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.
December 21, 2023 - Day 354 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 376
Game: Okami HD
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Dec 13, 2017
Installation Date: Dec 21, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 53m
Okami HD is a third-person action-adventure game, and a HD re-release of Okami, a game that was originally released for the PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo Wii.
It's genuinely like nothing else I've played this year. The game is set in "Nippon", and you play as the reincarnation of the Shinto sun goddess "Amaterasu", embodied in a white wolf.
You are accompanied by a bug named Issun who doesn't like being called a bug, and WILL NOT STOP TALKING. Issun is your guide.
You can break things throughout the game by headbutting them; in combat you fight with a sword that's held in your mouth.
However, what truly makes this game unique (other than the art style, which is based on classic Japanese painting styles, including Sumi-e), is that one of your combat techniques is literally painting.
You can fight an enemy until they are drained of colour, and then go into a "painting" mode, and use your brush to attack them with the various brushstrokes you learn throughout the game.
I've found some games hard to categorise because they're a mashup of so many game ideas that I end up with a long hyphenated description. I borrowed the description for Okami HD from the game blurb, because I just don't have a frame of reference to apply.
My only points of frustration with the game are that the camera was wildly frustrating until I found that you can (and I needed to) invert both the X & Y axes, and that manual saving is required, which can only be done at specific locations.
I've become so habituated to auto-saves, that even though the game goes out of the way to highlight the save system, I still managed to wipe out over half an hour of game progress before I realised what I'd done.
December 21, 2023 - Day 354 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 377
Game: Heave Ho
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 29, 2019
Installation Date: Dec 21, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 27m
Heave Ho is a 2D platformer, primarily designed for couch co-op play, but that does have a solo campaign.
However, just calling it a "2D platformer" would be like calling Forza Horizon 4 a "car game", or calling Dredge a "fishing game".
Nothing prepared me for the sheer hilarity of trying to play this game; at some points I was sitting doubled over laughing, yelling at the screen for how ridiculous the game is.
Primarily, you play as a head with two arms attached to the side. Use the left stick to swing both arms (yes, that sounds counter-intuitive, but it makes sense when you play), and use the left and right triggers to grip surfaces with either your left or right hands (or both!).
Whichever hand is gripping a surface then becomes an anchor point to wildly flail your other arm and headbody around in a desperate attempt to try and grip another surface, as you try and navigate across the platforms to the goal point.
This was another game from my unused keys list, but as my eldest already had it installed in his library, I installed using family sharing instead of my key, in case I hated it.
Six minutes later I quit the game and redeemed my own key, because Heave Ho is hilariously:
December 22, 2023 - Day 355 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 378
Game: Death's Gambit: Afterlife
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 15, 2018
Installation Date: Dec 22, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 49m
Death's Gambit: Afterlife is a 2D pixel-art soulsvania.
It's a updated version of the original Death's Gambit, where the dev team took the feedback they received about the original game, and reworked the game, while increasing the size of the game.
For reasons that I can't quite explain, particularly after playing so many soulsvanias this year, this somehow managed to hook me and keep me playing for 3/4 of an hour.
The game tells the story of a Tamil couple, Venba and her husband Paavalan, who have emigrated from Tamil Nadu, to make a new life in Canada.
Throughout the game, you proceed by preparing dishes from Venba's mother's tattered cookbook, frequently needing to solve what are, effectively, simple puzzles to complete each recipe.
There is so much that I'd like to say about this game, but to do so would spoil many of the emotional beats of the narrative.
It's not a long game; I completed it in a single sitting, and collected most of the achievements along the way.
Venba is a lovely, and occasionally heart-wrenching game; it is:
December 24, 2023 - Day 357 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 380
Game: Smoke and Sacrifice
Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 31, 2018
Installation Date: Dec 18, 2023
Unplayed: 6d
Playtime: 29m
Smoke and Sacrifice is an steampunk-themed isometric survival RPG.
