End-of-week Report

Steam's Ignore functionality broke down Saturday morning, and hasn't recovered yet. As such, I don't have last 2 days' games in the list. Ah well, it's not like I have a shortage, and I'm sure the issue will be fixed soon, what with how many people it's affecting.
In other news, progress again this week. I'm hoping to get Return of the Obra Dinn over with soon, and I started Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity, which seems to have caught my attention for more than a couple of hours.

• Games in backlog: 290 (-2)
• of which Early Access: 58 (+1)
• Games reviewed last week: 2

Lovecraft's Untold Stories

The quality of games I find in my list sometimes baffles me, and not in a good way of course. Lovecraft's Untold Stories is my latest disappointment. I'll just get straight into it.
The game starts with nary a tutorial nor much of an introduction, plopping me into some confusingly navigable map. Roll over some branches I should be able to step over, fire my shotgun at nothing, check the minimap which is missing all the walls and limited paths I'm forced to take, being entirely unhelpful, and finally fail to open a chest that requires some sort of key. So far so good. Then I melee a crate which explodes, killing me instantly and I lose the game.

So, y'know, I wanted to call it quits there, but "Cmon Torn, it's been like 5 minutes, give it another shot." a voice said in my head. And so I did, ignoring the oddly explosive box this time around.
From the way the levels were built, I thought I might be playing a bad Binding of Isaac clone. However, then some illogical bits of "story" started to surface, and, really, comparing that combat to any proper twin-stick shooter would be dishonorable. Some enemies just walked up to you and you shot them once and they died. Some enemies blasted you with unrelenting machine gun fire beyond your range. Still, most of my health was lost to traps that were basically placed under my feet after entering the room. 10/10 level design.

So, yeah, the voice in my head had no more arguments this time, and so I closed the game after my next death. Needless to say, I wouldn't recommend it. Don't even go near it.

Northgard

I can't believe I keep finding RTS games in my backlog. When am I going to learn that I am inclined against RTS games. Still, I'll try to give Northgard a fair opinion, as an RTS.

The first thing to note is that it's not an entirely typical RTS. I suppose it could be considered a sort of casual or at least a slow-paced RTS. Mainly due to the fact that you can't just outright recruit units - they spawn one at a time with about a ~1 minute timer, circumstances permitting, and then you can choose who they're gonna be. Another big aspect is that the focus isn't very much on combat. In a traditional RTS, you put a few units on production, and the rest goes into defenses and your army. In Northgard, it's sort of the opposite - most of your units will have to hold your economy up, make sure you have enough food and firewood to survive (especially through the winter), and keep your people happy enough.
I can't objectively think of any reason why the high economy focus would be a good or a bad thing. I guess it's just a different kind of game and you shouldn't go in expecting Starcraft. It's more like if you start moving from Starcraft towards Age of Empires, and then keep moving past that for a while longer, you'll reach what Northgard is.

However, that's all well executed and while I don't personally enjoy the distraction from combat that much, I do enjoy the slower pace it enforces, so it's kind of neutral. However, what doesn't sit with me is the relative lack of things to do. There's not a lot of different troops or military buildings, and the economy ones aren't really some sort of puzzle. It's mostly the same each game, where you just build what you need, not what you want, and you almost always need the same stuff. Wood for building -> food for survival -> military for fighting, sprinkle in some happiness and coin for when those start to run low, and that's that. So while the premise and execution of the game was fine, I found the content lacking. That and I just generally don't enjoy RTSes.

Overall, it wasn't that bad. I would still incline towards not recommending it, but I also couldn't recommend a similar game like it. Age of Empires is the closest well-made game that comes to mind, but if you feel like playing something even more economy focused... maybe you'll like Northgard? I will admit, it's not the easiest to judge a game you're biased against, but I do feel Northgard has its non-minor flaws.

End-of-week Report

I'm back. And despite the one week absence, I actually made progress compared to two weeks ago. That's great.

