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[Iduno]

At its base, you're in a large siberian area in which have to survive temperature and hunger like in a simple survival game, you'll have to hunt, making fire, collect items, craft more stuff, level up your Lara etc... until you collect a specific amount of artifacts and escape the area, of course there are also enemies and various other dangers.
All the while time is moving on through day and night

That does sound good.

[Robsoie]

If you're wanting to buy something on gog today, it seems they have some problems, be sure to read this to avoid getting into the same situation until they fix whatever is going on :
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/been_charged_twice_and_still_dont_have_my_games/page1

[Aoi]

Brotato... another early entry into horde survival (a la Vampire Survivors) available on Steam via free demo (no release yet), though this one feels like it's from the golden age of Flash gaming. You're basically a spider-potato, running around on two legs and (up to) six weapons, a pile of equipment, and trying to survive ten waves of death. Artistically, has a BoI vibe to it, without the 'gross' part of it. Short runs (a winning game is ~15min), fast play, and some interesting ideas.

Frankly, my favorite entry of the ~10 horde survival games I tried last night.

Backpack Hero... another pre-release/Steam demo, except this like Luck Be a Landlord: The RPG. Effectively, you've got a Tetris-style inventory, and you're pulling from there to attack, use items, block, etc. The twist here is that your item positioning greatly impacts the effectiveness of an item. Boots benefit from having extra inventory slots above them; helmets must be in the top row, heavy items will drop to the bottom of your bag, etc. A more dramatic example? Cleavers are fairly weak, 1x1 weapons... but there are two rarer variations-- 'When used, use the adjacent above cleaver.' and 'When used, use all adjacent diagonal cleavers.'

[JWNoctis]

Last Call BBS 1.0 is out. Supposedly the very last game from Zachtronics.

It's basically a collection of eight different puzzle and programming games, some of which are visibly direct descendents of their early browser demos, and two of them are (again!) variations of solitaire. There's even a surprisingly immersive modeling sim in delicious 2D 8-bit colour pixels.

The polish is as always incredible, despite an installer size barely larger than that of TIS-100.

EDIT: Of course, most of them are also molar-breaking hard, and loading games one by one at dial-up speed brings back fond memories.

[Rolan7]

Oh no, Zachtronics!  They've made so much good stuff.  Sometimes I still prefer the Codex of Alchemical Engineering (Flash, also there's a sequel/expansion) to SpaceChem.  Silicon Foundry is another freebie on their site, exe download, which is an early take at balancing cost and space efficiencies while making neat devices like MP3 players and modems.

Lots of other gems, plus their polished steam releases.

[Egan_BW]

Very good games which are for people smarter than me. I played Mobius Front on the easy mode they had to add and I still never managed to finish it. v.v

[Stench Guzman]

Arc Rise Fantasia.

Playing it for the first time.  It's pretty good.

That is all.

[Rolan7]

The polish is as always incredible, despite an installer size barely larger than that of TIS-100.

Dang you weren't kidding, 157MB.  A rare sight these days.

[Great Order]

I started playing unpacking at the start of this year. It occupies an interesting position, I've played over 30 hours but I wouldn't recommend it without a heavy discount. You get about 3-4 hours of gameplay out of it before you're treading the exact same ground.

As for the game itself...

It's nice and relaxing, which is why I've played it so much. I play it when I just want to chill, there's something nice to me about retreading known ground. The actual gameplay's simple, you're unpacking. You need to put things into the right place. However what the game does is actually follow a character, and you learn more and more about their life as you go through the years from 1997 to 2018. The first three stages are a nice, chill introduction, and the story picks up properly in the fourth stage. You don't learn about their life through written stuff or anything like that, you learn about it simply by virtue of *what* you're unpacking and where, and the places you're unpacking. For example...

Spoiler: I'd recommend not looking at this if you ever plan to play (click to show/hide)

For example, in stage 4 your character moves into a new place. It's already filled with stuff that your character never owned, so you're moving into someone else's place. They've only got a double bed that you unpack your clothes and other bedroom items into, indicating it's their partner. Finally, their stuff is male-centric. The protagonist is moving in with her boyfriend.

Spoiler: Even bigger spoilers (click to show/hide)

And there's loads of indications about the next stage, where the protagonist is moving back into their childhood bedroom from the first stage after an apparently bad breakup.

The protagonist needs to squeeze in, there's no space anywhere. The boyfriend hasn't moved items around to help her fit in, so you have to do it yourself. Finally, the most damning bit, unlike every other stage after the second (university) stage, there's nowhere for you to hang up the protagonist's degree certificate (Aside from over the toilet, which is, unsurprisingly, an invalid location). You have to tuck it under the bed or in the wardrobe.

Amusingly, one person on the subreddit actually refused to play any further until it was explained that the next stage was a breakup, thinking this indicated the protagonist had found a boyfriend and was settling down and no longer bothered about her education. In reality, the certificate can be put back up on the wall in every stage after.

