Mostly random indie titles, such as nova drift, rollscape, and peglin.
Nova drift and peglin both recently came out of early access, both are rogue lite games that offer unique scenarios each time you play, one is a top down shmup with loads of customizations and interesting builds to try out, the other being a bit of a deck builder with interesting setups to keep the ball bouncing.
Rollscape is a relaxing random number generator with some decision making guesses along to the way to attempt to get further. It’s way too random to be truly skill based, but knowing more of the game does diminish a bit of the random.
On mobile it has been egg, inc. and idle cave miner.
Egg, inc. used to be a very player friendly idle incremental game that offered years of play time in a very relaxed setting. It didn’t require spending money on it unless you really wanted to speed things up… Until a bit ago when they took away one mission a week, which was the catch up mission players kind of need to progress and locked it behind a subscription service. I’m still playing because as much as I don’t appreciate that change, I’ve been playing long enough that I don’t need the catch up mission. I still don’t suggest it for new players though.
Idle Cave Miner is a basic incremental idle game, you set your little dudes to mine a cave and see how deep they can get. It does have a bunch of micro transactions, including premium characters that probably mine harder than the rest. I don’t really care about that though. Spending money really isn’t needed on this one, but since it’s a single dev and I’d rather not deal with ads, I’m happy to toss a few bucks to remove those and help out.
Otherwise, I’ve been enjoying helldivers 2 every couple days to keep the medals rolling in, and the samples collected. The latest patch has been quite game changing. It’s nice to have more options to handle the opponents, but I finally had to change armors as my paper thin light armor wasn’t doing the job it had been from previous versions of the game
Started and finished 1000xResist over the course of a few days. In general I often find myself turned off by games with aging graphics, not for any good reason but more that I just find less of a pull towards them. I have more trouble being engaged or immersed, unless there’s a really strong art focus. This is one such game that I was worried I wouldn’t get pulled into, and in fact one that sat on a list of “maybe I’ll pick it up” because it was so highly reviewed but I was worried about that facet. It did not take very long for the game to grip me, however, because of it’s excellent storytelling. In fact, the game is almost entirely about storytelling, so there’s not a ton that I can share other than to say that it deals with a lot of difficult themes like intense trauma, bullying, having a tough childhood, extreme ideologies, and the long term effects of violence. It also deals with more societal and human issues like protests, fascism, extreme duress, how self-interested and powerful individuals can cause serious problems and inflict violence, being optimistic or nihilistic in the face of overwhelming odds, and the threat of extinction.
While it isn’t a very long game, consisting of maybe a dozen hours of gameplay, I found myself putting it down for a while after certain chapters in order to process what just happened. The story throws a lot of curveballs and reveals information that can easily change the way you frame entire chapters of the story from earlier, but it never feels like it’s done in a way that inspires whiplash - nothing ever feels like a ‘sudden’ realization and I’m honestly not sure how much of it can be attributed to such a difficult story (if everything is fucked, what’s one more thing?) and how much is because they do a masterful job at slowly unraveling the enigma of the story that very few pieces of information ever really feel out of place. There’s unfortunately only so much I can write without spoiling the story, but I will say that it was one of the best stories I’ve heard or played through and I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone who likes a good story or wants to explore the themes I’ve mentioned above. Also, if anyone else out there played through this, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the story… what did you think? Do you have any lingering questions left over? Were there parts of the story that irked you or that you found particularly moving?
An alternate universe corpo city filled with generated crimes to solve. You get a case board, scan for fingerprints/footprints, talk to witnesses, look up sales records, check out cctv cameras among loads of other stuff. All of it is happening live in the city - everyone has schedules, an apartment, a workplace, an inventory, an email account, a blood type, a shoe size… - so that murder/kidnapping/robbery literally happened in the game while you were crawling through vents looking for an envelope with sensitive documents that someone asked you to steal. Just yesterday I got to a crime scene super quickly and caught a murderer leaving the scene of the crime with the murder weapon on their person. There are deus ex style body augmentations too.
One of my favourite cases was a woman who got murdered. I had the husband pegged for it but couldn’t pin it on him. His fingerprints were all over the place and he was on the cctv but they lived together so that wasn’t really evidence. The case went cold. A couple of days later the HUSBAND is murdered and I’m stumped. Just go looking for anything related to the guy and hope I stumble across something useful by accident. So eventually I break into the husband’s boss’ apartment and find a bouquet of flowers with a note for the boss from the husband. It turns out the husband is having a secret gay affair with his boss. The boss kills the wife so he can be with the husband. Husband doesn’t want to be with a murderer I guess so the boss kills him too!
It’s occasionally a little buggy still. I was supposed to follow someone, take a photo of a briefcase handoff, follow the recipient and get the briefcase back and have done this type of case before. Yesterday though the handoff never happened and I waited with the original owner for a few in game hours. My guess is the recipient is dead or was someone I knocked out earlier while I was solving another case and I messed up their schedule.
