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November 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion
Week 3 has begun!
Post your current bingo cards.
Continue updating us on your games!
If you did not participate in Weeks 1-2 but want to start this week, that's fine!
Reminder: playing bingo is OPTIONAL.
Quick links:
Week 2 Recap
11 participants played 11 bingo cards and moved 43 games out of their backlogs!
There were 2 bingo wins. Congrats to u/Wes and u/J-Chiptunator! š
Also, in my rush last week to get the recap up, I forgot to celebrate u/Wes's win from Week 1. So, additional congratulations!
- Only 1 game this time had an ALL CAPS TITLE, but 9 games had PARTIAL CAps titles.
- The shortest title was 5 characters: Venba
- The longest title was 12 words: Tales from Toyotoki: Arrival of the Witch (The witch of the Ihanashi)
- We had the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, and 7 represented. Half of the digits!
(Note that this only works if I read "I Expect You to Die" as "One: Expect You to Die", which I do)
Game list:
- Afterlove EP
- AKIBA'S TRIP: Undead & Undressed
- Call of the Sea
- Citizen Sleeper
- Cozy Space Survivors
- Crimson Shroud
- CULTIC
- Devilated
- Drox Operative
- Eastward
- Hades II
- Haustoria
- NYT Lunch Break
- I Expect You to Die
- Intravenous
- Katamari Damacy REROLL
- MAKOTO WAKAIDO's Case Files
- Mask of Mists
- Metro Gravity
- Nine Noir Lives
- Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee
- Out There: Ī© Edition
- Pacific Drive
- Paradise Marsh
- Pumpkin Jack
- Rocket Skates VR
- Resogun
- The Room Three
- ROTA: Bend Gravity
- Shipwreck
- A Short Hike
- Sid Meier's Civilization VII
- Skator Gator
- Super Fantasy Kingdom
- Tales from Toyotoki: Arrival of the Witch (The witch of the Ihanashi)
- UnderRail
- Untitled Goose Game
- Vegas Stakes
- Venba
- Weapon Shop de Omasse
- We Were Here Expeditions: The FriendShip
- Zenith: Nexus
- Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma
Week 1 Recap
12 participants played 11 bingo cards and moved 24 games out of their backlogs!
- 25% of the games played started with the letters P and R
- 13% of the games played have ALL CAPS TITLES
- 21% of the games played have a number in their titles
Game list:
Two more games this week. I do hope to finish one more game this month, Keylocker, for the bingo, and I've already begun. But it's slow going and I'm not sure I'll have the time for any more beyond that.
What follow are my writeups for the week, which as always try avoid major spoilers, but not all spoilers. Read at your own peril.
Sā Soma
ā Wildcardā Children of the Sun
Mā Metro Gravity
Cā Citizen Sleeper
ā
Soma (CW: hideously self-indulgent analysis)
Hereās a question Iād like you to consider: is it moral to have children? Not āethicalā ā ethics, broadly speaking, are morals generalized to a population, and āis it ethical to have childrenā is the eugenics question. No, I'm asking, would it be right for you, the reader, to have kids, knowing what you know about yourself, your family, and the state of the world right now. This question is one I, unexpectedly, found myself considering while playing Soma, Frictional Gamesās 2015 horror classic. And questions like this one are, in a roundabout way, why I donāt really want to talk about Soma in any length or breadth of detail. But here we are. I can only do my best.
People often ask me, āEvie, how are you so sexy? Can I have your number? Oh, and, incidentally, how do you write such good game criticism all the time?ā
To which I reply āGenetics and hormones, sorry Iām taken, and well, itās all about your mindset.ā
You might intuitively assume that the work of writing about games occurs while writing ā youāve finished the game, and now you have to sit down in front of an endlessly blinking cursor and find a way to separate wheat from chaff, good from bad, experience from intent, with your words as scalpel. And you will have to do this, to a certain extent, but the real challenge of art criticism lies not in the criticism but in the art. How do you engage with a work, open yourself to it, in order to best understand it and, later, best communicate it?
The trick, I think, is to play the game, read the book, stare at the painting. Donāt think about whatās happening analytically, just experience the work. Then, only when you step back from the gallery wall, when you finish a chapter, when thereās a moment of downtime while youāre riding an elevator to the next level, feeling whatever feelings the art has stirred, then and only then you think about those feelings, and you think about what qualities of the work produced those feelings. It is one thing to write: āSoma is a scary game. There are jump scares, monsters, and troubling psychological themes.ā It is another thing entirely to write, āwhile playing Soma, just walking around, I found myself suddenly wracked with frisson, pausing the game, yanking off my headphones. Just for a second, to catch my breath. There wasnāt even a monster, I was just walking, on the sea floor, and yet I justā¦ couldnāt take a second more of the gameās oppressive atmosphere, an atmosphere largely created through visuals and sound design. Weāll return to this topic shortly, but for now,ā
Not only is the second example better written, itās also more engaging, because it ties my specific, human experience of the game to the gameās formal qualities. As a result, instead of a bland evaluation of whether the game is 'good' or 'bad,' or a listing of things that are in the game, the reader gets a better sense of the experience of playing the game, the reactions it can elicit, and, perhaps incidentally, who the writer is.
Similar techniques apply to writing about story, theme, structure, characters, et cetera. But the core idea is that good critique is grounded in your specific experience with the game. You can damage that experience by being too analytical, by myopically obsessing over whether what youāre playing is working or not, moment to moment. Breaking your immersion by thinking too much about the artistry behind the experience. I thought, quite frankly, that that was going to be be the experience I had with Soma.
Going in, I knew how Soma ended. I knew its core themes. I knew almost all its key plot beats. I knew all this, because Soma is an oftādiscussed horror classic, that tends to stick in the minds of the people who play it, and because Iām a fiend for games criticism, and read or watch as much of it as I can find. So I expected that my playthrough of Soma would be a primarily analytical exercise; that my stay at Pathos-II, the research station at the bottom of the sea that our protagonist, Simon, has his psyche crammed into, would be largely emotionless and unaffecting. That this was not the case; that my time playing Soma affected me deeply, set my head spinning, scared me and fascinated me in equal measure, was a true delight. Iām also not sure whether or not the game itself had anything to do with it. Iām worried that, the game having short-circuited my critical brain, if I turn it back on, itāll only be severely diminished by the examination; Thus, the long tangent about how to write good criticism. But Iāve digressed, stalled and dissembled enough, I think. Letās, at least for a bit, talk about the actual game.
Mechanically, Soma is probably best described as a horror walking sim, where you take a linear path through an undersea facility in full collapse, collecting readables, solving very light puzzles, and experiencing a gripping and thought-provoking story. Narratively, thematically, Soma is a close cousin to several games that are near and dear to my heart: Prey 2017, Dead Space, Signalis ā two of which, I wrote about for a Backlog Burner event last year. But experientially, in terms of gameplay, Soma is more similar to, say, What Remains of Edith Finch. Itās largely free of mechanics, gameplay, interactivity. The whole bulk of the challenge in the game is pathfinding around or hiding from monsters, and not even in a cool, āstealth gameplayā way. There are no bins or closets to hide in; hardly any ways to lure or distract or decommission monsters. Only waiting behind a table for them to wander somewhere else. The monsters, therefore, arenāt really the scary part of Soma. At best, theyāre speed bumps, at worst, annoying speed bumps. No, whatās scary about Soma is the atmosphere, the world, the weight and scope of its themes.
Soma is a true psychological horror experience; my mind was often occupied with mute terror at what had happened to the residents of Pathos-II, and what was happening to me as I explored it. And with questions: should I feel guilty for killing that robot? Is Catherine dying repeatedly, every time I unplug her? Is it moral to have children? Thatās where the fear comes from, I think, the uncertainty. Simon, the player character, is kind of a dumb guy. Heās probably never even heard of the Teletransportation Paradox (the philosophical quandry that underpins Somaās world and story); certainly, he regularly fails to think through the implications of major reveals. Itās never frustrating so much as it is sad; thereās the sense that Simon, and all the past residents of Pathos-II, some of whom who killed themselves after having their brains scanned for upload into a digital paradise, are coping with the end of their world and willful ignorance is their drug of choice. But it also means that core questions that the game introduces or explores are never introduced. You have to sit with them, deal with them yourself, if you want to be able to stop thinking about them.
The rest of the horror in Soma comes from the setting. The bottom of the sea, in a cavitating research facility, with creaks and groans and shrieks of shrapnel scraping, mingling with the footsteps of horrific biomechanical amalgamations on the other side of the wall or ceiling. And then, outside of it, wandering through an indistinct murk, following a trail of work lights that, obscured by distance, look more like the eyes of some colossal cephalopod. Finding the wreck of a sunken ship. Not knowing whether entering it has made you safer, or more vulnerable. Soma was, to some extent, always going to work on me; Iāve joked that my first horror movies were nature documentaries, the episodes of Planet Earth that dealt with the deep ocean. And I have formative memories about traveling to the US Virgin Islands for a destination wedding, about being urged deeper into the sea by my dad, about feeling a big and slimy and breathing something brush up against my foot. But, personal history notwithstanding, certain moments ā walking the sea floor for the first time, or coming to the edge of a plateau and looking down into nothing at all ā were among the scariest moments Iāve experienced in any game, and thatās thanks to Somaās soundscapes and its visuals, which look very aged in some moments but, on the seafloor, amid rusty wreckage and swirling clouds of silt, can seem almost indistinguishable from reality.
But this is the difficulty Iām having with Soma. If I wasnāt so fucking thalassaphobic, maybe I would think the game sucked. The monsters arenāt scary. The mechanics arenāt there to support a ten hour walking simulator. I wasnāt ever scared by, say, Signalis, not this viscerally, but that game actually had gameplay ā challenging, punishing, oppressive gameplay, that cultivates a mood, a horror unto itself. So the question is, is Soma scary, or did it just scare me? When I describe the elements of the game that make the horror work, they feel shockingly flimsy. āThe game looks good.ā āThe sound design is evocative.ā Great. Iāve just described, like, most games that release nowadays. And this doesnāt just apply to the horror elements of the game, either.
Our main characters, Simon and Catherine, are tasked with carrying the weight of the gameās story on their back. Though you meet or hear from other characters, itās mostly in the frame story, or simulations, or in sort of āaudiologsā that Simon can retrieve from the diving suits of the dead. Most of the game, itās just Simon talking to himself, or when Catherine, a digitized person, is plugged into the base, talking to Catherine. And frankly, I think both performers do a fairly bad job with the material theyāre given, which is also often clunky and subpar. Dialogue is often unnaturally phrased in an uncanny-valley kind of way. Characters in conversation often donāt sound like theyāre replying to each otherās line reads. Both main characters default to a tone that is in Simonās case affectless and in Catherineās that of a grade school teacher giving a lesson to a chronically uncomprehending child. This is a failure of voice direction, probably, and also of dialogue writing. But as much as I can point to this general deficit of quality I can equally point to scenes that were exquisitely written and performed: Simonās final explosion at Catherine, Catherineās memory of a Taipei she never truly experienced, Sarahās death scene. Iām worried that these moments, which even made me tear up with their sharpness of writing and their clarity of performance, were only accidental; that if I dig too deep into Soma's scenes, Iāll find that thereās nothing there really worth analyzing.
I feel the same way about the game's themes. I mentioned the Teletransportation Paradox, which asks: āIs a perfectly scanned and recreated replica of you, still you? What does it mean to possess ācontinuity of self?ā Is there even any such thing?ā Itās core to Somaās themes; the Simon you play as throughout the game is a recreation of an early digital scan of the original Simon, created in a doctorās office; as a first subject of such scanning, he became almost a placeholder, default personality uploaded thoughtlessly to many databases, many research stations. Catherineās plan to save humanity involves creating a digital paradise for scanned replicas of the dead Pathos-II crew. Your journey to save them involves simulating humans to interrogate them, then ākillingā them, in a harrowing scene; it involves creating new copies of yourself; involves grappling with an AI that tries to upload dead consciousness into robots to save them, but ends up torturing them instead. Soma presents enough permutations of its core problems, with enough variations, that it feels like nearly a complete exploration of the theme, and invokes fascinating questions along the way, like the aforementioned āis it moral to have children?ā More specifically: is it acceptable, for Simon to create copies of himself, with the brain trauma heās endured, with the horrific state the world is in? Simon never thinks about this, but I certainly did. Iāve been thinking about this question a lot lately, sort ofā¦ belatedly mourning my own infertility, and have come to the conclusion that no, Iām mentally ill enough, traumatized enough from my own relationship with my parents, in a precarious enough position, living in a bleak enough world, that I couldnāt justify having kids to myself. And so the question comes: did Soma raise that question, or did I, and I just happened to play Soma at the right time? If I really dig into its exploration of the aforementioned Paradox, will I find unexplored depths, or will I discover that Soma, while a decent primer, has nothing new or interesting to say on the subject?
I love Soma, and itās easy for me to explain why. Iām a good critic, Iāve thought about such things before. I could compare Soma to other great works of art, could examine its mien in considerable depth. Could explain to you why precisely itās been so beloved to those who played it, and so influential to those who came after it. What I cannot do is say, āSoma is a great game. I recommend you play Soma. Soma really holds up. If youāre a fan of horror games, youāll love Frictionalās 2015 game Soma.ā Because I donāt know. I donāt know if the game is a good experience, if itās scary, if the story is good, if the themes really resonate. What I know is that it worked for me, but Iām worried that, if I dig any deeper, my perception of the game will worsen, and my experience will be diminished. If you want a better answer or summation than that, play it for yourself.
Let me leave you with an anecdote. One of the women I live with used to love the film Everything Everywhere All At Once. She watched and rewatched it with all her friends. Broke down crying on the couch with me, the third time she saw a certain scene. It was such a good film, I think, that it got her invested in film as a medium. And now, sheās a film buff. She watches un-subtitled Eastern European films about bureaucracy, Argentinian films about men who shit on their enemies' windshields. Silent French films about bourgeois yo-yo players. She has (gasp!) a Letterboxd account. And she told me, recently, while we were sniping good-naturedly at each other over a draft of a script she'd written and I'd edited (rather ruthlessly), that she thinks that Everything Everywhere All At Once is overrated, that she agrees with most of the criticisms it gets from (in my opinion) contrarian film buffs. But, I thought, caught short, I held you while you cried over that scene with the donut, and murmured indecipherable things about your own family.
Sometimes, itās better to let your experience with the art stand. Sometimes, you donāt really need to dig any deeper than that. It might not even be the game's fault. Maybe all the problems I have with Soma, simmering away in my subconscious, would dissolve into nothing under the harsh light of a full and proper analysis. But for now, I love the game enough not to risk it.
ā
Children of the Sun (CW: normal, sensible and brief analysis)
It was not my intention to alternate between story games and gameplay games this Backlog Burner, but so far, thatās what happened. I played Citizen Sleeper (story) then Metro Gravity (gameplay) then Soma (story) and now Children of the Sun, which certainly possesses a story, yes, but only one shown in what feels like ten minutes cumulatively, in wordless bursts of comic panels between levels. No, though Children of the Sunās story is surprisingly rich and well-implemented for how sparse it ultimately is, the real reason itās here is to provide context for the gameās puzzle shooter levels ā which are the real reason youāre here.
If only there existed a game that had both gameplay and a story. Ah well. A girl can dream.
In Children of the Sun, you play as a nameless girl, the survivor of a high-control paramilitary sex cult that enslaved and killed her parents, as she takes up a rifle and slaughters her way through Montana in a magically enhanced revenge tour. You only have one bullet, one shot per level, so Children of the Sunās gameplay consists of finding a way to line up your shot so that you can kill every enemy in a level ā there are often as many as ten or fifteen ā in a single shot. This can be accomplished by ābouncingā your bullet from one enemyās head to the next, by blowing up gas cans, by bending your shot midair with magic powers. So the gameplay feels less reminiscent of, say, a Sniper Elite, more reminiscent of a SUPERHOT or a Ghostrunner, where the goal is to find the perfect route through a level to kill every enemy in one attempt, requiring both mechanical skill and careful planning to execute.
