In several years, This Town will join the glorious list of cards that make people go “why did this random draft chaff get banned?”
Silverchase
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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: January 21st, 2024
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At this point, we need to amend that saying about how mechanics are either clones of kicker or split cards. They can now be clones of kicker, split cards, or adventures.
4·7 days agoTic Tac Together is team-based recursive tic-tac-toe. When both teams try to claim the same square at the same time, they have to fight for it by playing a subgame. Or a subsubgame. Et cetera. It’s surprisingly strategic. How much board control should you give up to secure a contested square?
I’ve heard good things about Sunderfolk but haven’t played it myself. It has hex-grid tactical combat with co-op done via smartphone, so only the buyer of the game needs to share their screen.
Which ones have you heard of?
- Gauntlet Slayer Edition
- Good old dungeon crawling. 2014 revival of an 80s arcade classic.
- Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
- Defuse a bomb with your friends
- CATO: Buttered Cat
- Puzzle platformer featuring that joke about how cats and toast land when dropped
- Mosa Lina
- Aggressively randomized puzzle platformer
- Assault Android Cactus
- Arcade-style twin-stick shooter with pumping soundtrack
- Pizza Possum
- Very soft stealth game about stealing and eating lots of food
- Moving Out 2 (or 1 if you’re fine with local only)
- Drag and move furniture onto a truck
- Gauntlet Slayer Edition
I will back up Cassette Beasts for having a strategically interesting turn-based combat system.
Looks like you enjoy retro-style 3D platformers. Get Corn Kidz 64!
Like Pseudoregalia, it’s another N64-style 3D platformer released in 2023 with a goat protagonist trapped in a dream. This is an oddly narrow coincidence.
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Here are some “patient” games I’ve played that are on dollar-bin deals right now. Some are actually cheaper off-Steam, so in those cases, I link there instead.
- Black Mesa — 90% off, tied all-time low
- The fan-made remake of Half-Life
- Crypt of the NecroDancer — 90% off, new all-time low
- Rhythm roguelike
- Downwell — 75% off (cheaper on GOG)
- Shmup platformer about jumping deeper into a well
- Gato Roboto — 85% off (cheaper on GOG)
- Little metroidvania featuring a cat in a mech
- Her Story — 90% off (cheaper on GOG)
- Freeform detective game with FMVs
- Bastion — 80% off (same price on GOG)
- Action RPG with painted art, and Supergiant Games’s debut title
- Psychonauts — 80% off (same price on Itch)
- 3D platformer where the levels are in the minds of interesting characters
- Note: It’s an old game that works a bit weird on modern hardware, so check PCGamingWiki for tweaks
- Grapple Dog — 75% off, tied all-time low
- Grappling hook platformer with Nitrome-style pixel art
- Black Mesa — 90% off, tied all-time low
According to SteamDB, 40% is tied for the all-time low.
1·13 days agoI played around with the pixel settings in the Next Fest demo. It’s honestly more of a curiosity than something that really matters, but I’m glad someone on the game thought of this. The most notable change with pixel-perfect mode is the text font becomes lower resolution to be strictly snapped to the grid. Other than that, you’ll find that the backgrounds scroll choppily. I’d imagine it would feel good that way on a smaller screen.
It’s that eternal struggle you may have seen if you play modern games with pixel art. How strictly should the game follow the grid? I think Pipistrello’s default “soft” mode is my sweet spot. Rotated and resized pixels are yucky, but I’m okay with smoother scrolling and sharper text. Celeste is that way as well.
I was super impressed with the demo from Steam Next Fest last year. It’s definitely high on my list for Steam sale purchases.
One neat feature the game has, which was unnecessary but that I appreciate, is the pixel perfection settings. The game uses “soft” pixel precision by default for smooth scrolling and sharper text, but you can enable strict pixel precision, which snaps everything to the pixel grid.
My friends and I love to hum the gloriously CC-licensed main menu music!
I don’t think any game has made me feel so much for characters I don’t even get to see. There’s some real humanity in Hypnospace.
Damn that’s a shame
The drafters yearn for Battlebond
Day 5
Look Mum No Computer — Twin-stick shooter adventure
- Trying the demo purely because of the weird trailer
- Very retro PC gaming vibe. SID chip music!
- Rough introduction. Big info dump right at the start before I know what I’m doing
- Music changes as you change the installed skills, which are presented as synthesizer modules
- Struggling with visibility. Hard to quickly tell what’s an enemy and what’s background art. Also hard to tell what’s collidable and what’s clear
- I’m not finding the combat here very intersting
Pass
Morsels — Action roguelike (Isaaclike?) with creature collecting
- Gross and cute
- The classics from Rogue: traps, unexplained stuff, retrying a lot until you start to understand
- Demo shows a small but varied range of creatures with different abilities, which always come with a randomly selected bonus
- Quick switch between your roster of three
- At least in this early part of the game, ammo count is really low and even ranged attacks don’t go far
- Great presentation. Pixel art feels kind of like claymation
Pass. I liked the demo a lot, but I’m already playing a lot of roguelikes and my wishlist already has ones I’m more excited for
ODDCORE — Surreal boomer shooter
- Maximalism. An exhilarating force-feeding of the senses.
