Witch cards will drop: Ittle Dew

If you look at my Steam game playing history in terms of hours spent, I tend to gravitate toward somewhat less action-y, somewhat more think-y games but rarely all that think-y. I'm not a puzzle guy, not really, I lack patience. I always have. I do like turn based 4x games; the reason I haven't reviewed many (or any, I'd have to check) ends up with the feeling they eat time like no other. It's kinda hard to write about a game you should probably put a good hundred hours into to get a real feel for what it's like.

I do like puzzles in some games, though. I remember the sci-fi grounded puzzles in Dead Space really fondly. Clearing jams in the artificial gravity unit or life support wings were cool, generally unique ideas. But puzzle games themselves are generally the same thing repeated over and over. Push a block. Push a block. Now, push a block.

Generally, I think the biggest issue is one of general pacing - puzzle games tend to be sluggish and mistake the deliberate pace of the puzzle gameplay with something the game should have at all points in the production. It often feels like half the challenge is not getting bored out by having to slowly shove blocks around a room while your character moves at the speed of a waterborne slug.

Ittle Dew is a block pushing puzzle game. It was done by, previous to, the same individual(s) who put out Card City Nights, which was a pretty fun single player card game. It has the same tongue in cheek sense of humor and shares the same basic art style, albeit in a somewhat different setting than whatever you want to say CCN was in.

Witch cards will drop: Porradaria Upgrade

This game isn't any good, and neither was my reason for playing it.

I'm still putting time in to grind out games that have cards, that I want to play. I idle stinkers, but I can usually spare the five minutes to see if a game is worth playing. Porradaria, on the other hand, caught my eye because looking over the 'badges' page you can see black bars across some of the cards. I paused, staring at them in confusion. Was he censoring his own trading cards? What the...?

So yeah I installed and played it to figure out what kind of brazen nudity this greenlit game had managed to sneak through. For reference, there is nudity of various kinds in Steam, I think? The Witcher's cards are censored, although maybe they're not anymore, and I'm not sure how censored the Witcher 2 is. I'm pretty sure Huniepop is censored, but I don't own it, and I know from people's discussions in the SA Steam thread it has an uncensored version. But Path of Exile had some minor nudity (mostly statues, iirc) and many other games might have similar little bits hanging out. I feel like there was a horror game I played recently that had some nudity. Oh yeah, the ghost psychic in Fear 2 had her bits out.

That was chilling.

Personally, I don't think nudity is all that big of a deal. It can be effective in horror or in showing decadence, but those big black bars of censorship made me genuinely wonder what the deal with this game was. So, you know, a bad reasons to waste an hour of my life.

Inaccurately named: Gunpoint

I'm not a historian and I don't know when it happened, but at some point advertising took over the naming of things. Probably in the sixties, but probably like the 60s BC. A flashy name was worth more than actually, I don't know, describing the contents of the project. Thusly we have Gunpoint, a game in which I was shot about a hundred times but never held at Gunpoint, and only shot a singular person throughout the entire campaign. The developer straight up admits he came up with the name and built a game that got away from the name.

Your character is holding a gun on the box so... Actually I guess it's kind of a reverse spoiler or something... Well, whatever. Gunpoint is a puzzle game, a genre rarely recognized for its thrilling action-o-matic scenes. Actually it might be better described as a Noir detective ninja puzzle game, or maybe a spy thriller puzzle game. You're described as a spy, but you look more like a noir era detective. It's a spy game, basically, in that fantasy realm of spy games that I don't think we get that many of any more.

Well, there isn't a box. If there was a box, then he'd be holding a gun on the box. Or the tin, if you bought the hypothetical nonexistent collector's edition.

It's also a pixel art game. If you've been reading my reviews for a while, you probably realize I'm a little enamored with pixel art games. Good pixel art, mind you, which can be minimalist like Risk of Rain or incredibly detailed like Sonic Mania. There's lots of bad pixel art, lots and lots, people just taking the easy way out and making something "retro".

I wouldn't describe Gunpoint as retro. In fact, the juxtaposition of elements and ideas in Gunpoint are such that it really ends up defining itself by stringing together those elements into something that feels familiar but also unique.

