four cardinal directions. The main gimmick is an enormous pseudo-randomized talent tree for each run. It's a textbook example of the worst trends in so called roguelites (compared to the true roguelike.) It's impossible to win in the first run, and then the hyper-glimbus unlocks and then it becomess impossible to lose. The runs themself are fun and there's a decent variety of character powers and enemies, but as said previously many become immediately obsolete. It is in early access though, so I'm hopeful.

Grezzodue 2 is a Doom total conversion from Italy that claims "THE MOST EDGY, ULTRAVIOLENT AND BLASPHEMOUS ALL ITALIAN-FPS EVER IS RETURNED". It looks and plays like a bad late 90s Doom total conversion or early Megaman Romhack where the robot masters are all called "FUCKDICKCRAPMAN". I don't speak enough Italian to know if it's actually offensive or not, but I'm going to assume from the gratuitous nudity and gore that it is. Title theme is a banger, but the game is probably not really suitable for anyone tbh.

Gridroad an early access traffic management game where you build roads to get cars from a source to a destination. Has promise, but it's pretty short so far and the lane drawing rules are needlessly complex. 90% of the puzzle solving is dealing with the very boring and cumbersome traffic light system.

I had high hopes when I started Incarnation, a mouse-driven platformer. Where you start as an immortal floating god blob, but lose a power of your choice from an inverse talent-tree at the end of each level. Neat concept, but the game almost immediately throws mechanics not suitable to the mouse at you, and they've managed to somehow import horrible FPS ladders into a 2d game. There's a glitch where the aiming is slightly off too, which fucks everythong up. Despite the negativity in this paragraph, I'd like to give it another go because the concept is great and there seems to be more there.

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)

All Games Played

• MC Eternal: Good
• Ugly: Good
• Sunless Skies: Good
• Talented: OK
• Grezzodue 2: OK
• Side Pocket (SNES): Good
• Gridroad: Disappointing
• Incarnation: OK
• My Summer Car: OK