Dan Plays Games 10

I really need to make an index for these. 

 

Forward Escape the Fold

Previous game of the Pyrene devs. A simple roguelite where you have a 3-wide column of cards laid out in each level full of monsters / items / potions / etc, but you can only ever move forward (straight or diagonal). The art is nice, but doesn’t feel like it has a particularly strong identity beyond a light dusting of vibes (Pyrene does much better in this regard.). While enjoyable to play for a few rounds, the gameplay loop and lightweight progression system didn't really grip me.

Asbury Pines

Idle game with a generations-spanning murder mystery plot at the center. I normally stay away from idle games because they play like hell with my ADHD (this one did too, but it seems some later patches have addressed this), but the narrative focus on this one got me to check it out and I was pleased with the experience. Being able to follow characters for decades and then having to spend time with them because of the nature of the idle elements was really effective at getting me attached to the cast. I wanted to see things turn out well, but then so-and-so dies for stupid or tragic or avoidable reasons and time keeps on going. I think the final arc and ending were a bit weak, but I was still invested even then. It does an extremely good job of letting the time scales sink in, where you will find yourself thinking of characters you liked generations or even centuries ago but never really in a way where you resent their absence, since the current batch of characters give you equal insight into the trials and tribulations of their lives.

Also, despite being an idle game murder mystery, there are Civ-style tech trees for civic, religious, and scientific advancement, and religion unlock #2 is "giant ground sloth cult" - a thing that has no concrete archaeological evidence for its existence (to my knowledge), but has non-zero odds of having existed. Do with that what you will.

Dungeon Encounters

A sort of minimum-viable dungeoncrawler, stripped down to the absolute bare bones - I don’t think that’s a good thing.

There’s no real story outside of a couple short paragraphs for each party member; your characters’ only stats are HP and equipment points; Special abilities are unlocked and applied on the party level, so character builds or specializations don’t really exist; there are no battle items and none plus one (max health boost) outside of fights; the only variables in weapons or magic are 1-target vs multi-target, set damage vs random damage, and if it can hit flying enemies or not; the dungeon has basically no interactivity besides some hidden treasures; equipment drops from enemies are extremely rare; there is no auto-explore function despite the dungeon being mostly empty, featureless hallways; there is supposedly some way to speed up the battles but I was unable to find it; the default keyboard controls are never-before-witnessed levels of intuitive.

The end result of the experiment is primarily tedium. There are threats that can wipe you easily in ways that seem unfair compared to other games (a thief enemy can put you into massive debt if you get hit), but there are likewise easy ways to completely negate those threats (I got a passive skill early on that just gives my party total immunity to poison). There are multiple enemy abilities that can just remove a character from your party if they hit, and you’re stuck on a tedious journey to get them back or find a replacement. Movement abilities plus being able to identify what monsters are in an encounter before the fight starts mean that by the time you hit dungeon level 25 you can avoid basically all the tough fights if you want to. If you party wipe, you have to start with level 1 characters and can’t even use the good loot you’ve unlocked and have to grind out THE ENTIRE THING AGAIN. 

The best quality it possesses is, in some moments, you can play it on autopilot and not think about it, and if that’s what you’re after I’m certain there are much better games to scratch the itch.

Nuclear Throne

Picked it back up after many years away, thanks to the recent 10 year anniversary patch. I’m still absolutely terrible at the game - like truly, remarkably dogshit at it - but it's still got the sauce. I’d call it one of the perfect games; nothing needs added, nothing needs removed. The machine gun thumps like a bass drum and it just feels good to play.

Ye Guild Clerk

Short freebie, you play as a clerk for an adventuring guild, giving people missions and seeing how that works out for them. Takes maybe half an hour to complete, though all the adventurers can end the game positive or negative with you so there’s a replay in there if you dig it. I can easily imagine an expanded version.

Neon White

GOTTA. GO. FAST. 

It doesn’t matter one bit if you don’t care about the mid/late-aughts Deviantart-core narrative or are super-duper competitive with the speedrunning element: there’s a skip button and the progression gates are easily overcome. There are character-based bonus levels you can unlock but again, skip button means you can get right to the challenges if you don't care about the characters.

The difficulty of normal levels is self-imposed (how fast do you want to get?), which I think is an extremely good way of designing things. Also the soundtrack slaps.

Stackflow

Balatro, if it was Tetris. Still in early access but even with the small amount of content (and no metaprogression) I found myself playing and enjoying quite a bit. Tetris is Tetris and it’s difficult to go wrong with Tetris, and even with the limited number of special blocks and perks in the game at time of writing, it's still enough to keep me engaged for a solid amount of time. I do think it needs a good chunk more content to hang on for the long haul vs the many options for standard Tetris out there, though. The most recent update (0.10) came out between when I started and finished this review; while not particularly big, it is a step in the right direction. 

 

Monsters are Coming!: Rock and Road

I can’t really recommend this one, though I am sad to say it. It’s a perfectly servicable, functional game. You have a city that moves along a path at a set rate, you move your little guy around harvesting resources and fighting monsters, you expand your city, all that works on a moment to moment level.

The issue is that this is really all there is. There are unlocks, but none of the ones I have gotten have changed how I approached the game at all. The routes you can choose are differentiated by only a few variables and each run has a set-in-stone pacing due to the auto scrolling city. After you’ve done a handful of runs you've seen most of what the game has to offer.
 

 

Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop

A roguelite about being a four-eyed fox-headed cartoon man in a dumpy space station, fixing spaceships with only your in-universe manual to help you. I love this game's premise, I love its vibe, I love sitting down and rolling through some jobs. There's a fun sense of satisfaction of going from terribly confused to "oh I can do this module with no trouble at all." The game rewards player knowledge in the way that most TTRPGs can only dream of.

However: there are a handful of bullshit moments that yank me right out of the moment and set off the "it's time to take a break" notification. A certain amount of friction is to be expected, especially towards the end of a run, but these come as particularly jarring. 

• Reactor jobs can tank a run before you realize what the problem is (understandable and appropriate, so this isn't really a flaw, but it is a frustration point. You gotta remove that core NOW.)
• The faction endings introduce new and sometimes obtuse mechanics that don't always gel (Lawmakers in particular is absolutely miserable: you have to babysit a battlestation and keep the ammo topped off, but in order to move between the gun and the dispenser you have to take a single-person elevator that is also being used by the other crewmembers who are, in my unscientific opinion, the slowest motherfuckers to ever exist in this universe of base matter.
• The meteor shower hazard just makes ships catch on fire constantly (there's no buffer period, so a fire can start literally as soon as you finish putting out the last one) and can be completely negated with a cheap permanent upgrade (like you can probably afford it after your first one or two runs and then never have to deal with meteors again, which begs the question of why they are in the game.)

A more general issue is that the game has no manual save, and only autosaves after every day of work (normally three ships) - depending on how good you are and how complex the fix-it jobs are, you're looking at a substantial chunk of time that you have to devote to the game in one go - it's not a pick up and play a round while you're on break kind of game. I understand why (cuts down on save scumming), but it is still frustrating and leads me to pass it over in favor of other games.

Still, all that aside, it's a weird little game that provides a unique experience and I'd recommend it to anyone who thinks the concept sounds fun, because even with all the frustrations listed above it is fun. I've considered printing out a hard copy of the manual, just for giggles. Maybe as Mothership prop. No idea how you'd adapt the puzzles to Mothership, but....actually hold on to that.

(Speaking of Mothership - surprisingly relevant content despite the aesthetic. The cyborg hivemind is made of desperate people trying to escape debt, you're a "devotee" instead of an employee, there's an interplanetary treasure-hunting faction that's really just an MLM scheme sifting through garbage, stuff like that. It's good!) 

**

The Gameable Content Bonus 

Uncle Chop's ship module repair for tabletop

Spitballing here, gonna get loosey goosey for a moment. You give the players a print-out or pdf of the Uncle Chop's manual (or your own bespoke equivalent). Players do their thing until they need to fix a ship module. You tell them the symptoms / problem. Players then have to either find, replace, or build replacement parts to solve the puzzle. 

**

Ground Sloth Worship in Pleistocene North America (Corvee, Alan; 1992)

For Players: A brief text outlining Corvee's hypothesis that large swathes of the Midwest and Appalachia were dominated by the worship of giant ground sloths at the end of the Ice Age. While surprisingly restrained in tone for a text of this subject matter, even cursory examination of other sources reveals that Corvee's conclusions are not supported at all by mainstream archaeology.

For Handlers: The book is intended to plant the idea in the players' minds before revealing related evidence, rather than containing any direct Mythos material. It would work as a good trailhead or supplemental evidence for a plot involving Tsathoggua (sloth-god), the Voormis (sloth people), Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborean material (reframed as the ice-age Americas, with "Hyperborea" coming from Greek mis-interpretation of the Book of Eibon), the K'n-Yani (who worship Tsathoggua and live under the Americas) and the assorted New-Age lore of Mount Shasta (Mount Voormithadreth, anyone?). Practically writes itself.