As a puzzle game, Children of the Sun does more than enough to keep itself interesting and engaging for its less-than-threeāhour runtime. Introducing new enemy types, new powers to counteract them, and levels with different types of challenges: a timed level, where if you donāt hurry, more enemies will spawn in. A car chase level, where you have to bounce your bullet between moving automobiles. More puzzle-y levels, where itās all about finding the right path; more improvisational levels, where almost any strategy can work, and itās all about execution. I found the game was rich both in cool mechanical discoveries that made a level click together, and the sort of āspeedrunner thrillā of perfectly executing a difficult series of maneuvers. And since each level has a leaderboard, youāre encouraged to improve your runs, to push even further for a high score and a higher rank. I probably wonāt be replaying any of Children of the Sunās levels, but even so, it was cool to grind out some weird, tough, unintuitive solution to a level even on a first clear, see that my score had ranked in the top 1000, and know that not a lot of people thought of that, and that their strategies didnāt score nearly so well.
Children of the Sun isnāt a story game, but it certainly creates and reinforces a strong mood. With its jarring, garish art design, its sparse soundscape, its nonlinear comic panels, its non-puzzle gimmick levels that task you with cleaning the gun, hunting for food, or kneeling for and embracing other cult members in a dream. All these things, I think, mainly serve to at once clue you into and distance you from the mindset of the traumatized main character, who thinks thoughts like āI Just Killed A Man Now Iām Hornyā and (directed to the cultās leader) āSoon the sun will start shining through a bullet shaped hole in your head,ā who both is incredibly violent towards the cult and misses the comfort, the family, that they once provided her. Itās a visceral experience, but youāre held at a distance, I think, feeling more like an observer, or a subject, than a participant. After all, you donāt play as the former cultist; you play as her bullet.
Children of the Sun took me only two and a half hours to beat, and I had a good time with its puzzles, and was intrigued and engaged by what story there was. I canāt say it was life changing, or that I fell in love with it like I did its genre neighbors ā SUPERHOT got me into puppy play (look, honestly, we don't have to say anything more on the subject); Ghostrunner got me, briefly, into speedrunning; Children of the Sun will most likely not get me into anything, but it was a compelling and tidy experience, and I strongly recommend it, without even one of my usual self-obsessed wishy-washy qualms to hold me back.
I'm a big believer in resonance as applied to media criticism.
For a long time, it seemed to be the "correct" way was to interpret something in a sort of divorced, distanced way that attempted to be objective about the media's hypothetical impact to some hypothetical average person. The "view from nowhere" was held up as the most esteemed and idealized way to interpret a text of any kind.
I myself tried this for a while.
Clumsily.
It felt "right" according to the standards of criticism to turn off my own personal responses, because well, that's what critics do. But it felt "wrong" according to me in my own self because, well, what purpose does ignoring my own feelings serve?
It was unfortunately very easy for me to ignore those feelings for a long time. I didn't spend a decade in the closet without getting INCREDIBLY good at turning down the volume on my heart, for example.
After I came out though, I threw myself into a bunch of unexplored queer media. I got my hands on any queer books I could find and devoured them. Their resonance was more powerful than anything else I'd read up to that point. By critical standards though, these were all but invisible. It's not that they were duds. It's that they were so niche as to not be worth criticism in the first place.
This was my first introduction to the idea that the "view from nowhere" really isn't a view from "nowhere" but is, instead, a view from the generalized norm of humanity. It can sound noble, but it can also completely fall apart because the norm is so watered-down and homogenized to be almost nonsensical.
It's like that "the average person has one ovary and one testicle" quip. Very few people (if any?) are like that, but an average targets that hypothetical individual as if they represent the whole swath of humanity itself. When we sand off all the edges of personal, individual resonance in our criticism, we end up with something that might technically fit everyone, without really accounting for the possibility that the "fit" might be completely, distractingly off.
I have since adjusted my idea of criticism to put much more weight on personal resonance. Not only does this feel more true to the emotional side of me that I deadened for so long, but I also think it it's the richer way of looking at media in general. From the other side of criticism, reading it rather than writing it, if the driving question I'm using when consulting a piece of criticism is "what does this text offer me?" rather than "what did other people get out of this text?" then I'm really limiting my scope, prioritizing my experiences over others, and reducing the possibility space for how a work can be appreciated.
This is all a really long-winded way to say that your criticism of Soma doesn't have to live in the "view from nowhere" space. It can live in your heart, your feelings, your connections, the questions it brought up in you, the context in which you played it, the way you acknowledge its strengths alongside its flaws. The personal aspects of your criticism are what give your words oxygen and make them compelling to read and think about.
When I read what you wrote about Soma, I'm not just reading about the game -- I'm reading about another human's very human response to a game that asks a lot of very human questions. This is an asset for your criticism, IMO, not a flaw.
This is a complete aside, but I am deeply thalassophobic (and mildly submechanophobic) so Soma gave me the same heebie jeebies it gave you. I finished Soma (reluctantly), and I had to stop playing the amazing Subnautica on account of the anxiety it gave me.
I think this is the central conflict Soma awakens in me. It is central to creating good art criticism -- at least, if you, as I do, view it as an art unto itself; "the spectacle and the curtain at the same time," as the poet said -- that you be an artist in creating it. I'm keenly aware of this; I have a five thousand word piece posted on this website about, roughly, how goddamn much Genshin Impact once meant to me. But, it's like this. When I think of my favorite games of all time, kfwyre, there's one gacha game anywhere near that list, and it's not Genshin. I think, for me, I have the inescapable notion that to some extent, to love a game is not enough. It must also stand up to close and vicious scrutiny. The gacha visual novel Reverse 1999 has story arcs that are so well written they rival or exceed my favorite novels, chapters which I have read and reread and found astonishing new depths each time. I did not play it to keep from freezing to despair, as I did with Genshin. But Genshin Impact is an awfully written game, that wrenches everything inside it into tragic and disappointing submission in service a ruthlessly exploitative business model.
What I'm saying is, I love Soma now, because of my circumstances. When my circumstances change, I may no longer love it, if I spare too much thought to justifying the harsh criticisms I had while playing. I think my desire to keep it at a distance comes from that; to keep the love, or at least the memory of love, as my foremost impression of the game.
I hear you completely. I don't think resonance is the sole source of value by any means; I just think it's often downplayed rather than leaned into.
There are a lot of games that I've played for a long time that are "keep you on the hook" games that use the psychology of gambling to keep you going, even though the playing hasn't necessarily been worthwhile or meaningful. I loved playing these games in the moments in which I was playing them, but I don't love these games in my heart. Probably similar to how you feel about Genshin Impact.
Critic Claire Dederer has a criticism model that basically boils down to "Did the text deliver on its intent?" and then also "How worthwhile was the intent in the first place?"
I really like this model, because it can help us understand the appeal and resonance of something like Genshin Impact which effectively delivers on its intent, except that its intent involves, in large part (or maybe in total?) predatory monetization. Halls of Torment was like that for me. Great game, but I think it's great in part because the game is one giant protracted "number-go-up" grind designed to get you to do the same effectively mindless thing over and over again for hours and hours and hours. Does it deliver on its intent? Absolutely. Is its intent worthwhile? Hmmmm. That's a much harder question.
This is also part of why I think resonance is so important. Halls of Torment took up lots of time time and made my depressed brain light up, but it was devoid of pretty much any emotional valence besides frustration when my numbers didn't go up enough like I wanted them to.
The games that I love in my heart, the ones that are meaningful to me, the ones that I still think about decades later have all effectively navigated emotional resonance. It's part of their intent. Celeste is, mechanically, an utterly fantastic platformer. If you play the PICO-8 version, you get this part of the game. But if you play the full release, the mechanics are integrated with resonance which takes the game up a level to something truly great. Both the game's intent and delivery are elevated.
Soma is something that does the same, I think. Yes, it does have flaws, but those flaws exist within an integrated system of mechanics, design, art, and writing that use resonance as their connective tissue. I also think that resonance can be sort of a cheat code for covering up flaws. If done well, it can help us overlook something that otherwise would have pinged. If done unsubtly, it can feel cheap and manipulative -- something akin to
numberemotion-go-up.Everyone's experiences, of course, vary, in part because that resonance is landing on beds of completely different associations, contexts, etc. If I read a queer romance story, its resonance is more likely to cause me to overlook its flaws than, say, a straight or ace reader. The old model of criticism made me feel like I wasn't doing my job for reading it like a detached straight reader, and it took me a while to see that the old model was effectively advantaging that viewpoint. Meanwhile, when I pointed out flaws in straight works whose emotional resonance I was effectively immune to (e.g. Lost in Translation, Garden State), I was told that the fault once again lay with me because I didn't understand the text's "objective" beauty or meaning or whatnot.
(Note: I felt this way about Lost in Translation and Garden State when I saw them decades ago, not just afterwards, where they have started to come under more criticism from a modern lens. I think this is a sign that criticism is actually shifting away from the paradigm I'm decrying, so maybe my whole post is me just tilting at windmills from a grudge that I've been holding on to for way too long now?)
Iām not trying to say that queer resonance is better than straight resonance by any means. Instead, I think properly accounting for and considering resonance is a part of good criticism, and that was absent on both sides at the time for different reasons.
Anyway, I realize this is a lot, and the way I've phrased everything sounds really didactic, but I'm intending it to be completely the opposite. I'm not trying to tell you how you should think about Soma or criticism or anything. Instead, I'm trying to convey that I think that your criticism of Soma probably lands differently on me than it does on you, and I'm trying give you my personal framework for why that is.
You've blown me away, yet again, Evie. I'm worried I'll add too much pressure if I keep saying that, but wow.
More than just providing an incredible game criticism, you've also managed to capture the exact thing I've been stuck on this month. I've been trying to find a balance between living in the moment and enjoying games, versus taking a critical eye and trying to come up with interesting commentary as I play. I make notes as I don't want to forget any important thoughts, but I also worry that it interrupts the game, disrupts pacing, and puts me in the wrong mindset to take everything in.
I actually made a conscious effort this month to do shorter write-ups, to try to get more out of the experience than I put in, if that makes sense. Still, I'm finding it hard to break my pattern. The write-up I'm currently drafting has gone through countless revisions already, and I'm still not sure if it has any insight at all.
I appreciate your point about when to experience a work and when to consider it. I may try practicing a more mindful approach of allowing myself breaks for making notes, but otherwise trying to stay engaged. If I end up losing a thought, it's not the end of the world.
I may also try to give more consideration to abstract impressions, and focus less on the mechanical. Anyone can look up how a game plays on the Steam page. But only I can answer how it makes me feel. What stories resonated with me, and what senses did they evoke? That's the kind of writing I've always struggled with, but would like to improve at.
I found your meta-commentary on commentary very helpful, so thank you for sharing. I'm glad you love Soma, and I hope it stays that way for you.
edit: By the way, @SingedFrostLantern played Keylocker last year, if you wish to read their thoughts after putting down your own.
It was actually SingedFrostLantern's write-up on Keylocker that convinced me to buy it! Thanks for the link, though; I didn't have the commenr saved to hand.
I'm glad you liked my commentary, and that you hit on it at the right time. When I read books, I'll often put them down for a while after each chapter just to think about them. You do have to be careful not to let your thoughts crystallize before you're even done with the thing; to leave room to be surprised and delighted by the art still, as I was last week with Citizen Sleeper. I've enjoyed reading your writing too :)
Pinging all Backlog Burner participants/conversationalists: here's the new topic for the week!
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@deathinactthree
@Durinthal
@Eidolon
@J-Chiptunator
@JCPhoenix
@knocklessmonster
@Pistos
@sotix
@sparksbet
@Wes
@ZeroGee
If you would like to be removed from/added to the list, let me know either here or by PM.
We are two weeks in, and I'll have everyone know that I haven't deleted my card or had to reinstall Linux even once! This is a personal triumph.
My dog also didn't eat my writeups this time. I did type them in my notes app rather than the web browser this time, so even if he did jump on the computer again they would have been okay. But, as is the case with backups, issues like that will only happen when you don't have recovery set up. When you do? It's like the universe knows and leaves you alone.
General life things have kept me quite busy and, correspondingly, have kept me from being as present in the comments of this event as I'd like to be, but know that I'm thrilled with all of the great writeups everyone is doing. The true fun of Backlog Burner for me isn't just in playing my own games, it's in hearing what everyone else has to say about theirs too! So, big thanks to everyone for being so thoughtful and forthcoming in talking about what you've been playing.
Distributionā Pepsiman
Orderā Irritating Stick
Calmā Cursorblade
Simpleā Rocket Skates VR
Verticalityā ROTA
Annihilationā Cozy Space Survivors
Peaceā Vib-Ribbon
Openā Midtown Madness
Discoveryā A Simple Garbage Sorting Game
Swiftā Skator Gator
Abundanceā Inkbound
Isolationā Firestarter
Repetitionā Mask of Mists
Soundā Paradise Marsh
Maneuverā Arctic Eggs
Midtown Madness
This is a racing game from 1999 that looked SO cool to young me but that I never was able to actually get my hands on. We're spoiled these days with availability. If a game wasn't in my local stores back then, I never even had a chance to play it. As such, this is one of those games that I've always been interested in but never actually scratched the itch to pick up and play.
The game is noteworthy for having an open world back when that was novel and exciting. For example: I played hours and hours of Carmageddon back in the day not because I liked its over-the-top violence (it actually put me off a lot) but because you could drive anywhere and that was SO COOL! Midtown Madness does the same thing minus the violence, with its map being a facsimile of downtown Chicago.
I streamed the game from my Windows PC to my Deck, and set up a Steam Input profile to play the game with a controller which works better than it has any right to. It's inevitably clunky, especially in menus, but being able to stream a game to my handheld gaming device and use a control scheme it was never intended for is one of those reminders that I am living in the future. The me from 1999 never could have imagined such a thing!
Anyway, in terms of racing, the game is pretty standard. No rubber-banding, which is nice, and it's got various adjustable settings like time of day and traffic and "physics realism" (whatever that means). I turned the "realism" slider almost all the way down, and my car rolled when I went around a corner, which was unexpected and kind of fun?
In the middle of the map are these big drawbridges that open and close, so of course you can hit them while the sides are up for a perfect ramp that gets you massive air. It's a little quaint by modern standards, but I can assure you that it was undoubtedly breathtakingly cool back at the turn of the millennium.
I can't really say I recommend the game outside of a novel curiosity these days. As much as I love retro racing games, I also think they're one of the genres that ages the poorest. I don't know that the game has a lot to offer unless you're looking to relive your own nostalgia for it or, like me, scratch a decades-long itch.
If anyone is wanting to visit it, an abandonware download of it is really your only option. This is one of those games that will never see re-release due to its use of actual licensed cars (a problem that is still a death knell for most racing games in terms of long-term availability -- even the Forza games can't stay available for more than a few years!).
Firestarter
This one does have a modern re-release, being, from what I can tell, a GOG Exclusive.
It's from the same developer that did the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, though it was put out several years before the first of those games.
It's an arena horde shooter with quite possibly the worst onboarding I've had in recent memory. Instead of spawning hordes of enemies, the tutorial levels of the game laboriously and slowly spawn enemies in isolation, one-by-one, complete with multi-second cutaways to introduce each new enemy and weapon. Once you get past this the game gets more interesting, picking up in both pacing and difficulty.
The game does have a lot of cool ideas. There are different classes with different stats, and as you advance through the game you choose from among different boosts to your character in the now-familiar pattern of a modern-day roguelike.
The game is something that I would have enjoyed keeping up with, but unfortunately it was marred by some bugs that I have to assume are the product of running a 2003 game on 2025 hardware. I died for no reason at multiple points on multiple levels. In starting the game I had to adjust Windows settings to make my mouse not be stuttery in-game and finally got that working, only to have the stutter return when I used the first ability I unlocked (time slow).
Enough of these little issues accumulated that they would have made the game frustrating to continue, so I decided to shelve the game. I was glad that I was able to play enough to get a feel and an appreciation for it though.
Pepsiman
You are Pepsiman, a distribution superhero bringing Pepsi to people in need.
A few scattered thoughts:
This game is a perfect example of what I will henceforth call "The @vili Principle:"
The game is short. I probably beat it in about an hour or so?
But that's only because I abused the crap out of save states.
If I hadn't, it would have taken me hours, maybe dozens of them, to see the game all the way through. It relies on you learning its patterns and cycles through repetition so that you can avoid them. The game has a lot of cheap deaths or obstacles. If you don't collect enough Pepsi cans you can run out of lives and have to start all the way over. It's a bit unfair by modern standards to the point of potentially being unfun by modern standards as well.
