Wilmot’s Warehouse at first felt like it was supposed to be a zen game about re-organizing items in a warehouse and trying to figure out the optimal ways to place your stock, but it just devolved quickly into a stressful mess for me. I really enjoy the minimalist style and the core idea of what the game is trying to do, but I dropped it off quickly because being under time pressure to fulfill orders just wasn’t for me.
Slime Rancher is a simulation game where you manage a ranch filled with cute slimes. Armed with a vacuum gun, you move them around, feed them, expand your ranch, explore the world around your ranch, find new species of slimes, gain upgrades and repeat this loop. I didn’t have a great time with it, sadly - I was looking forward to trying this game - because I found the normal ‘Adventure’ mode to be extremely aimless. I do enjoy a game of that style - I had a blast with Graveyard Keeper earlier this year, for instance - but the lack of objectives combined with technical issues made me put down Slime Rancher quicker than I would’ve hoped.
Idle Life Sim is an idle game with a really interesting visual style and core game system, but nothing else going on for it. The absolute lack of player actions beside watching ads and not playing the game for long periods of time (also limited by the game if you don’t buy some expensive doodad) made me lose interest quite quickly. I must say that I’ve tried a bunch of idle games recently and this one continues the trend of not letting the player do anything while idling, which doesn’t work for me. I wish they had made something else out of that game.
Alphaputt is a small mini-putt game with a really nice sense of style, but not much else for me. The game has you putt across all 26 letters of the alphabet, each with their own theme and gimmicks, but with no great way to become better and no good sense of challenge. I went through the whole alphabet, then tried the challenge mode, but was left with no intention to keep up with the game, which is a shame, since it looks and sounds pretty good!
Looking at an old game like World Of Warcraft Classic is always, in theory, a balancing act. These old games exist to tickle our nostalgia bones and in some cases serve as formative works and warnings for the future game designers among us. Even by keeping that in mind, this is still a product being offered to play today, so I put on my rose-tinted nostalgia glasses and dreaded going back to the old school World of Warcraft. After going at it for a while, my conclusions are that it’s still a somewhat enjoyable game but ultimately a snapshot of a different time where I had way much time for MMOs and lower expectations of what the genre could do.
Deep Town is a pretty interesting little idle game where you dig, create items with the resources you find, fight some underground enemies and collect upgrades to create new stuff to keep the whole process going. I found many systems and core tenants of the game to be fun and engaging, but sadly the whole affair is packaged in a free-to-play model that means it sacrifices much of what could make it great in order to sell you premium resources, turning it into a disappointing wait-fest.
Arknights is an interesting take on the mobile gacha game where the gameplay is a tower defense instead of being an idle RPG or a slight tactics game. I had an okay time with it, but didn’t stick with the game long enough to see the depth of what it could offer. I was repelled almost immediately by the whole ‘free mobile game’ feeling that permeates everything about it. The endless menus, seemingly infinite number of different currencies to buy, grind and use to upgrade vague stats and skills. It’s too bad, because tower defense games are one of my favorite genres, and this could’ve been neat!
Glitchskier is a simple iOS arcade shooter oozing with aesthetics. While the gameplay is perfectly fine, I found it a bit too shallow to give it that much more time. What I really liked about this game was everything surrounding the core gameplay loop of shooting around and collecting powerups, but I still had a good time. I kinda wish there was more to it, some kind of secret metagame or story, but oh well!
I’ve never been the biggest Elder Scrolls fan but some stuff stuck with me with the other versions of these games; The sense of exploration, character building and the story. The combat always felt a bit too random for me, so I went with the ranged options - or just trying to diplomacy my way out of most situations. Elder Scroll Blades on mobile devices is the distilled essence of walking along linear maps to try and accomplish cookie cutter quests while doing a ton of combat. Not my cup of tea, even if as far as mobile first person games go, this wasn’t terrible.
Spaceplan is a strange but interesting story-based idle game that uses idle gameplay only as a story conduit where you are in a spaceship and need to figure out what happened to the universe by using the power of potatoes. Starting with small solar panels and ending with massive canons shooting energy-creating drones down at planets, I found the actual act of playing the game took too long and that it wasn’t super fun idle mechanics. Otherwise I was pretty curious where the story could go so that kept me going, but ultimately the ending also left me unsatisfied.
Hyper Light Drifter is a more action-oriented zelda-like where you explore a large world, fighting through difficult challenges in order to figure out the secrets of the place you are in. With a really kickass visual style and a good mix of challenges with rewarding exploration, I thought I’d be way more into it than I was in the end. I had some trouble with the controls and the difficulty of some segments of the game that ultimately left me frustrated. It’s a shame because I managed to tough it out for about a quarter of the game.