- Liminal spaces but actually awesome and fun. Exterminate the Backrooms! Shoot the jump scare monsters in their faces!
- Excursions into the Oddcore only last 5 minutes unless you buy time extensions
- Interesting idea: you can teleport home (almost) whenever you want to buy upgrades or more time
- Chaotic level progression, like really channel surfing through the multiverse. Sometimes, instead of warping to the next level, you end up in a corrupted level or a bonus level or just some weird, mildly creepy room
Wishlisted
Day 4 was all black cats
Everdeep Aurora — Exploration-heavy platformer
- Really well-executed limited palette art. It swaps palettes between different areas for mood. Maybe that’s why the playable character is a black cat.
- This demo is really short. I saw a bit of lore and played some hide and seek, then went through the scary door. The cat has a drill but I don’t even get to use it!
- Didn’t get a chance to see any interesting action except for the very last few seconds of the demo
- The camera feels unpolished. It always freely drifts behind you, so quickly changing directions often will make the camera jiggle unpleasantly. It would be nice if the camera would stay still or lock to an axis sometimes. That would especially help with aiming jumps, since the camera always jerks upward a bit every time you jump.
- The controls feel great. Super responsive movement with no sliding and little momentum buildup. Jump height is also quick to respond to letting go of the jump key.
Soft wishlist. This demo just wasn’t long enough to be totally sell me on the full game.
Project Arrow — Puzzle platformer with archery
- I found this demo to be good but not great. I’m struggling to identify why it didn’t appeal to me more.
- Maybe the selection of levels wasn’t impressive enough. There were a handful of puzzle ones, but some just felt like repeats with not much new each time. There seemed to be a lot of autoscrollers.
- Platforming movement mechanics were simple and straightforward, which is appropriate for a puzzle platformer, but then there are levels with precision platforming and not much puzzle
- Cool series of boss levels at the end
- Maybe the demo didn’t do enough to hint at the possibilities for the whole bow and arrow mechanic for puzzles, so I’m just not getting hyped enough
- Maybe I just don’t get the presentation of the game? Electronic music and high-tech UI but playing as a cat with a bow in the forest
Pass
Swoosh Cat — Precision platformer
- Celeste but with 360° dash
- Cool mechanic: dash into spikes to bounce off of them
- Slow motion while aiming, but the aim indicator isn’t very accurate. Also, unlimited slow motion
- Hard to tell when I have dash or not
- Something feels off about the air control. I often overshoot or undershoot when trying to land on a small platform
- What a long demo! This is a substantial amount of game to give out.
Pass. I had fun, but I’m currently not in the mood for Celeste-style precision platforming.
I want to shout out Left 4 Dead’s game instructor for smoothly teaching new players the game even while they’re playing with others. Get more ammo here. Use adrenaline to do stuff faster. Give Nick your pills. Rescue is coming - defend yourself! Then, once you’ve played enough, the help messages gradually become less frequent.
I’ll also shout it out for being my favourite implementation of HUD markers in any game. The icon pulses into view close to your crosshair, then flies over to the thing it’s pointing at. If it goes off-screen, the marker returns next to your crosshair, with an arrow indicating which direction to look in to see it again. A lot of other games have marker icons just suddenly appear at the spot and they crawl along the edge of the screen if the item is off-screen. The way L4D does it really draws my eyes.
Day 3
Bloodthief — First-person parkour/speedrunning
- Crusty brown gothic look, like Quake
- Gameplay really grabbed me. Sometimes, I was leaning forward and holding my breath!
- More and deeper movement mechanics, compared to other first-person parkour games, like SEUM or Neon White. Building up and preserving speed is a big deal
- Challenging levels, with actual enemies to fight and a quickly-rising difficulty level. Levels are usually 1-5 minutes long — lengthy compared to Neon White’s 10-30 seconds
- I managed to wall jump off of a deadly spike wall, and I’m still not sure if that was intended
Soft wishlist. I definitely enjoyed this demo, but I currently don’t have an appetite for this type of game.
Dice Gambit — Tactical RPG with dice
- First thing after the intro cutscene: a detailed character creation screen. That’s pretty overwhelming.
- I like the art style except for the subdued 3D character models
- Throwing the dice and watching them settle is satisfying, as it is in Armello
- Gameplay is clearly focused on battle grid combat, since the “dungeon crawling” is just clicking on a map, like Slay the Spire
- Do team management and watch the plot in the downtime between jobs
- There is an appreciable amount of role-playing in this RPG
Wishlisted
Finally, legal squirrellink!
End the turn or extra turn? What do we think?