Opus Magnum is a wonderful puzzle game by Zachtronics about creating alchemical products using reagents and tools that you can program. I didn’t get too much into the whole ‘optimization’ thing this time around, but I did beat the game and some of the optional puzzles. It was a ton of fun and I would 100% recommend it to everyone who enjoys puzzles in the slightest. The export to gif feature (which allows you to create animated gifs of your solutions) is also genius.
Exponential Idle tries something a little bit different with the idle game genre by seating its simple gameplay mechanics into a bit of lore and some heavy math stuff that I really couldn’t wrap my head around. Even with some attempts to explain everything in a tall instruction screen, I still really couldn’t figure out what was going on and just tapped everywhere. It’s a bit of a shame, because a math-based idle game could be really neat! This one just was a bit too much.
Sea Of Thieves is an online adventure game where you play a crew of pirates roaming around a great sea, looking for treasures to plunder, skeletons to defeat and other ships to sink. It entirely lives on the fact that you can play it online with your friend, and ultimately dies because of the lack of content, lack of progression, frustrating player encounters and the fact that your millage may vary with your friends depending on what kind of gamers they are. I still had a good time with it, but it’s entirely because it’s something I could play with my buddies during these quarantine times.
Idle Game 1 is a very minimalist, very simple idle game that takes some of the core ideas of classic incremental games and reduces them to basic interactions, removing most of the player choice you’d find into a more advanced title, but still leaving just enough to create an interesting loop where you very quickly reset your game multiple times in a row until you can reset for a bigger bonus. I didn’t stick with it until the end, but I still found it kinda neat.
World Of Warcraft: Shadowlands is the latest expansion for an MMORPG franchise that I’ve been playing since the beginning. Attempting to shake up a new things to solve the incredible bloat of a 1-120 leveling experience while giving players a new expansion with a choice of faction that would influence gameplay options, adding a new tutorial area and updating the character creation options, there’s a lot to enjoy in Shadowlands, but there’s a lot that frustrated me and quickly deflated my original idea of trying everything it had to offer. I still played it quite a bit!
VMOD is a simple little puzzle game for iOS where the goal is to activate all buttons on each level. The game goes through a bunch of new mechanics up until the end, so it never gets too boring, but after a while I’ve found that it became difficult for me to properly solve the puzzles, so I did a bit of mindless mashing in some instances. Nevertheless, it’s an okay game and I had some fun with it.
Factorio is an incredible game of crafting, research and automation where you crashland on a planet with almost no resources and nothing available to you until you manage to create a sprawling base filled with machines building everything you could ever dream of. Its got depth, challenge and plenty of time-filling action trying to optimize systems, perfect processes and optimize solutions. I had an absolute blast with it!
Kartrider Rush+ is a mobile racing game that reminded me of Mario Kart Tour in a good way; While being a hundred percent bogged down by microtransactions, superfluous systems and other free to play mechanics, I felt like the handling and feel of the game was pretty good here and the racing was actually fun and reminded me of ‘classic’ Mario Kart games. This is too bad, considering how everything else around the core systems seemed to be here to bring it down.
Oh boy 2020, oof. I haven’t even played that many videogames released this year! I barely could come up with ten of them, so I had to get creative near the bottom of my rankings. Even in the current circumstances I’ve had a quite comfortable 2020 so I’m counting my blessings. Even having the luxury to spend some time coming up with a GOTY list is making me grateful of my luck. 2020 gets a 1/5 stars. Without further delay and whining…
Territory Idle is a idle/incremental game where the core mechanics is growing an island by buying or fighting for tiles until you can sail away to another continents, accumulating various upgrades along the way. With plenty of systems working on top of each other, Territory Idle kept my interest the whole way - I managed to beat the game, in a sense - but ultimately I was left disappointed by the strange balance, lack of quality-of-life features, a few small bugs and a breadth of options that weren’t really all equivalent.
Miracle Merchant is a quite simple puzzle game about brewing potions using cards from four colored decks in order to meet the specific requirements of your stylish clients and get enough points on each turn to continue until you eventually run out of cards. To make things more difficult, you have cursed cards that remove points when you play them - but you sometimes need to - and a few more special cards effects to consider in order to maximize your potion-brewing capabilities. I had a good time with this game, feeling like the great core mechanics weren’t supplemented by enough meat around the bone.
Lucifer Within Us is a puzzle game that delivers a twist on the Phoenix Wright style of investigative mystery inside a strange cyber-religious setting where you play an inquisitor tasked of finding demons possessing. The game has some neat aesthetics and good writing, but it overall left me a bit perplexed, as much on the ultimate finer points of the story, the difficulty and overall length of the game and the core mechanics that bring everything together. I still had a good time with it and blasted through the whole thing in one sitting, so I’m overall appreciative of what they did with it.
Minimal Dungeon RPG is a strange mix between an idle game and a more classic RPG. It’s certainly incremental in it’s nature, but you’re not waiting for incredibly long periods of time, waiting for something to happen. Instead you tap on tiles in the rooms you’re visiting and you perform actions like exploring or fighting monsters that way. Where you need to wait is for your action and hit points to recover and allow you to keep tapping away. It’s a neat concept, but it got too stale too quickly and it also felt like being a free-to-play game hindered it a little.
Hollow Knight is a quintessential metroidvania, oozing with its gloomy charm and strange cast of character, this nail-wielding bug-starring platformer is a game I really enjoyed. A bunch of smart systems working together with familiar tropes and design concepts make for a really well-playing responsive action game with a ton of places to discover and enemies to fight. If you haven’t played Hollow Knight, I really recommend it!
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.
INSIDE is the spiritual successor to Limbo; an atmospheric, creepy, strange and sometimes brutal platformer taking place in a strange surreal land. Playing a nameless kid, you strut along buildings, fields and weird facilities for no discernible reason, besides the fact that you are pursued by men in black, dogs, killer mermaids and strange robots. I had a good time with this game, even if some parts were just frustrating and if the balance of puzzles wasn’t always on point. It was still pretty good, and I recommend it!
Home Quest is an interesting idle game where you build up villages, assign jobs to your villagers, raise an army and fight invaders while discovering new technologies, upgrades and resources. That sense of discovery brought me all the way to the end of the game and while I sometimes felt that you just couldn’t do anything and needed to wait with the game closed for a while - especially in the early game - at the end I was fully enjoying all the different systems you could optimize to beat the challenges the game threw your way. So much so that I bought the gold edition to support it! You should check it out if you enjoy idle games.
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.
Gunhouse is a very strange mix of tower defense and puzzle game about matching blocks and using special weapons and abilities to protect your house from wave after wave of strange and unique enemies. With a very interesting visual style, great music and solid mechanics, I had a good time with this game, even if the core of the puzzle system felt a bit hard to grapple with for a big chunk of my time with it and the variety of weapons and powers left me more perplexed than anything else. I finished this one, so you know it’s at least up there in my book!
Shattered Planet is a neat roguelike about exploring procedurally generated planets slowly succombing to a dark plague while fighting enemies, collecting loot and trying to survive while unlocking - and upgrading - new characters, discovering enemies, gear and events. I had a good time with it! I kinda wish it did more than what it does, but what is there is fun, addictive and still fun to play, even though it was released in 2014.