November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 1 Discussion
The blaze has officially ignited!
The November 2024 Backlog Burner is officially live. Use this topic to post about the games that you play.
Quicklink: Backlog Bingo
Etiquette:
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It is fine to make multiple top-level posts throughout the week.
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It is also fine to respond to your own posts.
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If you are playing Backlog Bingo, you can share your table either by markdown or through screenshots.
Gameplay guidelines:
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Goals for this event (if any) are entirely individual and self-determined.
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Playing Bingo is optional and not required.
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You do NOT need to finish games unless you want to. The point is to try out games and have fun, not force ourselves to play things we're not interested in.
Backlog Burner FAQ
What exactly is the Backlog Burner?
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, scratch some long-standing itches, and knock a few titles off our to-play lists.
It runs every May and November. New discussion topics will go up once a week during those months.
You do not need to sign up in advance -- the topics are open to all. If you would like to be included in the notification list, comment in this topic to be added.
How do I participate?
- Choose some games from your backlog and play them.
- Then tell us about your experiences in the discussion thread for the week.
That's it!
Optionally: you can play Backlog Bingo which is a fun way of cutting down the choices you have to make and playing games you might not have normally selected on your own.
Do I need to finish the games that 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!
Can I make multiple posts in the same topic?
Yes! Each discussion thread stays live for a full week, so feel free to make multiple comments in the topic as you play different games. This isn't considered noise -- it's considered valuable participation in the event!
Backlog Bingo FAQ
Important: All data for your Backlog Bingo card is stored on your device, not the server. Clearing your browser data will irrecoverably delete your card.
I'm a returning player. How do I reset my previous card?
If you've already created a card and wish to start over, click the Edit Rules button in the header to access your card settings. Then click the Reset button, and confirm the prompt. This will irrevocably delete your present card, allowing you to start fresh.
Where is my data stored?
All data is stored by your browser in local storage. There are no accounts, and nothing is sent to the server, so it's privacy-friendly by design. This does mean that you are responsible for not deleting any browser data on wescook.ca, either manually or through automatic cleanups performed on browser close.
Backlog Bingo is open-source, and licensed permissively under MIT.
What is the difference between the "Standard" and "Golf" modes?
In Standard Mode, each square on the bingo card corresponds with one single game. Duplicate games cannot be entered into different squares. A winning card would have a row of five different games that each filled in one square.
In Golf Mode, duplicates are not only allowed -- they are encouraged! The purpose of Golf mode is to try to find a single game that will fill multiple categories at the same time. For example: Stardew Valley might fulfill You got it on sale, A solo-dev project, and Has romanceable characters all at the same time. A winning card would have all twenty five squares filled, but possibly only six or seven different games.
What is the star space in the middle?
That is the "wildcard" or "free space."
In Standard Mode, there are no requirements to fill it. You can choose any game you want! Anything goes!
In Golf Mode, it does not need to be filled. Because Golf is all about stacking up categories on a single game, any game used in Golf would fill it automatically, meaning it has no real function. As such, the square will be pre-filled for you if you play in Golf mode.
Can I create custom bingo categories for this, or other events?
Absolutely! The Backlog Bingo app reads in simple JSON files which define the available categories. We've created a couple prebuilt lists for this event, but you're free to tweak our categories, or create completely new ones. You could even use them for books, anime, movies, recipes -- anything!
If you are interested in learning more, you can find documentation on the wiki, and use an example JSON category file. You can also ask for help in the topic!
Pinging all Backlog Burner participants/conversationalists: the event has begun!
Notification List
@Cannonball
@CrazyProfessor02
@Durinthal
@Eidolon
@Evie
@hamstergeddon
@J-Chiptunator
@JCPhoenix
@SingedFrostLantern
@Wafik
@Weldawadyathink
@Wes
@WiseassWolfOfYoitsu
If you would like to be removed from/added to the list, let me know either here or by PM.
Also, general announcement: as we go through the Backlog Burner, if you think of any categories you would like to see in Flux or Flow, please let me know! I’d love to incorporate some of those for the next event.
I’ve already started a list myself because new Flow ideas keep popping up for me as I browse my library.
I'm going to do something different than the last time (or two?) and go with a non-golf card, and I'm also using the one-word prompts. Shake it up!
My card
I'm still processing the card and going to look for some games to start matching to words! This is a cool new set of categories @Wes and @kfwyre - awesome addition! Thanks to both of you for getting the ball rolling.