I second Shadows of doubt. I haven’t played the release version yet (I’m still building factories in Satisfactory) but I can give my most memorable detective work from early access. I was doing side jobs because my murder case had gone cold. I had a gig where I needed to find proof that the clients partner is having an affair. The information I got about the potential lover were some vague physical traits like eye color and shoe size. But the key information was that the lover’s partner worked as Wait staff. So I
went through every restaurant, bar, diner etc in the city.
Got a list of every wait staff member.
Found out where they live.
Broke into their house.
Found their partner information.
Found the potential lover.
Started looking for key evidence to tie them to the affair.
The last step is where my gig ended up in a roadblock. I’m not 100% sure but I think it was bugged because I did everything I could come up with. I went through the clients partner personal stuff and found nothing. I went to their work and found nothing. I went through the lovers personal stuff and found nothing. I went to lovers work and found nothing. I even planted a tracker on both of them and followed them around to see if I missed something and I still found nothing. I even checked the mailboxes. So the key evidence was probably bugged and I couldn’t find it.
Despite that I haven’t had such a unique experience in any other game. It’s up there in my backlog waiting for me to return, but first the factory must grow.
A really cool Shmup, it’s hype as fuck, the OST it’s a banger, the scoring system is pretty straight forward but with enough dept and is approachable for new player to the genre!
If you’re tired of your million-hour games where the gameplay is just walking forward, a shmup that’s just condensed gameplay can be your oasis in gaming.
Lorn’s Lure - This game absolutely enthralled me over the past 2 weeks. It’s a parkour/exploration game, one developer, and it’s just so well designed. Punches way over it’s price for $15.
The maps are these enormous sprawling runes of an ancient machine, and there so much to find and see in each level. Then after beating the game you can go back with all upgrades and there are so many new paths, new secrets. There’s this special feeling when a developer adds so much in just for their love of the game. Things that don’t unlock new content, don’t satisfy any goals, just more fun and interesting stuff to look at and play around in, if you want. Then you get to the last level and it’s such an emotional peak. It’s like the dev spent 7 chapters just teaching us, preparing the player for the final level, and then doesn’t hold anything back.
AND it relates to both Hatch and Kill the K.O.T.H., Hatch specifically could be a lesson in pacing, I recommend that as well for anyone interested.
I feel like I’m ranting but I just want to talk about this game so much. The game is basically linear, but if you find a random hidden path you’re rewarded with a tiny bit of environmental storytelling. If you work your way off the main path, you find entire sections of jump challenges that have no purpose to the game. It’s like the game is saying “Look at this thing I built! Come jump around for a while!”
Just released 1.0 a month ago. Simple enough gameplay loop. Throw orbs at pegs on board to fight enemies. Go down different paths on a map until you reach the boss fight at the bottom, upgrading and getting new orbs and relics along the way to help. Repeat 2 more times and you win. Has 20 levels of increasing difficulty after beating your first run, but locked behind standard progression.
Dungoens and Degenerate Gamblers (Steam)
Released beginning of last month. Play Blackjack against opponents, but you each have a life bar. Score higher than opponent to deal damage equal to the difference in your scores to them. Various non-playing cards and other nonsensical cards will appear as playable cards. Things like a get well soon card, SD card, a flat out 21 card, a birthday card, and many more can be found. Go until you either lose all your health or beat the final boss on one of two different routes to be taken.
I do. It’s on my wishlist because I have so many new games that I didn’t play yet that it wouldn’t make sense to buy it now I just wondered, in regard to the gameplay, if some people eventually feel bored after some days :) so thanks for the feedback
I tried darkwood this weekend, and it’s left me torn. I really enjoy certain aspects about it, but I feel like the pacing is weird.
I finished Still wakes the deep the other day and I thought it was ok. It was an interesting environment to explore, but I didn’t think it was all too scary.
I’m off to find a different horror game to play now.
What’s up with Darkwood’s popularity recently? I know Pyrocynical made a video about a week ago, but I started it before that, because of a friend recommended it to me like a month ago. And I think I saw it mentioned elsewhere somehere inbetween too.
I generally don’t play horror games, so Darkwood scares me enough that I only play for maybe half an hour during daytime. Might take a month to get through.
My guess is that people are getting into the Halloween Spooky vibes already! But otherwise, I don’t know. Darkwood was free on Xbox games with gold a long time ago, and I snagged it then, but I just never got around to it until now
LOOOOVED darkwood! It took me a bit to get a feeling for the game, but after I got my daily rhythm I found the gameplay satisfying, tense, and occasionally scary.
Pretty sure, historically, they were also pretty powerful. I remember at one point reading about several nations that had serious issues with horse archers. A ranged unit of constant mobility, of course they’d be difficult to deal with.
How effective they are does depend on what kind of game you’re playing, however.
In Age of Empires II horse archers are only really good in those civilisations that have adequate research for them. And then it requires a good deal of player skill to micro the units to make use of their enhanced mobility.
In Mount and Blade Bannerlord it all depends on terrain. Horse archers are deadly on any sort of open terrain, but introduce trees or even a mild amount of rockiness and those horse archers are in a serious disadvantage.
They were also rare. To effectively pull off horse archery, you needed good horses, good riders that also happened to be good archers (both of which weren’t trivial on their own, let alone combined) and good coordination. Bows are more effective the closer you are, so to get the most out of your arrows, you’ll want to close in, but then you also need to wheel off again without your riders getting in each other’s way, so you needed to drill maneuvers for that.
So you either need to have a sufficiently large body of soldiers with the leisure to train both archery and riding instead of working the fields, or you needed a society that treats them as basic skills anyway and only needed training in the military application. Nomadic peoples like the Scythians or Mongols often had the former, so they were notable sources of dangerous mounted archery, particularly where the raising and support of a professional army wasn’t feasible. Rome had the Equites Sagitarii, but they were part of the distinct social class we would call Knights, so not your rank-and-file soldier (and those were already more professional than later levy- or retinue-based militaries).
So if we were concerned about accuracy*, these units should be expensive and require good management to make the most of them, but be very dangerous too. The point about open / closed terrain certainly fits as well.
What’s a bit more foggy is how games usually handle bow effectiveness at range, but that’s its own topic.
*I do care about accuracy, but not at any cost - games need to be fun too, and that’s worth sacrificing some accuracy for.
Yeah, in Age of Empires II they’re more expensive than Skirmishers, who are archer-countering units. They’re also more expensive than regular archers, and that’s not going into the research that a good cavalry archer needs, as they’re also subject to some of the most expensive research options.
In Bannerlord you can get good horse archers only be recruiting young nobles. Then you have to spend time on levelling them up, because at the lower tiers they’re just not that good, and you risk a number of the dying before they reach a high enough level.
So between the two games I play that prominently feature horse archers, I’d say they’re managed pretty well, with the increased costs, slower training times, player skill, or levelling requirements.
Skirmishers as in “Light Cavalry”, designed to catch closing archery and ride them down? I’m not big on RTS (I suck at multitasking), but I’m always fascinated by gamified implementations of historical dynamics.
I don’t suppose they also support “recruit auxiliary specialists” as option?
So the skirmisher is a spear-throwing foot soldier with a shield. Historically a foot soldier would have a shield, a few throwing spears, and then a melee weapon. But in Age of Empires II the spear throwing and the melee are divided into two separate units.
Age of Empires II does have a light cavelry line, though, and they’re pretty quick. But only civs historically known for their good cavelry have bonuses towards them that make the viable (i.e. There are various steppe-civs in AoEII, as well as Mongols and Huns, and I’m sure Turks and Saracens have some benefit to light cav as well).
In this regard Age of Empires IV is more historically accurate, as that game can have completely unsymmetrical civs, whereas Age of Empires II has far more symmetrical gameplay.
Cult of the Lamb - Got this for my birthday from my buddy and it's been very solid. I see why the reviews hype this game up; it's a weird rpg with base building elements and that's right up my alley. I've been playing it on the steam deck with a conservative power profile and it's been a lot of fun.
Tactics Ogre Reborn - I'm a FF Tactics fan and I was told this game would scratch the itch. So far I can say it's at got a captivating story. It's great that my choices matter in this game and that character development is based on those choices. The gameplay is familiar and fluid. The AI also seems to scale well with the difficulty setting. I'd say fans of FF Tactics should definitely pick this up.
Much like in real life, see them off with large groups of light cavalry. Meet them on their own terms with something that can chase them down and mob them.
Edit: but yeah, I find them to be largely ineffective or game breaking and nothing in-between.
The age old conundrum of the unit that may or may not be strong in real combat situations, but becomes absolutely gamebreakingly busted when added to videogames, because it’s strenghts translate into overwhelming advantages with none of the real life drawbacks it had to endure, usually via game design, bad balancing or games putting said units in unrealistic situations.
Take for example anti-aircraft guns since WW2. Other than the obvious real example of the FlaK88 being turned into an AT gun by the Germans, several others of these become anti-infantry or even anti-armor rapid firing nightmares in war games, because they’re put well inside their optimal range and within threatening range of infantry and tanks. Which would usually destroy them from afar. The OTO Melara gun is a good modern example. Italian radar guided 110mm naval gun, was never mounted onto a proper line vehicle that was adopted by any country. But the prototypes, like the OTOMatic, absolutely terrorize every game where they appear, as a hyper accurate, rapid firing, high damage anti-everything gun.
Horse archers are just the ancient ages example of that.
Um…archers on chariots were almost certainly extremely effective in any era they appeared. The main reason they stopped being popular in combat was because horses became big enough to ride after thousands of years of breeding.
Also because they were absurdly expensive for the civilizations that were using them. The loss of their chariots to Sea People invasions and the cost of replacing them is sometimes listed among the reasons for the Bronze Age collapse of the Hittites and the decline of Egypt despite their battlefield victories.
And it takes a lot of time to train soldiers to effectively ride horses, shoot bows and especially to ride horses while shooting bows while also making sure there’s enough money/logistics to take care of those troops. Much easier to give tons of people a simple bow and tell them to have at it. Or spears. Just… spears for everyone.
I think playing with them can be fun. And done right they usually have some counter. For example, foot archers being able to fire further than the horse archers so ample enough of foot archers should be able to cause them problems.
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Aktywne