I know I just started Generation Zero, but playing the beginning for real was a real eye-opener. This game is a lot more RPG-influenced than an initial glance would tell you. Like System Shock or Deus Ex, there are multiple branching skills, though they are more combat-related instead of job-related skills. I had thought there was just one as the tutorial doesn't inform you. On top of this, there are multiple weapon modifications that can be activated at the same time, like a rifle scope and silencer. And, there are even different ways to dress up; besides looking good in multiplayer, certain clothes give stat bonuses. There's just so many customizations that I can tell, it's going to get difficult soon.

I wanted to write because my predictions are coming true. There's a cute horse collectible in the game that looks really ethnic, so I guessing that's my #3. As well, this game goes out of its way to introduce a recycling mechanic that fits in very well with the bicycling lifestyle.

This game is great because it features my favorite kind of stealth fighting. The robots have very good aim, so you can't take them on in the open or when numbers are on their side. Instead, you need to sneak attack them, whittle their numbers down, hit them then run around to the other side to flank them. Very fulfilling.

I'm also glad that the English voice actors all speak with accents. It's another cherry on the sundae that makes this game all the more enjoyable, though I don't know what's going on with its massive pile of DLC. Seems excessive, but maybe there's a good community backing it. Co-op is available for this game, but I haven't tried it yet.

I shouldn't pop in with so little to say, but the main thing I wanted to say is that this has become quite the surprise: all the best parts of Half-Life, Fallout, and System Shock* in a European game.

Generation Zero is starting to get heavy. I'm now at the point in the game where:

As a result, I am taking a bit of a palate refresher with Breakneck which will occupy the bingo tile for "Has driving" and was generously provided to me by the affable and genial @kfwyre. I had thought Breakneck would be a quick and simple game that would take me away from saving all of Sweden from the apocalypse; I just didn't know how quick and simple.

Breakneck

The Bad

Right off the bat: Breakneck is a mobile phone game. It's got three different currencies to confuse you and your wallet. It's entire gameplay loop is about keeping you engaged on a daily basis, offering up daily leaderboards, new tracks served up daily, daily challenges. It gets harder, it gets more bells and whistles, but it's clear that this game will be the same game on day 1 as it will be on day 30.

It's a lot like Asphalt in that it's a racing game where you're not racing. Despite getting dressed up as a sci-fi racer like F-Zero, this is clearly an endless runner in which your ability to catch coins is hampered by a progression system that promotes a pay-to-play system. Reviews say this is a clone of Race the Sun, except this time you're racing a giant laser that acts as your in-game ghost, ending your run if you are too slow.

Looking at the Steam page, you'd think this was a super difficult obstacle course where you compete in on a track that crumbles and deteriorates with each lap. Yes, that would be a super cool game. But it's not this game.

The Good

Color me perverse, but a PC port of a mobile game comes with its advantages. Namely, all of the pressures of mobile gaming are switched off. Gone is the temptation of pay-to-play. There's no way to sink any more money into it (unless you buy the game's DLC soundtrack, which is aptly suitable for highway commutes during off-hours). This mobile game is yours, and you nor your wallet are beholden to it.

So, even though the game still follows its usual gameplay loop (and its currency system remains the same), you can have fun with it on your terms. It's a lot like getting a membership to the country club and seeing what they serve for Sunday dinner, if premium mobile gaming can be described as such.

The Digression

The most fun I've ever had with a PC port of a mobile game was probably with Corridor Z, a second-perspective runner that would have been perfect for mobile screens with its swiping controls. With its exploitative cooldowns done away with, I was free to enjoy this exploitative game about high schoolers running away from zombies.

The Verdict

Breakneck freedom from its mobile marketing chains aren't as apparent as Corridor Z, so it still feels a lot like a phone game; you're still grinding to earn currencies to unlock progression. This makes it impossible to recommend to a PC player who know better than to put up with such claptrap. But I won't deny that it's a good game for what it is. It looks okay, it has a good soundtrack, it's a good timewaster if your hardcore gamer sensibilities can avoid being offended. But it remains that there is no personality to this game; it gives nothing back except the fulfillment you ascribe to it.

Generation Zero

I'm am just about done with Generation Zero. At least, for this Backlog Burner, anyways. That's because I find myself at the business end of a bloated 20+ hour playthrough upon discovering that I'm still just on the tutorial island. Whaa?

I've said a lot about this game so far, and probably will have more to say once I have more of the game completed. But with what I've experienced so far, I feel confident in making a few conclusions about this game.

First, this is my favorite game from everything I've played so far for this Backlog Burner, and is probably my favorite game of this year. It hits all the right boxes for me in ways that I didn't even know I had boxes for. It began intriguingly, developed beguilingly, and straight up stole my heart with its heart and maturity. It asks a lot, and gives it all back in spades. It won't quit you, or ever let you down. This one's a keeper.

Secondly, as much as an honest disclosure will show it suffers from game-breaking bugs, Generation Zero remains a well-built and thoughtfully designed game. Even though 2019-era graphics are no longer impressive, what remains praiseworthy is that the devs have continued to work on this game for at least 5 years after its initial release. Things that new players like take for granted, such as the brand-inspired PLUNDAR storage case or the bicycles that I fawned over, did not exist at launch, making Generation Zero one of the few games around that are worth every penny you paid for it at launch.

As such, I warmly recommend Generation Zero to anyone looking for a game that offers the total package. Seven years after its release, this game still plays great. There is so much content to absorb that you may not even have time to try out the online co-op or the DLC cosmetics which are a great way to support this stand-and-deliver dev.

Did I mention you fight giant robots? Using guerilla combat? While using non-polluting modes of transportation? And recycle? While dressed as anything from a nerd, varsity athlete, or punk rocker?

This game had me in its Swedish mandibles from the start and never let go.

Guild of Darksteel

This new addition to the Backlog Burner fills the bingo tile for "Focuses on exploration" and is courtesy of @kfwyre. Taking 5 hours to complete, this shorter game is a length I will try to duplicate on successive bingo entries.

Guild of Darksteel is hard to recommend. As a one-man developer showcase, it's a smartly designed pixel art throwback that fully serves to unwind a tangled story about class and deception. And yet, it makes no bones about its spartan appearance and austere combat system that fail to appease a modern audience with more refined appetites.

Remember Karateka? Remember Flashback: The Quest for Identity? Remember Out of This World? Yeah, those were great games. Nostalgia can be very appealing, but in the case of Guild of Darksteel it seems to be mostly nostalgia for those games' mechanics that were innovative for the time. As much as QoL are implemented to bring this game to up to modern sensibilities, it's still an old game that requires players amenable to good-ol'-days-kind of thinking.

I liked it. The quick time combat is charming. Exploring is so much more satisfying without a map, as this game does. As mentioned previously, the story is the real standout here. There's nothing new when it comes to genre entries, but this game takes the time to avoid tropes, build characters, and flesh out a world where the lower class is pitted against itself by those in power -- even if the lower class includes the immortal.

The pixel art is okay, but don't expect flashy spectacle; even a lowbrow pixel art game like Terror at Oakheart has more impressive animations than Guild at Darksteel. Instead, expect it to be used to enhance the atmosphere of the game. If you're familiar with **Superbrothers, then kind of like that. The characters emote with their stances and fluttering clothes rather than with oversized eyes.

I wanted to like it more, but settled for liking it for what it deserved. Also, the game is abandoned, so anyone playing it now won't unlock 2 achievements that are destined to remained out of reach to new players.

First-person dungeon crawlers made a lot of sense back in the Golden Age of Gaming. The single-point perspective of Wizardry was more than enough to convince gamers that 3D graphics had arrived. All it took was a long hallway where corridors increased in size according to your proximity to it. Before Pole Position would blow people away in real time, dungeon crawlers were the bread and butter of gamers that wanted to experience a virtual world in three dimension. And, as were the limitations of the time, everything existed as right angles. Corners were right angles. Turning corners were right angles. It made for great mapping on graph paper, but it was one of those things from this era that really didn't make much sense.

Time passed. Dungeon crawlers have grown up. But the right angles remain.

Legend of Grimrock 2

And so we have Legend of Grimrock 2, a lovely game provided through the generosity of @xavdid. It knows what it is, throwback and all, logic be damned, all to provide some old-school dungeon crawling goodness.

I just started it, so don't have much to report. As this game occupies the bingo tile for "From a series you have played", I am happy to say that I played the first game way back when on a laptop that could not bear the strains of old-school dungeoneering, and gave out mid-run, but not before giving me a taste old school crawling.

This game happily straddles the line between being too obtuse and being too respectful of the player, having nothing in the way of a tutorial. For this reason, I think I learned the controls improperly, relying on mouse movement instead of buttons. I think I found a workaround, but the frustration was enough to get me to try a new game...

