January 24th 2023
This week I started my “finish the damn game in a month” initiative. Hence I’m spending 3-5 hours every day working on my game, inevitably leaving less time to play games. But of course I did manage to get some gameplay in.
So, here’s the Games I’ve Played This Week:
- Stellaris: This is one of the games I come back to again and again. Stellaris is a 4x game (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) set in space and it is also very focused on stories you engage with along the way (eg “you found a planet covered with a shield. Do you disable it?”). This time I really wanted to “finish” the game so I started on a tiny galaxy with the very easy difficulty. And it was super fun! Finally I could expand and do whatever I desired without fearing that if I mismanage my resources for a bit I would get destroyed. I will definitely return to this one later as more DLC gets released with more sci-fi stories to discover.
- Satisfactory: I played this one before as well but unlike other factory games this one didn’t stick to me too much. Satisfactory is as the name suggest a factory building game but it is 3D unlike Factorio. I found the first person perspective and long traveling tedious and 3d-ness didn’t add much for me. This time though I was playing it my girlfriend which made it a lot nicer. Instead of having to building everything myself, we could split the workload. Also she likes exploring a lot more than me so seeing her get excited about weird alien plants makes exploration a lot more enjoyable for me too.
- Soko Loco Deluxe: A mini game from the SokPop Collective that releases a new game every month. In this one you build railways between places like a farm, a windmill, and a city to bring resources around. As often with SokPop games this one is super chill, very charming, and very tactile to play. But also as with other SokPop games there is not much to do after the initial learning phase, although there a lot of challenges if you really like this sort of game.
- Luckitown: This one is also from SokPop. This one is a turn based city builder/tower defense. You roll dice each turn to get resources, then with the resources you can build towers or dice generating buildings for your economy, both of which require houses to operate. Somewhat similar to Stacklands this game was a joy to figure out and win the challenge. There is a lot of interactions with the different buildings and defensive strategies. But as with Stacklands after you finish it once there isn’t much replay value. Still a good game as with less and less free time I like it when a game just does its thing then lets you go enjoy something else.
And that is all for this week! I recently bought a 4TB SSD for my computer so now I can install more games (and keep more Unity projects around) without having to delete the old ones, meaning I have many more games installed that I haven’t played. Maybe one day I will reach a sort of “Steam 0” state with an empty “games to play” list but it won’t be anytime soon.
PS: I thought I would play more of Factorio’s marathon mode but it kind of didn’t stick. I guess more of the same wasn’t good enough to entice me to play, especially so soon after playing a LOT of Factorio recently with the Space Exploration mod. Still a nice time to see the different early game.