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.
July 31, 2023 - Day 212 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 231
Game: Möbius Front '83
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Nov 6, 2020
Library Date: July 31, 2022
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 30m
As I mentioned in my Opus Magnum review, I own most of the Zachtronics games. I went through the list, and there were four I don't own, and I recognised Möbius Front '83 as a key I had in my spreadsheet, so I installed it.
I read an interview with Zach Barth (not to be confused with Zach Braff) about ending Scrubs.
Oops... I mean ending Zachtronics. In it he mentioned that Zachtronics was known for a particular kind of game (correct), and that if he were to go back to development again, he'd want to explore a different genre of game.
Ah, there's the rub. I wish him all the best in his future endeavours, but everything about Opus Magnum that endeared the game to me is missing from Möbius Front '83.
It took me half an hour to complete the tutorial. I probably could have completed it faster had I not been exhausted, but it just felt like a grind.
Möbius Front '83 is a hextile turn-based strategy wargame. You've got infantry squads that can move only move one tile at a time, or shoot, but can move through forests and hide in them to ambush others, and can also load into a troop carrier to go further. In addition, when hiding, they can only be shot at by units in the next tile. Also, they have rocket launchers as well as rifles.
The troop carriers can go further, but appear to carry the a single rifle's worth of damage, and you lose a turn when it deploys the troops.
Tanks have guns and missiles (?), can move multiple tiles in a single turn, and then shoot in the same turn.
That about seems to kind of be it. I was just bored by the end of the tutorial.
After finishing a NewPlay, but before writing a review, I'll read one or two other reviews about the game. Not to crib from them, but to see if there's something I missed, some aspect to the game that I would have seen if I'd played longer.
It's disappointing how often a game turns out to be more of the same.
As such, with Möbius Front '83, it's interesting to note that apparently the game introduces some more interesting sci-fi stuff later in the game; the title isn't just something that sounds vaguely cool, but is actually relevant.
Unfortunately, it turns out that my initial feelings aren't that far off the mark. There is quite a bit of a grinding involved to get to that point.
Grinding in service of a storyline isn't a bad thing, per se. I played WoW for a very long time, and that's just par for the course. The key is to hook the player with the storyline first. Not just force them to grind.
In any case, Möbius Front '83 was a bit of a disappointment as a Zachtronics game. As a turn-based strategy game, it's just:
Land Above Sea Below (LASB) is a hex-tile isometric strategy game. It answers the question "What if you added pressure to Dorfromantik (2022)?"
I haven't reviewed Dorfromantik (DR) this year because this was mainly games that had sat in my pile of shame, not a game that I bought the day it was released. It's a very chill little hex-tile strategy city-builder.
LASB was released almost 18 months after DR, and the influence is obvious, right down to the identical gameplay controls.
However, where LASB veers away from DR is in going upwards. In DR, you have several different types of items that can appear on a tile; houses, forests, fields, grasslands, rivers, and railways.
Each hex tile in your pile can have any combination of these items on any edge. Match an edge, score points, match more edges, score more points.
In LASB, while it has rivers, the cards instead have themes. And instead of just spreading out into nothingness like DR, in LASB, you're building islands surrounded by water, which is part of the "pressure" that LASB adds.
LASB has game rounds called "seasons". Each season lasts seven "days", with icons at the top of the screen showing you what the tiles you're going to get are.
At the end of the season, the water level rises. Your island is centred around "the fall tree" and if the fall tree gets flooded, it's game over.
However, when you're placing your tiles, if you connect them on three sides to three other tiles with the same theme, all of the tiles connected (of the same theme) are raised higher, with many potentially above the water level rise.
If you connect a tile on four or more sides, you get extra days (and extra tiles) in that season.
River tiles behave differently; they neither get flooded, or raised.
It becomes a balancing act of trying to decide whether you can lift enough tiles, above the water level rise, or if you want to try and extend the season; being that there's no guarantee that the tiles you'll get for the extra day(s) will match the theme - which may result in more land being flooded.
It's an interesting alternative to DR, but it doesn't have quite the same chilled-out feeling.
With that said, LASB feels slightly rougher around the edges. Dorfromantik feels polished, cleanly adapting to my ultrawide monitor, where I had to fiddle with LASB's settings just to get it to run letterboxed at 2560x1440.
LASB also adds a slight blur at the edge of the screen which I find more annoying than "cute tilt-shift".
Although clearly derivative, Land Above Sea Below presents an interesting twist on Dorfromantik's gameplay, which is quite:
Niche - a genetics survival game is a top-down hex-tile turn-based strategy game with roguelike elements.
The single player game opens with a cutscene of a kitten-like animal being stolen from its family by a bird of prey. In mid-air, the kitten scratches the bird, and is dropped, where it wakes up alone on an island.
Your goal is to get back to your family... in a manner of speaking. "Adam" will only survive 14 days (unless injured), and so needs to find a partner, and mate, with Adam's descendants eventually finding their way "home".
At this point I was already on the verge of tears, and learning of the gameplay pushed me over the edge.
It might have been recoverable if the gameplay had been better, but it's just clunky. Adam died within a few days on my first run, because of how clunky the UI is, and in trying to climb onto a rock in the water, it was unclear that would, in fact, leave Adam in deeper water, taking damage.
On the second run I did a bit better, but found the whole thing just a little bit too clunky and complicated.
Humble really decided to lean into the strategy games this month, with the third game in the bundle being HUMANKIND. It's a hex-tile based 4X strategy game.
It does a lot of things in a strategy game that Victoria 3 doesn't, which gave me a considerably easier on-ramp.
It purports to allow you to progress from a hunter-gatherer tribes, all the way to a space-faring society, but I didn't get that far in 23 minutes.
It could just have been because I was tired, I just didn't quite connect with it, and I don't really have much more to say about it.
I'll possibly poke it again, but it does feel a lot like Civilisation in some ways, and if I wanted to play a game that felt like Civilisation, I'd just play Civilisation.
The version of the game included in the bundle is the definitive edition, so you immediately have all of the DLC expansions right there, but I'm not sure I'll ever get that far.