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[Aoi]

Yall remember Tremors, or were you not born yet?

I admit, I even watched (and liked) the Tremors TV series...

But I find the game concept fantastic-- plays somewhere between survival and twinstick, and you're constantly on the move to keep ahead of whatever deadly MacGuffin is on your tail. Stick around and loot a few more buildings, or grab the low hanging fruit and move on? Tack on multiplayer, and-- HEY! COME BACK!-- maybe hop a bike and catch up with your friendasshole who forgot that you were carrying the gas cans when he drove off.

Different monsters act differently-- the graboids are a fast constant threat, never more than a few minutes behind you, even if you drive off in a truck, but can be fended off for short times with small arms; zombies basically sweep the map in a solid wave and destroy everything behind them, but are easy to deal with individually... n; War of the Worlds aliens radiate out from cities and are easy to avoid and hide from, but nigh unbeatable if they get their eye on you.

...This rolled deep into that 'games that should exist' or whatever it's called thread, so I'll just shut up here.

[Aoi]

Stoneshard. It's basically a rather pretty roguelike with a solid chunk of potential... and some godawful annoying mechanics in the name of realism. Hopefully they'll tone it down as it's in EA, but I kind of doubt it. There's a free demo (labelled Prologue) on Steam. (And as a heads up-- if you're playing the full version, you don't keep anything from the prologue, so feel free to faff about.)

So lets start with the good: Pretty nice graphics; vaguely reminds me of Battle Brothers. More detailed health management than a typical roguelike; you've got a paper doll body with limbs that can bleed, get injured, etc. Injuries decrease your max hp, and unmaintained injuries will accrue pain, which decreases morale and has various other negative effects, including eventually making you pass out (and straight up dying from being killed while unconscious... hello, URW). Skills a few hours in are fairly interesting, though they're all pretty stock for people familiar with the genre. Character growth is more focused on gear/skills than stats. You're not a hero, but a regular combatant... getting caught 2v1 is pretty much a death sentence. Combat against bosses (...all one I've encountered) is fairly interesting-- involves a lot of positioning, tile-based dodging, and a grasp of their attack patterns (which you can get info on with rclick). Corpses left on the ground will get birds picking at them, which a nice visual touch.

And the bad... which is kind of extensive. Some are fixable though:
You save at the inn... which costs in-game money. (A minor amount, but still.) There appears to be no 'suspend' option.
There's no fast travel. Which wouldn't be a problem, but see above. Corollary: Movement over long distances feels kind of slow.
Oh, and there's no minimap or automatic mapping, but you do get a rough 'sector' map when you start the game. Which wouldn't be a problem, except after 30 minutes slogging through a dungeon, you might forget where you are relative to your savepointinn and... see above.
...Yeah, the save system is kind of infuriating and leads to a lot of irritations.
The game graciously shows what containers you've looked at when you mouseover them. Which is good, because there's like eleventy-billion empty cupboards, shelves, racks, etc. Except 90% of them are empty in the actual game. (Unlike the tutorial/prologue, which has stuff in about half of them.) Oh, and item highlight doesn't show them. There's also a ton of 99% empty crates and barrels, though these actually obstruct movement, so there's tactical value.
You don't see quest deadlines until after you accept them.
What appears to be total lack of autopickup. Please, pick up the dropped gold. And arrows, if I already have an incomplete stack in my inventory. (Assuming no hostiles around.) And while we're at it, automerge items with limited charges. And coinpurses.

And the awkward... mostly things that are to taste:
Tetris inventory! Especially if you're an archer/melee hybrid, because that takes a ton of space. Pure spellcasters have it easy.
Lots of trash loot. If you're dedicated, I guess you can pick up every junk sword and spend a few minutes running back to town.
Not sure what to consider this, but it's kind of silly: I walked out of town and found myself standing at the center of a triangle with three wolves. Nope'd it right across the map boundary and reentered elsewhere. Where I was basically face to face with bandits. So I entered between the bandits and wolves, aggroed them towards me in the middle, hopped across the boundary, walked a bit, crossed back in, and picked off both groups while they were fighting each other.
Detect Traps is a freebie skill you get at the start that costs nothing other than a turn to use and is incredibly useful. Given it costs nothing to use, you should be spamming it whenever there's no hostiles around. ...Why do we have to do that manually?

I mean, the gameplay itself isn't shabby. But there's a ton of annoying stuff. Like it's easy to accidentally target an open door instead of a hostile unit standing in the doorway. Or if you use mouse to move (no numpad and trying to go diagonally), you'll end up trying to pick stuff up in the tile first. And you can't hold items in your hand from the floor-- trying to figure out if that's a 1x2, 1x3 2x2, etc. item when dealing with a full inventory? Can't see it that way.

Edit: Oh, and I evidently have an extra 15% off coupon on Steam for owning DD, if anybody wants it.

[nenjin]

So where does that leave your overall recommendation? I've had the prologue on my wishlist for a while but the comments always made me go yyyeeaaaaahhhhh maybe later.