I can see the brilliance in Return Of The Obra Dinn, a first person puzzle game that puts you in charge of identifying all passengers of a boat just returning to port, figuring out how they were killed, and who - or what - caused their deaths. With a novel framing of being part of an insurance company and doing all of this for insurance reasons - using a mystical watch that lets you see the moment of death of any corpse - you navigate the four levels of the boat, watch death scenes, re-watch them, try to figure out who’s who and - if you’re not me - piece together things on your own. I had an okay time with this game that turned sour the moment when I had no new scenes to view and was left to my own devices. I just couldn’t figure anything out, so I resorted to cheating. But this is not the only way this game can go and I still recognize how brilliant it is, I just couldn’t get through the whole thing by myself.
Borderlands 3 is the fourth entry in the borderlands franchise; one which I enjoyed a lot in the past. I was on the fence about this new one - whether to get it at all, for instance - because of controversy surrounding people involved in making it, but ultimately I nabbed it during a pre-order sale; I had to know what they would do to the Borderlands recipe to make it update it to 2019s standards, I wanted to know if I still enjoyed that game of game and also how they would tone it. After playing about half the campaign (I still want to finish it at least once) I can answer these questions. They didn’t update it, I still enjoy that kind of game but with diminished returns and the tone is still horrible.
Velocity 2X is a space shooter/platformer where you move through a space drama by running and shooting in a few environments, alternating between the two different gameplays. You mainly do this to complete four objectives per level - beat the level quickly enough, get enough crystals/survivors and get a high enough score, all of this feeds into an XP system that ultimately just allows you access to more levels. I first tried playing this on a keyboard and really couldn’t, but even with a controller this game suffers from the ‘rub your belly and pat your head at once’ syndrome, there’s just so much to do that it’s quite difficult to do everything correctly and it quickly becomes frustrating. I tried to give it a chance, but at some point the game introduced one mechanic too many, and I stopped.
I had a good time with the first Nonstop Knight game, a little automatic dungeon crawler where you’d fight a bunch of enemies in a diablo-like fashion, collecting money and experience, gear and new skills, pets and other trinkets to get stronger and clear more and more dangerous challenges. I decided to give the new one a shot and I’m kinda unhappy with the things they changed, making it a more aggressively micro-transactionned adventure where ultimately, playing more won’t give you any progress and that feels real bad.
I played a bunch of old-school RPGs back when I was younger; Baldur’s Gates, other D&D properties and a few of the Fallouts as well. I had never touched Planescape: Torment, so I was pretty intrigued to try Torment: Tides of Numenera, as I started the game I wondered which aspects of the genre it would reflect in this modern offering; I tried getting into T:ToN as much as I could, but ultimately just hit my weary brain against a wall of pre-established lore and way too many NPCs to chat with. I didn’t have a bad time, but I also didn’t feel like I was connecting with the game, I was always waiting to get to some point that might not even exist.
Duskers is a curious little game where you play someone stuck in a spaceship and you need to survive by exploring other vessels in order to collect resources to repair your ship and tools. To explore you have drones that you control either manually or by typing commands in a console. The game has a very interesting style and some neat mechanics - especially related to how you explore using your drones and the way everything breaks down over time - but the lack of direction and the fact that it’s one of these games where you need to restart when you lose (which I feel like I don’t enjoy as much these days, especially if a run lasts a few hours) made me drop it after one such run.
The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain is a game that reminds me of a choose-your-own-adventure book (and has the creative pedigree of such works, also has some Dungeons & Dragons baggage). You play an adventurer that goes into a vast dungeon to try and accomplish some personal objective while avoiding traps, fighting monsters and exploring the bowels of the mountain. I thought the core concept was neat, but the finer mechanics didn’t click at all for me. For a game that you need to replay multiple times, it quickly becomes a chore and the battle system feels random and unfair.
Postknight is an idle game where you fight across sidescrolling 2D maps as a young Postknight - a knight that delivers mail - by killing a bunch of mosters. The game is pretty simple, although maybe not idle enough and the barrier of free-to-play limits gets pretty rough after a while, but I enjoyed the bit that I’ve played. It’s not my favorite idle game of all time, however.
I wasn’t really sure what I was getting into with Invisible Inc. On one hand, the game promised a deep tapestry of lore and intrigue set in a futuristic world ruled by corporations and filled with hackers, military drones and assassins while on the other claiming to be a roguelike where you would lose constantly, crushed by the might of the corporations before you would finally have enough characters, skills and AI programs to finally win by the skin of your teeth. I’m not sure I got either of these because my first playthrough went pretty well, didn’t take that long and I still managed to win, uploading my AI into the corporation’s server. The game kinda expected me to retry on a harder difficulty, but I was left wanting for a reason to do so; Either from a gameplay or story perspective, I felt I was done with Invisible Inc. after that run.