You play as Sachi, a mother seemingly forced to sacrifice her first-born child to "the Sun-God", a machine that provides light and heat to Sachi's village, after "the freezing".
However, all is not lost; turns out that the children being "sacrificed" are not actually being sacrificed (killed), but transported to an underworld, and being sacrificed to a form of slavery, forcing them to work to feed the "Sun-God" and keep it running.
Sachi finds herself transported to the same underworld location, where she begins her survival journey to try and find her now-seven-year-old son.
Unfortunately, the story wasn't enough to overcome the frustrating survival mechanics that I encountered in the first 30 minutes of the game, with successive fetch quests required to slowly grind the story forward, by the time I hit save, I was hoping that I could find a recap of the storyline of the game somewhere, just to find out how it ends.
Sadly, for Smoke and Sacrifice, the last thing I was interested in sacrificing was any more of my time; it's a:
December 25, 2023 - Day 358 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 381
Game: American Fugitive
Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 21, 2019
Installation Date: Dec 18, 2023
Unplayed: 7d
Playtime: 20m
American Fugitive is a top-down 3D open-world action-adventure game.
Feeling a lot like early GTA games, you play as a petty thief who's been framed for the murder of his father. After breaking out of prison you set out to clear your name.
By committing other crimes.
After escaping from prison, you need to avoid the police until you escape from the general area of the prison. Apparently, they're looking for a red-haired bearded man in a yellow prison jumpsuit, and not a red-headed bearded man in a white shirt and blue jeans (that I just stole off someone's clothesline).
Graphically, it's well executed, although I found the steering of vehicles to be incredibly twitchy.
One of weird little things that became clear to me this year is that I really don't enjoy games where I'm playing as a criminal.
A game that expects me to commit crimes against NPCs portrayed as innocent bystanders, is something that just rubs me the wrong way, and as potentially interesting as the setup for this game is, I just felt kind of icky afterwards.
Also, playing as a male character still continues to make me feel disconnected from what's happening in the game.
Unfortunately for American Fugitive, that just leaves me feeling pretty:
December 25, 2023 - Day 358 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 382
Game: Baldur's Gate 3
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 4, 2023
Installation Date: Dec 25, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 91m
You had to know this was coming.
Baldur's Gate 3 is an open-world RPG featuring turn-based combat, and the ability to move the camera to play in an isometric top-down playstyle, or third-person.
After more than four months of reading people raving about it, I opened up my Steam client this morning to see a gift from my son: a Baldur's Gate 3 Steam gift, just waiting for me to accept it.
Of course, then I needed to re-arrange a bunch of games to find room for the 137Gb required to install it. Freshly installed, I then went and spent some time playing games with my wife and son.
I put the roast into the oven for dinner, and sat down to start playing.
Things immediately went sideways. I found myself thrust into a cut-scene that ended in one of the most viscerally horrifying ways I could have not even imagined.
I was not prepared.
Then, suddenly, I'm in a character creator. OK. Create my character. Create her guardian.
...aand now I'm back in the scary room, and the cutscene continues.
I am becoming increasingly confused by what is happening, and then... oh. OK, that's what's going on.
Wait... no. What the hell is going on? Whatever I expected... it wasn't this.
Finally, I find myself in playable territory. Movement is... counterintuitive. Years of right clicking where I want to go means that the left clicking doesn't come naturally to me.
I start breaking things that seem to need to be broken, and then suddenly... I am dead, and I have to start over again (fortunately, at the playable part, not the cutscenes).
I am staring at the screen, and thinking about all of the people who raved about this game, and all of the people who told me what an amazing experience it was.
...and feeling how terribly they had undersold it.
The environments are stunning. This feels like a fully realised world. When I finally start encountering other characters, they're not woodenly delivering clunky dialogue like other RPGs I've played recently.
The characters feel... real. At one point, I wonder if I'm going to have to break up a fight between two party members.
After 90 minutes in-game, I've completed, apparently, the prologue.
