Tildes' 2022 Backlog Burner: Week 2 Discussion Thread
Use this thread to post about the games that you play!
Also, a quick note about thread etiquette: It is fine to make multiple top-level posts throughout the week if you play multiple games. It is also fine to respond to yourself with updates if you're continuing a single game and want to talk more about it as you go!
Previous threads:
What is this?
Your "backlog" is all those games you've been meaning to play or get around to, but never have yet! This event is an attempt to get us to collectively dig into that treasure trove of experiences!
How do I participate?
Choose a game (or several) from your backlog and play it/them. Then tell us about your experiences in the discussion thread for the week! If you're not sure what you might write, take a look at a previous backlog post or our previous Backlog Burner event in 2020 to get an idea. Also if you want to keep track of statistics across the whole event or anything else like that, go for it!
Do I need to finish the games I play?
Nope! Not at all. There aren't really any requirements for the event so much as this is an incentive to get us to play games we've been avoiding starting up, for whatever reason. Play as much or as little as you like of a given game. Try out dozens for ten minutes each or dive into one for 40 hours. There's no wrong way to participate!
What's the timeline?
I will post an update thread weekly, each Tuesday, for the four weeks of February. At the end of the month, I think it would be neat to tally how many collective games we all removed from our backlogs, as well as what the best finds were from our collective digging into our libraries. I expect we'll turn up some good hidden gems, as well as interesting insights.
Do I need to sign up?
You don't have to do anything to officially join or participate in the event other than post in these threads! Participate in whatever way works for you. Also, because this is ongoing, it is okay to make more than one top-level post if you're updating the thread with new information.
Well, I find myself taking part, which is nice.
I started playing Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition and I have been enjoying it quite a bit. It is a delightful mix of RPG, cosmic horror, steampunk, political intrigue, and all with classic GTA1 style top-down controls, quite tunable difficulty options, random map generation, which necessitates exploration, and more. The art style is good, the story is good, piloting a flying steam engine through an alternate world filled with sky monsters is good. One thing that is great is that it has "rolls" for a lot of the RPG elements, but thus far I have not experienced any story elements being locked behind those rolls, which is something that really turned me off Disco Elysium. If you fail a roll, instead of just not progressing, you do whatever you were doing badly and there is a drawback; you often lose some of a particular resource - there are several that you must balance, being fuel, supplies, terror, nightmares, crew - and you are left dealing with the consequence. For example, if your Nightmare level is sufficiently high, you may have a terrible nightmare, that you have to try to deal with emotionally; if you succeed, you may increase your Terror level; if you fail, you may increase the Terror level, or decide you have to turn on more lights, which burns more fuel.
There is also an option to play "Legacy" mode, which means that if you die, and there are a wide variety of ways to do that, then your captain is Dead and that captain doesn't continue, but luckily bequeaths quests and some relevant items to a new captain.
Borrowing Deimos' rating scale, I am torn between 3 or 4, and may report back on this next week. Edit: I'm going to say 4 / 5.
I also experienced (I would not say "played") The Beginner's Guide, which is a game by the creator of The Stanley Parable. I may not have been in the right headspace for this; it took about 90 minutes, and it's not really a game, but something you work through with the narrator. I didn't have any real preconceived notion about it other than that The Stanley Parable is a 5/5 for me, so I guess I did have some level of expectation. Overall, I think that giving this a rating as a game is almost orthogonal to the point. There are youtube videos that are playthroughs of the game and you will get exactly the same experience out of watching those playthroughs as you will get from having the game and doing it yourself, so I would recommend doing that if you are interested.
This is why I have a backlog of games I want to play but don't. Last week, I didn't play any of my backlog games, during this month of backlog game-playing, because a new shiny game came out and I played that instead. It's great and I'm having a lot of fun playing it, but it's not what I had planned. I had never intended on only playing games from my backlog this month, but I'm shuffling around three, now four games, and none of them are what I intended.
What's the shiny new game that you've been playing?
Not who you asked, but I'm gonna guess it's Lost Ark given how many people in my Steam friends lists have recently started playing it, and also the fact that it's what killed my Backlog Burner efforts this month too. :P
I guessed that too, but wanted to gently encourage them to write about the game anyways. ;)
Lost Ark
This is a bit different than most folks backlog, but I have a group of friends who are super into playing Legend of Zelda: a Link to the Past Randomizers. They've been at it for years at this point, but the couple of times I've tried to get into it I've bounced off of it. I decided to give it another go this past week, so I got everything set up and this time I made sure to get a good auto-tracker set up. I'm not sure if that's the difference, or if I've watched enough of their races and other randomizer runs that I've picked up some of the strategy, but I'm enjoying it WAY more this time around. I've completed a couple of runs and I'm a little way into a third and so far I'm having a blast.
I had to look up ALTTP Randomizers and it looks pretty interesting. I might add this to my backlog - what an interesting thing to come across! It has been a fairly long time since I played ALTTP - or any Zelda game actually - so maybe it's time to reacquaint myself with the series.
Yeah there's a pretty big community of folks playing and racing randomizers for a lot of games, but from what I've seen ALTTPR is probably the biggest. It's a very popular game so lots of people are already familiar with it, but it's small enough that it's feasible to clear the game in one playthrough (if you're good at it) and there are a good number of item locations that are locked off behind particular items, but not so many as to be overwhelming. It adds a fun puzzle element to the game (do I have the item I need to check this location?). Once I got over the initial hurdle I've really been enjoying the game. Hopefully as I learn better routes through the dungeons I'll cut my times down more, right now it's still taking a 2-3 sessions per run, but most of my friends that have been playing a while can knock out a seed in a few hours.
This is awesome! Glad you're having a good time.
I love the idea of playing a randomizer myself, but sadly I don't think there's a game I know well enough that it would be a good candidate for me.