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

When "funk" is used in modern culture, you usually think people are using it to describe a mood or an ambience, sort of the way "jazz" (cum "jazzy") is often used. But in Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, "funk" is well represented in its purest form, dropping giant bombs on the one with a soundtrack featuring bass lines you'd swear are made by Bootsy Collins himself, eking out the required quota of circus theme motifs as the Funk constitution decrees.

Bomb Rush Cyberpunk comes courtesy of @kfwyre (thank you) and occupies the bingo tile for "Popular game you never got around to playing". I just started playing it, but it's clear this is one of those games that even if you never finish it, you are rewarded from the start. The cool cel-shaded art style is gorgeous, featuring a warm, cozy square esthetic that can make a square cleavage fashionable. Movement is beautiful and fluid, taking place within the context of a futuristic city where open public infrastructure makes is ideal for grinding and doing sick tricks on.

I missed out on Jet Set Radio. It seemed like such a cool game with equally cool vibes. I look forward to getting my groove on with Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, glad that I finally have this chance to catch up on this game I had been eyeing for quite a while. Now that I'm playing it, it certainly looks to be my jam.

Day 15:

I played a somewhat different type of game today: Infectonator 3: Apocalypse. It's a zombie themed 2d game where you have a map with mobs on it and you need to infect all the mobs. Then there's an overarching campaign where you invade different parts of a map with the ultimate goal of taking over the planet before a cure is made (like plague inc). I feel like I've played all of the parts of this game before, largely in flash era games. But it's well done and surprisingly engaging. I played it for a couple hours and was engaged, but I found myself losing interest pretty suddenly after a while as the game play does get really repetitive. There's different units and tools you can use in the main round to spread the disease, but there's not much variety and there doesn't seem to be much of a learning curve or anything. The UI is clearly designed with touch in mind which, combined with the progression, makes me think it's mostly targeted at mobile, with steam being a port. The art is good enough and there's some references/humor to it, but nothing actually funny. The music, however, is painful.

Pseudoregalia

My first impression of this game was not a good one. After playing for a couple hours, the word that keeps coming to mind was "directionless". Exploring an endless labyrinthine castle, I kept running into uncrossable gaps and areas that I knew I'd need to return to, but doubted I'd ever find again.

Finally, I stumbled my way across the beginning area again. And in searching a small side room that I passed right over before, I found it: the map! This was a major breakthrough.

Admittedly, I still felt rather lost while exploring, but the map helped me reorient and figure out some of the passageways I'd not gone down before. I found two ability orbs that greatly enhanced my mobility, opening the game up to what I expect it was always meant to be. Not a series of blind corridors — reminiscent of Lunacid, which I played during the last event — but a platforming metroidvania.

The platforming feels pretty satisfying once you unlock a few abilities. There's a high jump, a long sliding jump, and something akin to a wall kick that takes a little practice to get right. The game generally breaks the areas up to focus on specific abilities, but it seems that some sequence breaking is possible (possibly by design).

There's combat, but it's deemphasized. I've only fought one boss so far, and most enemies die in a few hits. I only just discovered there's a heal button, which works similar to "soul" from Hollow Knight. Hit bad guys to build up a meter, and use that resource to heal.

Graphically, the game has that old school N64 look to it. The game runs at a smooth 60 FPS, but the animations are clearly slowed to still provide a retro feel. This hybrid approach works. The terrain is relatively basic, and there's some visible z-fighting issues, but it does make the platforming more telegraphed.

I'm not in love with the anthropomorphic bunny character design, but I'm sure it's brought in its own share of fans. You find outfits throughout the game. There's also a menu option to give your character pants (this is off by default).

HLTB puts the average play time at six hours, which I'm about to hit. That said, my wandering for the first two hours was pretty unproductive, so I expect I'm well behind. Despite my negative first impression though, I've warmed up to the game and would like to finish it.

pureya

Channeling the random energy from @dannydotcafe, I rolled a 462-sided die and got 324. Realizing I didn't want to tap the down arrow that many times, I quickly counted the distance traveled by hitting "Page Down" instead and did a little math. Moments later, I downloaded pureya.

This is a rapid fire game in the vein of WarioWare (or so I understand -- I've never actually played that). You play through a series of random minigames in ten second bursts.

pureya features a cute opening cutscene where a young girl accidentally spills marbles across her toys laid out on the floor. Rather than be upset, the marbles are integrated into the play as each toy becomes the setting for a new imagined game. The toy car becomes real as you expertly control it, until the moment has passed and the next toy is picked up instead.

The minigames themselves are fairly simplistic, and generally not very interesting. You're usually weaving back and forth to collect marbles and avoid hazards. A few lean into "awkward controls" as a gimmick, such as the squid and penguin minigames. Each game is only controlled with the left and right arrow keys, which makes them easy to pick up.