Witch cards will drop: Blue Estate

Originally back in September, which I sometimes like to call Shootember, I was going to play through a mix and match of games that involve shooting. After playing Nuclear Throne, which definitely has quite a bit of shooting, technical problems and general apathy pushed me to play some other stuff. Blue Estate was on the list, having downloaded it after realizing it was something akin to a shooter without being a true FPS game.

Technically, I guess rail shooters are first person shooters, but with the rise of the first person shooter they went rapidly extinct with a handful of titles a year instead of being... Actually I guess they were never all that popular. The main difference between rail shooters and FPS games, to me, is actually less in the lack of movement and more what the lack of movement does to the game-play. Instead of being rewarded for careful placement and strategic play, it's basically all reaction time as your protagonist blunders into the line of fire over and over.

I honestly can't remember the last time I played a rail shooter and I definitely couldn't name one I thought was good or an exceptional product of the genre or whatever else. I'm not a great shot in real life and I'm not definitely not a great shot in this or in any other rail shooters. So we'll say this is one of those experiences where I find myself playing a game I'm not fundamentally suited toward playing, which is generally not an inspiring catalyst for a review.

On the other hand you've got to branch out and try different games, right? Even if all you end up doing is finding out you honestly don't like a given genre.

Witch cards will drop: Tower of Guns

Roguelites, which is a pretty vague half-genre description, spread to many different full genres and do many different things to those games. To my surprise, one of the genres that seems most easily adapted to roguelite behaviors is shooters the list of ones recommended to try is pretty short. I mean you have this one, Tower of Guns, and then you have that other one Ziggurat. Then I don't think much of any have come up as worthwhile.

You'd really think roguelites would prosper with FPS gameplay, given most if not all of the core elements are so easily transitioned over. Random drops, leveling, random events, levels assembled by quasi-procedural nonsense, FPSes can do all of this and maybe actually do it in fun ways. I don't know, maybe there's a literal ton of them, but I can think of like two indie FPS roguelites that don't fall on the list.

It's a little bit annoying that I keep running into roguelite games while doing this streak of reviews, but Tower of Guns I simply had installed from weeks or months ago and had forgotten about it. Recently, I picked up a used geforce 960 GTX, so I was looking at shooters I'd forgotten about and realized I actually had more than a few currently installed. Which is, you know, kind of silly. So I loaded this up and gave it a whirl.

Actually, though I guess I'll find a copy of Ziggurat eventually, maybe the reality is the problems with Tower of Guns highlight why FPS into roguelite is a bit difficult. Guess we'll see whenever that shows up in a bundle or whatever.

Witch cards will drop: Space Run

Tower defense games are, on the most part, one of the few genres I feel is always reliable. TD games are almost always "good" if they look good but inversely almost never "great" no matter how great they look on the surface. A handful I've played have really impressed me, but usually by stepping a measure outside the genre, though that often enough doesn't work so well either. The best example of a completely in genre TD is probably Defense Grid, while the best one working outside the genre is probably Orcs Must Die 2. Both of those have sequels I'm not all that eager to play, which shows just how tenuous the process can be.

Space Run is, without a doubt, completely in the genre of being a TD game. Oh, it tries to step out a little. The game is about running cargo along a straight 'space lane' or whatever you want to call it, which is a very linear track. As you go, various obstacles and enemies arrive, hover around your ship for a little and then sometimes wander off, fight you, or whatever else. If they're asteroids, sometimes they run into you, which is hurtful.

Your main character is the handsome and handsomely named Buck Mann, an everyman space jockey who owes money to the space mafia (which unfortunately does not include references to Black Shadow or Blue Bacchus)  and works as a space runner. Your partner is the android Addam12, who has 12 written on his forehead and is drawn in a manner that reminds me a little of Kryten of Red Dwarf but isn't voiced in quite a charming way. He's a beep boop robot, etc.

Buck Mann accepts jobs from various wacky characters; well, the first company you work with isn't all that wacky, but everyone afterward is increasingly strange. Then you're off to drive a spaceship in a straight line through space and tower defense your way through what may come.