But the roast needs to come out of the oven, and dinner needs to be prepared.
Tomorrow morning, I will sit down and play 15-30 minutes of some other game, and probably spend the rest of my day in Faerûn, because Baldur's Gate 3 is:
5: Excellent (as if it was going to be anything else.)
Niffelheim is a Norse-themed 2D survival crafting game with some RPG elements.
As part of my two remaining goals of attempting to review 400 new games by the end of the year, and to get my unredeemed keys list down to under 200 (current count: 201 left), I had no idea what this key was actually for.
At some stage I'd overtyped the title without noticing. Niffelheim it is.
The game opens up with a Viking funeral boat, aflame and disappearing into the mist, while a narrator intones about how my boat has been hijacked on the way to Valhalla.
I then found myself at a character selection screen with a choice between three burly male warriors, and a well-endowed Valkyrie.
My Valkyrie then found herself armed with some basic weapons, and a basic hut, and a series of quests delivered by a raven.
Other than that, you're in pretty standard survival game mechanics; kill things, cut down trees, gather food. The 2D aspect makes playing with a controller natural, and before I noticed, I'd been in-game for 45 minutes.
I found Niffelheim strangely compelling, so let's say that it's:
December 26, 2023 - Day 359 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 384
Game: The King's Bird
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 24, 2018
Installation Date: Dec 26, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 21m
The King's Bird is a 2D platformer that utilises a "momentum-based flying mechanic".
You play as a young girl, who explains in the introduction level how she's always dreamed she could fly, and has always been caged.
From there she goes on to gain the gift of flight (in a sense), and you're off to explore. Her gift of flight is less "flight" and more "momentum activated short-term gliding".
The controls are simultaneously simple and frustrating. Movement instructions are presented as pictograms, and even when following them exactly, results can vary.
When everything comes together, movement feels glorious; however, it's not entirely clear on what makes everything come together.
The game's atmosphere is gorgeous, all silhouettes and varying monochromatic colours, and the score is beautiful.
If only movement wasn't so inconsistently frustrating; at this point in the game, The King's Bird is:
December 26, 2023 - Day 359 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 385
Game: The Hex
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Oct 17, 2018
Installation Date: Dec 21, 2023
Unplayed: 5d
Playtime: 26m
The Hex is a trippy, genre-bending 2D pixel-art pastiche adventure game.
From the blurb: "In a creaky old tavern, in a forgotten corner of the video-game universe, a storm is raging. An anonymous caller suggests that there is a murder plot. Six video game protagonists are the only plausible suspects..."
Beyond this, the game is difficult to review, because to try and review it is to spoil the game.
One of the things I've learned over the last year, is that I prefer games where the gameplay supports the narrative, rather than the narrative being an excuse to try and justify the gameplay.
The other thing that I've said is that given my general lack of nostalgia for pixel-art games, a pixel-art game needs to offer something that overcomes my general lack of interest.
The Hex delivers that in spades. With that said, there are some minor frustrations I have with the gameplay, but even going into those runs the risk of spoilers, so I'll just say that The Hex is:
December 26, 2023 - Day 359 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 386
Game: Grid (2019)
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Oct 11, 2019
Installation Date: Dec 26, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 19m
Grid (2019 - to separate it from the original Grid released in 2008) is a motor-racing game.
It was delisted from Steam on Dec 1, 2023, so if you don't have a key, you can't buy Grid.
I had a key, I used the key, I probably wasted the key. As a racing game, it's perfectly serviceable, enjoyable even.
However, I'm not a big "racing" player, and my go-to for racing games is the Forza Horizon series, and a racing game needs to capture me with something that Forza doesn't offer.
In Grid, I have a game that's been delisted because the licensing for the vehicles has expired, made by a company (Codemasters) who received the Electronic Arts treatment, as did all of their existing games.
Consequently, it's a game that I probably won't sink any time into, purely because it's effectively racing into a dead-end. Grid is:
GreedFall is a third-person action RPG set in a fantasy version of the 17th century.