That said, this isn't exactly a criticism. Back in the day, I was the kind of gamer that would have eagerly put those dozens of hours into this game. It was just how we played back then. I'm glad I was able to try out the game, and it was genuinely enjoyable playing it with save states. Without them, however, I think I would have hit a frustration wall pretty early on.
Vib-Ribbon
Similar to Midtown Madness, this is another 1999 game that always interested me but that was completely inaccessible to me as a kid (it never came out in North America).
I don't think I even knew about the game in 1999. Instead, what put it on my radar was when I started making my own custom DDR stepfiles for Dance With Intensity (anyone else remember that?). I embedded myself into several online stepfile communities, including one that had a custom map for the track "Laugh & Peace" from this game.
I was entranced by the song. It was odd. Quirky. It had drastic tempo changes and memorable lines. It feels like something that would fit right in on the amazing Katamari Damacy soundtrack.
My knowledge of and interest in the game stopped there for decades, until I finally picked the game up for CGA.
The game is a delight. Full of personality and charm. Its minimalistic, monochromatic graphics punch well above their weight in making the game feel lively, exciting, dynamic, and cute. Vibri is adorable.
The soundtrack is also excellent. I have since acquired a copy of it and uploaded it to my Apple Music account, so that I can listen to the tracks from the game whenever I want.
The gameplay is, well, there.
Unfortunately, for a rhythm game, Vib-Ribbon has some timing issues. I suspect even the built-in tracks for the game were procedurally generated rather than hardcoded in, because there are obstacles that do not follow the song's beats correctly. I took to watching Vibri's footfalls to know when to press buttons, rather than going with the "feel" of the song, which takes a lot of the fun out of it.
I did still enjoy it, particularly the wrinkle the game throws at you in the final Hard stage. I also haven't played any custom tracks yet, but I plan to try to get a custom disc going with my emulator. Despite what I see as an unignorable issue with the game's obstacle timings, I was ultimately won over by the game's irrepressible charm. It's got a personality all its own, buoyed by a bright, endearing, wacky cuteness.
Arctic Eggs
I'm going to be honest, I don't really get this one.
Admittedly, the game crushes it on vibes. It's surreal, weird, strange. It's got a crunchy low-res, low-poly aesthetic that takes me back to the PSOne (completely with swimming textures). I honestly do love the art style, as weird as that sounds (it's... deliberately not beautiful). The score is nice and jazzy.
That said, the gameplay involves you repeatedly making eggs for hungry people. You get a pan, you have to maneuver the egg around the pan to heat up one side, then you have to successfully flip the egg and cook it on the other side. All of this is done through mouse movements, including the rather delicate process of successfully flipping the egg and catching it back in the pan.
Great concept, honestly. Cooking Mama meets an absurdist horror-adjacent Antarctic community. I can dig it.
Different people in the game that you make eggs for will have different things that go in their pans. You might have to make multiple eggs at once. Or an egg with a can of sardines (that you have to heat up to get the lid off of). Or an egg with... cigarettes? Again, the game is weird.
Unfortunately for me, while I vibed with the game's aesthetics, I hated the gameplay. I got zero satisfaction from successfully cooking anything, and I spent a non-negligible amount of time fighting the controls in more crowded pans. I think the āfunā of the game is that itās meant to be a clumsy QWOP-like.
Those definitely arenāt my speed though.
There might be more to the game that I didn't really get to see in my meager half hour of playing it, but I didn't really enjoy any of that half hour, so I moved on from this.
Inkbound
This is a two part tale: one of a technicality, and one of sorrow.
The technicality: I started this game well before the Backlog Burner started. So can I really count it?
Well, up to this month, I had only played it multiplayer. Also, the group that I play multiplayer with is like, VERY good at technical things in games while I am not, so I really wasn't playing with them so much as I was along for the ride, not fully understanding the game's many systems and whatnot. Playing it with them, however, gave me the itch to play it solo. Now that I've done it, I can honestly say it's a pretty different experience in solo versus multiplayer. Hence, me counting it for the event.
The game is a turn-based roguelike that kind of reminds me of an isometric Slay the Spire. Explaining the game's systems is rather involved, so suffice it to say that there are an abundance of different builds in the game that are legitimately viable. There are different classes, different abilities, different upgrade paths for those abilities, different items, different item set bonuses, different passive bonuses, etc.
Also, like Slay the Spire and many other roguelikes, when you get a build to take off, you get that wonderful sensation of frission where it goes SO smoothly and you are SO powerful that it's staggering.
It's been a while since a game has gripped me like this, and it's out of my usual lane. My husband keeps finding me playing "just one more run" and has let me know multiple times how surprised he is that I really clicked with this game since it's not in my wheelhouse.
So, if it's so great, why is the second part a tale of sorrow?
Well, the game was abandoned by the devs. It was made by the people that did Monster Train, and they said that this didn't sell enough for them to continue development. Personally, I feel like the Monster Trains printed money for the devs and they could spare the little bit more it would cost for them to see this through to the finish line, but I'm biased because I genuinely love this game and I also know literally nothing about game development.
The state that they left it in is still very good mind you. I am satisfied with it and love it.
But it's not the fully polished final product it could be. I'm frustrated because I can see perfection on the horizon and know that the game is never going to get there.
In particular, the game has some bugs, some of which are minor, but a few that have been significant enough that it ruined a run or two for me. Also, being a multiplayer-first game that's "technically" playable solo, it's dependent on external servers. Once those shut down, the game is going to be unplayable.
This is particularly sad for me because, with a little bit of longer post-release support, I truly believe this could have been an iconic indie game that's still getting played a decade from now. It has great bones, great ideas, great execution. What it doesn't have is the little bit more it needed to be truly timeless.
I still think the game is absolutely worth playing, and there's a lot of fun to be had. My friends and I have done dozens of multiplayer runs. I've done maybe a half-dozen solo runs. I will likely do dozens more of each type. There is a lot to love about this game, but it saddens me that it's eventually going to be one that gets away with its imperfect self instead of one that lives on forever, polished to a perfected shine.
Until now, my perception of Inkbound was "that spinoff game from the Monster Train devs that didn't do so well". It sounds like it's actually a lot more interesting than I gave it credit for. A build-heavy roguelike with crazy scaling and multiplayer? Yes please.
They do still seem like a small team (it took years for Monster Train to come to Android after iOS), so I guess I can understand them reallocating resources, but it does suck to see a game you love being neglected. It seems like even a skeleton crew could have worked on polish and giving the game a final send-off before calling it quits.
I'm glad you're still having fun with it, though. And after all your practice in solo, you should be much more fearsome during your next multiplayer session.
Yeah, the fact that itās like, 90% of the way there already is the frustrating part. But, then again, perhaps that last 10% really does take 90% of the effort. Also, I canāt really blame them. I donāt work for free either!
Multiplayer is fun because you can trade items, so itās much more likely for a build to take off simply because there are way more opportunities to get what someone in your group is specifically looking for. Of course, the game knows this and scales to it, so it remains challenging even with 4 players.
In each run we do, thereās usually one person who becomes the runaway breakout star, far more powerful than everyone else on account of the random drops and trades aligning for them.
When we played last week, it finally happened to me! I was the belle of the ball, and it felt great.
Irritating Stick
This is basically a digital version of one of those carnival games where you're given a metal rod and you have to maneuver it around a wire without them touching.
As the name
impliesoutright states, it is irritating.Movement is kind of deliberately clunky. The levels are kind of deliberately difficult. When your stick hits a boundary, you get a jarring jolt animation and sound. Apparently your controller is also supposed to rumble a lot, but that doesn't seem to be working on my current emulator setup.
The game requires deliberate steadiness and caution -- an ordered approach rather than a chaotic one. Go too fast and you'll hit things way too easily, but go too slow, and you'll run out of time. The titular stick needs a deft, confident driver.
Like Pepsiman was an early runner game before the genre was really solidified, this is a rage game before its genre took hold.
I can't say that I had a lot of fun playing this, but I will admit that I was kind of charmed by the game's full-tilt embracing of its own aggravation.
Cursorblade
Your mouse cursor is a blade with conspicuous Kirby eyes. You slash the blade through the enemies onscreen to defeat them, but have to watch out because you'll lose health if they're currently attacking. As much as I wanted to just wave my mouse around frantically to attack everything, I had to be much more calm about my approach otherwise I would quickly die and lose the whole run.
After each successful wave, you can add/upgrade weapons and passives, making your blade more powerful so that it can, of course, tackle more powerful enemies. Lose all your hearts, and it's permadeath time and you have to start a new run.
The game is a neat little time-waster with cute graphics. I've been playing a run or two of it in between other games.
A Simple Garbage Sorting Game
This is one of those games that plays with your expectations, where the fun is the discovery of what it does next. I don't want to spoil anything, but I'll let this stand alone as a sort of synecdoche for my playthrough:
At one point, I fell out of bounds, and there was a non-negligible amount of time where I wasn't sure if that was dev-intended or not.
I wouldn't say it's great, and a lot of what it does has been done better by other games, but It's also only a buck at full price, and I definitely got a dollar's worth of enjoyment out of it.
Also, with those games added, I now have a DOUBLE bingo!
New goal: going for blackout before the month is over.
I never owned Midtown Madness either... but there was a demo available and I played that at LAN parties with friends back then. We never did much in the way of racing but had fun just driving around the map and I definitely remember using the bridges as ramps.
I love the gaming trope of drawbridges turning into impromptu jump ramps! It's right up there with "secrets behind a waterfall" for me.
I know what you mean about racing games not aging so well. I recently revisited an N64 title, Rush 2: Extreme Racing USA, and my nostalgia simply could not overcome the jank. That game was so 90s that you literally collected Mountain Dew cans for secrets. Admittedly, this might have sounded more ridiculous if you hadn't just played Pepsiman.
I am surprised to see a runner game from so early on. Though the permadeath definitely feels like a legacy from arcade days, where killing the player was quickest way to earn a quarter. It took a few years for game designers to adapt to the home console market.
As a side note, Canabalt was great, and I still listen to its OST from time to time.
We're all so proud of you Kefir!!
I'd like to accept this award on behalf of distro hoppers everywhere.
Connectionā Eastward
Quantityā Katamari Damacy Reroll
Maneuverā Haustoria
Loveā Eastward
Faithā Agatha Knife
Erosionā Eastward
Perspectiveā Agatha Knife
Recursionā Eastward
Emergenceā Pushmo
Vulnerabilityā Haustoria
Destructionā Eastward
Harmonyā Agatha Knife
Unorthodoxā Pushmo
Fragmentationā Eastward
Happinessā Agatha Knife
Traditionā Agatha Knife
Continuing my quest to finish games I've already started, I'm playing Pushmo on my 3DS! Which... I don't actually expect to finish this time either, since this is sort of a "whenever the mood strikes" game. But I figured it'd be fun.
It's a puzzle platformer which I consider unorthodox because the "puzzle" is fairly literal. You pull out blocks up to three spaces so you can jump up and climb up the structures to free trapped children. (I'm using "Emergence" fairly literally here to refer to how the blocks pop out.) It can be tricky.
Today I've solved 10 puzzles from the Murals 2 section: two dinosaurs, an ice cream cone, a hamburger, a house, a sea turtle, an elephant, a giraffe, and a matryoshka doll. And I think I'll stop here because the R button started sticking, and I need that to zoom out to check the rest of the puzzle. Now I get to worry about that button... Yaaaay...
So I knocked out another two!
First off was Katamari Damacy Reroll. Which I saw @Wes also played last week. I'd reached the eighth star during previous playthroughs, and last night managed to complete it. I marked it for Quantity because you're collecting as many things as possible. Not much to say about it, except that our royal father is... not a very good dad? Or king of space?? The opening still remains one of the funniest things I've seen that.
After that, I looked at the bingo card to decide my next game, and as I looked at the square for Faith, one game came instantly to mind: Faith. But I don't own that and I'm a coward at actually playing horror games, but another game also came to mind: Agatha Knife, a game I bought years ago and last played in 2017. It's an adorable point-and-click adventure game about a little girl living at a butcher shop starting a religion for animals so they won't be so terrified of death!
...Yeah, I'm going to hell for some of those squares.
Speaking of, I have a proposal for a new category for future bingos: "Games that PETA would protest". This would include Animal Crossing, every PokƩmon game, and Agatha Knife. Except Agatha Knife deserves to be protested by PETA way more than those other two examples because... she's a butcher. Making a religion for animals. So that they'll be happy about dying. Also she's seven and lives in the back of a butcher shop instead of in her house, and is very annoyed at all these people who express concern about child exploitation.
If not obvious, this game has some VERY dark humor. This is definitely not a game for everyone. If you're a vegan, this game is not for you (someone actually asked if it was vegan-friendly on Steam, wtf??). If you're a bit morally uptight and don't like children in adult situations, this game is also not for you. Seriously, just look at the premise, that's pretty morbid. It's offset by Agatha, who is innocent and... not quite sweet, she can be snarky and rude to some of the adults, but she does genuinely love animals and is quite vocal about how animals should be treated well.
and also might or might not like the smell of animal blood, that was one of the options when Marilyn Manson asked if we did any drugsSo, the above is all your warning. I'm going to put a good chunk in a spoiler box now mainly because... animal death. Can't even say it's non-graphic animal death, there's only like two scenes but it does quickly show the butchering process. And also spoilers because I'm just going to spoil the entire thing this time, but mainly animal death. I kinda expect that to put some people off playing it anyway.
Seriously, final warning. Also this is LONG
So to set the scene, we play Agatha Knife, a little girl who lives and works in the abattoir of her mother's butcher shop. Agatha LOVES playing with the animals, but she hates how scared they are when it's time for her to slaughter them. Alas, the butcher shop has been down on business, so her mother takes her to pray at a church with a priest coincidentally preaching Chronodairyism. Which is all about buying wheels of cheese he receives from the Time Lord, who threatens people to buy them so their souls go to heaven after death. Yes, the word "threaten" was very explicitly used by an old lady who gives us money to buy some cheese and light a candle. I explain this only because that helps further set the tone for the game.
So I marked off Harmony because that word was explicitly used in the pitch by Marilyn Manson (yes, really) about the benefits of starting our own religion! The game opens up with him giving us a nice lecture on how we can use religion to achieve all sorts of goals, like how the preacher above had a failing cheese business. It's actually a fairly interesting look into how
cultsreligions grift people. In Agatha's case, she and her mother are worried about the butcher shop, and she wants her animal friends to stop feeling so bad. Marilyn Manson thinks it's a unique case, and after confirming we're sure we don't want to report our mother, he accepts us into his course and assigns us a mentor.So, cut to the butcher shop, with no customers again. And our mother sends us to slaughter our last pig. First we end up being teleported into the office of the Awesome Sandro, our mentor. He goes further into how religions work, and how our first big step is to make up a god. He divines the next steps via tarot reading and requests animal blood.
So we get teleported back to the butcher's shop, and slaughter the very sad and scared pig. And... Yeah, we see its entrails and part of the butchering process in a comic-style montage. It's still the same cute art style, but I can't say it's non-graphic. But we get its blood and teleport back to Sandro, who uses it to make a potion that tastes surprisingly good.
So we drink the potion and enter our imagination, and meet... The Great Bleeding Pig.* Who we only see as an ominous red shadow, and who communicates in ominous oinking noises. Then Sandro pulls us out because we spent too long talking to him, reminds us that the Great Bleeding Pig is made up, and sends us off to find a blank book to use as a sacred text for our religion, Carnivorism.
Thus begins the fetch quests as we complete task after task. Honestly, morbid themes aside, it really reminded me of the point-and-click games I'd play as a kid. Very specifically those aimed at kids, like a Madeline game. The art style and gameplay doesn't feel like adventure games geared towards adults, none of the puzzles are that obtuse and the game gives you plenty of hints. I had a guide open solely because the most annoying part was going back and forth, and I didn't want to have to travel all the way from the library to the butcher shop for a single thing I forgot again. (Still happened in the end, dang it.)
And... honestly, irreverent as the game is overall, it is pretty thought-provoking in some ways. Because in our quest to start this religion, we discover the reason we've lost all our customers is because the supermarket and a new burger bar have been buying cheaper meat from... the vet. Who gets animals from people who just say "I don't want to spend THAT much money on animals" and just abandon their pets there.
