December 22th 2022
It’s another week! I’m a bit late this week because I was very into I Was a Teenage Exocolonist so I thought I would write this after I’m done with the game, but I couldn’t finish it so I will just write this before I skip the entire week.
And the Games I’ve Played This Week:
- Plate Up: Roguelike Overcooked. In this game you operate a restaurant as the cook/waiter and have to prepare food for customer and deliver it fast. I liked Overcooked and I like roguelike games, so I thought this would be nice, especially as the store page was advertising that it is also fun as 1 player. It wasn’t really fun as 1 player. Maybe I will do another review after I got my friends to play this, but if you are solo there is just so much to do on your own. And the chaos of playing with friends also don’t exist, which makes it very samey all the time.
- Taur: It’s like those mobile games that you keep seeing ads for but a full game. You build your tower and defend it, buying upgrades after each round to upgrade your base. Has a cool concept and fine gameplay, but the balance is very bad. I guess it’s because it is being developed by a solo dev and they don’t have the resources to balance the game yet? Still I had my 2 hours of fun, which is more that a lot of games.
- Necrosmith: This one truly feels like a mobile game. You collect various body parts and bring them to life, making zombies, skeletons, vampires, and more. It’s pretty fun to see how different combinations work and the game’s pixel art is pretty lovely. It is a bit rough around the edges though especially with your zombies being very dumb and keep leaving your home base defenseless.
- Floodlands: Yet another base builder. This one is set in post-global warming earth where there is trash everywhere. I think it has potential but at its current state it is a bit rough. Also it felt too much like the devs are trying to push an agenda without really thinking it through.
- Train Valley 2: Trains go cho choo! In this one you build tracks and move resources from one building to another, making wood->planks->chairs etc. It plays as whole bunch of mini-levels and it was fun for a while. Later it gets super repetitive though.
- Choo Choo Charles: A nice and short indie horror game. 10/10 would choo choo again. In this one you go around in an island upgrading your train while Choo Choo Charles, a spider monster inside a train, haunts you. I wish this game was a bit harder. To upgrade your train you collect scraps but you get so much scraps, like in the range of 100, but every time you die you only lose 1-2 scraps, so dying in this horror game is pretty chill. It was still pretty fun though. I’m glad they didn’t make it too long, because many things were getting old towards the end.
- Titan Station: You go work in a space gas station in a modern-day-but-they-kept-the-space-race-world. You look around the space station and a shocker! It is surprisingly abandoned. But you still have your manager making you go do mindless IT tasks. This game started really nice but I could not suspend my disbelief anymore when I was talking to someone back on earth over radio and telling them how the communications on the space station is broken so I need to go repair it. Like couldn’t that person over the radio communicate with others? They aren’t in the same station? Well it has many other plot holes but at least it had nice atmosphere. Too bad after a bit it essentially becomes go to point A to click some thing then go to B and so on.
- I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: This game is super good! It is essentially everything that was missing in Titan Station and Floodlands. It’s in the future where there are a bunch of woke communes living on earth. But others don’t like them so there is war. So they hop on a spaceship to go live in an exoplanet, going through a mysterious wormhole at the edge of the solar system. You live from ages 10-20 as a colonist, going to school, surveying the lands, and defending the colony from yearly attacks from mysterious aliens. You are also connected to the wormhole somehow so you can see “alternate timelines” which are your different playthroughs. Sadly almost everything in the game is done with this card game where you are trying to match colors or put cards in ascending numbers etc. which got boring to me at the 20 hour mark. Luckily they do have an option to disable that entirely and put a simple coin flip instead to see if you win the challenge, so I will definitely be continuing the story with that option. Best part about this game is that people really thought about how something like this would work. Like what would be problematic for people, from problems cultivating food to alien allergies. Even the sci-fi technology they have is feasible, and they even make sure to mention how most of their tech will probably break down in time so they need to do things low tech like cultivating farms or sewing clothes when the 3d printers die down.
And that’s all! As it is my winter break I’m going through all the games I’ve accumulated. Hopefully next week will be a long long list as well 🙂