JDungeon is a free-to-play, open-source Massively Online Role-Playing Game (MORPG) set in a medieval fantasy world. With its top-down 2D perspective, it offers an immersive gaming experience. JDungeon is built on the principles of community-driven development, accessibility, and inclusivity.
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.
7 Billion Humans is a top-down puzzle programming game.
Really not sure which order to stick those adjectives, because the fundamental gameplay loop is solving puzzles by using simple programming logic.
In playing it, I thought it felt a lot like World of Goo, (both stylistically and audibly) and it turns out that the reason it feels a lot like World of Goo is that one of the three devs who make up Tomorrow Corporation, is the dev who created World of Goo.
As far as programming/puzzle games go, this one is pretty good, but I realised that I run into the same problem I run into with every programming/puzzle game:
I'm not a very good programmer. I'm not quite sure why. I feel like I should be good at it. I first started trying to learn to program over 40 years ago. I've written programs in multiple varieties of BASIC, C, COBOL, and TurboPascal, as well as doing years of HTML & PHP work.
But while I can look at someone else's code and kind-of work out what's going on (at least to a middling degree), I don't seem to be able to get past a point with my own attempts at coding where everything just kind of goes blank. It's like there's too many things to keep track of, and that part of my brain shuts off.
Anyway, that's where I got to with 7 Billion Humans. It's:
October 23, 2023 - Day 295 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 315
Game: Lords & Villeins
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Nov 11, 2022
Installation Date: Oct 23, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 15m
Lords & Villeins is a top-down pixel-art medieval city-building sim. Number six in the October Humble Choice Bundle.
I generally try to find something good to say about a game, but I genuinely can't find anything to like about this game.
Top-down & pixel-art was a hard sell to begin with, but Stardew Valley is top-down pixel-art and that worked for me.
This just didn't click. It's not so much of a city-building management sim, as a micro-management sim based on city-building.
The systems in the game seem disconnected from one another.
You assign land to a family. A 10 block x 10 block area of land is "10 acres". Each person takes up 1 block, so I guess each person is 10% of an acre in size?
But then you turn that area into a house, and now it's a 10 acre house?
I have to give the villeins everything single thing they need from my "warehouse". There are things in my warehouse. How did they get there? I do not know.
For instance, I had to give them X amount of straw.
Then they need walls on the land I zoned for them, and I can build the walls out of straw or wood. Do the walls come out of my warehouse pile of straw or the straw I just gave to the villeins?
The game does not tell me, and at this point, I do not care. I just want it to be over.
I attempt to build walls. You place the icon and drag out the wall. I dragged it in the wrong place. I can't cancel it. I need to delete it. I can't delete it with a drag. I have to click on and delete every single piece of wall individually.
The systems in this game are opaque and frustrating and when my 15 minutes were up, I gave a sigh of relief.
There is probably an audience for this game, but wherever that may be, I assume they have a tolerance for pain that I lack.
November 23, 2023 - Day 326 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 346
Game: Soundfall
Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 12, 2022
Installation Date: Nov 11, 2023
Unplayed: 12d
Playtime: 16m
Soundfall is part rhythm-based top-down dungeon-crawler, part looter-shooter.
So far, one level in, this musical odyssey feels like a dungeon-crawler in name only. So far the dungeons are brightly-coloured floating islands, adorned with equalizer level bars rising and falling in time with the ear-wormish pop soundtrack.
Existing in a third space between Hi-Fi Rush and Metal Hellsinger, this is an interesting take on a rhythm game, and the only reason I'm writing a review instead of continuing to play is that it's been a tough day, and I can barely keep my eyes open.
The only issue I have with the game is that in spite of having previously needed to calibrate my video and audio latency for other rhythm games, the calibration tool in Soundfall insists my calibration requirements for both are 0ms.
I think it's this that left me feeling like I was constantly slightly off-beat, just enough that it didn't feel quite right.
Even so, Soundfall is already fun, and I'll happily say it's:
December 11, 2023 - Day 344 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 365
Game: Nobody Saves The World
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jan 19, 2022
Installation Date: Dec 11, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 41m
Nobody Saves The World is a cartoonish top-down fantasy RPG dungeon crawler, number 4 in this month's Humble Choice bundle.
It's weird as hell. Waking with amnesia, and no pants, you set out on an adventure to find out who you are, and what's happened to the world's greatest wizard, Nostramagus.
Armed only with Nostramagus' wand (which you obtain early on from the crime scene), Nostramagus' protege sends you tumbling into a dungeon cell.
From there, you start a series of quests, leading to the ability to shape-shift, first into a rat, then into other forms, and developing skills for each form, as you level them up. This leads to further quests, etc etc etc.
It's just a mad lot of fun, and given that the RRP for Nobody Saves The World is AUD$35.95, and a month of Humble Choice is AUD$16.95 it makes this month's bundle almost worth the price, even moreso if one of the earlier games is something you want.
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 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.
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.
OTXO is a noir-themed pixel-art top-down shooter with roguelite gameplay, and is the fourth game in the January Humble Choice bundle.
The game opened with low-res top-down pixel-art of a train carriage, and as someone gets off the train, they drop a mask that you pick up and are immediately compelled to put on; at which point everything fades to black, and you wake up on a beach like Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception.