Yeah, Agatha rightfully chews him out. She makes a big point about how she slaughters animals MEANT for eating, which is totally different from animals meant to be pets! Also, that meat might be lethal. There's a guy at the diner trying the Doggy Burger challenge, and when we go back to confront the owner he's apparently dead according to Agatha's dialogue. Agatha is pretty passionate about it, ranting about she and her mom visited many farms before selecting the one with the best animals. (And, according to her mom, Agatha hugged a piglet to death at the farm they chose by squeezing it so tight she crushed it and it bled from its mouth, eyes and snout, and was apparently devastated by its death. I... now wonder if that might be the source of a bunch of Agatha's... everything.)
That said, not many adults seem to care. A good chunk of Agatha's rude and snarky remarks towards adults center around her telling them the burgers and supermarket use dog meat, and they decide they don't care. One woman even demands a burger to alter a robe to use as our holy habit, and the inventory specifically describes it as "a piece of dog in a bun".
It's... like I said, thought-provoking. Especially because one of the animals you can see at the vet's office is a guinea pig, which I know are commonly eaten in South America. The vet claims Agatha is the same as him, but she vehemently denies it and calls him an Animal Assassin. Those same words are later lobbed at Agatha by the local zoo owner, after learning Agatha's a butcher only after giving the seven-year-old an industrial meat mincer. (I swear it's not as ridiculous as it soundsāokay, no, it's ridiculous, but it's not as dark as it sounds out of context. Credit to this zoo lady, she's a vegan but still previously used the meat mincer even as the smell made her feel sick to ensure the animals had appropriate diets. Though uh... not sure a raccoon eating over 2,000 burgers in a single day is "appropriate"...)
Anyways. By that point we're mostly done with the setup. We bound a book and dipped it in blood, met the Great Bleeding Pig a second time and filled said book with his words (and it took a while, long enough for Sandro to gather food), we secured a new customer, shut down the crooked vet (good riddance), got the title to the butcher shop so we can establish the abattoir as a proper sanctuary (mother of the year everyone), got a holy habitānow we just need to gather followers!
So we go to the farm to invite animals. This involves requesting directions from our genius friend Nika who is drunk for some reason, and she spouts some cryptic riddle about praying to clowns at the circus where Sandro... works? Worked? He's part of the caravan, but according to the lion, the midgets (his word, not mine) confronted the ringmaster during a show about being paid only half as much as others, and the audience agreed they were only "half" so they got angry and cut everyone in half.
So uh, the circus tent is all blocked off and the show's probably over for good. (By the way, Agatha remarks how she never liked the circus anyway because of how they treat animals, adding further moral questions about ethics when dealing with animals in any capacity.) But there are still two clown signs, so we pray to them three times!
And then the clown signs speak because they're annoyed at Agatha for being so chatty, and then reveal they hid the farm because it was smelly and lift the fog obscuring it before leaving due to the smell.
...I knew magic existed in this game's universe because of Sandro. Hell, we'd also summoned a magic book with answers to all the great pop culture mysteries complete with lightning. But I still did NOT see that coming. I'm totally with Agatha on asking if those clowns were clown gods or something, because clown portraits shouldn't talk, or have any sorts of powers. Like she said, humans and animals speak, but signs shouldn't!
.....And I just realized I didn't emphasize that animals can speak in the game. There was this whole quest with delivering a recipe for antelope meatballs from the dad lion at the circus to the zoo where his children now live, we even got an achievement for making the dad lion happy. So yeah, animals can talk, and that made the final act finally start to feel more uncomfortable. Because this is where we actively convince these animals to come to our butcher shop to be killed.
They talk about being scared of death and the meat trucks, and we have Agatha trying to convince them that with Carnivorism they'll find eternal happiness in death. It's... a bit unnerving, won't lie, even with how they're surprisingly blase about the whole thing. Again, we are actively convincing them to agree to be killed, and this game has emphasized repeatedly that these religions are made up purely for grifting. Sandro has reminded us, repeatedly, that the Great Bleeding Pig is not real. It's like scamming, but with death instead of money, and I started to feel a bit bad about it because I'm convincing them to die for nothing. We're trying to give them a new Perspective on death and butchering that works in our favor.
The animals still agree to go to the butcher shop to see a demonstration and meet The Great Bleeding Pig, and we receive our final task: to convince one pig to become a martyr. This involves feeding said pig that potion we made at the start so he can enter our dormant imagnarium to meet the Great Bleeding Pig, because if he's so great, surely he can come to the farm he demands to have him wish him a happy birthday! His first birthday.
Seriously, the game is really hammering in how messed up this all is.
We accomplish our task though, and he races off to the butcher shop where he terrifies our mother. She's sitting by the counter in the dark, because the electricity got cut off due to unpaid bills, and she's all spooked because of the crazy pig that barreled through shortly before our arrival. I have no sympathy for that woman, she transferred the shop's title to her seven-year-old after making her do all the leg work in securing a new customer. But hey, the lack of electricity sets the ambiance perfectly in the abattoir, where hordes of animals are waiting!
So, we set up the lectern. Set up the holy book. Put on our habit. And begin the ritual.
We use the last of the blood potion to draw a circle around the feet of our martyr. We set up candles and light them. Then, Agatha asks the Great Bleeding Pig to come to the sanctuary using him as a vessel.
And the martyr rises on his hind legs, opens glowing red eyes... and glowing blood pours from his eyes, snout and mouth.
And it becomes clear then that the Great Bleeding Pig was not Agatha's imagination like Sandro thought. He is, in fact, a real being, that we have actually summoned, and whose words can only be translated by Agatha. He's actually the piglet who was killed by a hug from Agatha, and he does find genuine comfort in his death because he found that dying in her arms from that much affection to be the nicest way to go. And he wants to share that with the others by emphasizing that they can join him in this postmortem salvation by Agatha's knife and no other butcher's.
And that scene is the whole reason I made this writeup. I'd had thoughts that maybe, just maybe something was up with The Great Bleeding Pig after our first meeting, and then with the second. Then there were the examples of actual magic existing. But it still somehow took me by surprise to confirm he was actually real. And it actually made me feel a little better about the whole thing, because it confirmed there is an afterlife in this game. So we're not scamming them to die for nothing. They'd be slaughtered no matter what and they all know it, but Carnivorism gives them actual eternal happiness.
From there, we slaughter the Great Bleeding Pig in the martyr's body after asking that the martyr feels no pain, and sprinkle his sacred tears of blood upon the others. And as we begin butchering his remains, the other animals begin clamoring for their turns. A few days later, the store reopens and business is booming, life better than ever. And we get this final monologue from our heroine:
"Everything is awesome... thanks to Carnivorism. I've learnt so many things on this course... and now I'm a master of faith and religion. I know what a god is, and how to make one... I've got a sacred book that makes no sense... and I've set up a sanctuary in the butcher's. My religion is so cool. Oh, and the most important thing of all... My animals aren't afraid of me anymore! The ritual worked. They trust me now. They all want me to kill and eat them. (stomach growls) Oh... It seems like the Great Bleeding Pig wants new friends. Anyways... I'm going to spread some happiness... Because I am... Agatha Knife."
Cue Title Drop and credit screen
So, as I kept saying, it's a thought-provoking game. Lots of dark humor, but it delves into some deep themes in a fairly tongue-in-cheek way. Seriously, the way it talks about religion is just all-in on how religions are fictional and often used for greed, and then there's just all the ethics around meat and animals. Absolutely an acquired taste, but I enjoyed it. Like I said above, the simplicity of the gameplay reminded me of playing point-and-click games like Madeline more than adventure games meant for adults. I never got bogged down by frustration and could focus on the narrative and moral quandaries this game raised.
It's a fairly short game, it took me around six hours to complete, and I can recommend it if anyone does think it might be their cup of tea. Namely a willingness to put aside all discomfort with the heavy emphasis on animal death.
Also seriously, can we add a "Games that PETA would protest" category for future bingo's? Agatha Knife would be protested for fairly obvious reasons, but... well, they protested Animal Crossing because you can sell fish and bugs or donate them to the museum. And that was before New Horizons added cooking which can, in fact, use fish we catch. The standards are low. I'd love to see what other games people can find to fit that!
Whoa. What a rundown!
Thanks for taking the time to type all that out for us. This is a game Iāve never heard of and have no interest in playing, but I loved reading your thoughts on it.
Iām of two minds on this.
I really like a clever, creative category idea like this one. Itās unusual, and would likely surface an interesting collection of games. Very cool.
On the other hand, I could see how adding it might come across as dismissive of people who are genuinely concerned about animal welfare (in the vein of āGames that would make vegans madā or something similar). At worst it could look like an endorsement of digital animal cruelty, which feels mean for meannessās sake.
Iām open to other thoughts on this. Anyone else have strong opinions?
Yeah, I don't expect many people would be interested in playing it themselves, which is why I decided to do the whole write-up. Usually I try to keep spoilers light since sometimes people look at these for ideas on new games to play, but this one's concept is out there enough that I'd be surprised if anyone else here had an interest in it.
That's my main concern, though I think PETA has a bit of a reputation for frivolous protests. I mean... They protested the museum in Animal Crossing. Any game with a fishing or bug catching mechanic would apparently qualify. And any monster catching game like PokƩmon, Mario because of the tanuki suit, probably any game with combat where you play as an animal... A lot of their protests are more performative (seriously, the fact they went to a museum in AC means someone donated fish and bugs to get it built), so it's admittedly hard for me to take PETA complaining about games seriously.
But if someone's unfamiliar with their history, it can easily feel judgmental for the reasons you stated. I wonder if there are other big names who are known to protest games for other reasons... Maybe we could have a general "protested game" category? Because plenty of games get protested for very frivolous reasons. (Night Trap, anyone?)
Iām completely out of the loop on PETAās activities, but from an outside perspective, their Animal Crossing stunt looks less like an actual protest and more like engagement bait for social media?
I do like the idea of something like āA game that people might protestā though, as thatās pretty open. If we limit it to just games that have actually been protested, the pool is much smaller, but keeping it as a hypothetical lets people be creative in their interpretation.
We do have the category "Known for its real-world drama" in Flux, which is reasonably close to something that might be protested. @CannibalisticApple
I got it in my Week 4 card, and am searching to come up with something that might apply. I refuse to download Roblox. :|
War Thunder comes to mind with all the leaked military secrets from the playerbase. So does PokƩmon, Mario, Grand Theft Auto, Night Trap...
Lots of options if you start looking into controversial and banned games!
Wow, now that is in contrast to your usual picks.
Definitely one of the most unique titles submitted so far. It seems like the devs really enjoy the weird and dark, but also wanted to lean into that to make a statement.
I can definitely see the criticism of cultish thinking (or maybe it's meant to be educational), which I completely jibe with. I'm not sure what the takeaway is on the ethics of animal butchery, though. It's okay if you have love in your heart? I guess that works. We thank the Great Bleeding Pig for bestowing us with this lesson.
That's dark, Apple. That's dark.
Yeah, I found it kinda funny given last time I ended up playing a bunch of games starring animals. I bought it on a whim when I saw someone play the beginning on Youtube, I don't think I would have gotten it otherwise given the subject matter. One of the thumbnails from that channel made me think Agatha might have some regrets... She doesn't. She is very happy with the results. Not to a psychotic degree, but everyone is happy! Even the animals are clamoring to die by the end!
It's less morbid in practice than it sounds, but the concept is still definitely not one I'd usually touch (though I do love dark humor, but... Animal death). I'm still not sure what the message on butchery is, other than that I'd probably buy from Agatha's store since she does genuinely love animals and wants them to be happy before dying. She's basically an ethical butcher compared to the other animal assassin she shut down in the game.
I had a feeling this one would be pretty unique compared to most entries. And I'll make up for how unique it is by the fact that I think a good chunk of my remaining intended backlog games have already been played by others this month!
...Also I did not make that pun intentionally, but I'm cackling.
Noooo! I felt this viscerally. The same thing happened with my first Steam Deck.
Thankfully, it was easy enough to work around that, and it was also easy enough to eventually just get another whole Deck when my battery also died, but 3DS hardware is a lot harder to come by. Hopefully you're able to figure out a fix.
Also Pushmo looks super cute by the way.
My 3x3 card - Mode: Custom | Bingo! | Finished 3/9
Puzzleā The Room Three
Bullet heavenā Death Must Die
Word gameā NYT Lunch Break
Death Must Die - Bullet Heaven. Well, I'm old, I'm not 100% sure that this is a Bullet Heaven and not a Bullet Hell or it might actually not be in either because there's no bullets, though there's an occasional projectile. Nevertheless, here we are.
The Good - I feel like one of the first things I always bring up with games is the art style, and this is going to be no different. I like the art style for this game a lot; it is a blend of modern and retro, the characters are all great, the bosses look great. I haven't progressed very far because The enemies scale well; they start very easy and dopey and they ramp up in difficulty in a pretty reasonable way. The gods that give you buffs are all well designed, both from the art perspective (Aegir looks a lot like Jason Momoa) and from a game design perspective. There are a good variety of buffs and progression available, and no two runs feel exactly the same.
The Bad - I want to try different maps and enemy sets, and that hasn't happened in the first several hours. It's somewhat broken up by the good character design which gives good variety, but the map itself is fairly drab and a little "samey" and I'd like to see other maps, which probably happens if I experience more success than I have in this game. I guess another "bad" is me - I'm not particularly good at the game, so I haven't had a lot of progression. EDIT - I unlocked another map. Turns out I'm just bad and you have to get somewhat good to unlock new maps. Part of getting good is getting talent points via failures to make your characters more and more powerful. It took me a while to get to the point where I did enough damage to outpace even the incidental damage that I was taking, which caused me to lose runs. /edit
The Different - one of the ways that this differs from other Bullet Heaven games is that it has thus far been very difficult for me to build for sustain or healing; there are times where it feels inevitable to take damage, and heals are few and far between. I have realized that I tend to rely on some kind of healing in games like this, and when it's not there, I really struggle. I don't think this is a fault in the game at all, I just have to figure out how to build better and take less damage.
Overall if you like Bullet Helleaven games, this one is pretty good. I don't know that it's going to go on my all-time list, like Brotato or Vampire Survivors, but it's a good take on the genre.
The Room Four: Old Sins - Mystery / Investigation. I felt like I had a good card to play two games that I wanted to play for a while that were quite related - The Room 3 and 4 could both go in any of at least 3 spots on my board - so I took the opportunity to play both of them almost back to back, with a quick Death Must Die break between.
The Good - I will refer back to my comments on the Room 3 here, and say that all the things that were good about previous games in this series remain good about The Room 4. If anything, the music, art direction, and feel of the games only improves from each iteration to the next. This game is gorgeous and engrossing, the puzzles are good, the story is creepy and the calls back to previous Room games felt exceptionally well done.
One of the things that I felt was a bit rough from The Room 3 was that the multiple rooms did not have a distinct enough feel; the library, the office, the upstairs all had a similar colour scheme and vibe. I didn't really feel this point explicitly until I played the Room 4, which is why I didn't comment on it before. For comparison, the Room 4 has more rooms, and they all have a very distinct feel and theme; the Kitchen is very different from the Maritime Room, which is different from the Art Tower, and you can feel the difference in each of them right away.
There are still puzzles where you go from room to room, but there were very few times when I did not have an idea of what to do next. When I did find myself at a loss, out came the hints, and I felt a lot of trepidation as the first one came up. I don't recall exactly what the hint was, but it was explicitly helpful; I had picked up an item, and I didn't know which of the three rooms available that the piece belonged in, but the hint was something like "that figuring you picked up makes you think of the Maritime Room". It didn't tell me that I should solve a puzzle, or that I should look for things to click on, it just gave me gentle direction on where to go next. As soon as I got to the Maritime room, I could look through the eyepiece and have some idea at where interactible things were in the room, because they returned to a design where the eyepiece, in addition to having some other explicit functions, also gave you clues about what in a room was clickable and what was just set pieces.
I felt like someone had read the things that I said were bad about the Room 3 and fixed them all in the Room 4.
The Bad - none. No notes.
The Different - the story of each of the earlier games is good but not great, but each one continues the previous story, with A.S. sending you messages. The story is mostly told through finding letters to get a clue as to what is going on. The Room 4 mostly abandons A.S. and the Null, though you find letters and cursed books and some other things scattered through the house. It tells a story about love between Abigail and Edward and Edward's obsession and madness with the Null. I felt it was a much more cohesive story, and one which pulled in some of the older games as well, but it would be nice to return to A.S. and continue that storyline.
Overall this is my favourite of the series.
Iāve played all the The Room games (including the VR one), and I agree with you wholeheartedly. This one really is the best of the bunch.