Posting my base bingo card here. I'll update it as I play games this week.
kfwyre's Bingo Card (Standard/Flow, 1/25)
Fleeting✅ Windward
Windward - Fleeting
Am I allowed to make my first entry a pun? I'm going to make my first entry a pun.
I saw
Fleetingin my card and wasn't really sure what to do with it, but as I was browsing my library, I saw this game about navigating a ship. I then wondered if my ship would be part of a group, which would make me part of a "fleet", and then I could justify cruising around with my ship buddies as "fleeting."Sure enough, I got to cruise around with my ship buddies in this game. I was fleeting! We fleeted!
Is this the kind of player freedom we wanted to allow with these abstract Flow card categories? Or am I taking the concept too far and exploiting their lack of guardrails? You decide. 😂
Anyway, this game has a cool concept. You procedurally generate a water map populated by islands and coastal areas (broken up into different sections -- it's unfortunately not one contiguous open world). You then choose a particular faction to sail under. Then you can go around sailing from port to port, taking on quests, making trades, buying cheap goods in one town and selling them in another, etc. There's also ship-to-ship combat between factions and with pirates.
The game has a decent number of systems and what seems like a lot to offer. For example, when you dock at a town, you can read "rumors" from the townspeople which help hint at potentially useful information, and if you complete quests for that town, your relationship increases so you get better quality rumors. You can also help towns build defenses so that they're less susceptible to pirate attacks. There's honestly a lot to love here if you want a mostly chill sailing game.
I unfortunately don't think I'm going to keep playing it though.
My main issue with it is the controls. Instead of the joystick turning the ship relative to its current location, the joystick's position is always absolute. Pushing the joystick to the right will always make your ship sail to the east; pushing it up will always make your ship sail north. As someone who enjoys smooth movement in games and was looking forward to swooping around on the seas in my schooner, this kind of makes it a non-starter for me. Even after playing for half an hour, I never got used to the movement and didn't find it enjoyable.
Additionally, the game is slooooow. Going from place to place takes a while, especially if you're sailing against the wind. It reminded me of Valheim a bit in that way.
Now, like Valheim, I think this game is actually intended to be played multiplayer, rather than single player. That would make its pacing a lot easier to stomach, because everything is more fun and goes faster when you're coordinating with friends.
But combining the game's slow movement with un-fun controls meant that I didn't really enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay, despite conceptually liking what the game had to offer. I'm wondering if it plays different on a desktop with a mouse and keyboard, but I'm also not too interested in trying it out that way, because the game is exactly the kind of thing I want to be able to play in the comfort of my bed with my Steam Deck.
Also, if I'm being really honest, I'm thinking that I'm itching so bad to dive into the deep end of the Backlog Burner immediately that the idea of playing a more chill, relaxed, slower-paced game isn't vibing with me at the moment.
So, my verdict is that it's not a bad game by any means, but it's also not the right game for me at this moment. I'm glad I tried it nonetheless!
And I wholeheartedly apologize for sullying this good event with terrible wordplay. 😁
Oh I fully intend to stretch every category to its limits. Every one will be prefaced with "Technically...". It's going to be complete pandemonium.
I've played a bit of Windward, and I agree about the game feeling slow. Sometimes I like slow games, but for whatever reason I didn't jibe with this one. The gameplay loop needs to offer some kind of hook to keep me interested.
I actually had a chance to test it in multiplayer. It's a surprisingly hard game to host a server for! I remember needing to forward ports, and I think communication with the local server even required telnet. Definitely more work than I felt it was worth, and we fell off after an hour or so anyway.
It looks like a game I should like though, so I don't know. Maybe it would work better with a tighter design and clear objectives.
Durinthal's Bingo Card (Standard/Flow, 1/25)
Choice✅ Slay the Princess
Updating this over the course of the week as before, I got an early jump on a game that I wanted to revisit from May's event.
I considered flipping my Flow card to Golf mode, getting 100% on one game and then declaring a blackout with just that since I think I could argue it for every square I have (some better than others).
Slay the Princess is a game I first played in May's event, but with a new update out last week I wanted to return and continue my exploration of its many paths. Each choice leads you down a different route, with the complexity of the game coming from how many branches exist by in total and what you need to do to reach each.
I feel like it's a story best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible so I'll put the rest of it under a spoiler tag.
Slay the Princess spoilers
As I mentioned with my first time through it's a game built on repetition where you're meant to play through it multiple times and pick different options the next with the progress coming from your increased understanding of the characters rather than anything mechanical.