[Aoi]

So where does that leave your overall recommendation? I've had the prologue on my wishlist for a while but the comments always made me go yyyeeaaaaahhhhh maybe later.

On a 4-point scale, I'd probably drop it in at a 2: Tentative negative. (Yes, it's a weird scale, but I do it with cause.)

I don't actively regret playing around with it, there are certainly lots of worse options, and there are small bits and pieces that are quite well done... but the experience as a whole kind of... not good. But evidently it's just made it to EA, after like a year and a half of glacial development, so give it another two years and it might be something worthwhile.

Unfortunately, it seems that the saves are an engine limitation thing, and people are defending the save mechanism by basically saying, "Well, at worst, you're 40 minutes away from a save point, so it's not like you're HOURS away." (...Yeah.)

Take the combat system, toss it on top of something else (I inclined to say Dungeonmans.) and you end up with pretty solid gameplay.

Oh, and you can't drag items to the quickbar. Just skills.

[Kagus]

The Prologue's a free download, try it out to see if the general mechanics are to your liking. A run doesn't take particularly long, there are only like 3 floors in the actual dungeon area.

That said, I have heard that the cohesion the game has during that prologue dungeon more or less falls apart in the full-version open world. And the survival aspects get even more tedious, which is a shame because there was some real potential there if they'd put some more weight on that side of things rather than the casual hack-and-slash it mostly is otherwise.


Also I have no idea why the saving is an engine limitation thing, considering the prologue can be interrupted and recovered at your specific point... But hey, there's a lot of stuff I don't know!

[scriver]

Well I tried the Prologue and I liked it, so I bought it and I like it, but reports here have been correct on a few things: item drops lessen drastically in the real game, as well as item progression (which I guess is because the Prologue is a demo compounded into a much shorter game period), and notably this also regards healing items that in the Prologue was so common I was throwing stuff away but in the actual game is next to nowhere to be found. You can buy stuff, and it's not too expensive so you'll still be in the black, but the demo really gives you the wrong impression there. Do spend starting money on splints, it's extremely easy to end up in an unstoppable regression to death right after leaving the village if you get an injury. If you haven't got a splint there's basically nothing you can do at that point.

I agree that the save system is annoying too. I get the point of it but it's incredibly annoying to have to start over back in town every time you die -- I wish they'd at least had made the game autosave when you enter a dungeon so you'd be able to load at the start/outside of that.

Item juggling is a pain. Being able to inspect/compare items that are on the ground to the ones in your inventory would be a big plus. Aoi was wrong about arrows not autostacking, though, they do -- but if you've got more than one stack of arrows they default to the one that isn't equipped. Which is an annoying pain in the butt if you're playing the ranger dude.

[Aoi]

Arrows autopickuped for you? There must be some additional condition for that because mine definitely weren't... I wasn't using a bow though, just had an accidental partial stack in my inventory when picking junk up... I don't think it's as smart as DCSS about stuff like that though. (They do, however, autostack.)

You'll also want bandages; bleeding is less common, but can fairly readily lead to bad situations too... Salves, on the other hand, I found to be an unnecessary luxury. Just pack extra food and rest.

[scriver]

No, I meant autostack, not autopickup. I guess I remembered what you wrote wrong!

[Aoi]

Admittedly, I think I was complaining about both in fairly close proximity; items with charges (like the salve) don't autostack, even though the charges are functionally identical and you can merge partially charged items (So... why bother with charges? Just make them short stacks.), and other items seem to have no practical use, other than flavor, like coin purses that you have to pick up and empty into your own purse. (Or maybe your inventory, then purse.) Considering I've only dropped them off bosses so far, I think the idea is that it's the equivalent of a treasure chest, but... ehhhh.

[Aoi]

Legioncraft... It's basically a puzzle game, wrapped in the trappings of an RPG. It has an interesting core and I could picture it doing okay on mobile. The translation, as is, is kind of... indecipherable. Thankfully, the mechanics aren't totally obtuse or require upwards of an hour to see each time. (...Damn you, Chrono Ark.) Or necessary, in a lot of cases. (Save the trouble and skip the narrator and flavor text.(

So you've got your unit, a 1x2, running around on a fairly narrow Hugex10 grid. You can use the resources you have as either buffs, or to recruit units on the grid, which have their own respective stats, skills, 'runes', and position on the grid. You move around on that grid and initiate autocombat by bumping into other units on the grid, with your now not-1x2 blobtacular army.

However, only units that touch the enemy attack... unless they've got the ranged rune. Each 1x1 can hold up to 4 copies of one type of rune, and blocks of the same rune that are adjacent to other units combine totals.* A unit can share one of its runes with an adjacent unit if the receiver's slot is empty... This basically means you either want small units so you can more selectively choose what you want to combat, or large units, since you can stack a ton of buffs onto them.