The series has always had a knack for intricate puzzle boxes, so the choice to make an entire dollhouse an intricate puzzle box was really cool. I also thought they pulled it off really well. Itās a stellar game.
How good is the VR one? I haven't played that one.
Story spoilers for all Room Games
I was really hoping that at some point it would reveal that Abigail Lockwood was actually A.S. from the previous games, and that the dollhouse was where the Null began. I realize that would be a bit of a ret-con, because A.S. does seem to be explicitly a man in at least one of the previous games, but I think it would still have worked; she started dressing as a man to be taken seriously as a scientist or something.I guess that could still be the case.
I liked it a lot.
Itās pretty much what youād expect from a The Room game in VR. Itās a little less pretty than the other games, and youāll get the usual clumsiness of interacting with things in VR, but what it loses there it makes up for in immersion.
The horror-adjacent vibes of the series have always been quite strong, and that holds for this game. I was considerably more creeped out than I have been with previous games ā not because itās deliberately scarier, mind you, but because everything is more intense in VR. Seeing creepy tentacles hits harder in a headset than it does on a screen.
Also, the gameās trademark interactivity works well in VR, despite the aforementioned clumsiness (which I feel is just part of the medium ā itās hard to make interacting with objects that arenāt there feel ācorrectā).
If youāve already got a VR setup, then itās worth playing. If you donāt, itās not worth getting one or anything. By the standards of VR games, Iād say itās quite well done and polished. By the standards of the regular games, Iād say itās a little bit simpler (though I did get stuck a few times, as I have with each of their games).
As for the story, well, this is one of the rare things on which we diverge! I didnāt pay attention to the narrative at all in the series, in part because there was a several year gap in between when I played each one.
If you haven't seen it yet, Fireproof Games also made a full VR game called Ghost Town. I played the demo for it during one of the Steam Next Fests. It's more narrative-focused, and definitely leans into the spooky factor.
The demo was pretty short, and apparently so is the game. So I probably wouldn't grab it at full price, but maybe on sale. (I'd say wait for a bundle, but these devs historically don't do bundles).
That looks great. I've added it to my wishlist!No, no, NO! I'm doing the Backlog Burner all wrong!
This is one of the pitfalls of so many great writeups (or even just off the cuff mentions) - the backlog grows!
It's all fodder for the next backlog burner though right? I think we'd have to have a four week BLB every 2 weeks for me to reasonably make it through my backlog though.
Nice one. I've only played the first The Room game, so I'm glad to hear that they continue to iterate on the formula -- and correct any missteps, where necessary.
I bought these games on mobile, thinking that tap interactions would feel more natural, but I've realized I almost never actually sit down and play mobile games. I might need to start including them in my backlog planning...
But I think I'll try to pick up the rest of the Room collection on Steam during the next sale. They don't seem to ever get bundled via Humble, et al, and are cheap enough on their own.
And so quickly too! Now that's service.
I got The Room on mobile, but didn't get the others, and ended up going back to steam, just because that felt better to me. This is likely a result of many years of point and click puzzle games like 7th Guest, 11th Hour, Myst, Ryven, etc. but I just couldn't get into it on mobile as well. I'm not advocating for trying it in a different method, but saying that I think it's great that there are multiple ways to get the content and play the game, so it's cool to see what works for people.
I wonder if my complaint about the clues was a common one, because the clues in 4 seemed very thoughtful. It felt like they must have playtested it and asked people what would help them in each situation, instead of applying generic "have you tried solving the puzzle" style hints. It just felt much better crafted and smoother.
Death Must Die - Update.
I've played a bit more and I need to amend a bit of what I wrote above.
I put this in an edit above, but there are different maps. You have to kill the final boss of a map to progress to the next map, and I had not actually done that at the point that I wrote my original review.
Maybe I'm not quite as bad as I thought; the game does have talent trees and a fair amount of progression for each character. I've unlocked all the characters, but to get skill points for your skill tree, you have to kill some of the bosses. I was acquiring but not spending skill points, which was really neutering the characters' damage output. I've gone through the first map a few times to farm some skill points, and now I can consistently finish the first map and have been progressing on the second.
In this way, the game is more like Vampire Survivors, and I guess it's been a while since I had started that game; I was used to the end game of VS, and not to the progression part. The last Bullet Heaven game I played was Brotato and it is different; there's no skill trees for each of the taters you can be. You pick a tater and you are at full strength for that tater. Death Must Die is different, you need to unlock and build your character.
I haven't given specific ratings to each of the games this time, but after some more replay, this has certainly improved over my initial review. I'm enjoying it even more.
Two more games gives me a 5-in-a-row! I'll definitely continue filling out the board, though there's zero chance for a blackout. Unless maybe I get kidnapped and held in a room with nothing but my steam deck and browser running tildes. If you see me complete the full board send help! (no rush though)
Has a lives systemā Darkenstein 3D
Is one of the oldest games you ownā Wizorb
Owned for more than 5 yearsā Victor Vran
A solo-dev projectā Gunpoint
An updated version (remake, re-release) of an older gameā Grim Fandango
From a different culture or countryā Call of the Sea
Has a review score above 92ā Baba is You
An updated version (remake, re-release) of an older game - Grim Fandango
Only a few weeks late for Dia de Los Muertos, I gave Grim Fandango a try. Since playing Monkey Island and Sam and Max long long ago, I've declared myself a fan of Lucasarts adventure games, although I haven't touched one in years now. Even from a quick glance, you can see that Grim Fandango is a wonderfully unique game, and I've wanted to play it for about as long as I can remember. When the remaster came out I grabbed it right away. And checking the calendar, I realize that was 10 years ago, of course.
Finally starting this long-awaited game, I immediately fell in love with the presentation. The graphics are simple 3D models against pre-rendered backgrounds, but with a really great sense of style. The voice acting is good and the dialogue is very funny. I don't know how they came up with the idea to make a Film Noire game about Day of the Dead, but I love the setting.
The remaster is also well done, mostly because it actually changes very little. There are updated, smoother models, though they're quite faithful to the originals, and there is new lighting and shadows that complements it well. I can make a direct comparison between old and new because swapping between them is just a button in the game, something I'm always happy to see in a remaster.
As far as actually playing it, the game's first few tasks were straightforward, clearly directing me to whatever was next. This signposting lasted for a half hour or so, and then abruptly ended.
A couple early-game spoilers in the next paragraph!
I had deduced that I needed to plug up the pneumatic message tube system to advance the story. I knew the what, but didn't have the how. But I was open to a bit of trial and error. I had a loaf of bread which could be sent through the tubes, though nothing happened. Then I realized I could fill a balloon with packing foam and send it through the tubes, which I tried. But still nothing happened.
Finally I checked hints online, which told me I had done the correct thing, but I needed to do it 3 more times to trigger the event! What value did this add to the puzzle, or the experience? At the very least there could have been some hint that repeating the action was the way to go.
"Seriously? This isn't like the Lucasarts adventures I remember," I say to myself. And then I think a little bit more, I remember that this is EXACTLY like those other games. Retreading every room for the 100th time, clicking on every object I see, trying to figure out how to trigger something, anything! I had youthful resilience and a lot more free time, and was willing to chip away aimlessly until I stumbled on a solution. These days I don't consider that especially fun.
I'm not sure how much longer I'll play Grim Fandango. I like the setting and writing enough that I might continue, but I'll certainly be using hints or maybe even just a all out walkthrough to keep things moving.
Has a review score above 92 - Baba is You
Honestly I can't think of a lot to say about this game. It might be flawless, a pure puzzle game, deceptively simple. Solutions range from straightforward to something that feels like I've hacked the game and broken the fabric of its reality.Puzzles are small, and I think almost always optional. Advancing to a new stage just requires solving a certain number in an area, so the one time I got stuck was more a function of my own compulsion rather than a gate put in place by the game.
Despite all this, its probably not a game I'll play all that often. I'm generally more inclined towards narratives, cohesive worlds I can explore and spending time in. Still, Baba is You will probably live on all my computers, maybe forever. 100mb of storage devoted to the occasion when the mood strikes.
Errata: Some fact-checkers might point out that it Baba is You has a Metacritic score of 87, which I just discovered as I was about to hit post. In my defense, I had picked it by sorting my library by Steam review score, which doesn't provide a numerical value, although steamdb says that translates to a 95. And since we all know Metacritic is meaningless anyway, I'm going to stand by my choice.
Changing
[SCORE] [IS] [METACRITIC]to
[SCORE] [IS] [STEAM]is 100% the right way to solve that problem and incorporate Baba Is You into your card! Well done.
Well done on the bingo! I guess I'm willing to look the other way on this review score fiasco, this time...
Grim Fandango is a game that I feel similarly about. I love the mix of themes and the classic Schafer-esque writing. However, I don't think I'd enjoy actually playing it. I watched a Let's Play from a YouTuber I liked, and was able to get most of the good stuff without subjecting myself to '90s adventure game logic.
If you find you're getting frustrated, I think using hints is totally justified. Thankfully the game is old enough that there's likely a lot of good resources in that department. GameFAQs will never let you down.
Baba is a bit of a crowd favourite on Tildes. I've been meaning to pick it up for a while. It seems like the kind of game where you might be stuck on a puzzle for weeks, only to have a eureka moment while cleaning out the coffee machine.
I do suspect it might be a bit mentally exhausting to play for long periods, though. Some puzzle games like Stephen's Sausage Roll took too much brain power for me.
Thanks! Watching a letsplay is probably what I'll do at this point, since in the few days since I played Grim Fandango, any desire to go back and engage with it's puzzles has completely evaporated.
The puzzles of Baba however, keep growing on me! I'm sure the difficulty will scale as I continue playing, but I suspect in this case mental exhaustion could be mitigated by a willingness to back off (and arrive at the solution a little bit later when folding laundry).
I LOVE Point & Click Adventure games. In the 90s, when I was a kid, I'd watch my older cousins play them (including Leisure Suit Larry...yikes). And I'd sometimes help (including Leisure Suit Larry, gasp). And then I eventually played them myself, sometimes with my younger brother. Between him and I, I think we've played all the Monkey Island games, for example. I Played Sam & Max Hit the Road, plus some of the sequels. Day of the Tentatcle (think even Maniac Mansion eventually). Space Quest 6. Plus several others over the years. I even played a modern one this month for Backlog Bingo: Nine Noir Lives. It was great!
So I was super excited years ago, when Grim Fandango came out on Steam. I heard a lot of good things about it, that it was a classic, that if you love Point & Clicks, you gotta play it.
So I did.
And I had the same experience as you. Puzzles that made no sense. That had me like, "what in the fuck? How I would I have figured that out without a guide??" I had to use a guide for most of it. There was no way, without some serious brute force, that I was going to finish that game on my own. Which, as you say, isn't fun. Don't get me wrong; I'll use a guide when I'm stuck. But rarely do I have to use a guide for basically a whole P&C game...At least not since I was a kid.
I do remember that, yes, some of those games back then did require brute forcing. But I don't remember them at the level of Grim Fandango. I felt like it was turned up past 11. Which really ruined the experience for me. Even with the guide, I was still like "huh?" And maybe it's because of that experience, I don't remember the story being worth it. Idk, Grim Fandango seemed like a letdown.
Its good to know that my memories of enjoying those games weren't completely youthful ignorance. In my list of potential backlog burner games I have another classic Lucasarts point and click that I've never played - Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. After Grim Fandango I wasn't planning on touching it, though your comment gives me hope, and I think I'll give it a try before the month is up!
Roguelikeā Darkest Dungeon 2
Arena/boomer shooterā Cultic
Driving/pilotingā Pacific Drive
Alright, so... I had basically expected to get through my first two games (Pacific Drive and Cultic) without trouble. But last week, I pretty much gave-up on Pacific Drive after 12-hours. The appeal really wore off and it's repetition set in to the point where I end-up just feeling annoyed at the game. The game certainly has a lot of friction to it, which I don't mind, but it feels arbitrary and unearned. Like my car has issues just because it can and there's nothing I can actually do about it until I get further into the game and build the thing I need to solve those issues. It all feels like the developers had this vision and executed on it, but kind of just did things randomly which piss me off and leave me frustrated. So, on to.
Cultic. This was one of my favorite Boomer Shooters of the last couple of years. Playing the first episode felt like going back and playing Blood for the first time back in 1996; it had some horror elements, but was largely focused on fun shooting, cool levels and challenging enemies, without all the bullshit that comes with Blood (hit scan galore). So I eagerly jumped into Episode 2, which just came out in September aaannnd...
I'm frustrated. I'm not enjoying myself. I feel supremely disappointed. I've seen some complaints about the large, complex levels, which frankly, don't bother me. I'm an explorer at heart, so I enjoy moving around the levels and finding stuff; it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I don't even mind backtracking. But what's gotten really tedious is the developers over reliance on big arena fights without saves or checkpoints. I'm only on the 6th level and again, I'm trapped in an arena while hordes of enemies are thrown at me with not enough resources to really compensate for it and the enemies are massively overtuned. I keep dying and having to repeat the same stuff over and over and over and I'm frankly, just done.
I feel hugely disappointed with this outcome, as I love the first Episode and was so stoked for more, but it really feels like the developer lost sight of their vision for what this was supposed to be. Either that, or they took massive inspiration from the new Doom games, which are basically just that, arenas with hordes of monsters. Anyway, I may try again, as I was reminded that there's a Dash/Dodge I haven't been using and I'm willing to see if that makes a difference, given I'm not using all the tools at my disposal.
Otherwise, I've started Darkest Dungeon 2 this week. I played it about a year ago and really didn't gel with it, but got the hankering for some Darkest Dungeon relatively recently. I figured, rather than go back to the game I love and have spent 100+ hours in, I'd try 2 again and try and reframe my approach, remembering that it's not the same and it's meant to be different and so far? I'm enjoying myself. I've only played about 9-hours, but I feel like I understand a little better what's happening and what I ought to be doing, even if I suck at it.
I've been more focused on what routes I take and how that plays into my long term strategy of getting more Candles to unlock more, as well as unlocking more Hero abilities through visiting Shines of Rememberance or whatever they're called. I've gotten to the point where I've unlocked a reasonable amount of abilities for the first four Heros, as well as having unlocked the Vestal and pumped her up with new abilities. I tried this new team comp which is the Vestal without any damaging abilities and purely buff, heals and support and the Man-At-Arms as a pretty pure tank with minimal damage and control. Between the two of them, I'm actively mitigating damage and pumping up my own damage where possible so that my Bandit and Grave Digger can focus on taking out enemies fairly quickly.
It's been fun to begin to find a groove with the game, though I still feel like that I don't know enough about it. But I intend to keep at it and hopefully figure it out and see the end at some point.
Bummer that Pacific Drive and CULTIC are disappointing you now. It sounds like Episode 2 of CULTIC took your primary critique of the game and really centered their design around that. It's been a bit since I've played it, but I think I stopped my playthrough of AMID EVIL for similar reasons. Despite genuinely loving the game, I fell off of it at some point because my love was starting to get soured.
I'm glad you're liking Darkest Dungeon II though. I have a friend who adores that series and its oppressive atmosphere and difficult decision-making.
I'm really not sure what they were thinking when it comes to Cultic. I ought to play Episode 1 again, just so I can solidify my critique a little better, but I'm no @Evie and I'm pretty bad when it comes to criticism and understanding why I do or don't like something, so unfortunately, I can't say much more than, "I think this is bad because it's frustrating!"
DD2 is a good time though. My only complaint is that it's not a chill game, so I often have little to no desire to play it in the evenings, because my brain just isn't able to think about it.
Edit: I'm actually feeling quite tempted to cheat in Cultic. Just throw on God mode and be done with this awful level. Is that giving in though? Or is quitting entirely giving in? I just don't know.
Cheating gets my vote. That will let you determine whether this is a singular pain point, or if the remainder of the game follows a similar design pattern.
Plus, cheating in boomer shooters is like, genuinely part of the genre. After all, who among us hasnāt played through DOOM with
iddqdon?Also, donāt sell your writeups short! I appreciate your earnest assessments of what youāre playing and how you feel about them.
This is true. I mean, I cut my teeth on the classic games but using cheats all of the time and I do want to get past this part. But it has shown itself to be a constant in this game with these long, tedious wave fights, but at least they've been less egregious up until this point.
I do read that the next level is not great, but honestly having had a look at it, it looks kind of up my alley. Almost like an old Thief level.