Your decisions lead to a transformation of the Princess, each chapter a new increment in that particular journey. For example if you want to display empathy toward her and don't bring a weapon when first encountering her, the Princess is one of tradition, the kind of beauty you'd normally show up to save rather than slay. If you think you're following a path of justice and try to free her, you may end up with a love that is ultimately fleeting after the light of a smothering love is (quite literally) extinguished. For once the Princess passes the threshold and leaves her prison, she cannot remain in the world.
Aside from the damsel you may choose a path where you enter the cabin in silence and kill the Princess outright. Or depending on how you engage in the struggle she may emerge with an incredible power over you if you give in to fear, able to command your body against your will. That kind of friction can be fun too.
The path of uncertainty is an interesting one as well, as leaving her locked up for eternity is something you can try. The resulting connection between you in the following chapter can be rather nightmarish.
One of my favorite routes is one of absence where you choose to not visit the cabin at all. That ultimately leads to a fragmentation of reality as the Princess doesn't know which form to take and instead becomes every version possible. The same goes for you on your inevitable journey to reach her and you're both lost to infinity.
While it is just a visual novel and the only inputs you have are selecting an action for your character, at one point you're presented with a long list of actions to choose, all identical aside from one. My first time playing through my precision was off and I accidentally bumped my joystick to select one of the many same options rather than the unique one I wanted, which lead to an interesting outcome in its own right.
CrazyProfessor02's Bingo Sheet
Part of a trilogyBeholderThoughts about the game
I was vaguely aware of the Beholder series, with the only one that I knew about was the sequel because I watched gameplay about it, and I thought this would be a good game to start this series off with. The basic premise of Beholder is that you are a government appointed landlord that has to spy on and report on your tenants. And the government will get a lot more annoying bans, such as a banned on foreign music. I was going to with any endings that you can get. So, I could move this over to the You can complete it in only a few hours because you can get a ending within two hours of play time (guess how I know this). It is a interesting game and a interesting concept, that I might go back and try to get the other endings besides the one that I got.
SingedFrostLantern's Bingo Card (Standard/Flow, 1/25)
Change✅ Darksiders Genesis
Change - Darksiders Genesis (Steam)
As I'm typing this, I realize Planescape: Torment was also an option to try out because of its famous quote
"What can change the nature of a man?". Change probably works for a store sim as well on account of giving someone their spare change. I'm also realizing that Darksiders 2 is still on my backlog too.Anywho, Darksiders is an action series about the Four Horsemen: War, Death, Fury, and Strife with their duty of keeping balance between heaven and hell and the general amount of asskicking they have to do after someone kickstarted the apocalypse early with War getting blamed for it. Where Change comes in is how each game has a different protagonist and genre: 1 has War in a Zelda-esque journey, 2 has Death and random loot/equipment drops, 3 has Fury in a Souls-like, and Genesis has Strife and War in a 2P co-op isometric action game along with it being a prequel to the other games which take place at the same time.
Performance-wise, it runs on a consistent 60FPS on Steam Deck with medium settings so far, though it's putting my desktop GPU (AMD Radeon RX 5700) at full usage and 100 degrees C for some reason.
Completed Mission 5 so far, I will choose to describe the plot as a buddy cop show with Strife as the wacky one-liner cop who keeps voicing distrust about their orders and War as the serious cop who would threaten to rip out someone's tongue and feed it to them, and then actually do it. Right now it's just them hunting down Lucifer and other demons aligned with him.
Gameplay-wise, Strife is the twin-stick shooter experience with multiple ammo types to swap between for his two fire buttons and being on the evasive side. War is the swordsman bruiser who gets different elements for his heavy attack and leans towards blocking/parrying. Both of them get to tap O/B to execute low health enemies. L1/Left Bumper (by default) is the modifier button to swap between horsemen in singleplayer, use wrath skills, summon their horse, or activate their special mode. Not exactly the paragon of depth, but it's serviceable. That said, there appears to be some RNG grind where enemies drop soul perks which are slotted into the skill tree and naturally you have to gain more of the specific perk type to level them up and raise the horseman's stats by matching the soul type to the soul slot.
Mostly my time is taken up by how there's a map for each level that shows all the hidden collectibles and naturally I feel compelled to hunt them down though it does the thing where there's stuff you can't access yet until replying the level with story-locked gear. The game is at least gracious enough to let the player choose when to return to the hub after completing a level for exploration purposes. Apparently I'm averaging an hour or so a level for this though which is probably messing with the pacing.
I think this is a podcast/work downtime game for me. I'm not particularly gripped by the gameplay or overall franchise story/lore, but it serves as a Steam Deck goal to clear.