• Games in backlog: 292 (-1)
• of which Early Access: 57
• Games reviewed last week: 3

House of the Dying Sun

House of the Dying Sun has been in my backlog since I was still writing about everything I added there. It's a mission-based 6DOF shooter, and as I found out, its main selling point is most probably VR support, especially ~3 years ago when it came out and VR was much more hyped.

The game's simple. You control a ship and fly through an asteroid field, killing other ships. There's different missions, difficulties, some upgrades and different weapons, and an optional "flagship" boss fight at the end of every mission. Clearly, most of the focus has been placed on visuals, and there is a preference on realism (as far as sci-fi space shooters go) rather than ease or fun of play. The ships are a bit floaty and difficult to control, and enemies are difficult to see unless they're straight in your face. It's all quite realistic, and probably very aesthetically pleasing in VR, but as a game, falls short on the fun.
Adding to this, there isn't a lot of variety, and the whole ordeal is only a few hours, unless you're going for 100% completion, in which case it might take longer, but would also be repetitive.

Not enough content, not enough fun. Pretty, and possibly attempting to cash in on the VR aspect, but I couldn't really tell you about how it feels there. As much as I know, I can't recommend it.

Simmiland

Simmiland is a god game mixed with a card game. There's the usual island, autonomous humans running around and doing their best (which isn't very good, mind you) to survive, and you blasting the ground with various things like plants, rocks, wildlife, weather, or even some natural disasters. There's a little mixture of exploration through trying out different combinations. For example, sunshine increases temperature, causing grasslands to turn to deserts, but also swamps to tropics. A plant in a desert is a cactus, but in water, a coral. Wildlife on grasslands is a harmless chicken, but wildlife in a tundra is a polar bear that will maul a lot of your people. The tacked on card deck system limits what god powers you can use at a given time.

To mention some of the better parts first, I liked the cheery atmosphere it had. Can't say the music and graphics were much, but they fit well, so that can only be a positive. Trying out the combinations of what does what, how everything interacts, and trying to understand what goes through the minds of my little creatures running around was also pretty nice, but sadly lost its luster quickly, as content dried out. That can be said for the whole game, where I had seen 50% in the first 20 minutes, 75% in an hour, and 90% in about two hours. The rest was going to be repetitive, as nothing was going to go significantly differently in the next playthrough.

I think the worst part (aside from the lack of content) was that you had to guess too much. Sure, exploration was fun at first, but since advancement through the game was almost exclusively through your godly deeds, it got very difficult to guess the right combinations for those last items, mostly devolving into spamming your cards, hoping something would happen. And speaking of spamming, the game was fairly frantic for a "card game". Never mind that the whole card aspect could have been left out without making anything worse, but the most effective way of getting through the first half of the game was to just use all your cards as fast as you could to make all the suitable environments and items for your people. They themselves did relatively little that influenced you back, so really, the interaction with the game was just poor.

I've never been a fan of god games, instead preferring the management types of games. Cutting the AI allows you to make much larger and complex things inside the game, and means the player doesn't have to rely on the AI not acting like an idiot. Even though most management games only allow you to say what needs to be done, and not order your people around directly, it still creates a better interaction with the game, instead of the one-sidedness of god games.
All in all, I enjoyed it for the first hour or so, while it was new, shiny, and showering me with unexpected things. Then it ran out of things to shower me with, and I realized it wasn't all that great. Not recommendable.

A House of Many Doors

I gave A House of Many Doors a good attempt. It's supposedly very similar to Sunless Sea, although I couldn't verify that as I've not played the latter. I can, however, compare it to Faster Than Light. In case you're not familiar with either of those games, the essence (of at least FTL and A House of Many Doors) is that you're leading a ship with some grand goal. To get to that goal, you have to navigate around the world, manage your crew and supplies, make decisions, and quite often have a battle. The battles are very similar as well, with you commanding the crew around the ship, trying to destroy the opposing ship while the enemy does the same. The main difference is that A House of Many Doors focuses a lot more on the story.