I really liked Noah Gervais's video on Pacific Drive. In addition to being a critic, he's an avid roadtripper and shitbox-mechanic, and he said that dealing with the car and its quirks really built a relationship with the car in a way that mirrored the relationship he's had with real cars.
Not that I liked Pacific Drive when I played it earlier this year, mind. The repetition especially only gets worse as the game goes on. It's way too long to have as little encounter and anomaly and world design variety as it does. I wish I'd had the sense to cut my losses after 12 hours like you did. I found that with some of the annoying mechanics turned off under the difficulty menu it at least made for a decent podcast game
I'll have to check that video out, as I'm also a mechanic that's fond of road trips. Just took one and hit 245k miles on my van over September!
That said, my van's doors don't randomly fall off. The hood doesn't open and shut randomly and my headlights don't just fade in and out while I'm driving at night. I do like Pacific Drive, in theory and it is fun replacing parts, upgrading and stuff, but yeah, everything else just gets tedious.
But, you mentioning turning off some of the annoying stuff in the menu does make me want to go check out those options and see if I feel I could return to the game or not. Pacific Drive is a nice podcast game (what I might call Cozy) and I enjoyed having it because I could play it in the evening while I sat with my wife and she watched TV; I didn't have to be so invested and constantly paying 100% of my attention to it.
I totally get what you're saying about Pacific Drive. I really like the loop of setting up a run to go perfectly, only to have it all fall apart because of random conditions, barely escaping and limping home to repair what I could. For me, the randomness balances that repetition a bit. I think their goal was to make runs continue to feel dangerous, balanced with upgrades making them easier. And I can definitely admit that doesn't always land! Its all worth it for me since I think their vision was unique and ambitious, but I can definitely see how that would cross over into annoyance for a lot of people!
I'm entering week three with another mini card. I'm still working on this one though, so I'll likely break it up into multiple comment updates.
I also remembered that the Bingo app has a checklist output for sharing blackout cards, so I'll use that for easier reading.
Week 3: Form
Titan Quest - A seminal ARPG that isn't named Diablo.
Originally released in 2006, Titan Quest has received an uncharacteristic level of support. The developers released an Anniversary Edition in 2016 and continued to release new DLC from 2017 to 2021.
This gap makes for an interesting mix of modern and legacy elements. The game runs well on new hardware, and even supports borderless fullscreen and 4K resolutions. Though there are hints of its age, such as the tiny UI scaling and some retro game design (hello again, inventory Tetris).
The biggest hangup for me is probably the mouse-based movement controls. Yep, I'm one of those people who
believesunderstands that WASD movement is far more comfortable in ARPGs. I'm so relieved that all the newer games in the genre are adding it as an option (Diablo 4, Path of Exile 2, and even Titan Quest 2). But for a game from 2006, it's not a big surprise that mouse movement is the only option.My control-related complaints aside, the gameplay still feels fresh by today's standards. The animations are surprisingly smooth, and combat feels dynamic. You're given two different weapon slots, which allows you to switch combat styles by alternating a bow and sword. I'd usually pull an enemy or two with the bow, then swap to the trusty sword and board to finish them off.
Most enemies telegraph their attacks enough that it's possible to avoid damage with active play. For a weaker enemy, trading hits is fine. For larger bosses, I needed to sneak in hits while avoiding their attacks. I did find that a number of larger enemies were exploitable by finding the edge of their leash points, but it often proved more fun just to engage directly.
Titan Quest is a solid ARPG, and certainly deserving of its legacy. It looks great and plays well. The dialogue is fully voiced, and Ancient Greece is a unique setting when compared to other ARPGs.
Moonlighter - Oh, I get it, because you moonlight as an adventurer.
I would describe this one as a cross between Recettear and Rogue Legacy. You sell items by day, and journey into dungeons by night. Earning gold helps fund your expeditions, and they provide the inventory for you to sell.
The game is broken into two main gameplay loops:
The game includes a number of meta-progression mechanics. You can spend gold to help build up the town, unlocks access to a blacksmith, potion brewer, and more. Other upgrades are available for both your adventuring gear and storefront. It's up to you to decide where to invest your resources.
I do like roguelikes that embrace meta-progression, and adding a real town makes it feel more substantial. However, for this game to click, I think you'll need to enjoy both gameplay loops. And while I did enjoy the dungeoneering, I found I didn't really gel with the shopkeeping.
The shop very quickly started to feel like busy work, requiring constant adjustment to keep the prices on target and items stocked. There's a lot of trial and error in determining prices, and you need to constantly tweak things as customers stream through your shop. I mostly just found myself wanting to jump back into the dungeon.
The dungeon combat isn't incredible, but it's definitely serviceable. The bosses offer learnable movesets, and the dungeons include a number of unique rooms and events. One neat surprise was a portal that briefly led me through one of the other dungeons I hadn't yet unlocked. That was a nice bonus, since all of my loot was higher-level items.
For the moment, I'd say the gameplay isn't enough to propel me forward. However, Backlog Burner months are admittedly not a great time to start grind-heavy games like this, so it may just be my own impatience coming through. There's a chance I'll return to this one.
Doki Doki Literature Club! - Who knew that literature involved so much reading?
I'm going to try to avoid any major spoilers in this write-up, but I will touch on themes and impressions. To be extra cautious though, I'll place my thoughts into a details box for those who prefer to go in completely blind.
Doki Doki Literature Club! thoughts
I've never been much of a visual novel player. The only one I'd tried before was the rather long-winded Don't Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain't Your Story, released by Christine Love in 2011. It wasn't a bad game, exactly, but it was enough to convince me that visual novels weren't really my thing.
Still, Doki Doki had been recommended often enough - most recently by a friend - that I decided to give it a try. Since I was working on a "Form" card this week, it also seemed in the spirit of things to step out of my comfort zone. Well, consider me discomforted.
I'll need to speak about this one largely in the abstract, as specifics will risk spoilers; forgive me if I use a lot of words to say very little.
What I can say is that Doki Doki makes good use of its medium in several ways. Structurally, it explores the relationship between player and story through inventive methods. Thematically, it both leans on and criticizes the tropes inherent in visual novels, and possibly anime as a whole. It does so first by utilizing them, and then deconstructing them. I don't read it as blanket criticism, but rather the work of someone who sees room for improvement and wants creators to do better.
Coming from the outside, I've often found anime and visual novel tropes hard to connect with. Characters often feel one-dimensional, defined by terms like "tsundere" or "moe", and existing mainly to fill a familiar role. They're placed into situations that feel equally artificial, with plots driven by coincidence rather than character agency: the pretty girl who accidentally bumps into you at the park; the assigned study partner who is startled into your arms when a lightbulb pops. It reads largely as wish fulfillment.
This contrivance is most evident in the protagonist's role. Typically, through no effort of their own, a plain protagonist suddenly becomes the object of affection for several suitors. We know the affection is unearned, yet we can't help but feel it as our own and indulge as if it were.
This sense of contrivance also extends beyond the characters themselves. In the real world, choices multiply potential outcomes. In a game world though, the further we progress, the more constrained our options become. We're led down a corridor towards a known "ending", adding yet another layer of artificiality. Are we really players making an impact, or just voyeurs along for the ride?
Doki Doki seems aware of all this. It earnestly presents its own archetypal characters, inviting you to choose your favourite. It goes beyond just leaning on tropes to embrace them completely. Your protagonist is a bumbling idiot who couldn't catch a fruit fly, yet is treated as the most interesting man in the world. This intentionality feels almost subversive. It satirizes the satyr, in its own way.
And yet, for all my waxing poetic about the overreliance on tropes and the kinds of writing they engender, I'd be lying if I claimed immunity. That group of cute girls still had me under their spell, and by the end of the game I wanted nothing more than to return to that place of indulgence.
If my impression was that powerful even while being lampooned, I suppose I can better understand those who regularly play these kinds of games. It taps into a very human desire, and sometimes it's nice to wallow.
A big part of that pull comes from the writing, and Doki Doki's is stellar. It carries emotional weight which left me affected by its difficult themes. The poems felt genuine and personal, and I particularly found the poem Bottles quite harrowing. Reflecting on its meaning led me to think more deeply about the characters and their roles.
In the end, I don't know if I can say that I enjoyed this game, but I certainly don't regret playing it. It left me with much to think about and meaning to take away from the experience.
All told, it took me about seven hours to finish, which is considerably longer than the How Long to Beat estimate of four hours.
Doki Doki Literature Club! is available for free on Steam and itch.io. There's also a paid version available with some additional goodies. Given its subject matter, I would only recommend playing if you're currently in a good mental headspace.
Starsector - A boundless expanse.
Last week I played Drox Operative, a galaxy-spanning action strategy game. This week I played Starsector, a galaxy-spanning action strategy... wait, come back, it's different!
I was expecting to draw a lot of comparisons between the two titles, but I'm actually surprised by just how different they feel. Drox cast you as a mercenary navigating a political conflict between larger players. Its mechanics had depth, but also felt arcadey.
Starsector, meanwhile, is much closer to a simulation game. Real systems underlie its mechanics, such as managing your fuel economy and burn rate. Simplified orbital mechanics are used to dock at stations or sit at stable Lagrange points, which are also where jump gates are stationed. There's active and passive scanning, which hostiles can also use. Going dark and disabling your transponder will let you avoid detection, assuming your bandit doesn't perform a sensor pulse.
Combat is also much more in-depth and exists at multiple scales. At the small scale, you can pilot a single ship to control its thrust vector, weapons, and auxiliary functions. Shields can be powered off briefly to dispel "flux", which behaves like heat. In a pinch, you can vent all flux at the cost of a temporary system shutdown.
Fire groups can be configured for different weapon types, each of which has different impacts and ranges. Defensive capabilities are also important, such as configuring your PDCs to auto-target incoming missiles.
If you have a larger fleet, you can also zoom out and assume the role of fleet commander. At this scale, you deploy and command ships in an RTS-style overview. This becomes more important as you grow your armada through trade and conquest.
As with Drox, there are many deep mechanics to learn if you wish to be an effective commander. I've put in a couple hours now, but still feel like I've barely scratched the surface. To put it in perspective, there's a popular tutorial video with an 11-hour runtime.
Starsector feels to me like the Dwarf Fortress of space games, and I mean that in a good way. It's a labour of love with an uncompromising vision. Though, as with DF, I don't know if I'll ever invest the time to properly learn the game. That kind of difficulty curve can be challenging to overcome. However, I picked up the game for its long-term vision, and I'm still excited to see where it goes.
Tails of Iron - A medieval medley.
This game defies categorization. It's ostensibly a Soulslike, though it eschews many of the common Souls tropes. It has clear inspiration from Metroidvanias, yet there's little emphasis on exploration or unlocks. I've decided to default to the nebulous "action-adventure game", as no other genre quite describes it.
You play as Redgi, a young rat prince set to inherit the crown from your father, the rat king. However, just as you're ready to take the throne, the loathsome frogspawn attacks. They destroy your kingdom and scatter your people. You must fight back to reclaim your rightful place as king.
The story admittedly doesn't break any new ground, but it still served to keep me interested and pressing on. It seamlessly integrated the tutorial and introduced new mechanics as needed.
I can also forgive it, as the rest of the game just oozes charm. The art is completely hand-drawn, giving it a stylized feeling. The animations are smooth and congruent, and the lighting system blends everything together.
The characters use animated bubbles with pictograms to communicate ideas. After the frog invasion, someone came to me for help, showing: "Frogs carrying citizen", "Windmill", "Sword clash". Got it -- I need to fight the frogs at the windmill to rescue someone.
Although the characters are not voice acted, there is a persistent narrator. Unlike most games that only provide an opening cinematic, the narrator stays with you throughout your adventure to provide flavour, and sometimes to add context where the aforementioned pictograms might be vague. It's voiced by Doug Cockle, who you might know as Geralt from The Witcher, or Victor Vran from, er, Victor Vran.
The main focus of this game is certainly on the combat. Many describe it as "clunky", but I don't think that's fair. It's responsive, but methodical. You're meant to commit to an action, not spam buttons.
Enemies telegraph their most punishing attacks through coloured symbols, similar to Sekiro. Some attacks cannot be blocked and must be rolled; others cannot be dodged but can be parried. It's important to read the situation and react appropriately. Situational awareness is more important than response times.
That doesn't mean that combat is easy. Death comes quickly, and the first boss made me croak a dozen times over. Even in death, though, you make progress. I eventually learned his attack patterns, and perhaps more importantly, how to slow down my own. I found I needed to break my instinct to roll often, as that provides no iframes in this game.
Once you're more confident with enemies, you can take the initiative. Most regular attacks can be parried, giving you a small window to be aggressive. You can weave light and heavy attacks to target an enemy's weakness, such as breaking a shield with a charged heavy attack, or firing off your bow when an enemy is flying.
Benches act as checkpoints, but they only save your game. They don't refill your health or "potion flask". That's called bug juice in this game, and you can only recover that by harvesting from mosquitos and other creatures you've felled. I found this system quite punishing at first, but eventually came to appreciate how it rewarded skillful play by allowing more rapid progression. If you falter in battle, you'll need to trek back to save or resupply.
Backtracking was unfortunately a common issue, and even if you play perfectly you'll find yourself retreading the same environments. At one point, I was tasked with collecting enough gold to restore sections of the castle, and this involved five back-to-back quests venturing into the sewer to eliminate bug infestations.
While the game does allow open exploration, it's also fairly linear. There's a clear intended route. This is why I don't feel the metroidvania moniker really fits. It's much more focused on telling a story, and giving you just enough freedom to feel like you're not on rails.
I played for five hours. I wanted to play more, but I needed to get this write-up onto the boss's desk by morning, and schedule some meeting time with other games. I have one more mini-bingo card that I need to complete by week's end.
I do expect to return to this one once the Burner is over, though. I will take back my land from the vile frogkind.
I've added these to the week 3 recap and adjusted the stats (Starsector gave us yet another single word name!). It felt right to have them go there rather than carrying them over into next week's because you've been CRUSHING these mini-cards each week. That's quite a commitment and I'm impressed that you're pulling it off.
I swear, each week seems to have one fewer day than the week before! Thanks for updating the stats. I'll do my best to get my final card in before the Week 5-ish thread to make it easier on you (but no promises!).
You're not wrong! I've been quite inconsistent in getting these up at the right time.
A Bird Story - Poignant and fleeting.
In May 2024's Backlog Burner, I played (and loved) To the Moon. I've since finished a small experimental side-story in that same universe.
A Bird Story is indeed a story about a bird, but it's also one of childhood loneliness, escapism, and imagination. There isn't a single line of dialogue in this game's one-hour runtime, yet it still conveys those feelings that many of us would recognize -- even if we've since forgotten them.
The story is told entirely through the lens of childhood, and blends scenes that are seemingly real with imagined ones. A school classroom might open into a playground or a forest path, and that works fine because those are the only set pieces that matter. This gives the game a dreamlike quality, or perhaps that of a patchwork memory. As a narrative device, I found it very effective.
Like To the Moon, the soundtrack features a piano score which sets a somber mood. It doesn't reuse the same motifs, but feels familiar enough to create a connection to that world.
I found myself pulled along in this kinetic adventure. I'm normally the type who explores every nook and cranny of a game world, but in this case, I was happy to just to play along and let the wind carry me.
Paper Beast - Unusual origami.
A lot of shorter VR titles are described as "tech demos", and for good reason. Early on, VR was still an emerging technology, and many of the first games were short and experimental. Everybody was still figuring out what actually worked, and it didn't make sense to invest in a full VR experience yet.
That was my expectation going into Paper Beast, but I'm pleased to say that it's much more than a tech demo. It's certainly experimental, but it feels like a complete experience.
The game uses a framing device to introduce itself. It opens in a clinical room where you've seemingly just finished constructing a "universe simulation". Now you just need to wait a few million years for it to run. The computer prompts, "Would you like to play 'SwirlyBeat' while you wait?" May as well, right?
Click the colourful swirl that pops up and you're instantly transported to a party room. I don't really know how else to describe it, but it's sensory whiplash. Japanese rock kicks on as lights flash around you.
You can use your VR controller to guide floating blobs of colour that circle around the room. A little experimentation shows these influence the different audio channels, amplifying the vocals or different instruments. It's honestly a ton of fun, and I was grinning while rocking out.