Overall, if you're willing to drop £15 for 3-4 hours of chill and wholesome fun, I'd advise it. If it sounds good but too expensive, I'd wait. If, like me, you can play the same relaxing game fifty times in a row without stuff changing, go and get it. The issue is I think most people fall into the second category, which is why I can't unequivocally recommend it.

[JWNoctis]

Very good games which are for people smarter than me. I played Mobius Front on the easy mode they had to add and I still never managed to finish it. v.v

That's one of their apparently not-as-well-received forays into the wargame genre. One reviewer described it as too hard for most, but not hardcore enough as regards its simplistic rules and mechanics for wargame grogs. The closest hardcore wargames with similar settings and style are the Flashpoint Campaigns series (not to be confused with the much-better-known Operation Flashpoint) and Armored Brigade, both Matrix/Slitherine stuff.

I've never got far in that, either. Infinifactory and Opus Magnum are a lot more accessible, at least in their main-story levels.

The polish is as always incredible, despite an installer size barely larger than that of TIS-100.

Dang you weren't kidding, 157MB.  A rare sight these days.

I know, right? All the assets are laid bare and not packed in any way as well, and close to half of that is the OGG audio soundtrack. I half expected MIDI at that size.

Of all its eight games, 20th Century Food Court is probably my favourite so far, though it's starting to give me the infuriating feelings of trying to make square pegs fit into a round hole with an inflatable hammer, barely into the third row.

[vjek]

A game called Noble Fates just caught my attention. It's a colony sim, coming to Steam EA December 14th.

All the usual colony sim stuff seems to be here. Gather resources, build housing and storage and tradeskill places, keep people happy and defend your home from invaders.
There does seem to be fairly deep unit personality, with individuals having various preferences and remembering things that have happened to them.

The major gimmick here is that you can leave the eagle-eye view, or take a third person view over your leader, manually controlling them to gather resources or fight off invaders.

Looks like it could be fun! Going to keep an eye on this one as it launches.

Been playing this one the past few days.  It's got ~16 Z Levels below the embark level, and it has the equivalent of breaching the HFS/Circus too.  Iron, Copper, Silver, Gold and Stone for mining.  Wood, seeds, plants, farming, make your own weapons, armor, sell to traders, all that.  As your Nobles become more prestigious, they want better stuff.  You can build out of wood or stone, but some enemies use fire arrows and catapults.  You decorate with cloth, wood, and stone.  There are work rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms, and the value of room quality.  Carpets can be added on top of flooring.  Drapes can be added on top of walls/doors/beds.
There are strong likes and dislikes of and for every entity in the world, and the storyline is pretty entertaining.
Of particular interest is the way they present the Z Levels:

When you take control of the leader, it's pretty much exactly how I would imagine a Dwarf walking around a dwarf fortress, in terms of first person perspective.  The art style is cell shaded/cartoony, and it fits the light hearted narrative.  Doors can be locked, but invader pathing is a bit different than DF.  Even so, you can setup things like shooting galleries, murder holes, and similar for defense.  You can, if desired, build everything on the surface, or simply build a stairway down, start digging, and build it all underground.

Also, there are hundreds of text files that comprise the configuration, and you can alter things like stack size, input to workbenches, outputs from workbenchs, inputs for item creation, outputs from salvage, opinion weights, racial and attraction parameters, how many seeds you get from crops, and how likely certain skills will produce Rare or Epic quality items.  It has weddings, feasts, and you can offer serfdom to conquered invaders, or accept petitions to join your kingdom/colony.  You can adjust how long it takes to create and/or learn things, and adjustment of things like XP per denizen is very straightforward in CE, if you're a fan of memory editing ala DFHack.

Anyway, I've found it very fun. 

[Cthulhu]

Last Call BBS 1.0 is out. Supposedly the very last game from Zachtronics.

It's basically a collection of eight different puzzle and programming games, some of which are visibly direct descendents of their early browser demos, and two of them are (again!) variations of solitaire. There's even a surprisingly immersive modeling sim in delicious 2D 8-bit colour pixels.

The polish is as always incredible, despite an installer size barely larger than that of TIS-100.

EDIT: Of course, most of them are also molar-breaking hard, and loading games one by one at dial-up speed brings back fond memories.

I love this game.  I like how the presentation ties into the ideas behind it, the game is an old computer you get from a family member who used to be big into computers and the internet, but is moving on from that life, and the "story" elements are a little bittersweet with that, which is exactly the meta story too.

The games are mostly great.  I'll list them with my thoughts.

Dungeons and Diagrams:  This one's kind of like sudoku with a fantasy theme.  You have a board with monsters and treasure chests, and have to place the walls of the dungeon according to a set of rules; monsters must be in a dead end, treasure chests must be in a 3x3 room, etc.  I honestly can't do this at all, and I consider myself pretty good at sudoku.  I beat the first puzzle and gave up on the second.  I can't fault the concept though, my brain just doesn't run that way.

