It has the same elements as They Are Billions - create a home base, defend it against zombies - but the village simulator aspect of it is really involved and fun. Each villager has super basic sim stuff like moods and needs, and you have to balance them to ensure your village is productive.
And you NEED to be productive, because the moment you start on a map, “the corruption” begins to encroach, spawning zombies and ghosts and specters and ghouls to attack your village every night. Like most tower defense games, though, you can maze to let your towers rip them to pieces, and you can also spawn golems and do god powers to keep them at bay.
I’ve played it before, and fell into it pretty hard last time, but I’ve yet to finish a map. The corruption starts hitting your village HARD once it runs out of room to expand, and you want to keep them from expanding too much (buildings and campfires push corruption back as long as they are connected to your main building), so eventually you have to start building out a serious line of defense to protect yourself.
All the pixel art and sound effects are cute and soothing too, very Settlers-esque.
the game is a little cutesy/twee i guess… and some of the endings are a little bit boring. but it’s a genuinely cool concept to have players just look for as many different endings as possible. the idea of like multiple paths and endings in a game like this is something that i’m interested in exploring in more detail if i do make future games. basically like a weirder/artsier way of exploring some of the stuff that this game does.
I’m finding Forza 7 comforting to play after a long day at work during a shitty week. I am bad and use all the assists but it’s just nice to do laps and unlock cars. Do I know anything about cars? No, but they are pretty to look at.
SpelunKing, a casual game that has the feel of a mobile port. You dig around using match-3, pulling your perspective in the direction of each match to “explore”. It has some thinly-designed progression layer which amounts to “buy the upgrades when you can afford them” and a bunch of levels.
Instant Farmer, a puzzle game where you swap tiles to solve puzzles around watering plants. Feels like a student game. In that respect it’s a very well-designed game: it’s trim at 50 puzzles, and is entirely inoffensive in look and sound.
There’s a sort of “workhorse”-like quality to these games that I respect. They aren’t compelling to me because I crave either novelty or difficulty, but they are polished for what they are and within their budget, and there’s nothing particularly bad about them. They make me think of the games my grandma had on her computer in 1998. But I was always a Starcraft player myself.
For the price of a coke, though, totally worth it just for the feelings playing them pulls up.
My eyebrows raised when I saw the Afrikaans title. Now I’m curious of this studio will develop more. All the South Africans I know were either obsessed with League of Legends or PUBG so this sort of thing is a little unexpected.
Has anyone else experienced this phenomenon? I’m having difficulty processing the text in DQ11. I’m not sure if it’s the font or what. I’m also playing with the voices off. I’m reading everything two or three times over here.
I don’t know that I experienced it that severely but I did have some trouble with the text every now and again in that game. At the time I just attributed it to my terrible eyesight but I think the fairly thick outline over a serif font does create some legibility problems.
i do this too. i’m always like “maybe it will be some kind of misunderstood hidden gem”. i even have that exact game on my wishlist though i skipped over buying it many times on sale because i read the reviews and they indicated what it was. though i don’t ever try and spend more than like… 7 bucks on a thing like that.
most of the ones i regret are on the Switch and games that i paid closer to full price because i was like “oh i’ll definitely play this” but then never have like Stardew Valley or… sigh the recent Mario All-Stars Compilation.
here are a few ones i bought on sale for cheap enough but even i am like “wait why did i buy this again”:
honestly i have no idea how i found this game. i think i only purchased it because the trailer was kind of funny/meta. i thought it might be chunky in an interesting way. never played it.
i dunno man. i like rolly ball games. i have no indication that this is particularly unique or good. i think it was that this game is usually like 15 dollars which is quite high but i think it went on sale one time for 75% so i was like “it’s now or never”. still have never played it.
the last game doesn’t even seem to be available in a non-demo form anymore and when i tried to link to the Steam page on here it’s broken. it’s called “Crying Is Not Enough”. there’s this speedrunner who usually plays janky weird shooter games (his name is “peaches”) and in some passing in some interview at GDQ he rattled off a bunch of names that i’ve never heard of. i think he might have been joking. of course i ended up buying all three games (the others are called “Red Lake” and “A Dump In The Dark”). this one in particular was usually kind of expensive but then a couple years later went on sale a bunch so i was like “it’s now or never” again. i guess it really was then or never! i have never played it though.
there are many more but i’ll spare sharing all of them.
After way too long avoiding it because I didn’t feel far enough into the main plot, I finished the main cabaret club subplot in Yakuza Kiwami 2. What a gem. If the whole game was just getting to know these (actually well written for once? way to go, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio) ladies and play this mini game I’d have been pleased with it. Now to beat up the rest of the bad guys!
lmao this is like being inside of a dying brain. i looked up some gameplay footage and this game looks like an insult to Marble Madness. i don’t want to be too mean about the C64 and what it could do in 1985 though, lol.