I was immediately impressed by just how good the 3D binaural audio was. I could turn my head to perfectly locate objects by their sound. It was a treat for the ears, and this party room was a perfect showcase for it.
Once the song ends, the room around you collapses and you find yourself in a barren landscape. This is where the "real game" begins, and we begin to meet the eponymous paper beasts. These are low-poly creatures that inhabit the world, seemingly made of simple triangles. However, they move, react, and generally behave as if they're alive.
The creatures are one of the main driving forces of the game. They utilize a responsive (and sometimes creepy) bone system, and exhibit realistic dynamic behaviours like eating food that you offer them. Each species has certain personality traits and abilities, and you need to understand them to solve various abstract puzzles to progress.
In one of the earlier levels, for example, I found a room filled with dung beetle analogs. After watching them interact, I realized they were collecting mud from the room, scurrying around to grow the mudball like a snowball, and then depositing it into a large mound. They did this to get closer to a floating jellyfish(?) they were attracted to. Using this knowledge, I maneuvered the jellyfish towards my exit to have the dung beetles help me build a path out.
The game also features an impressive terrain deformation system and complex water physics. For instance, in one level I needed to build a wall to stop water from draining into a tunnel. There was a convenient tube-shaped creature nearby that took dirt in one side, and deposited it out the other. Blocking off the water allowed me progress.
Admittedly, these features do have a very "tech demo" feel to them, in the same way that Half-Life 2's balance board puzzles were an exhibit of its engine's physics. I don't feel that diminishes them, though, and I do appreciate the more technical problem solving. The physics seem open-ended enough that you could likely solve some puzzles in unconventional ways.
A few levels did take me a fair bit of trial and error. Even when I thought I knew the solution, it could take a while to test whether it worked. That does introduce some friction, which is felt more in a VR environment. I'd have preferred a more immediate feedback loop.
The game is broken into chapters, of which I've finished about half so far. There have been hints at a meta-narrative about the simulation we created at the start of the game, so I'm curious to see just how deep that goes.
The chapter structure and minimalist narrative remind me quite a bit of Journey, which I played earlier this year. It's certainly an art game, and that won't appeal to everybody, but there are enough puzzles to keep everyone happy.
Paper Beast was originally made for VR, but they released a pancake version a few months later too. I don't know if the creature interactions or 3D audio will land in quite the same way, but I think the game would still be enjoyable on the whole.
Lunacid - A grim plunge.
Admittedly, I don't remember buying this game. I really had no idea what to expect when launching it. After playing for a couple hours though, it feels like the perfect pick for the "dungeon crawler" spot on my card.
This is an RPG in the style of King's Field or Shadow Tower, two games that I must ignominiously admit to having never played, despite calling myself a Fromsoft fan.
The gameplay itself is fairly old school, as you might expect. You're (quite literally) dropped into a sprawling dungeon, with many twisting paths and no map to guide you. You start with almost nothing and enemies are everywhere. It's up to you to survive, gear up, and overcome.
In my first draft of this write-up, I complained that the enemies were far too damage-spongy. It would take a full minute to kill a slime! I found myself starting to run past enemies, hoping to progress and find better gear. (I did! A battle axe!).
Well, guess who didn't read the game manual? It turns out, you need to hold the attack button to charge your weapon if you hope to do any damage. That might've made the first few zones easier. Admittedly, I both loved and hated running from enemies into unknown tunnels, hoping desperately to find a save point.
The game manual is really beautiful, so I want to shout it out. It's a digitally rendered game manual you can flip through. It gives you a rundown of the story, character classes, controls, and yes, how to charge your weapon.
The manual also hinted that real-world lunar cycles affect the game. That blew my mind, and I couldn't help but look it up. Apparently, the game boosts your "lunacy" level based on the current moon phase. Since I played right on a new moon, I had higher defenses but lower spell damage. Very weird!
The dungeons are actually far spookier than I was expecting. The atmosphere can feel quite oppressive when it's dark, as you need to hold a torch just to navigate. The lighting engine feels great though, with coloured lights scattering off shiny surfaces.
Shaders are used effectively to provide that old school nostalgic feeling. The game tastefully integrates effects like menu transitions, and a few less-tasteful ones like cursor trails. There are also a number of additional filters to choose from in the menu, including VHS and PSX modes.
There are a few things that feel cutesy in contrast to the creepy. One of the friendly NPCs is a demon girl with a scythe, who bears a striking resemblance to a character from Shadow Tower. A nod, I would guess. The NPC dialogue uses synth voices similar to Animal Crossing, which feels weirdly anachronistic in this universe.
Despite loving the overall aesthetic of the game, I still feel a little mixed on the gameplay. These dungeons are truly massive, and I know it will take me hours to go through and mentally map them out. However, now that I've found a battle axe and learned how to use it, I do have some urge to return to earlier areas to impose my might. No longer will those slimes get the better of me.
That is very cool.
When I was a kid, I picked up some random floppy disks at a garage sale, one of which had a star map program on it. Not only did it show the locations of stars currently, but you could rewind or advance time to show the positions of the stars and planets years in the past or, even more cool: the future.
Kid me was utterly enthralled with the idea that we could know that. It gave me this profound sense of mysticism about the cosmos -- knowing that we could predict the position of the stars twenty years out felt like fortune telling.
I love the idea that a game has incorporated that to affect its mechanics. Such a neat idea. In addition to the star map, I've been a sucker for that sort of thing ever since Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast would read the time on your system and adjust its time of day to the local time for wherever you were racing. I thought that was like, unbelievably advanced at the time. So modern. So futuristic. So realistic.
Gah! Somehow made it to Week 3 and got too caught up to write anything down! But I did play some games! Here's some stuff I said about them!
deathinactthree's bingo card
Skul
No Straight Roads
Trek to Yomi
Trek to Yomi--Pretty much the Platonic ideal of "cinematic", as the game is directly modeled to look like a 1950s Japanese samurai movie, entirely in black and white. The film grain, the classic title card style, environments in the Unreal engine that are set up and shot in a way to look like Kurosawa is behind the camera, the score where they used a traditional gagaku orchestra playing period-correct instruments...the whole experience is not simply a nod to the heyday of mid-century Toho dramas, but an attempt to fully recreate one. It's legitimately impressive how much it captures the vibe, the design team clearly has both a love of and deep knowledge of its visual inspiration. As it's a short game (5 hours max if you're any good at the combat or playing it on Easy), it's worth playing solely to look at it.
The story is also trope-y of the cinematic period: You're a young samurai, your master gets killed, you seek revenge. There's more to it that I won't spoil, but the story is pretty straightforward even when you're faced with a couple of choices that lead to one of three endings. Nothing innovative in the narrative, but nothing disappointing in the execution either. Voice acting is very solid if you play it in the default subtitled Japanese to preserve the vibes.
The combat is where it received most of its criticism, though I don't quite think it deserves it. All combat and most travel is 2D but it's not a Metroidvania, so there's very little backtracking or exploration or much verticality of any kind, though you can mantle onto ledges and will occasionally climb ladders. Despite the game's supernatural trappings you don't have magic. You're a samurai with a sword, and will pick up a couple of ranged weapons of dubious utility, and that's it. You don't jump or use aerial attacks or Call Upon the Light of the Ancestors to imbue your sword with lightning. These are intentional design choices in order to stay faithful to the inspirational source material--you're a katana master, but you're still just a normal human guy, fighting normal human guys (until you're not)--so combat will be fairly limited in options to what a normal human can do. Some reviewers didn't like that and found it too constraining. I would agree if the game were any longer, but I didn't feel like it wore out its welcome especially in the late game. There is still a lot to master, though the reviewers are right to say that the core mechanics won't vary too much.
What mechanics you do have are sword combos, more of which you unlock as you progress the story. The combos are designed to do different things, such as pass behind your enemy to his back as a method of crowd control, quickly attack someone behind you, throw a quick flurry of blows that don't consume stamina, or precisely target weak spots on armored enemies. None of these are flashy, because this isn't anime. They are extremely useful however, and absolutely necessary after about the game's halfway mark where duels start to actually feel like duels. Likewise you can block but you have a parry mechanic that is critically important to master by the end of the game, so it's worth your time to practice it a lot near the beginning when the combat is much more forgiving. Parrying and your anti-armor sword combos must be precise in the final levels or you're going to get stuck. Practice now, thank yourself later.
On that note, of the game's 3 difficulty modes: Easy lets you button-mash your way through the entire story if you just want to be a tourist, no skill required. On Normal, the game will still feel like a cakewalk for most of the first half, at least up until you reach the first real boss, but will get quite challenging by the time you find yourself in the titular realm of Yomi. On Hard, it's Sekiro-level difficult start to finish and every single enemy will test you. These are worth mentioning because you should know that you can change the difficulty literally at any time, so if things feel too frustrating or too boring, nudge it in one direction or the other for a bit and you'll have a more enjoyable time with it.
I did finish it, and I very highly recommend it if the idea of "2D Sekiro-lite directed by Akira Kurosawa in 1955" is appealing. While at the end of the day the game is a lot more style than substance, there's enough meat on the bone with dueling to not be brainless, nor too boring since the game's pretty short and you can drop the difficulty to Easy long enough to speed-run a frustrating section if you don't want to waste more time on it. And the style is so well done for what it's trying to achieve that the game's few legitimate faults didn't prevent me from having a great time channeling Toshiro Mifune as I slice through General Kaguro's lieutenants running through the streets of a burning village that looks straight out of Seven Samurai.
Skul--A side-scrolling roguelite platformer, and though not without its charms, a fairly missable one. You're Skul, a skeleton in the Demon King's army, off to single-handedly recapture the King's castle after it's been seized by heroes using the power of Dark Quartz. You traverse through short levels that rotate out randomly, beat all enemies to unlock the next door and get a treasure or boon on the way, beat bosses that also rotate out, die and start again after buying incremental upgrades with the Quartz you collected on your last run--the gameplay loop is essentially the exact same as Hades and similar games, just on a 2D plane.
The supposed differentiator of this game are the skulls you can collect during your run and replace your own head with that change the weapon you're swinging, the magic you have, and most entertainingly, your entire appearance. There are about 100 skulls to find that all do different things, not at all created equal, and they each change your li'l dude to a new costume or physical form that the game's charming pixel graphics make it delightful to run across one you haven't seen before. This is a fairly fun idea and mechanic, and the game's single biggest strength.
Unfortunately, even with that, you're otherwise in for more of the same of the thousand or so copycat roguelite, Metroidvanialite games like this. Which would be fine if you just want another one of those to kill a bit of time with, but Skul seems to be chasing a trophy for just how much you have to repeat the same gameplay loop. Like Hades, its core design assumes that you're going to die enough until you grind enough to unlock enough to be able to withstand enough to get to the next incrementally higher stage, until you've run the loop so many times you can powerlevel your way to total victory. What Skul doesn't do well however is understand how not to wear out its welcome before then, with so much grinding required that you'll get sick of seeing the same mix of 4 level layouts and 5 or so enemies (variations of knights and treants in the first part) before you finally obtain enough Quartz to get another 5 hitpoints or increase your attack strength by 13%. Not all 100 skulls or the other weapons or artifacts are available in the RNG straightaway, so you're going to find a lot of the same stuff, often, and for a long time until you've beaten your head against the wall enough. Also, you have a strangely large hitbox for such a little guy, so be prepared to experience what are going to feel like a lot of "cheap shots" as you try to brute-force your way through another run.
This could be a lovely little game to spend occasional afternoons with despite that there's zero here you haven't seen before if you've played any 2D pixel Metroidvanias in the last 5 years, but I have to say that this game prioritizes quantity over quality too much. The grind frankly feels like a F2P mobile game for how much time any meaningful incremental progress takes, or at least it did to me. There's too little to distinguish this game from better examples of the genre for me to recommend it, which is a shame because Skul himself is kind of adorable.
No Straight Roads--Vinyl City, which is conceptually "what if Tron was about the music industry", has been taken over by EDM as the only music available to citizens. In the opening sequence, friends/roommates/bandmates Mayday and Zuke want to revive the lost art of Rock and Roll and set out on a quest to do so, by competing in an American Idol-style reality show to bring guitar-based music back to the masses. Unfortunately the judges are themselves EDM moguls and it takes no time (well, the length of the tutorial actually) before they all hit the red buzzers and toss the band Bunk Bed Junction to the street. Then, as Mayday and Zuke commiserate on a rooftop overlooking the city, the NSR (corporate governing body of Vinyl City) shuts down power to most of the metropolis to ration the dwindling supply of electricity and unsurprisingly only the rich and elite get to have power. Mayday and Zuke are instantly radicalized with class consciousness and decide to take back the power for the people with Barre chords, quite literally.
This game is incredibly stylish and instantly reminded me of some of the better recent kids' cartoons in both visual presentation and sense of humor. If you liked, say, the recent reboots of She-Ra or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (and I did, for the record), this plays out a lot like one of those series. If you find those kinds of show entertaining, you'll be instantly at home here--despite some initially very corny dialog about The Unending Power of Rock Music, particularly from the wide-eyed Mayday, the dialog has frequent sharp and funny moments and I chuckled out loud quite a few times. You end up liking these characters, both the heroes and the villains, and between the wit and the music and a very consistent visual style, it all ends up being a good time. Though, I absolutely cannot help but point out that even though you're supposed to use Bunk Bed Junction's savvy with "three chords and the truth" to bring down a city full of Skrillexes, it's the EDM that actually stands out on the soundtrack. Bunk Bed Junction's music frankly kind of sucks. Maybe there was a reason EDM took over after all? Ah well. Your side's already been picked.
The game is not a "pure" rhythm game, more an Xbox-1st-gen-style 3D brawler, but timing your combat moves to the rhythm of the music is the major component of the gameplay. It's not exactly "trying to get 100% on Dragonforce's 'Through the Fire and Flames' on Guitar Hero"" level of difficult, but you can't just button-mash your way through any of it, you have to sync your movements and attacks to the beat. Mayday, the guitar player, swings her axe (guitar) and is powerful on single hits. Zuke wields a pair of drumsticks like an escrimador and specializes in fast combos and long attack chains. If you're not playing with two people, you can switch between both at any time during the game, and you will need to since the non-active character can passively heal while you're fighting.
I definitely recommend this game if the idea of playing a light and easygoing modern-day Saturday morning cartoon ("modern" = think Teen Titans Go!, not Ren and Stimpy) is appealing to you at all. It's fun, it's funny, it's easy to pick up, and without giving any spoilers, the boss-level setpieces are large and legitimately impressive. But if you're an adult who is sanguine to a more Gen-Z-style type of entertainment but don't find it entertaining yourself, you can safely miss No Straight Roads--the gameplay is fun enough but not so engaging that it'll carry you through the kind of dialogue and humor that is clearly meant more for your kids than for you. But I'm a middle-aged dude who found it a rather charming way to spend a few afternoons, so.
Oh my god, is it ever! I already own this game from a bundle, but hadn't given it a proper look until now. You basically said the magic words to move it right into my own backlog though. (Two steps forward, one step back)
Skul sounds like it'd be interesting if not quite so grindy. There is something I enjoy about the "die until you win" game loops, but there needs to be checkpoints that feel rewarding as well. It can't just be 3% damage increases all the time. I at least need an "Atta boy!" when I beat a boss.
Rogue Legacy really worked for me, whereas my submission earlier this week Moonlighter did not. But I also suspect it's just as much about mindset and expectations than actual game quality. On another day, or another (non-Backlog Burner) month, it might feel much better. Sometimes it's nice to have a game where you can turn off your brain and just watch number go up for a time.
As an aside, I like the idea behind the head swap mechanic. It reminds me of swapping your shell in Another Crab's Treasure, or just Kirby games, I guess. It's a fun way to introduce some variety in combat, and keep the player on their toes.
I felt the same way--Rogue Legacy was great and I finished it, Moonlighter looked right up my alley but I found it cumbersome. But like you said, sometimes you might just have to be in the right mood. I may come back to Skul sometime later and find it cozy, but now is not that time.
It is genuinely a fun mechanic, and comparing it to ACT or Kirby is pretty accurate.
Alright, another five down this week. Not necessarily trying to go for a Bingo, but I'm getting real close.