Witch cards will drop: Steredenn

I spent way too much money in October (hint: Chicago is expensive) and now I need to get my ass in gear for the Christmas sale! And what place does one take one's ass for the Christmas sale: That's right, grinding on cards. While I idle most of the cruddier games that have cards, there's a ton of good, or at least good looking games that can be short reviewed for fun and cards. And everyone loves selling cards.

One advantage to playing a lot of games is getting to see the filtering of ideas, or even hypothetical parallel evolution. That is to say when designs are not influenced by each other, but rather arrive to the same design conclusion independently. It makes gaming feel a little less like closed individual systems and more like ecosystems of ideas, which almost makes it feeler grander in the way art likes to be played as. We're all aware of basic copying, of taking a basic "thing" from one game or a basic genre, like platformers in the 80s and FPSes in the 90s, but the more subtle cues and design hints make for a more interesting way to see games made.

And to mock their short-comings.

Steredenn has one of the oddest little names I've ever seen. Google's best translation is from Breton and it translates into Star. So the game is basically named Star. It's a simple name for what is ultimately a pretty simple game.

Anyway, Steredenn is a shmup of the side scrolling variety, built from the higher end level of pixel art where style and aesthetics are both emphasized. If the game has much of a story, well, I didn't notice. Instead - as games are wont to do in the modern indie paradigm - the game is a psuedo-roguelike, or roguelite, or something I'm tempted to call rougelite since we've fallen so far from the original design that boy is my face red.

Rougelites kinda drive me batty. Ha! Get it?

Witch cards will drop: Fire

So I think of myself as an individual who dislikes adventure games, but when I look back over the games I've played since starting up this blog, there are a pair of adventure games - Primordia and Morningstar - which I actually look back on positively. And that's my entire line of adventure games, right there, so maybe I'm wrong.

Or maybe those were just good games.

Fire is an adventure (puzzle/exploration) game set in a fantasy stone age world, along the lines of something like There was a Cave Man, or maybe a better example is Bonk's Adventure or the Flintstone's. I wish there was a Bonk's Adventure game on Steam, that would be good to review, since those games are acid trips. The game does not have english writing nor english dialogue, instead conveying information entirely through visual and more basic sounds than pure language. Though it does onga bonga blap blap at you as well, I guess. Basically, Fire is "in the stone age" through the lens of a drug high sliding in the wrong direction toward a bad trip.

The game's interesting hook is that complete lack of writing; puzzles are not really themed in any meaningful way as per the setting. The last section I bothered to finished had you feeding berries to creatures who looked like cartoon bushes, which would then allow them to play music. Once you lined up the tunes, and then spoke to cavemen in masks, the music would reduce them to meat. You then feed the meat to baby birds, who go back into their eggs and...

Well, you get the idea. Basically, it's not "the stone age", it's just goofy illogical puzzles without much in the way of explanation. The game cheats a little, even, using visual elements that convey speech or convey the meaning behind speech. Pictographs are still text, you know? Visually the game is a total thematic mess, it's pretty obvious the art team just didn't care and made whatever they felt like making. The music and audio, on the other hand, are just there to chill you out and provide gentle ambience while you play. Those are good, or at least, good at suiting what the game needs out of music. I don't think people play Adventure games to rock out while going through the puzzle sections or something.

Basically, the game is a generic puzzle/adventure thing, but entirely lacking any story or narrative structure. You appear on a screen, try to puzzle out the development logic and then you get a firefly that teleports you to the next level. The game's humor is utterly puerile, and the visuals are often weirdly off putting. There's just like, a frog anus or dinosaur brains or people being electrocuted to death to go with happy smiling flowers and dancing dudes who melt into meat. If it was trying to be cute, it would be cute, but instead it halfway tries to be cute and then slops over gore in the other direction.

Basically, I dislike this game, and at about the halfway point I shrugged my shoulders and stopped playing it. The puzzles are a mix of hunting pixels for what you're supposed to click on and then from there warping your brain to logic out puzzles that have so little to do with the setting. Maybe it's normal for adventure games to be so lacking flavor and story, I don't know, but it doesn't feel normal to me.