Kakomando (2023) [7 min] by Alexandra Bloch, Clémence Collignon, Louis Augustine Lubega, Bertil Toby Swanekiaer and Delaly Guy Corneille Tchocodo | #France
Introducing Friction 0.9.6 Beta 1. This release includes several changes to the user interface and some additional new features. We are now in feature freeze, please report any regressions etc.
Cafe Monochrome, with a 2D illustration style that looks great & surprising when stepping in. The whole cafe is covered in white with black lines made to look like a sketch. 3D objects such as furniture & lamps are also flattened. Edges of objects are covered with lines that makes them blend into the illusion.
Pretty cool experience.
I'm not one for "New Year's resolutions", but I am one for overly ambitious projects.
For 2023, Project365 is "One New Game Per Day".
Given that I have 634 unplayed games in my Steam account and {mumble} unredeemed bundle Steam keys, there's a reason my unplayed collection is tagged "Pile of Shame".
I'll pin this to my profile, and give a brief summary here each day (or x, if I miss x days due to work or stuff).
I'll play 15-30 minutes of (at least) one new game I've never played before (or played less than 15 minutes of). I'll give every game at least 15 minutes, even if I hate every minute of it.
I'm also open to suggestions; if you reply to this thread with a game, I'll schedule it, or tell you what I thought of it.
One of the things that's come up is that I have a bunch of games that I've played once, and not touched again.
Braid is a 2D platformer, with hand-painted artwork and an interesting time-reverse game mechanic.
Much like most arcade racers now, you can press a button on the controller to reverse time to just before you died, and try again.
The artwork is gorgeous, as is the music. However, I won't be continuing to play.
Braid is a game that turns 15 next month, and it's a little bit janky on newer hardware. That's fine though, because devs are releasing an anniversary edition next month that has an upgraded engine and brought the original artist back to update the artwork for the higher resolutions of modern systems.
March 24, 2024 - Day 449 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 484
Game: Draw Slasher
Platform: Steam
Released: Oct 13, 2016
Installed: Dec 14, 2019
Unplayed: 1562d (4y3m10d)
Playtime: 15m
Draw Slasher is a 2D mobile port of what basically seems to be Fruit Ninja, but with zombie monkey pirates. I guess it's technically a hack and slash.
The translation from mobile to desktop is passable, until I got to a point on the first boss where I unexpectedly had to slash a particular pattern in a particular order, or else the boss' health bumped back up and I had to wear him down again.
Except the game didn't acknowledge two out of three slashes. Every. Single. Time.
It wasn't a great game to begin with, lacking the style of Fruit Ninja, but I just intentionally died to the boss at the 15 minute mark.
If Found... is a 2D hand-drawn visual novel, that's telling two seemingly disconnected stories.
One is the story of an astronaut, Cassiopeia, and her entry into a black hole.
The other is the story of Kasio, a young Irish trans woman in the 1990's, and the fallout of her coming out as trans.
The UI is unique in my experience; you only have an eraser. You move through the story, partly as presented in Kasio's journal, by erasing your way through Kasio's life, and experiencing different memories as you go.
Sci-fi? A trans woman's coming out story? It's very much right up my alley, thematically.
I just wish I enjoyed it. There's a story there I want to engage with, but I wonder if it's the autistic part of my brain that's just struggling to connect with the story of a early-20's trans woman in a queer share house in Dublin (I think?).
The metaphor inherent in the UI is lovely, but it starts to get frustrating after a while.
I appreciate the love that's gone into the story, but I just found myself struggling to remain engaged, and that's something I often experience with visual novel style games, so I found that particularly disappointing in this regard.
I wonder if it's the kind of game that I could play in a different context and would be more enjoyable (perhaps remote Steam on the iPad).
In the end, I would say that for me If Found... is:
Alex vs Bus (github.com)
A platform runner game for Android and PC in which Alex needs to catch the bus on time