Collectathonā Cassette Beasts
Programmingā Hacknet
Horrorā Tokyo Dark
Point & click adventureā Nine Noir Lives
Escape roomā Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma
Base buildingā Patron
Stealthā Intravenous
Action-adventureā Arco
Comedyā AKIBA'S TRIP: Undead ļ¼ Undressed
Mystery/investigationā MAKOTO WAKAIDOās Case Files TRILOGY DELUXE
Horror - Tokyo Dark
Tokyo Dark
Released on Steam: 2017-09-07
Purchased by me: 2025-11-02
Time/Amount played: ~1hr so far
Brief Let's Play
I don't normally play horror games and scary games. In fact, I play them very, very rarely. During last November's Backlog Bingo, I tried Signalis. Which was really cool! But also too scary for me. I got a lot further than I expected before my nerves got the better of me.
So I was a little hesitant to try Tokyo Dark. Even though I bought it. But in the 45-60min that I played, there were just some brief images of creepy looking anime girls popping up on screen. Sure, slight jump scares, but nothing really terrifying. In Signalis, I'm actively shooting and dodging monsters. Here, this is more of a noir-style, narrative-driven, investigation game. So how scary can that be, really? Again, it's just anime girls (he said as he avoids playing Doki Doki Literature Club).
Not a lot has been revealed, as I mostly just got through a prologue. So I haven't been "hooked" yet by the game. I'd be willing to give it a little bit more time though. I really appreciate a good story and I get the feeling there is one under this. Like if this were an actual anime, I'd probably watch it.
Collectathon - Cassette Beasts
Cassette Beasts
Released on Steam: 2023-04-26
Purchased by me: 2024-03-06
Time/Amount played: ~45min so far
Brief Let's Play
Basically just Pokemon. Sorry! I mean NOT AT ALL like Pokemon! Don't want to get sued by Nintendo! I've played a few other Pokemon-clones: Palworld, Temtem, and Coromon. Cassette Beasts is definitely closer to Coromon, which means they're really close to Pokemon.
I like the retro feel of it. Obligatory, "Do kids these days even know what cassettes are? Do they know what the pencil is for?" I also like how instead of summoning the monsters to fight for you, you actually become the monster. Does that change anything thematically? Probably not. But I also didn't get far enough to really find out. Maybe that is a big deal that you as the player become the monster instead of summoning them.
So I'd probably play this again. That said, I haven't had an interest in a Pokemon game in awhile. Not sure when I'll come back to this. Though I'd probably play this over Coromon, even though I'm further along in the latter.
Action-Adventure - Arco
Arco
Released on Steam: 2024-08-15
Purchased by me: 2025-08-25
Time/Amount played: ~2hrs so far
Brief Let's Play
I was a little confused that this was tagged as Action-Adventure. I knew, from the Steam store page screenshots that there was a turn-based element to the game. So how could that be Action-Adventure? After playing it, it kinda makes sense.
I think it's the combat system that's the tell. It's not fully turn-based, but it's not fully active action either. And it's actually pretty fast-paced, moving between these two phases. To me, it feels very similar to the combat system in FF7 Remake/Rebirth. There are times where my character is just running past baddies, trying not to get hit. Other times, I gotta stand my ground and fight. It's just not fighting/running in the open world. I'm doing this in a battle screen. It's actually a lot of fun.
The cultural and historical aspect is neat, too. I knew Arco had something to do with Native Mexicans. It seems to take place in the late 1800s/early 1900s, when white settlers start moving in to take control of oil and other natural resources. Which is interesting to me. As an American, I feel like I don't hear a lot about that history, even though it's pretty close-by and probably even happened in Texas and New Mexico and other states along the border. I always appreciate when I can potentially learn something from a game.
The pixel art style is really cool. The landscape with mountains in the backgrounds are really well done. I almost feel like I'm at these places, even though it's just pixel art.
I played for almost two hours and I'm definitely planning to play it more. Again, the combat is kinda addicting.
Programming - Hacknet
Hacknet
Released on Steam: 2015-08-12
Purchased by me: ??? (Steam doesn't say, must've gotten it free)
Time/Amount played: ~1.5hrs so far
Brief Let's Play
Unlike the rest of the games I've played so far, I have played a little bit of Hacknet in the past. I first/last played it in 2016. But I think it was one of those situations where I opened the game, started it, maybe did one thing, then stopped. I barely had any time in the game, maybe like 15min.
So thought I'd give it a try again. And it's kinda fun, being a 1337 H4x0r and all. It's definitely helpful to know basic Linux commands. That might be why I didn't play much the first time; I had little experience with Linux back then. The game teaches you stuff and will give hints, but it definitely feels more real if you already have that basic knowledge.
I played for about 1.5hrs total this time, which got me through the tutorial and a handful of starting missions. Not sure what the story is, as I have to play more. But it does get a little repetitive. At least at the start. Maybe it gets less so later on, but I have my doubts. It's basically always, port scan, hack the ports, maybe flood the proxy, then you can pwn the computer. Delete the target file, clear the logs, then disconnect. I get that practice makes better and faster -- and there are some barriers that are time-limited -- but it's still repetitive.
That said, I'd probably play more of this. How much more? We'll see.
Base Building - Patron
Patron
Released on Steam: 2021-08-10
Purchased by me: 2021-12-16
Time/Amount played: ~2hrs so far
Brief Let's Play
Basically Banished. Which is a city/base builder, colony manager type. I've played a few Banished-clones, like Timberborn and Frostpunk, but in many ways, this is basically the same as Banished. Some things are named exactly the same as in Banished and do the same thing. The UI looks very similar to Banished.
Which isn't a bad thing. I put several hundred hours into Banished and the popular Colonial Charter mod pack. But the game, and the mod pack, stopped being actively developed years ago, so there's nothing really new. At least Patron has some additional features like research and like a story/campaign mode to give players additional things to do. I'm sure there's more, and I'm excited to see what else there is.
This is definitely a game I'll be playing more of.
I played Hacknet for the May 2024 Backlog Burner and really liked it. I agree that itās a bit rote, especially at the beginning, but if youāre liking the basic concept then I recommend sticking with it. There are some neat curveballs it throws later in the game, as well as some optional parts that I found interesting to dive into.
Your comment about the network map is spot on. And given that I'm just at the start and I think it's already cluttered, I wonder how much worse it gets...
Is the story pretty decent? I often play games for story, so if it's good, I'll stick with it.
Thereās a broad story arc thatās fine. Nothing too noteworthy and kind of expected for the genre. What I liked were some of the little narrative nibbles along the way.
Thereās one scenario that centers on an fraught moral question that I thought was really interesting. There are little breadcrumbs about people and things sprinkled throughout the files on different servers that give you some neat little grins. Thereās a minigame that I thought was fun. I wouldnāt say the game has an excellent story, but I will say that there was enough variety in the game to keep me entertained alongside the rather rote process of getting into new systems.
Also, for the network map, I copied down on IRL paper the key nodes I knew Iād be returning to as well as their approximate location. It was a huge Quality of Life improvement in the endgame.
Awesome! Loving the LP clips again. I've just finished watching them now.
Tokyo Dark seems intriguing. I'm not hugely into P&Cs, but I enjoyed the beginning of the story, and the droning OST was great for added tension. Weird about all that fresh red paint, though.
I think it's actually cool that a recent-release happened to work out on your bingo card. It's nice to knock out a more recent game.
You are wiser than me.
Cassette Beasts was on my backlog too, so in a way I feel like I half-crossed it off by watching you play. I liked the inclusion of lyrical tracks. So many of my favourite OSTs cut in at the right moment with a powerful song (eg. Build that Wall).
I did actually play Bytten Studio's previous game, Lenna's Inception, A very odd take on Zelda which embraces "glitch mechanics" popular with speedruns on the older 2D titles. Stack overflows, wrongwarps, and that sort of thing. Very unique title.
Hacknet was given away a couple times, so you're probably right about that one.
In Patron, you kind of blew my mind with "Sawyer" coming from "Saw-er", or one who saws.
Good batch of games, and getting you close to a bingo in a couple directions.
Ha, yeah the Sawyer thing was definitely like gears slowly turning in my head and being like "wait...wait a minute...hold up..." One of my cousin's kids is named Sawyer. Wonder if he'll go into construction or woodworking. Would that still be considered nominative determinism if the name originated from a job in the first place?
I'd forgotten how good Bastion's soundtrack was -- and just how good of a game it was! Which also reminded me of one of my favorite lyrical games songs from Transistor. Which makes me think I should check out Hades at some point (I know I'm super late to the party...hence Backlog Bingo!)
Thanks for watching the LPs! It's great to read everyone's comments about the games their playing, but sometimes I think it's nice to see what a game is about, plus get those comments that come in the moment.
I love that Transistor song. I haven't played the game, but I've most definitely listened through the OST on many occasions. The Spine and Paper Boats are also fantastic. Maybe I just really like Ashley Barrett.
I actually just bought Hades last month, so I'm looking forward to giving it a go. I guess it's officially on my backlog now.
Durinthal's Bingo Card (Form, Standard, 11/25)
Cozyā Wanderstop
Interactive fictionā Afterlove EP
Time managementā Coffee Caravan
Arena/boomer shooterā Devilated
Miningā Prodigal
Tactical RPGā Super Robot Wars 30
ā Wildcardā Hades II
Digital tabletop gameā Fabled Lands
Grand strategy/4Xā Super Fantasy Kingdom
Dungeon crawlerā Wander Stars
Political simā Civilization VII
Probably going to play one or two more games tomorrow but not sure which ones yet.
Prodigal is a game in the same vein as Link's Awakening and the Oracle Zelda pair, a dungeon crawling, puzzle-filled adventure that looks like it was lifted from a Gameboy Color.
As for why this has the Mining tag, your main tool is a pickaxe and a lot of the puzzles involve using it to break down rocks and clear paths for block pushing puzzles. So far the three other tools assigned to buttons are a thing that teleports you back to the entrance of the room (leaving the room state as it had been so necessary to jump back for some puzzles), a lasso which can either pull enemies/objects toward you or pulls you over to a heavier object or grapple point, and a big fist weapon for hitting bigger/heavier objects, similar to the pickaxe but stronger.
I'm about a third of the way through at two hours in and want to finish it at some point. While they're still enjoyable the puzzles have gotten rather samey, but I just reached a new chapter and I'm curious to see if they change things up next. The main character you play as has a mixed past that I want to find out more about (thus the title) and all the other characters in the town are fun to interact with as well. Going by achievements I haven't gotten there's apparently some kind of dating sim element to it so I'm curious how that will play out.
Super Robot Wars 30 is another title I've had in previous events but happens to fit perfectly as a Tactical RPG that I still haven't beaten and want to. If I put in 10 hours every Backlog Burner I should finish it in maybe a couple of years?
I look forward to seeing your next bingo card, with the titles Super Robots Wars 1 through 29.
Prodigal looks great, and I'm not surprised to find it already sitting in my own Backlog category on Steam. It looks like the tools do open up a fairly large problem space, with a number of ways to approach each room. Though I not sure there's enough for ~6 hours of content there, so I can understand it getting samey.
I see that beating the game unlocks a randomizer, and that's pretty cool.
The latest entry Super Robot Wars Y came out a few months ago but I'm not picking that up until it's on sale (and ideally after I've beaten this one).
A built-in randomizer is neat, I can see how it would work for Prodigal though don't know if I'll ever try it myself.
I unironically love the idea of someone completing a backlog game over several different Backlog Burners. I say go for it!
I do want to finish it, I just have so many other things I want to spend my time on that when it comes to gaming this particular one is a lower priority. This event's a good excuse to focus on it from time to time and I can chip away at it.
I didn't intentionally pick two barista games to play back to back but it worked out.
The first trailer for Wanderstop had me interested in Alta's story and from the two hours I've put in so far, I want more of it. The gameplay loop is fairly straightforward: grow plants, make tea for customers based on their request, clean up the place. Explore Alta's past and present through having her drink the tea as well, evoking different feelings or memories based on the taste. No time pressure for any of that, so it fits the cozy tag. I've managed to avoid all discourse about The Stanley Parable from the same creator so I had no expectations going in, but was surprised by some parts already.
The first two customers...
So the first two customers that I ran into were quite goofy which initially felt like a weird contrast to Alta's overly serious demeanor, but I think that it can be a juxtaposition that works out for the better.
One is Gerald, a dad who's way too into his son and is currently parading around as a knight to impress him. Considering Alta was some kind of gladiator whose sword is her life partner and Gerald shows up with a modern American stop sign at one point, I'm also kind of curious as to the setting and how far the time shenanigans of the forest go.
The other customer early on is a demon hunter whose organization has turned to community service since they already got rid of most of the demons, including public speaking events. Alta is not enthusiastic.
Meanwhile, Coffee Caravan is all service, no story. You have different recipes that require different steps to make and need to get that done before the customer's timer runs out, earning the time management tag. One aspect that I wasn't expecting at all was that the parts of the game outside of the core loop of making and serving drinks is that there's a map and shop basically lifted wholesale from Slay the Spire. Instead of buying new cards or artifacts you get new recipes and equipment options/upgrades, like an automatic coffee grinder rather than needing to manually do that step.
However, I found myself waiting with nothing to do for five to ten seconds between customers even on the "hard" difficulty, so I think the game needs some tuning. Recipes can be toggled on and off so I can easily limit myself to ones with shared steps and equipment, and I can prepare some middle steps in advance without any penalty. For example, I kept one shot of espresso in a large cup at all times so it could quickly be turned into an Americano (add hot water), a Double Espresso (add a second shot), a Cappucino (add frothed milk), or a Flat White (add a second shot then frothed milk). Because I could froth the milk and boil water ahead of time those were always ready to instantly add, so the only step that took time beyond a button press was adding an espresso shot. If the frothed milk only lasted for a short time or a half-finished drink went bad after a bit so I couldn't do most of the work in advance, that would increase the time pressure a good amount.
Or maybe I'm just early on and it steadily ramps up, I'm not sure. I got through three or four maps and it seemed like after the third one it just gave another version of that indefinitely, but maybe I'm wrong.
All that said, I spent four hours on it and went an hour past when I was supposed to go to bed so even if it has flaws I had a compulsion to keep playing. Aside from coffee there are tea and ice cream game modes with their own recipes and I built a bubble tea empire before calling it a night, which has the same problem as the coffee where I can do most of the work early and only need to pick the right fruit flavor they're asking for once the customer arrives.
Ah, I like the double shot of espresso in your picks.
Wanderstop seemed to garner a lot of attention when it first launched, but but I kind of forgot about it. I appreciate the reminder, and I'm glad to see it's been well-reviewed since then.
I do like that it focuses a little more on the relaxed tone of a life sim, rather than the purely frenetic action of most time management games. Maybe I'm just unable to multitask. But I recognize that having those elements in the game - even without the time pressure - does add some direction, and gives you something to work towards.
Coffee Caravan feels like it would be more stressful for me, but I'm glad you were able to enjoy it. The roguelike mechanics are a unique spin that seem like they'd add some replayability.
You may have had a little too much caffeine after all.
If you're into barista games -- we'll pretend that's a genre now, ha -- might be worth checking out Coffee Talk and Coffee Talk 2. They're definitely more about the story than making the drinks, but making the right drinks has an effect on the story.
I say "story," but It's not your or the MC's story; it's your regular customer's stories. Very slice of life. And the gameplay is more in the direction of light-interactive visual novel. But it's chill and cozy. Personally, it gives me nostalgia for experiences I never had, if that makes any sense.
I also own both of those! Can't remember if I briefly played one for a previous event or if it was another similar game like Necrobarista.
Necrobarista added to the backlog!
No, no, NO! Youāre doing the Backlog Burner all wrong! š
Has a first-person perspectiveā Gothic II
Has a moody vibeā UnderRail
Has a moral choice systemā Planescape Torment
Planescape Torment
I am sorry to say that my only conclusion is that I cannot adequately review this game right now. I needed an excuse to get a first impression and having made it through the tutorial, I'm set on completing it, but not now. I'm too snowed under with work projects to cope with such a cerebral game. But I did like what I saw. Clever, witty writing. Descriptive nuance. A morality system from DnD (hence ticking off my category) with a twisted inversion of the ethics of living and death. An Enhanced Edition which highlights the things you can interact with, making the game a lot easier but also just saving you heaps of time. A detailed, intriguing setting. And the soundtrack is great, although it really should have been remastered for the EE. The Combat was really the only thing I found a little grating and it seems like quite a basic point and click, but I haven't really gotten into the game far enough yet to see how tactical it is. I've deposited this back into my backlog, but now I know that it's a priority for when I'm ready for it.
Onto next week...will have to make the effort to get through two games to finish my streak!