The marbles are a type of currency, and every five rounds or so you get to feed them into a pachinko machine. This system is used to unlock new games, skins, and music tracks.

After about 25 minutes of this, I unlocked two new minigames. Unfortunately, they didn't add much variety, and by this point the game was getting rather samey. Even in such a short time, you end up seeing the same minigames a lot when they're only ten seconds long.

I'll give points to the music, as there were quite a few tracks included in this otherwise diminutive game. They're also a bit samey due to sharing the same tempo and instruments, but I still went through the jukebox menu (what we used to call a sound test) to give them a listen.

The menus are a bit difficult to navigate due to the fact that they contain no words. Everything is an icon. To change your resolution, it's Cog icon > TV icon > Box Growing icon. Not ideal. It reminded me of entering secret codes into SNES games, except I was just trying to get my settings right.

This game feels practically designed for mobile, and would probably work well on a Steam Deck. The bumpers would feel right at home for controlling each game. That said, the native Linux version didn't work for me at first, and I needed to switch to the Proton build.

Knocked off another square with Doki Monsters: Quest! Which I'm playing on my Switch and thus blocking off my ability to launch Pokopia, where it's called Doki Monsters on the home screen but the monsters are called Dokimon in-universe. Game's name seems to have a minor identity crisis.

It's a retro-style Pokémon clone, and is a very clear love letter to the first two generations of Pokémon (first town has a direct reference to the rumors about Mew being under a truck in Gen 1). It has its own distinct identity though, being set in a world where Dokimon first arrived 100 years ago and destroyed 70% of humanity. Society has settled into a new status quo by the story. Mostly.

One fun thing: the player character actually has dialogue. There have been a couple funny quips that got chuckles from me. The game isn't a comedy or satire game, but it has a sense of humor and I love that.

I'm also tempted to cross off "Has multiple playable characters" because there's a flashback near the very start where we play as our long-lost friend. It only happened that one time though and I'm apparently halfway through the story, so feels like it'd be cheating. Speaking of our long lost friend, this game has a big overarching mystery to it that could've gotten that square crossed off too. I'm eager to find answers on what exactly is going on in this world~

One last bit of praise: this game requires grinding, but it has a good system. You can rebattle opponents as many times as you want, and in these sorts of games trainers always give better EXP than wild encounters. At some point I noticed a counter appear in the upper corner counting the rematches, and then I noticed one more thing: they actually gradually increase in level. Realized this one enemy team went up in level from 17 to eventually 19.

Yep. Really good way to implement grinding.

Also I like the designs. They're all fairly original, with some small exceptions. Namely there's an Eevee clone called Kitsu, and its dark evolution looks like a black Fennekin, but I'm giving it a pass. Some of the names are also just normal words, like Luna and Eclipse, which is... Weirdly refreshing?

And while they're usually monochrome, there are color variants for all the palettes... including "Unique" variants with multiple colors. So that adds another layer of fun to wild encounters, though so far I've only found one rare variant.

So yeah. All around a good monster taming game, and I can heartily recommend it!

Oh wow. You got through a ton of games!

It's my view that even if a game doesn't click for you, it's still progress towards games that you do enjoy (like Lost Nova). You didn't know before if you'd enjoy them, but now you do.

Also, moods sometimes ebb and flow. I might find myself disagreeing with a game the first time I try it, then later find myself in the mood to try it again. So I wouldn't feel too dissatisfied about coming across a couple duds. It's all progress in the end.

Lost Nova is now one of my favorite gaming experiences and everyone should buy it now

You're the boss; into the pile it goes. Okay, maybe it's not all progress in the end.

Ooh, I love precision platformers. I cut my teeth on these when I first got into PC gaming, so floor spikes and falling platforms are old friends to me. It's no surprise then that this one is already in my backlog.

It looks like the difficulty ramps up pretty swiftly based on your deaths. Nice work on completing so much content, though. Especially if you're new to the genre.

I also like the connection to Empathy. I've kind of been half-hearting my category connections this time around as my time has been so limited, but all of yours have made sense so far.

Visual Novels Take Forever — And so I played a short one that's already been covered this event, Doki Doki Literature Club. It was that or Hatoful Boyfriend and I had other people pick for me.

I regularly see Dan Salvato giving significant donations to charity during Games Done Quick events so I'm glad it worked out for him, but currently I'm cursing his name because the main musical motif has been stuck in my head for nearly a week.