A lot of time finishing off my map for RAMP2024 this week. I'm quite happy with how it turned out, despite the MSPaint art.

I've played more of Grønland and have really enjoyed the vibe of world, and the slow burn of the mystery. I've resolved a few subplots, and they wrapped up in interesting ways. Unfortunately I also seem to have hit a complete stop in the plot. Either through a bug, or my own ignorance of somehthing completely obvious, I seem to be completely unable to progress the story any further. I've spent about an hour in game with zero progress and there aren't any guides, or many people playing who've played the game, so I guess this is on pause for now.

Still making slow progress in Leaf's Odyssey. I've explored the world as much as is possible for now, and seen a variety of puzzles. I'm at a point where I fire it up every now and again, and if I solve one puzzle that's satisfying enough. I've also added a new minor annoyance to the collection sadly. The game has a fast travel system, but for whatever reason, only one of the branches actually has fast travel points.

Epigraph is the latest game from Matthew Brown, the creator of the Hexcells series, release earlier this year. This one is one of his games that are built around a very limited number of very difficult puzzles (often just the one.) In this game, you are tasked with translating an unknown language on a handful of artefacts to open a puzzlebox, with just a handwritten letter from an associate for context. At first the game seems completely impenetrable and obtuse, but there is an exploitable piece of information to start from. I've made limited progress but I am enjoying the translation process a lot. What I am not enjoying is interacting with the interface, which is clunky and requires a lot of squinting at the (unzoomable) letters fixed in the corner of the screen. It's also very easy to type or erase something accidentally with an errant keystroke or mouse click, but similarly all deliberate inputs seem to require one mouseclick too many.

I grabbed a game called Beltmatic in the steam sale. It is a factory/production line game with the gimmick that all inputs and outputs in the system are just numbers, and the 'factories' are just mathemtical operations. It's a really unique take on the genre, and it's aided by the absence of any in-game financial pressure, turning the game into a purely logistic affair. On the negative side, it's either extremely slow or requires you to produce way too many of the same constructions to speed things up.

The Last Door - Season One is a faux-retro adventure game from 2014, from the studio that would later go on to make the *Blasphemous games. I played some of it at the time, but dropped it for some reason. It recently came up in a discussion, so I decided to start playing again as again. I've only played the first episode so far, which concerns a 19th century man visiting an old friend and finding his property deserted. I've enjoyed it so far, it creates a very spooky ambience with creative use of motion in the comically low resolution. And the use of 'modern' digital audio with this is surprisingly effective. But in general the fake retro aesthetics have aged quite poorly, more poorly than the much older games it is parodying. The game's worst sin is that it is a "grab every item for no reason" game, but it's also a game where you only know if an item can be picked up after you examin it at least once.

A quick mention too for The Natural Number Game which is more of a programming tutorial for the "Lean" mathematical proof language, that takes the form of a game where you slowly construct the natural numbers from axioms. I'll likely never have an actual practical use for this language, but I'm enjoying learning it...

June Game of the Month

Wooden Ocean

The game is not finished, has some major balancing issues. But it's also basically the only game of significant size I played all month. If you want to collapse an elaborate Gnostic'ish cosmology through monopolising the Netflix supply and precision use of radiation poisoning. Then this is the game for you.

All Games Played

• Leaf's Odyssey: Good
• Sunset Solitaire: Good
• Grønland: OK
• Epigraph: Good
• Beltmatic: Good
• The Last Door - Season One: Good
• The Natural Number Game: Good

I powered through a heavy work week, and then spent a bunch of time on my RAMP2024 submission, which is coming together nicely. I managed to find time for a few games too.

Sunset Solitaire is a stylish solitaire compilation made in Pico8, from the creator of Hellgineers. It has a handful of variations (none of which seem to by Klondike Solitaire) and deck patterns, with more to be unlocked. And with some chill music has a similar presentation to Zachtronics solitaires. Pico8 mouse support is a bit cumbersome, and some of the rules of the variants could be worded a lot better. But overall pretty good.

On a whim I fired up Farthest Frontier for the first time in a year or so. I loved the game last time I played it, but there have been many changes. However, I didn't get to any of them through a combination of; Forgetting a lot of the game over time. Some small, but significant changes to the games mechanics. 200% increase in the level of obnoxiousness of the tutorials, while somehow also avoiding any information that would be relevant to what I've forgotten. And most importantly, an apparent willingness of the game to start itself in the middle of wildlife chewing your villagers to death and ending the game. It's probably still a good game, but that was annoying.

The Powder Toy suddenly appeared on Steam (for free), so I played some of it. It's a physics sandbox where you paint various material particles onto the map and watch the physics and chemistry happen. The game is as great as it was ~20 years ago, though I'm not 10Grønland0% sure how to engage with scripted events in the publicly shared levels.

I played more Leaf's Odyssey on and off over the week. I've started to gel with it more, and have seemed to gain the ability to puzzle out the more byzantine puzzles. There are still a few annoying ones where the solution ends with "...then draw the rest of the owl." And I've run into more occasions where I needed to already know the new mechanic on the level its introduced. But I think it's a really great puzzle game if you don't want to waste your time with anything simple.

Grønland is a strange open-world mystery game, where you play as a sailor who wakes up in a mysterious ice-cave. From there you navigate an arctic environment, soon locating the nearby village of Godthåb, talking to locals (both Inuit and Danish), and attempting to piece together the story of how you got there. The pitch of the game frames the character as having pseudo-amnesia, but most of the responses have the protagonist aware of their identity and life events, even if the player is unaware.