You start walking and find a mansion, where a groundskeeper explains to that your loved one who was next to you on the train is now trapped at the heart of the mansion and all you have to do is kill everyone inside.
A tutorial walks you through the gameplay, but the keyboard and mouse controls left a lot to be desired, and I just couldn't get it right with a controller, and I wasn't enjoying myself anyway.
January 9, 2024 - Day 374 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 410
Game: Baba Is You
Platform: Steam
Released: Mar 14, 2019
Installed: Dec 14, 2023
Unplayed: 26d
Playtime: 26m
Rating: 5 - Excellent
Baba Is You is a top-down pixel-art puzzle game. It's like Sokoban on acid.
Each puzzle has a goal. The rules for each puzzle are in each puzzle, as blocks you can move.
For example, there are three blocks "Baba", "Is", and "You".
When these three blocks are lined up, they're active as a statement. You can move one of the blocks, which will break the statement, but also fail the level.
The same level might have "Walls", "Are", and "Stop". However, if you move the "Stop" block, it will break the statement, and now you can pass through walls.
Each level also has a win statement, which is usually (but not always) "Flag Is Win". Your goal is to reach the flag.
Wonder what would happen if you pushed the "Wall" block into the place of "Flag".
Now you have an active rule of "Wall Is Win", and... now you just have to walk over a wall piece, and you win the level.
I really needed a simple game to try and knock over tonight, and this hooked me (and my 11yo, who solved one of the puzzles for me, and now wants the game himself!).
Baba Is You is a wonderful example of a pixel-art game whose gameplay overcomes my resistance to pixel-art, and so it's:
January 23, 2024 - Day 388 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 424
Game: Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition
Platform: Steam
Released: Feb 1, 2019
Installed: Jan 23, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 24m
Rating: 3 - OK
Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition is a 2D top-down "Gothic Horror" RPG, that's part visual novel and part "what the hell did I just play?"
You start the game as the first mate of a space-faring Victorian steam locomotive that sails through the aether unmoored from such frailties as railway tracks.
It only gets weirder from there.
I genuinely don't know how to review this game, or quite honestly, how I feel about it.
There's something here that I can't quite put my finger on; Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition is:
January 30, 2024 - Day 395 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 431
Game: Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition
Platform: Steam
Released: Nov 28, 2012
Installed: Jan 30, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 15m
Rating: 2 - Meh...?
Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition is a remastered version of the original Baldur's Gate released on Dec 21, 1998. It's an isometric RPG, and I've made a terrible mistake.
The original purpose of this little project was to play through games that were in my unredeemed keys spreadsheet, or already installed in Steam, which I've stuck to most of the time.
I've been enjoying BG3, and last night got an email for a Fanatical Star Deal for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, and Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition.
Only A$5.98? Download, installed, start playing after knocking off at 11:30pm.
Here's the thing: I know Baldur's Gate is considered to be a classic RPG.
Even though The Enhanced Edition runs natively on a 3440x1440 resolution monitor, it's not in a good way. The UI, which was originally designed to sit close to the centre of the screen, is now sitting out at the very edges of the monitor, with the play area a relatively small area in the middle of the screen, dwarfed by two huge black voids on either side. Then the UI.
If that wasn't enough, after 15 minutes of playtime, I was still in the tutorial. I hadn't skipped it, and it's good thing I hadn't, because the idea of pausing mid-battle and making moves is considerably different to both BG3, and any other game I recall.
At the end of the day (not a cliche, literally), after more than twelve work hours, I don't think I was in the right mindset to either take the game in, or to work around the technical limitations.
With that said, I'm not sure it will grab me, but I've put it into the "replay" category to give it a second chance.
For now, Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition is a bit:
Game number 5 is the February Humble Bundle is There Is No Light: Enhanced Edition. It is a top-down, pixel-art hack-and-slash action-RPG (ARPG).
It's set in a brutal, seemingly post-apocalyptic world, and opens with your wife being stolen away during childbirth, so that your newborn child can be sacrificed for the sake of the community.
This threw me off from the get-go, and it didn't improve from here on in.
Here's the thing: I'm on call this week. It's Wednesday morning. I'm three reviews down (have played, though) - four, if I pre-emptive count today's review. I'm running on three hours sleep, and today is going to be another long day.
The reviews this week are going to be perfunctory, but I've remembered the point of this whole thing: whether or not I enjoy a game, and want to play it again.
The answer to that question in regards to There Is No Light: Enhanced Edition is:
March 10, 2024 - Day 435 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 470
Game: Black Skylands
Platform: Steam
Released: Aug 16, 2023
Installed: Mar 10, 2024
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 19m
Black Skylands is game number five in the March Humble Choice Bundle; it's a top-down pixel-art steampunk-themed... game. It's a category mash-up that's part-twin-stick shooter, part-open-world-action-adventure, part crafting-sandbox.
Within that mix of genres, I had trouble situating myself within the gameplay that I connected with it.
It's another game that I'm going to give another shot and see how I feel about it once I get a bit further into the game.
jdungeon: An opensource 2d morpg (github.com)
JDungeon is a free-to-play, open-source Massively Online Role-Playing Game (MORPG) set in a medieval fantasy world. With its top-down 2D perspective, it offers an immersive gaming experience. JDungeon is built on the principles of community-driven development, accessibility, and inclusivity.