One thing that's kind of awkward is that the more you heal in a single battle, the less effective it becomes. And, since the bosses are one long battle, it basically meant that against the last boss, I was smashing his face in for the first 80% of the battle until my heal-based defenses caved in and everything fell apart. -_-

Spoiler: "*" (click to show/hide)

Say you've got two units, a 2x1 and a 1x1 next to each other with the same mods: (##_#)(##)
They each have 5#. The 2x1 does not have a 5+5 bonus.

[Aoi]

Does anyone know anything about The Pedestrian?

It looks like a platformer where you can move parts of the game around to solve puzzles. It looks interesting, but I have no idea about how difficult or long it might be.

There's a demo on Steam or at itch.io... I didn't find anything in the demo to be remotely confusing, though they did say it's mostly tutorial so it's fairly simple.

It comes across as Framed meets platformer, but that's a disservice to Framed (which is a fantastic puzzler, might I add). You can't really rearrange the 'rooms' after you've started, so each screen is basically two bits: Figure out how the rooms are connected, then do a platforming segment. Pretty much all the screens in the demo had only one solution (the section introducing the rearranging has two options... there may have been another tutorial that could be done differently, but I don't think any of the real puzzles could), which was kind of disappointing. Some of the puzzles in the video for the full game look more interesting... but, given what I've seen in the demo, I'm definitely not touching it for full price... maybe in a bundle in a few months.

Edit: Fixed the itch.io link, courtesy of n9103; thanks!

[n9103]

itch.io link

Fixed that link for you.
I do disagree with your conclusions, but that's as viewer watching the GOGcom twitch stream.

[Aoi]

itch.io link

Fixed that link for you.
I do disagree with your conclusions, but that's as viewer watching the GOGcom twitch stream.

Fixed the link, thanks... you need quotes for spoiler titles and not for URLs, whoops. -_-

It probably picks up later on in the main game, seeing as the puzzles in the trailer looked a lot more dynamic, but the demo (itch.io version) never got there, unfortunately. It looks slick and it's definitely not bad, but I'd hold out for at least a 25% off sale (and just for funsies, I'll guess there'll be one within the next four months... anybody want to bet against? =D), and there'll probably be more.

I admit, I'm also not the best for commentary on platformer-esques as I've played maaaaybe 20 of them since the SNES era, of which they're mostly Kirby and Castlevania. And, on the puzzle side of things, I spent more time trying to wrangle the connections into position with my touchpad than trying to solve them. Once I grasped the basic rules to start from, everything else fell into place.

[Mephisto]

Yall have probably at least heard of CubeWorld. Thought I'd share another game that's somewhat similar. It's nowhere near prime time (authentication isn't a thing - pick a name and go; I'm pretty sure the build that I downloaded said nothing was persistent at the moment as well) but it's looking pretty good.

Veloren

How not-CubeWorld is it?

[Aoi]

Urtuk: The Desolation: Battle Brothers in a Darkest Dungeon wrapper.

It's good. Not sure about late-game play which tends to be less polished for stuff in EA, but it's a surprisingly solid experience so far.

Narratively, you're a victim of weird experiments, got broken out, and now you're roaming a kind of post-chthonic Mad Max wasteland looking for a cure for... whatever affliction you got from the experiments.

Mechanically speaking, you start off with a squad of three, which rapidly grows, which is good, since you're limited to six combatants. And death is easy. (Not that death in combat is inherently death-- you just sustain injury, and when you fall when injured, you permanently die. And medicine is pretty rare and valuable.) You're on a hex grid with height, obstruction, terrain, etc... all the stuff we come to expect from a reasonably detailed combat layer. Personally, I like using my tanky shield guy to bumrush people into walls to stunlock them, or a monk to fling people off cliffs into toothy pits of doom. My last battle featured a max of six player characters, 6 enemy units, and 4 friendly immobile NPCs. Who hit surprisingly hard for being emaciated slaves in boiling oil... they kept killstealing.

Some interesting features:
It costs a bit of resource, but you can basically rip out traits from enemies you defeat and equip them on yourself... my crossbowman, for example, recently acquired one that gives him the ability to fire 'through' friendlies at no risk. One of my frontliners heals for 40% when he kills somebody.
Perk get unlocked conditionally, and they get stronger the more the conditon's met-- the Strong vs X perks give an extra 10-50% damage, and an extra 10-50% chance to doubletap, and when maxed, it guarantees a crit. (And considering how many strong abilities trigger off of crits, that's a huge deal.)
Battlefield factions-- you'll occasionally run into combats with multiple sides (in addition to friendlies) who focus on each other if they're in range, which leads to some fun, easy, and chaotic battles... one of mine featured myself, two opposing forces, and a third hostile to everybody team.

You might end up with some BS fights though-- I walked into one map village combat map to find there was exactly one way into the main battlefield of the map for non-jumping (of which I have one class) meleers... against four ranged targets. Retreated immediately. There's a small cash penalty, but nothing else for that, at least.