Chipwizard Professional:  Integrated circuit design game, designed to look like a pirated CAD program. Build different circuits with metal traces and silicon. Very similar to Engineer of the People if you remember that from ye olden days. Not the hardest on the list, if you know how to build logic gates out of PNP and NPN you know mostly everything you need, but the playable space is extremely small and forces some non-linear thinking to build solutions that actually fit.

20th Century Food Court:  This is a weird one, and the most "modern zachtronics" of the games. Set in the distant future where people go to mall food courts as a historical tourist attraction. Build automated production lines for stuff like nachos, soft serve, and hot pockets. Despite being in the future all programming automation is done with giant rack-mounted logic controllers that you wire together with headphone cables.  This one's really fun, I like it a lot, and the aesthetic is very nice. Spoiler for one of the early puzzles, to give an idea of what I mean

Hack Match: I think this was in Exapunks? I didn't play that one.  A japanese arcade game where you swap falling blocks to match 4 colors, with a versus theme; matching more than 4 blocks in one go damages your opponent for each block.  Each enemy has an ability to turn blocks into garbage which is fixed by matching blocks next to them.  Not super hard at first but ramps up big time, the final enemy can just turn your entire field into garbage.

The Forbidden Path: Bizarre cellular automata puzzle game. You play a black magic pilgrim seeking immortality through forbidden flesh magic. There is very little english text and none of it tells you how to play.  I won't say anything else about it, experimenting and figuring it out yourself is half the fun and core to the Lovecraftian concept, the Great Work doesn't come with instructions.

Sawayama Solitaire: Just regular klondike solitaire, the kind that came with your computer.  Three card draw and no re-stacking the deck makes it reasonably challenging, it's easy to put yourself in an unwinnable position, but once you've drawn the whole deck the deck slot is a free cell for one card.  I dunno what else to say, it's solitaire.

Kabufuda Solitaire:  Like Freecell but with Japanese kabufuda cards. Match 4 and place them on an empty cell to remove them (and the cell) from play.  On higher difficulties you start with fewer free cells but unlock them when you remove a set from play.  Pretty damn hard, requires a lot of thinking ahead and very economical movement.

[Kagus]

Okay, so... It's bad enough that the true ending of the game can only be achieved by effectively sequence-breaking everything in order to skip one of the early bosses, meaning that you're almost certainly not going to manage to get it on your first run through. Okay, fine, NG+ it is then.

It's worse that the only in-game hints towards this being the case, and how to go about it, are ludicrously vague and unhelpful and under no reasonable circumstances would actually result in someone understanding what needs to be done. And making one mistake (not talking to a particular dark blob the first time you see it, or fighting the aforementioned boss) will permanently lock you out of that ending for the entirety of your run. So you've gotta be careful even in NG+, or else you'll have to plug through the entire game again in order to get another shot at it in NG+2.

It's downright insulting that even if you do everything perfectly and unlock the prerequisites for the true ending, the special boss won't spawn until the end of your NEXT playthrough.


Given that each NG+ cycle only lets you carry over your levels and skillpoints, and none of your weapons, equipment or consumables (including the finite hidden consumables that grant you +skillpoint when used, a resource otherwise only granted by defeating the bosses which are also naturally a finite resource. Better make sure to chow down before pushing the one button that ends the game!), you can't even zoom through the route faster than normal since you still have to run around to every nook and cranny getting your necessary items (not to mention your build) back.


Bah... Y'know, I really do like a lot of what Unworthy has to offer. But there are some truly hostile game development choices that were made along the way.

[Aoi]

Nadir... yet another deckbuilder in EA. I recommend ignoring the subtitle (and theme) as it's kind of... heavyhanded: "A Grimdark Deckbuilder". 

To the gameplay-- There's no energy system; it's straight up attack-and-response in 1v1 matches. Each card has a red/blue theme, with red generally being damage, and blue being generally support (surprise, surprise).

So what's major twist this offers? Every turn, there are three possible enemy counters, and they're red/blue themed as well... and you have to play one of your cards of a matching color to that counter. Once the turn resolves, the response flips over, with a different response and other color. Playing your cards require 1-3 responses of the appropriate color, so if you want to play a 3B card, if the current counters are BRB, then it's unusable. This means that you have to keep in mind what the enemy's six actions are, what your deck requires, and how they fit together.

Edit: In other news, opening a bold tag and closing an italics tag dun't werk.  -_-

[Akura]

Looked at my stats and saw it had been 1 year to the day since I last played Elite: Dangerous. Logged in, made a quick 1.6m credits on a quick trade run in my Type-6.

Also, some story stuff happened.

Spoiler: I haven't really followed the greater story, but... (click to show/hide)

Humanity seems to have pissed off the Thargoids, big time. Ah, whoops.