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.
Since I have a huge number of unplayed games, common sense would dictate that I don't add any more to the pile.
Sadly, it appears that I am lacking in the "common sense" department. A few days ago I caught a couple of minutes of a gameplay video of Boundary.
Boundary is a 6DOF multiplayer space-based tactical shooter. It looked like a lot of fun. It's in early access on Steam, so I added it to my wishlist.
Then Fanatical sent me an alert yesterday to advise me that it was on special for 10% off, and I had an outstanding 5% discount voucher, and FOMO minutes later, I was the proud owner of a copy of Boundary.
I played it today, and I'd love to say I was not disappointed. Unfortunately, I cannot say that.
There's very little in the way of laying out what each piece of kit does.
In-game found myself getting railed from across the other side of a space station one too many times (which is nowhere near as fun as it sounds).
It's got potential. When it's fun, it's really fun. It's just that it's mostly full of bots; when it's not, if your team is losing, there are no penalties to other players quitting out, so they do.
November 14, 2023 - Day 317 - RePlay Review
Total RePlays: 10
Game: Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 26, 2022
Library Date: Jun 20, 2021
Playtime: 59h20m
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is the first game in this month's Humble Choice bundle, and on the short list of games that I've completed - on July 24, 2022.
Also, you may note that the "Library Date" predates the "Release Date", and this is not a typo.
It was released in Early Access in 2022, and I did not once regret buying it.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a 6DOF first-person action-adventure sim, in which you play a blue collar space worker, who has signed up to work with Lynx Corporation as a ship breaker.
Living in space, it's your job to dismantle, sort, and destroy, recycle, or recover, all the parts of junked spaceships.
There's just a small catch. While you can make good money ship breaking, Lynx Corporation uses cloning technology, and when you sign up with them, they own you and your DNA until your pay out the billion credit debt you incurred in training.
Ship breaking is a dangerous job, with a lot of risks; for instance, one of the big ones is death.
But that's OK; if you die, Lynx will just reconstitute you, and you get to keep on working. The cost of the reconstitution is added to your debt, so no biggie, right?
The actual mechanics of breaking up the ship involve a ruggedised spacesuit, a tether tool, and a laser cutter.
The procedurally generated ships become increasingly complex, with new dangers involved as you level up.
Each ship floats in an orbiting salvage yard with a furnace & salvage bay on both the left and right hand sides of the yard, and a recovery barge below.
You use the laser cutter to break up the ship, and the tether tool to either send recoverable whole objects to the barge, recyclable materials to the salvage bay, and junk to the furnace.
You're paid on the basis of how much usable material you recover from each ship, as well as earning "Lynx Credits" that you can use to upgrade your tools and skills.
It's a surprising amount of fun cutting up a ship, and tethering all the recyclable parts together and firing them off to the salvage bay.
As long as you don't get too close, and get recovered too, because... yeah, I died that way. A few times.
The whole thing is set to a soundtrack that wouldn't be out of place in an episode of Firefly; in some ways, the whole game has a bit of that vibe.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker isn't just a game, it's a game with an excellent narrative that has lot to say about capitalism, corporate exploitation labour abuses, and unionism.
I genuinely love this game, and it's up there with Firewatch as one of my favourite games.
It's worth buying this month's bundle JUST for this game, because Hardspace: Shipbreaker is: