For less than $5 CAD, I picked up Maiden & Spell, an excessively cute sidescrolling shooter a la R-Type, except it’s a levelless boss rush with Story and Versus modes. It’s got a very Touhou aesthetic (i.e. rather than spaceships or dragons or something, everyone is cute girls).
Story mode is basically a Touhou boss rush, where your character fights 4 monster girls and 2 out of the other 3 human girls, with no level in-between, it’s just bosses. There’s a threadbare but acceptable story linking them, with each playable character giving a different perspective on the same story, and then there being an epilogue chapter and a bonus extra boss. Story mode has 4 difficulties, the easiest of which is called Cute Mode and is basically unloseable, so even if you’ve never played a game like this, you can give it a go.
Versus mode is basically a 1v1 fighting game. You and one friend each pick one of the 8 girls and do bullet hells at each other until you see who wins. It’s not complex, but it is kind of tactically deep.
The same author is currently working on a sequel, Rabbit & Steel, a very similar game except rather than a versus battler, it’s a coop roguelike inspired by MMO raid mechanics. A sneak-peek demo with online multiplayer is available, and it’s really fun!
I have three games on the go at the moment. Gotta enjoy those few weeks off from university, when I actually have some time.
Empyrion: playing this with my partner. This really feels like a game that could be amazing if the devs gave it a bit of polish, cleaned up the bugs, and updated the in-game information with the current game mechanics. There’s something deeply frustrating about not knowing how to do something, and every post on Steam community and Reddit has a different answer, and very few of those answers are correct in the current version of the game. It’s a shame, because I’m really loving the actual gameplay. I spent most of today rebuilding my ship: suffice to say, the NPC faction that blasted holes in the previous version of the ship are going to rue the day they blasted holes in my ship. I have shields and a lot more guns. 😈
Earthlock: still enjoying this. Delightful RPG in the style of 90s Final Fantasy games. The storyline isn’t wowing me. It’s fine, very standard fantasy, but it doesn’t stand out as anything really amazing. But it’s a nice, easy-playing game with a lot of nice elements. It’s cute, the gameplay mechanics are interesting, and the puzzles are just the right balance between too easy and too hard. And I can plant trees that, for some reason, spawn frogs around them. I have no idea why, but I’m not complaining. 🐸
Maneater: I really had no idea how much I needed this game in my life until I started playing it. It’s been a rough couple of months, and something about being a shark on a quest for vengeance is incredibly cathartic. Those people in that fancy yacht totally had it coming. My glee definitely did escalate once I moved into an area with lots of rich people. More golf courses should have electric sharks sliding through them, chomping on the golfers. 🦈
It always seemed like “Baby’s first GTA” to me, but I think the Spyro the Dragon series might scratch that same itch. Especially the second and third games on the PS1.
After finishing The Last Of Us 2, I spent a lot of energy being sad about all the people in my life who don’t play games. They’ll never have that experience, and I found that somewhat upsetting. There’s no other way to live that story, and I wish l could give it to just everyone, and have them actually play and enjoy it.
The issue with Epic isn’t as bad as people imply, but it’s very real. They produced an incredibly shoddy launcher and store, frequently engage in anticompetitive practices like exclusives, and are happy to frequently update their launcher with new unhelpful bullshit without addressing its core problems.
Me, I’m not upset that Epic exists, even as a Steam user I would not like to deal with them as a true monopoly. But, they give me zero reason to use the store.
Honestly, if their launcher wasn’t so buggy and didn’t refresh itself every 10 seconds, I would use Epic a lot more. They have given out a bunch of great games over the last few years I’m trying to play.
One of my biggest complaints with the EGS is their anti-competitive actions. Rather than try to out compete, rather than try to be the better choice, they pay developers to only release games on their platform, flat out barring them from releasing on any other store. They don’t try to win your favor, they don’t try to be a pleasant experience, they just shortcut their way to being the only option, without a care for improving any of the other faults or shortcomings.
My next complaint is that Tencent has a 40% ownership share in Epic Games, and I make active efforts to not give them a dime.
There needs to always be multiple game stores to keep prices in check. Steam can not be the only option or prices will skyrocket. See game console stores for reference. I use Playnite to seamlessly bridge my game libraries from Steam, GOG, Epic, Amazon Prime, itch.io etc. This is the way.
I wouldn’t have much reason not to buy from Epic, but I also wouldn’t have any reason to buy from it either. Other than free games I don’t see why pick Epic over any other place. Steam has more features and GOG is DRM-free, even ItchIO has the benefit of being more supportive of smaller and upcoming game devs. Epic doesn’t do anything but the basic.
Occasionally Epic had better deals on, and if I was a big developer I might be tempted by their lower fees. That would certainly be offset by lower sales though.
The Epic store will probably stop being attractive to anyone as soon as “the kids” swap Fortnite for something else. They’ve basically got $6 billion in spunk money every year to try and make it a good alternative to Steam. When that money dries up, the Epic store isn’t going to make enough money to be worth keeping going. I doubt they’ll go bust, but they won’t be able to just hurl money at it to keep people interested.
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