... The main difference in essence, that is. Realistically the main difference is that A House of Many Doors is pretty poorly made. Were the idea well executed, I might even like it - I mean FTL was decent. However, A House of Many Doors has a lot of issues. To name some: Visual bugs where sprites slide off into infinity, layer issues blocking important game information, an overall inconsistent and arguably poor art style, a lack of explanation of what most stuff does or how to do various things... despite the otherwise overabundance of text. I understand it's a game with a lot of lore and story, but I felt like I was reading a book, not playing a game - some visual novels have more visual action than this game. The writing wasn't bad, and was actually somewhat interesting, but it felt disjoint as the game had barely started and I was already chasing like 3 different plot lines with tens of items in my inventory that maybe had some grander use.

Overall, a jumble of individually nicely written text walls with a terribly executed game on top. I feel like the author might have had more success writing a book or an interactive novel, not a game. Might have helped make the story and lore less spread out and more sensible. But as a game, not only is it not worth playing, it diminishes the quality of the underlying story. I wouldn't recommend it.
I noticed I did not have Sunless Sea nor Skies in my backlog, despite them seemingly being very similar games, just with higher production quality? In any case, because or despite of this game, I will not be trying either of those either. However from all I've read, I feel confident in recommending both of them (and FTL) over this. If you felt this game idea to be up your alley, try the Sunless games first, then come back to this if you want more.

PS. I misspelled the name of the game as "A House of Many Doots" far too many times. I found this humorous, and hoped you might as well, as a change from my undesirably dry writing.

End-of-week Report

I am not completing as many games as I had hoped. I've no clue as to what excuses to give anymore, even. Time just vanishes somewhere.
I started with Return of the Obra Dinn a few days ago, and I'm quite enjoying it. It will probably take some 10-20 hours to complete, but it's rather exhausting to play in single sessions, so I might start some other games alongside it.

If anyone remembers, I talked about a scoring formula I made some time ago. I discovered a bit of redundancy in it not too long after, and I finally got around to crunching the algebra to simplify it. The weighing constants no longer looked as pretty, but as they were arbitrary anyways, I changed them around a bit, which in turn slightly changed the ordering of the games. These changes are represented in my backlog Sheet, but will also eventually make their way into the Steam Leaderboards site.

Finally, I am going on a vacation for almost a full week next week, so there will be no progress on anything then. Next week's report will be skipped, but expect a return the week after.

• Games in backlog: 293 (+3)
• of which Early Access: 57 (+1)
• Games reviewed last week: 1

Devil Engine

Devil Engine is a pretty standard bullet hell shooter. I don't have a lot to say about it, and I'll mention upfront that it was nothing noteworthy.

To start with the positive sides, the art and soundtrack are good enough to mention on their own. The opening sequence of the game really hyped me up, but sadly that hype died down in mere minutes as I discovered I don't have mouse controls, and was instead given a one-way speed cycling button, as if that would make the arrow keys even close to a substitute for a controller, let alone a mouse. So, okay, sure, after my first game over I was quickly given a "very easy mode", which did indeed make things a bit easier, but no less frustrating that I didn't have as fine a control over my ship as I knew I could have.
I suppose it's not too big of a bother, considering I didn't encounter any outstanding elements in the game. The main gimmick it used to differ from the rest was a bullet absorption field around your ship for a fraction of a second that spent your combo multiplier. I think this was to be the remedy to its otherwise overwhelming (or poorly designed, who can tell, really) bullet patterns, instead of something that could be properly dodged. I don't know, I didn't like this change, but then again, I didn't get much use out of it due to my terrible keyboard skills.

Overall, most of my experience was ruined due to the lack of mouse support. As far as I could tell, even if it had mouse support, it wouldn't have been a particularly good game from its gameplay standpoint. I wouldn't recommend it.