You play as a noble of the "Merchant Congregation", one of several competing factions seeking to colonise the island of "Teer Fradee", hoping to find a cure for the "Malichor", an illness that is wreaking havoc on the Merchant Congregation's capital city of Sérène.
I was just going to play 15 minutes, write up a review, and move on.
Instead, I found myself deeply engrossed in the storyline, and regretting that I hadn't discovered GreedFall earlier.
Firstly, the character selection screen gives you a choice of the gender, and basic look of your character, with them being fully voiced. Huge checkmark.
But the worldbuilding itself is just amazing. At least in the initial quests in Sérène, it most closely reminds me of Dishonoured in terms of setting (which is a very good thing).
GreedFall is currently on sale on both GOG for a historical low of A$8.76, and Steam for A$10.99, and if you feel like scratching an itch for a game set in the Age of Discovery (when you're not playing Baldur's Gate 3), I don't think you could go wrong with GreedFall, because it's:
Night Call feels like noir-ish adventure mashup between a visual novel and a map of Paris.
Being that you're playing as a French cab driver, that's to be expected. You were assaulted and left for dead by a serial killer at the site of a pick-up while driving your cab.
The game has you investigating your own attempted murder, with a touch of blackmail thrown in; another cop determined to prove that ACAB has determined your true identity, and uses this to blackmail you into assisting with her "investigation".
The screen is split horizontally, with the top half being a stylised GPS screen, and the bottom half being the inside of your cab, as if you were watching from a dashboard-mounted camera.
Each night, you drive your cab around, picking up passengers that appear on the GPS screen. You engage with the passengers, conversing and occasionally gathering clues.
It's incredibly moody, but so very slow. Fortunately, there's the option for the conversations to auto-play until you reach an engagement point, but I did end up running some CSR2 grinding races on my phone while reading the conversations.
At the end of each night's driving, you take the clues you've gathered, plus the ones left by your detective "friend" in an envelope outside your house each night, and slowly try to work out which of the five suspects is the killer.
It's this aspect of the game that has me continuing to want to play, but only just. Night Call is barely just:
December 27, 2023 - Day 360 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 389
Game: Strange Brigade
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 28, 2018
Installation Date: Dec 27, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 42m
Strange Brigade is a solo or co-op action-adventure third-person shooter, set in Egypt in the 1930's.
I'd been sitting on Strange Brigade for a while, because I've previously played one of the Zombie Army games by the same developer (Rebellion), and it so thoroughly creeped me out, that I had no desire to go through it again.
But with access to the game via my son's Steam account, and a spare Steam key, and it being the middle of a sunny day, I thought I'd give it a shot.
You play as one of four members of the titular Strange Brigade, a special unit of the British Government tasked with dealing with supernatural entities.
One of the options is Gracie Braithwaite, a brawler, and a red-headed Lancashire lass. One of the things I've learned from my family tree, is that great-grandmother was from Lancashire, and was described by my grandmother as "a Lancashire lass", and it just felt right to choose her.
In terms of the gameplay, while it bears some basic similarities to the Zombie Army Trilogy (because zombies are heavily featured!) and it uses the same Asura engine as ZAT, it styles itself heavily after pulp movies of the 1930's, with an overly chirpy English narrator providing running commentary.
The game is bright and colourful, unlike the spine-chilling environments of ZAT, and I found Strange Brigade a far more enjoyable experience - at least once I remapped the rather wild control scheme.
Nothing like hitting the shift key to run away from a zombie, only to drop a grenade instead.
I had a bunch of fun with Strange Bridgade; it's pretty:
December 27, 2023 - Day 361 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 390
Game: Ultimate Zombie Defense
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Dec 9, 2020
Installation Date: Dec 19, 2023
Unplayed: 8d
Playtime: 36m
Ultimate Zombie Defense is a top-down co-op wave defense shooter.
