It's Sokoban! A game whose name I recognise as shorthand for this type of puzzle, and yet have never seen. It's also a genre I'm not overly fond of, preferring puzzles I can sometimes get through by intuition (Spring Falls), brute force (every switch-the-lights puzzle ever), or entering chaos mode (real life).
But I like Isles of Sea and Sky. From starting it almost on a whim, I was playing and figuring things out with zero fuss and no overt tutorialising pretty much immediately, and from there suddenly found that several hours had breezed by without frustration or boredom.
]]>Alright, sure, so we technically assassinated your leader, and detonated a populated planet, and wiped out the first clan we ever met. But that was all self defence and we're not here to cause trouble. We just... have a lot going on okay.
The Pegasus Expedition is one of my favourite kinds of game. I'm not sure if it quite comes together enough, but it's trying something so original that even its partial success is worth celebrating. You're leading a 4X-ish effort to establish a power base in an unfamiliar galaxy. But you're not doing it to conquer everyone or win victory points. You're doing it so you can go back home and save Earth from annihilation.
]]>A decent name is one thing, but one like To Hell With The Ugly plain demands to be looked up. That's when you see the striking art style, and yeah okay, I'm already on on board.
Based on a French novel by Boris Vian, this tells a strange and surprisingly dark story about a famously handsome young himbo who gets caught up in a sinister plot in 1950s Los Angeles and has to adventure, talk, fight, and - horrors - reason his way to the truth. It's an adventure game with quick-time event bits, and a 50s America setting, all of which could put me off it entirely, but I can't bring myself to say anything bad about it at all.
]]>Dave the Diver (character) is a bit out of practice, but he's an easygoing sort and it doesn't take much to convince him to get back in his flippers to look into the local anomaly at the behest of his arms dealer "friend", who would be clearly bad news even if his name wasn't Cobra.
Said anomaly fills with new sea creatures from all over the world every time it's visited, and possibly building-sized terror beasts and ancient merfolk, but Cobra's sure it'll all be fine, so in you go, mate. It's certainly pretty down there if nothing else, and Dave the Diver (game) is, if nothing else, a rare game that makes the usually tedious water level a bit of a treat to wander round in.
]]>Brinkmanship doesn't get explored all that much in games. Precipice is almost certainly derived from Balance of Power, a political strategy simulation from 1985 about the Cold War powers and their winner-armageddons-all staring contest. It was impressively original, complex, and completely unplayable. Happily, Precipice has kept most of what made that game interesting to begin with, and dumped the baggage.
]]>It was 3am and Hucks the cellar spider was finally surrounded by, instead of carrying, her wee hatchlings. Clarice, her slightly dim neighbour, was resting after another hour spent fruitlessly stumbling around after an even dafter flying thingy that would eventually blunder right into her face.
Playing Webbed seemed inevitable for someone who watches her ceiling spiders when she can't sleep or finish an article. But within about a minute of playing, it became clear that it's the kind of game that will bring joy to almost anyone. Webbed is immediately brilliant.
]]>Old school shooters are still in vogue and that's basically a good thing. But I wonder where it'll lead.
G String might offer a clue. As well as having possibly the worst name in history, it's a strange sort of throwback to the early/mid 2000s, an era you might, if you had to say these things for a living, call "middle school". I'm surprised at how refreshing I found that.
]]>Managing the climate is usually an afterthought in colony building games, if it's included at all. It tends to be a non-issue until the game’s basically over, and its effects are usually underwhelming.
Imagine Earth isn't entirely about the environment. And it needn’t be, given that you're working for a business colonising one of countless worlds. Who cares if you destroy a planet when you can easily skip over to another one? You can do that. You can be pretty rapacious. But I find it more fun to be the oceanic aliens, because they start out with lots of seabase technology, so when your rivals accidentally melt the ice caps you can mostly just laugh at them.
]]>14 years on, it might say more about me than about games that I automatically want to reference Portal when I play a game like Claire De Lune. It's a bit unfair to compare everything in the first person physics puzzle subgenre to one of the best games ever made as a default.
You have a zappy non-violent gun necessary for navigating a series of platforming challenges. That's... actually where the similarities end. Instead of the increasingly sinister laboratory and wry humour, Claire De Lune crashes you into an alien planet and asks you to reunite with your daughter while periodically getting a flash of sad backstory.
]]>I am not a train person. I like travelling on trains. Or at least I would, if I was rich, or lived in a country where all train companies weren't contemptible thieves actively draining the blood of society. But games about trains always passed me by. Not even the classics of the genre nor acclaimed descendants like openTTD have ever grabbed me.
So I started playing NIMBY Rails almost as a joke. Then I coughed, and two hours had passed. It is dangerously engrossing.
]]>Going Medieval will be huge. I had an eye on it, but didn't expect it to land quite so well as it already has, and now that I've had time to try it out, hoboy. What a delight.
It is, in a word, the leading contender for the next Rimworld. I try not to be so reductive, but denying Rimworld's influence here is pointless. It has a less colourful setting but aside from that it copies pretty much everything. And that’s okay.
]]>There was a time when actual arguments were had over the validity of "real time with pause" as a design choice. A foolish time we ought not to revisit. I bring it up because I've been playing Fates Of Ort, a light-hearted action RPG that's more like "pause with real time".
Everything is frozen in time until you move, swing a sword, or cast a spell, replacing the usual reflex-based clickfest with a measured pace. Combined with its intriguing magic system, it lets you combine conditions and spell effects without becoming a test of how many button sequences you've memorised. There's even a hint of bullet hell, an experience I evidently enjoy more (ie: at all) when I can pause, and a tiny pinch of Dark Souls in its respawning/healing system. It's fun stuff.
]]>Tanks are usually a boring, one note interruption to the exciting infantry shootytimes I was having.
Armoured Commander II, however, is fun. How dare it.
]]>
.png?width=1200&height=630&fit=crop&enable=upscale&auto=webp "שחרורו של Assassin's Creed Shadows נדחה למרץ כאשר מועצת המנהלים של Ubisoft שוקל מכירת חברה")
