I will take this opportunity to recommend Crosscode, one of the best action RPGs of all time according to 90% of people who play it.
But yeah even amazing games like that fly under people’s radar in the huge deluge of games. I wish it were easier for good games to find their audience
I like CrossCode, but I am going to bat for Phoenotopia Awakening, one of the best game almost nobody has heard about. Slightly different perspective but similarly massive game full of secrets, puzzles, fun characters and a consistent world where even the tiniest bit of banter can lead you to discover something on the other side of the map.
Not having a quest log made that game hell for me. Massive world with tons of little quests that take you all over the map and no way to track progress or see what the last part of the quest is asking for.
It was not a huge problem for me, but I play lots of metroidvania, and I am used to memorizing stuff for later. And for stuff that I know will be hard to remember, occasionally, I might take notes or screenshots of hints.
Though most of the time, there are more than one hint for a single quest. The game does a very good job at updating every related NPC dialogue when something has changed.
But if you want to find everything, yeah you have to talk to absolutely everyone. TWICE. Almost everyone has two lines of dialogue at any moment.
I love that game but I made the mistake of putting it down for a year. When I came back I was completely lost and had no idea what I had already done or what to do next. The game does not have quest logs and does not hold your hand this way. It’s a game where people might benefit from documenting their progress as they go, especially in case they ever take a break from it.
I bought it last night after reading this. I hadn’t heard of Phoentopia at all. You suggested it. I watched one video. I found it on sale on GOG, and I bought it. I will install it and play it this weekend.
No one reads oldschool curators like RockPaperShotgun anymore. They’re barely afloat.
Generic algorithmic social media like YouTube tends to snowball a few games.
Forums are dead. Reddit is dystopian.
That leaves Steam’s algorithm, and a sea of sparsely seen solo reviewers. But there are billions of people oblivious to passion projects they’d love, and playing AAAs or gacha phone apps instead.
The problem is engagement. Discord, YouTube, even Lemmy all ping you in your pocket and offer more “instant” dopamine hits than a forum or news site, hence they’ve sucked all the attention.
It works. I’m guilty of falling into it for sure, even when I keep telling myself I will change my information diet.
John Walker (founder of RPS, back when it wasn’t a window to Eurogamer style content) is currently doing Buried Treasure, a small review blog for things that aren’t being appreciated by the masses. Well worth checking out!
Stardew Valley totally would have taken staff and money if you can’t live in your parent’s house forever. edit: I didn’t want it to sound mean towards Barone, it’s great what his family did for him, but this game was made possible with a very strong support net – a luxury not many have.
Nowadays, creating fonts is easier than ever, with widely available tools. Creating good fonts that don’t look like hot garbage and don’t make your eyes hurt after reading a paragraph is somewhat harder, though type designers graduate from courses every year. There are lots of small independent foundries selling fonts around the world, and consultancies that will design fonts on commission for brands. If Monotype are going to play the private-equity extortion game, they’ll soon find game companies commissioning fonts they then own outright from designers, or even hiring a few type designers with the usual intake of 3D graphics/texture/animation artists.
You also didn’t hear about it because it’s not great. I watched a stream of it: the gameplay looks uninspired, like a student project to mimic Burnout, and the visuals would have looked dated in 2010.
But it was functional. So it’s neither good nor bad enough to rave about. You just say “huh”, flip a coin, and either uninstall forever or play every 7 months when you remember it’s on your hard drive.
“They have formulas that they apply to games to try to figure out how much money they could make, and in the end you end up giving a whole lot of games that look exactly the same as last year’s games, because that makes some money,” Gilbert explained.
…
He continued: “That’s why I really enjoy the indie game market because it’s kind of free of a lot of that stuff that big publishers bring to it, and there’s a lot more creativity, strangeness, and bizarreness.”
There’s still a lot of creativity in big games but it’d be shame to see more movement towards nostalgia-driven/pastiche type games.
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