It was free last week on Fanatical, and I grabbed it because it was free, of course.
Although I'd already done zombies today, why not a few more?
You're in a fixed area, and you're armed with a gun, and a little bit of cash. Kill zombies under the wave is over, spend cash on fortification & weapons upgrades, rinse and repeat.
I got to the fifth level solo, and learned the hard way that in spite of the previous four levels with the zombies only coming from the North, they can also come from the south.
Where I had no fortifications, and no chance of survival.
I then jumped into one of 5 (!) available 4-person multiplayer servers, and played with that team until we were all dead.
At which point I quit; I would have quit earlier, but I didn't want to abandon the bunch of randoms after someone had already done so.
December 28, 2023 - Day 362 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 391
Game: Lightmatter
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jan 16, 2020
Installation Date: Dec 28, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 2h12m
Lightmatter is a first-person puzzle platformer, and answers the question "What would you get if you mashed up Portal and one of the best two-part Steven Moffat episodes of Doctor Who, Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead?"
Featuring a Cave Johnson-like voiceover, "Virgil", the CEO of Lightmatter is going to guide you out of his facility after a small technical issue occurred during the demonstration of his Lightmatter renewable energy source.
The small technical issue being that there were some big explosions, and touching a shadow will kill you (a la Moffat's "Vashta Nerada" from the aforementioned Doctor Who episodes).
The game wears its influences on its sleeve too, with Virgil making mention of Aperture Science and taking multiple digs at Cave Johnson.
Fortunately the game is different enough from Portal that it doesn't feel like a retread, and immediately dragged me in for an enjoyable couple of hours.
I'll go back to finish Lightmatter next time I'm deep in a puzzle mood because it's:
Mini Motorways is a minimalistic cozy top-down traffic puzzle strategy game from New Zealand developers Dinosaur Polo Club. It's a follow-up to their previous railway puzzle strategy game Mini Metro.
Following on from the design aesthetic in Mini Metro, Mini Motorways presents you with a grid, initially containing one stylised house, and one stylised destination, in the same colour, and provides (n) road pieces to join the two.
Cars in that colour will then travel back and forth between the two locations. The destination building will tick, adding an icon for which a matching car is required, with each building having a certain capacity. If the building reaches capacity without enough matching cars reaching it, it's Game Over, man. Game Over.
Each level is presented as a specific major world city, and achieving certain goals in one city will unlock one (or more) cities to play in further levels.
Levels are played on a "weekly" basis using an in-game clock; as the in-game week passes, new destination buildings are added, often in a different colour, with a matching house in the same colour.
These houses can be on the other side of a river, or the other side of the map, or both, and you must use the roads to enable enough vehicles to reach each destination before the building "fills up".
At the end of each week you are given one of two options to choose from for extra pieces for the following week. One option may be 30 road pieces, with the other being a roundabout, with 20 road pieces, or a bridge crossing, with 20 road pieces, or one of several other options including the titular motorway, allowing you to connect distant areas of the map in a single hit.
I broke my guideline of mentioning the developers because in spite of them having only released these two games, I love both of them. Mini Motorways is:
Mindustry is a top-down automation strategy game mashed up with an RTS.
I've always had a thing for automation games, which I suspect is a largely #autistic thing. Most games of this type are about systemisation, finding efficiencies, then building (and rebuilding) automation pipelines to produce a particular outcome.
These are games that I avoid because they suck me in to the point that I've lost entire days inside them, with Shapez & Production Line being just two examples. I've seen at least one person whose entire Steam 2023 review was one game played, no new games. All Factorio, all the time.
A game in this space has to bring something different to the table; for Mindustry that's planetary domination, leaning into the RTS side.
Build factories, research technology, build tanks, and defenses, seek and destroy.
Unfortunately, this is where Mindustry leaves me a bit cold. It's not that I don't like RTS games: I cut my teeth on Dune II. I went on to Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, then finally StarCraft.
