T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve played a few game demos from steam’s next fest.
One of the two of any note was Sir, We Have an Orc Problem. Just an incremental tower defense, with only five levels in the demo, but I enjoyed it. There isn’t a grid to place towers on, instead you place them freely in the build zones and adjust the cone of fire to where you want. The enemies also don’t follow a set path, they behave more like individual physics objects being pulled towards the end zone.
The other game of note is Casualties: Unknown. A 2d exploration game with an extremely unforgiving injury system. The setting is that you’re playing as an anthropomorphic character whose species is treated as expendable fodder, and are tasked with descending into dangerous caves filled with trash, fauna, and depression.
I don’t think a game has ever made me feel so terrible for getting my character injured. The first run I did I fell off a cliff and got internal bleeding, broken bones, and a concussion. There’s less of a sense of I messed up in a video game, and more of a I’m going to die in a cave, and it’s not going to be quick. The injuries are truly unpleasant, your character will vomit blood (which is yellow), wince in pain, and get panic attacks.
It is an extremely cool game, but I cannot recommend it if you’re at all squeamish.
So how’s everyone else doing?
The Best of 2016
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
The Biggest Game Ever
How did this niche racing game make a gameworld so massive, and why is that a big deal?
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
TitleWhat’s Inside Skinner’s Box?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
Diablo III Retrospective
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
Got in another session of Suikoden V. And, again, the plot is the best and most detailed of the Suikoden games I’ve played, as in this short session we are told that the Dawn Rune was taken by rebels and still hasn’t been found, a mysterious character — probably Leknaat from the previous games — shows up to admonish us about not finding it, we discover that the three women in line for the throne all agreed to give it to Arshtat — the main character’s mother — and renounce their claims and refuse to get married and have children — which is certainly responsible for Sialeeds and Gizel breaking off their engagement, which left him free to pursue marriage with the young Lym which will cause so many issues in this game — because of a previous civil war that involved assassins and assassinations, and then we go to Raftfleet which is run by a former Admiral as a reward for helping to repel an invasion, and which will be important later. And all of that exposition is given naturally and covered a couple of hours of playtime, with a joke sequence of a bumbling father and daughter trying to pan for gold in a protected place and only not getting executed because of their connection to Raftfleet (the mother is the second in command there). We haven’t even hit the really BIG plot developments yet, but everything is setting up for them.
I have demo’d a few things.
Deadstick – Bush Pilot Simulator was fun, until I tried to land with mouse and keyboard. That was where I massively bounced off of it, because to get through the tutorial you need one non-destructive landing. And no. Still, if you like flight sims, give it a look!
Over The Hill is a nice little offroading sim. It’s fun. I might get the full one.
Motor Town is a less offroad-y, more career focused driving sim, with a million ways to level up a million different driving skills. It can be very medidative in the right mood, and very jarring when not.
Dopaminer I can see an appeal of, but the loop is very unappealing to me.
Pixel Washer, aka “Power Washing Simulator 2D”, looked fun for a minute until I couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to open a door. (It’s Very Hot here and I am not braining well xD)
The Iron Nest demo suffers heavily from “I’ve seen this level about five times on youtube”, but otherwise it delivers the exact experience I was expecting.
And aside from all that, I have experimented A Lot with a Raspberry Pi 3 – my goal was/is to replace the Steam Link with something that can also play youtube (without ads, as my TV is too old for the custom firmware allowing that) when the Big Machine is off, and after trying a bunch of browsers and a bunch of third-party-players I had to concede that this just will not work. I’ve ordered a Pi5 and will try again.
Yakuza Kiwami 3: Dark Tides: Not much to say about it. They hammer it in, that Mine is always alone, and Kanda isn’t really good for him.
Palworld: Obon boss has fallen, finally; 1m30s left on the clock. And the island south west is explored almost completely. One headhunt is missing, where we need to find a cave entrance somewhere. And one boss (Frostallion Noct) and the Tower of that island is waiting to be beaten. On the Summoning Bosses Blazemut Ryu got a timeout victory during its second phase.
Analog: Expeditions, Bomb Busters, Vale of Eternity (What an excellent game) , Castle Combo and Alli Gator. The later one is new, but nothing to recommend, it has the same tactical depth as Uno.
Attempting yet another Steel Soul run of Silksong. Been pretty consistent about getting to Act 2, but now instead of dying at the same boss all the time, I die to random arena mobs. I think my constant deaths would be more satisfying if the game kept track of how far I got afterwards, so my progress is not just entirely erased from memory.
I tried a Steel Soul run of Hollow Knight some time ago. Did it in one try. Damn, Silksong sure is more punishing.
I played just a smidge of Battle for Wesnoth again, and I watched some gaming content that almost made me feel like going back and brushing the dust off of Baldur’s Gate (the first), but still not a lot of gaming activity here.
My son, on the other hand, has been pretty gung-ho about They Bleed Pixels, and is slowly inching forward through the higher levels, with occasional forays into the challenge levels he’s unlocked. He says that the normal levels he’s going through are more-or-less comparable to Hollow Knight‘s Path of Pain, but it’s pretty clear that some of the challenge levels are “kaizo”-type difficulty spikes.