I've really enjoyed Grønland from the 90 minutes or so that I've played. But I do have a minor issue with the pace of the game. I quite enjoy the slow-burn nature of the main plot, which is almost completely in the background for now, and only moved forward by occasional hidden diary pages. But the physical act of getting from one place to another takes a long time, and often when you get there you'll encounter a Zelda style "If only you had a SHARP BLADE to cut this bush that is blocking the entrance" barrier. This is a minor issue though in a game that has captured my imagination.

I also reached the "true" ending of Wooden Ocean, or at least whats there so far. I wrote about this elsewhere, but for a game that has an unfinished narrative the ending is truly satisfying, if a little mysterious. What I'm not a fan of, is the absurd difficulty spike in the very final stage of the final boss. I had got to this point with all my characters having ~900HP, and suddenly found myself taking 1000+HP damage in one turn. To make things worse, this comes well after a point of no return in the game. This can be rectified, either through a New Game+ loop. Or more easily through a little grinding, purchasing, and use of the talent tree. But these are presented in extremely non-obvious ways that could easily be missed by a player. Otherwise... It's one of my favourite games this year.

All Games Played

• Wooden Ocean: GREAT (Notable)
• Leaf's Odyssey: Good
• Sunset Solitaire: Good
• The Powder Toy: GREAT
• Farthest Frontier: Good
• Grønland: GREAT

I'm finally as healthy as I'm going to get. This week I again spent a lot of spare time working on my RAMP2024 submission, and playing more of Wooden Ocean.

I think I'm done with Ouros. The space limiting puzzles are not only annoying, but seem custom built to run into "this was built for phones" problems. The last thing I did with the game was attempt to reset the level, but fail because the control point for the curve was within 300 pixels of the reset button and the game assumed I was trying to click that.

It's a good thing that I discovered Leaf's Odyssey at this time. Which is a puzzle game that is excellent, but only half as good as it is impossibly difficult. The game is a turn-based tile-based puzzle game where you play as a ferret named' Leaf. The main objective in a room is to kill all the enemies in a room without dying, and in a way that still allows you to reach the exit. Those familiar with the DROD games will immediately see the appeal of this game. The enemies' all follow simple behaviour rules, and you have a handy journal (that the game unfortunately doesn't do a good job of immediately highlighting) that describes each of these rules when they are first observed. After a few tutorial screens, the game immediately jumps to a difficulty that would be a late game challenge in most games.

If I had to nitpick about Leaf's Odyssey, and I do, I find that a lot of the puzzles are a bit "fragile" and teeter right on the edge of being annoying and/or "some bullshit." A few puzzles have required me to know an enemy behaviour rule on the very first screen it's used (ie. not in the journal.) Fortunately so far these have been just intuitive enough not to cause an issue. Additionally, it's quite common for a puzzle to have something like 50-100 steps and the majority of the puzzle to be in finding the single exact solution in the millions of permutations of a dozen or so steps in the middle. The game has an undo button, which is very appreciated, but until you've solved a puzzle there's no real indicator if you need to rewind 5 steps or go for a full reset. Still, these are relatively minor issues that have a lot to do with how I played the game. If you want a rock hard puzzle game that demands your full focus, then the game is top class.

I've discovered why a some of the side-quests in Wooden Ocean were unusually deep. Because I "finished" the game, and shortly after discovered that there are actually two different main narrative paths, with their own ending. The game has a New Game+ mode, but doesn't seem to be the sort of game where there are narrative reasons to loop (it doesn't save the game after finishing,) so I just reloaded my last save and started back on the second path again. That said, there's still a lot of material outside of these two quests, and I had unlocked about 0.01% of the tech tree when I "finished".

I didn't have much time for Steam Nextfest demos but I checked a few out:

Divine Frequency is a spooky fps with a very aggressive VHS filter made with the GZDoom engine. I didn't play much, but it had a very dark atmosphere. It seems superficially similar to Silent Hill 4: The Room, in that there is a room, and you go to fucked up places from there. The first room of the game is entirely dependent on you knowing one of many random floating things is in fact the "interact with this object" symbol.

Scramble: Battle of Britain is a 3d WW2 dogfighting game with the novel approach that it is turn based. It gives a good aesthetic impression of a usable control interface in screenshots. But playing it is a massive challenge given some crazy control choices, and the ability to pan the camera or make control points but NOT BOTH. I could tell it gave a very clear explanation of how my inputs would change the plane's flight if I rotated the camera at just the right angle and squinted at the corner of the screen.

Goblin Cleanup is a co-operative game about being a goblin maid cleaning up the mess of destroyed adventurers in a dark dungeon. It's neat, but the single player mode (which I played) seems ill advised given it makes the tutorial area take half an hour without other players. Also has the most elaborate facade of a control rebinding screen without having the option to change any of them

Elation For The Wonder Box 6000 is a fucking weird game about some insane claymation creature arguing with people about his favourite game "Elation For The Wonder Box 6000" on the internet and then being told to go outside. Seemed fascinating, but I found it impossible to play without an invert-Y axis option for mouselook. I attempted to struggle on for 5-10 minutes after discovering this, which is extremely high praise.

All Games Played

• Wooden Ocean: GREAT (Notable)
• Ouros: Good
• Leaf's Odyssey: Good
• Divine Frequency (Demo): Good
• Scramble - Battle of Britain (Demo): OK
• Goblin Cleanup (Demo): Good
• Elation for the Wonder Box 6000: UNPLAYABLE

I mentioned this before as the DROD-inspired puzzler that has me hooked. Like all my favourite puzzle games, this one is very "few puzzles, but they all ask you to intuit something important about the mechanics". Every single room is a headscratcher. Love it, love it.