Unfortunately, Mindustry feels it doesn't quite pull off either type of game that well. The gameplay elements are not explained clearly, and the UI is really clunky, making it difficult to find critical information, and not always making it clear what the next step is.
Unfortunately, the RTS side of things feels like (at least in the early stage of the game) like the only real strategy is Zerg rushing.
I finally quit out of the game, entirely unsure whether I'd completed that stage of the game, or needed to do something else.
There are a bunch of nice ideas in the game, and I think it's the work of a single dev, as far as I can tell. I just feel like it needs a lot of polish.
Shatterline is a multiplayer F2P co-op PvE & PvP FPS with some roguelike & extraction shooter gameplay elements.
Launching a F2P FPS into early access in 2022 was a huge risk in an already flooded market.
Launching a F2P FPS in 2022 when your development headquarters are based in Kyiv, Ukraine? They don't make risk-management charts that big.
The premise is interesting, and the intro is well done. Even the initial PvE tutorial level is great. The gameplay is smooth, and the UI is polished.
However, the problem with F2P multiplayer shooters is that there are so many options available that a game has to present something that's utterly unique to rise above the crowd, and Shatterline doesn't quite deliver that.
In this case, that's less my judgement of the game, and more that Steamcharts shows that the average players has gone down consistently every month since launch averaging 285 players per day over the last 30 days.
No matter how good Shatterline's design and gameplay is, with a game that's primarily multiplayer, without the players, a game is pretty much doomed to failure.
Unfortunately, as interesting as Shatterline's backstory is, and as nice as the gameplay is, I suspect Shatterline may follow in footprints of The Cycle: Frontier before too long.
December 30, 2023 - Day 364 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 395
Game: Outward Definitive Edition
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Mar 26, 2019
Installation Date: Nov 30, 2023
Unplayed: 30d
Playtime: 37m
Outward Definitive Edition is a third-person fantasy RPG with survival mechanics.
The problem with any RPG released from here on out is that Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3 both exist.
However it's worse for RPGs that were released before 2023, because between these two games, they've raised the bar so incredibly high, that most games are going to suffer in comparison.
Outward Definitive Edition is an updated release of Outward release in May 2022 that includes "quality of life" improvements; given the state of the game, I shudder to think what QoL was like beforehand.
However, in trying to be fair, I looked up RPGs that were released in 2018 & 2019; which means comparing it to games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and Greedfall.
Unfortunately, even then it doesn't fare well. It just feels very rough around the edges, and frustrating to play.
As an example, whether you love it or hate it, most RPGs use some kind of encumbrance gameplay mechanic (and if you love encumbrance, I wonder what's wrong with you).
Outward leans heavily into the realism, which means it takes barely anything collected in your backpack before you're encumbered. Better* still, after combat I picked up two weapons from the mobs I'd just killed. One of them left me encumbered. The second left me completely unable to move.
Not that the screen indicated the change in any way. There's an icon that appears onscreen when you're over the encumbrance limit, but no warning to say I'd been completely immobilised. I thought the game had bugged out completely.
There's also a cooking mechanic (because survival gameplay as well) with some recipes, but also "manual cooking". I tried to cook something with fresh water and fresh raw salmon, but instead of boiled salmon, it resulted in "diseased mush". I probably shouldn't have eaten it, because eating it left me diseased, with an icon onscreen, and nothing to indicate how to resolve that.
It feels like the game wants you to work really hard to like it, and I'm glad that I got it in a bundle, because I don't feel bad about disliking it.
You've probably already guessed, but Outward Definitive Edition is a:
December 30, 2023 - Day 364 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 396
Game: Wasteland 3
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 29, 2020
Installation Date: Dec 21, 2023
Unplayed: 9d
Playtime: 54m
Wasteland 3 is an isometric squad-based RPG with turn-based combat mechanics.
Apparently it's all RPGs all day here. Less "all", and more "this afternoon", because I ended up spending all morning cleaning out my desk and sorting screws.
