I finished off one biggish game, and spent a lot of time wondering what I'm going to play next.
I started Arranger thinking I might enjoy it, but it didn't click with me at all. It's a tile-based puzzle game where instead of moving, you slide the row/column of tiles you are standing on. My biggest issue is the lack of an undo/reset puzzle button. The game doesn't need it per se, but equally I don't want to follow each "oh! now i get it!" moment with a need to undo the mess I'm in.
I finished Dungeons of Hinterberg the ending and final levels were as underwhelming as I feared. Part of me is glad I finished it, the other part wishes I never started.
Pico Pico Dungeon! is a series of small roguelike puzzle scenarios. The game itself is not an actual roguelike, but there are a series of small dungeons/puzzles that are self-contained roguelikes themselves. The suggested order of the dungeons seem strange, small puzzles near the starting point with 5 or 6 enemies are strangely difficult, but big dungeons far away are relatively easy. I've enjoyed what I played, but overall it's quite hard.
Sapiens is an in-development building game, where you control a paleolithic tribe. I've had my eyes on it for a while, because the premise seems interesting. Upon playing, I realised I could not deal with the utterly bizarre interface. The map pans via keyboard controls like a top-down city builder, but moving the mouse to select items/tiles rotates the camera as if in an FPS. Insane.
REAL WEB LEGENDS: Carter's Quest is a action-adventure platform game. The developer has been unfortunately fucked around by Valve, so the release was slightly delayed. The game's humour seems fun, but there are a few deal-breaking bugs at the moment. I'll give it a go at a later date.
On a whim I played some Oxygen Not Included for the first time in a while. It's a game I rate highly, and I've enjoyed a lot in the past. That said, the game that interprets "Losing is fun" as "it's fun because you lose", rather than "developing the game in a manner so that fun can be had while losing." My experiences with the game. and things like this, has made me keenly aware of when a save will become permanently screwed within an hour or two. Most likely I'll put the game away for a few years again now.
The best game I've played this week is Psychroma. It's a narrative-focused horror game set in a queer share-house in some sort of future cybernetic dystopia. And it is filled with all manner of horror, gore, violence, psychadelia and weird mould. The game controls like a side-scroller, but it is an adventure game1 at its core. You spend much of your time finding out information in one location, then exploring and finding a place to use it elsewhere. This generally works extremely well, though my biggest critique is that there are at least two points in the game where progress is gated around utterly obtuse connections between two items/locations. If the game had a more traditional adventure game style, at least "Use Item with Item" would be on my mind at all times.
The narrative of Psychroma is extremely strong. You play as Haze, a resident of the house, who wakes up with no memory and tries to socially fumble their way through events, while also regaining their memory. Before a number of shocking twists occur (way too many of which are described on the Steam store page) and the main mystery unfolds. The story does get a bit muddled towards the end, but this comes with the territory for games that jump around time and perspective.
Psychroma's characters are even stronger. There is a large cast of characters, all with a lot of depth and backstory. I was invested in the future and history of all these characters, and was eager to see what happened to them next. A minor quibble on this is that there is an in game organisation that is kind of an antagonist. And it seems to have been focus-tested and honed to be the platonic ideal of "Entity that is bad for all the reasons transphobia/homophobia/racism/etc are. While simultaneously not having any explicit bigotry." While it achieves this goal quite chillingly, it does ring as less authentic than the rest of the game.
Overall though - Psychroma is incredible.
Lastly, REDACTED has too many Buttons.
July Game of the Month
Anthology of the Killer
Genuinely hilarious psychadelic zinester comedy about murder! What more could you want?
All Games Played
- Cosmic Collapse: Good
- Dungeons of Hinterberg: Good
- Arranger: OK
- Pico Pico Dungeon!: Good
- Sapiens: Disappointing
- REAL WEB LEGENDS - Carter's Quest: Unplayable (Controller issues)
- Oxygen Not Included: Good
- Psychroma: GREAT (Notable)
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At some point I will formally describe the "Should have been an adventure game" genre and its two flavours.