Yeah, I forgot my ADHD meds, and today has been erratic. The kicker was discovering that I'd doubled up on a day count back in early October, meaning that instead of only needing to play one extra game per day for three days, it was two extra games today, and two tomorrow to hit my "400 new games" goal.
Anyway, turns out I've had a bunch of cool isometric RPGs just sitting in my unredeemed Steam keys spreadsheet; it's suddenly an embarrassment of riches, between Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, BG3, and now Wasteland 3.
Having not played the previous two Wasteland games, I thought it was some kind of post-apocalyptic FPS, but instead it's a post-apocalyptic RPG set in a nuclear winter affected Colorado.
The game starts out with a cut-scene talking about what happened to the Desert Rangers after the events of Wasteland 2 (and providing enough information for context), explaining that the Desert Rangers are on their way to Colorado to meet with "the owner of Colorado" to seek assistance for Arizona (I really need to look at a US map).
Looked at the map, got distracted. Anyway, things do not go according to plan, and you get ambushed on your way, and off the game goes.
Looks like I've got a lot of RPGs to play in 2024, because Wasteland 3 seems:
MOTHERGUNSHIP is a bullet-hell FPS built in the Unreal Engine.
I immediately ran into problems when I tried to run it, because it did not want to play well with multiple monitors, insisting on running on the left-most monitor (which isn't my main). No options in-game to choose which monitor to run on.
Putting it into a lower resolution and windowed mode somehow made things worse, because it pushed the window chrome AND the back button off the top and bottom of the screen, respectively.
Eventually I got it running on the main monitor, and away we went. You're a nameless pleb dropped into combat on a spaceship, receiving instructions from an army General, and a tech, delivered by VO and a text-box in the middle of the screen.
You're wearing some kind of exo-suit, and you can see your robotic hands at the bottom of the screen, and you're sent off to start punching sci-fi cartoonish turrets.
When you die (oh, and you will die), you're immediately resurrected to keep fighting, with the "General" lampshading this.
A few rooms in, and you can start buying gun parts with the coins you collect, and then you can build and rebuild your weapons, into whatever wild assemblies you can imagine.
I was pretty tired last night, and it's only just occurred to me that the reason I couldn't buy parts in one of the shops was that I didn't have enough coins. There was just an error box icon that would appear when I tried to pick up gun parts, which I thought meant I'd run out of room or something. It didn't make it clear why I was getting that icon.
Which highlights one of the issues with the game. The ship(s) are bright and colourful with a lot going on, and the UI just kind of tends to blend in with everything else on screen.
I don't usually highlight the engine that the game is built in, but sometimes games have a certain "feel" to them that immediately registers as the game engine, and when I checked, I wasn't surprised to find it was an Unreal based game (no Unreal splash at the start, though!).
If bullet-hell shooters are your thing, this might be worth picking up on special, but I probably won't be back; they're not my thing, so for me MOTHERGUNSHIP is just a bit:
December 31, 2023 - Day 365 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 398
Game: Beyond: Two Souls
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jun 18, 2020 (PC)
Installation Date: Dec 19, 2022
Unplayed: 377d (1y12d)
Playtime: 24m
Beyond: Two Souls is a third-person... interactive movie?
I picked a doozy for my final primary NewPlay. The game starts by presenting the option to play in the "original" non-chronological order, or the "remix" chronological order.
I picked "original", and then found myself in a cutscene with a mo-capped pre-transition Elliot page, and then an unexpected Willem Dafoe, setting up an interesting premise.
Whoever Jodie is, she's dangerous.
After the cutscene, I found myself playing as child Jodie. This was where I ran into my first issue with the game. I'd picked mouse & keyboard to play with, but given that this was originally a console release, it really isn't designed for mouse & keyboard, and the controls just felt weird.
Switched to controller, and things started to make more sense.
The hard part of trying to provide more of a review is this: explaining what happens next goes into spoiler territory, and so... I won't.
Because the game relies on mocap, and was originally released in 2013, prior to Elliot Page coming out as a trans man, I found playing as adult Jodie in the next section somewhat disconcerting, and in a way that I really can't quite put into words. Not enough to make me not want to play, but enough to break immersion.
This is not a critique of the game, rather an acknowledgement of how events in the real world can affect my perception of a game.
I really enjoyed (and completed!) one of Quantic Dream's other games, Detroit: Become Human, which is what lead to me buying this and Heavy Rain in a bundle last year.
Based on past experience, I'm interested in continuing this playthrough of Beyond: Two Souls; so far, it's:
December 31, 2023 - Day 365 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 399
Game: Saints Row
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 23, 2022 (PC)
Installation Date: Dec 31, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 59m
Saints Row (2022) was a poorly received reboot of the Saints Row franchise. It's a third-person action-adventure RPG, that is, this time around, based around the founding of a criminal gang named "The Saints".
You play as "The Boss", and can choose from a set of pre-made characters, or build your own from scratch, so I lost track of how long I spent in the character creator.
In this case, I didn't go into the game completely unawares; I've played some of Saints Row IV, which was cartoonishly over the top.
I remember reading reviews of Saints Row saying that they wanted it to be more grounded, and to paraphrase Inigo Montoya, "...that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Maybe it's not quite as OTT as the last game, but grounded is not a word I'd use either.
I'm a little surprised at this point that the reviews were so awful, as it definitely feels a lot like the previous Saints Row games to me.
I'll probably slot in some further Saints mayhem between RPG sessions in the new year.
December 31, 2023 - Day 365 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 400
Game: Dave The Diver
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jun 28, 2023 (PC)
Installation Date: Dec 31, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 43m
Dave The Diver is a 2D sideways-scrolling pixel-art* game that's part management sim, part fishing sim, part restaurant game, and part action-adventure RPG.
When Dave the Diver first showed up on Steam a few months ago, I was still very much of the "pixel-art-no-thank-you" mindset, so it was a pass.
Then I saw some folks raving about how good it is, and then the free Dredge DLC was announced, and I went back and added it to my wishlist.
As they're currently offering a "Dredging & Diving Bundle" on Steam which meant the game was cheaper than the sale price (by a couple of bucks), I decided to add one more game to my pile of shame, and then take it off again, and what a way to finish this project out.
It is REALLY hard to categorise, because it pulls gameplay aspects from multiple different genres, and it's probably best if I lay it out.
Firstly, to address that asterisk against pixel-art, the game uses pixel-art for the gameplay, but uses vector art for the UI, which is a great way to make the game feel up-to-date.
The game opens with Dave relaxing on a beach, drinking a beer, when his phone rings, and he gets a job offer. Queue plane & map intro cut-scene.
A guy named Cobra has offered Dave a job diving in "the Blue Hole", which is a procedurally generated environment that is different on each dive.
After a tutorial sequence, where you learn to catch fish with a harpoon (fishing sim!), you learn that you've been roped into managing a sushi bar as well (management sim!).
Dive twice during the day to complete quests (RPG gameplay!) and catch the fish that you then use at night to set the nightly sushi bar menu.
Oh, and you're also the sushi bar waiter; this takes partial gameplay ideas from cooking sims like "Cook, Serve, Delicious!" in that the various customers will order the things that you've added to the menu, and the cook (thank goodness!) prepares each meal, as you run back and forth serving them, and cleaning up after some detty pigs, as well as another mini-game where you need to pour green tea and fill the cup perfectly.
Some of the RPG gameplay elements like equipment upgrades and weapon upgrades are handled through unlockable "apps" on an in-game "smartphone", and given that there are a number of preloaded apps on the phone with locks on them, looks like there are more mini-games as well.
Somehow, though, the devs managed to pull this off in such a way that it all fits together seamlessly, and is a lot of fun as well.
So, there you have it; for my final game review of 2023, Dave the Diver is: