Oxygen Not Included

I was surprised to find I had already talked about Oxygen Not Included back in 2017 when I was trying to do daily posts. It has indeed been sitting in my library for an awful long while, and I've been anticipating playing it, not just because it's been in Steam's top 100 games all the while. It almost met my high expectations.

Oxygen Not Included is a colony sim, with the twist that it takes place inside an asteroid with more-or-less limited resources. Most things that you produce only convert resources from one type to another, forcing you to run various production chains to get the resources back to what they were. Dirt and water to crops, to food, eaten, then out as sewage (polluted water), which is purified, returning to water and polluted dirt, which is composted back to regular dirt. There are other such examples of resource conversion cycles, but some resources do get lost, so some generators exist too.

Of course I couldn't talk about colony sims without mentioning Dwarf Fortress. I'm really glad that for once, a game does not try to copy Dwarf Fortress, and does something unique. The side-view perspective is a fresh change from every top-down colony sim, better facilitating the gas and liquid physics the game has. Liquids and gases don't mix, and not just with each other. On one hand, this makes both liquids and gases separate out into layers, but it's more often unrealistic and annoying than not, especially with stray tiles of gas or liquid that torment the base, yet are impossible to catch.

The start of each run is exciting enough as you feel out the surroundings and figure out what tools you have to tackle your immediate problems. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be quite enough to do, because as time goes on, games both get more similar, as you eventually reach the same final solutions for your problems, but also slow down heavily. One of the biggest problems I had with the game was how only a small percentage of labor went into tasks not crucial to keeping everyone alive, and it was very frustrating to see some tasks be queued for multiple days without getting completed. This is the same problem as in Don't Starve, which is their other very successful game, and I honestly don't understand how so many people can like it. I always complain about management games not having meaningful decisions. Then these games come along and reward efficiency and good design like few others, and yet it's too much, even for me.
If your colony does die, it's usually not some grand accident that's fun to watch. It's a slow death of attrition as your colonists are no longer able to produce more than their daily needs for some reason, and your supplies dwindle to zero over an agonizing length of time of not getting anything done.

I did get a good amount of hours in - far more than 90% of the games I play, but the eventual final straw was how the game really was designed to just make everything as difficult as possible for you. Many times, the solutions to problems seemed almost like bugs in the system, and problems were created where there should have been none. Managing all the liquids and gases with the limited space and resources you have is difficult enough. Some buildings output into pipes, but others have to vent gas or liquid straight into the atmosphere for no apparent reason. There are no airlocks for some reason, and the accepted answer is to just abuse the fluid simulation by making everyone go though a U-pipe of liquid instead of a door. You try to avoid that design, but you quickly realize that there just isn't a rational solution to certain problems aside from solutions like that. Similar situations can be found for turning heat into energy, gathering meat, and more.
This is compounded by the previous issue of there being little leftover labor. Good designs expect large redesigns of the base, but those can take weeks of in-game time, or hours of waiting in real life, and risk destabilizing production to the point of catastrophe if you go about them too fast. It's both infuriating and boring.

But I don't want to be too harsh on the game. I had a lot of fun playing it, and was borderline addicted at first. Regardless of its flaws, I would still say the game is well made. I think it's not difficult for someone to copy the formula and do a better job, but for now, it has merit being relatively unique. Recycling and fluid simulations are systems I absolutely love on a very personal level. I just wish I could spend more time playing the game and watching my designs come to life, instead of watching my colonists go about their daily necessities all day. Ultimately, I would still recommend it, and it even gets an under-the-line position on my favorite games list.

Remnant: From the Ashes

If I had to describe Remnant: From the Ashes in one phrase, it would be "Dark Souls with guns". And so what your opinions on the game are will very much depend on how much you like Dark Souls, and how much you like guns. But let me break it down for people who are not familiar with that game.
Remnant is an action RPG, taking place in a half-fantasy, half-post-apocalyptic world. There story is there, but it's never really in your face and can be safely ignored. For people who do care, there's lore dumps scattered about the world, and NPCs have optional dialogue, letting you ask them a bunch of questions.
The world apparently has some amount of random generation in it, but ultimately is a series of large open rooms connected by doorways. It's not all one big open world, but it feels close.
You have two guns, a melee weapon, two activatable abilities that are recharged by shooting at enemies, and a few pieces of various armor. All of this is upgradable, and you also find new pieces throughout the game. I would have liked to see more variation in guns at least, as they all feel quite similar, and that's one aspect where there doesn't feel like there's a lot of progress in the game.
You also have traits, which are passive abilities, often unlocked by doing something specific a bunch of times. I found this system to be particularly badly made, because there isn't an infinite supply of trait points, and there didn't seem to be any way to reset them, incentivizing you to hold onto them forever, hoping that maybe you will eventuall unlock some good trait.

While the game is reasonably polished, looks good, handles well, the design just isn't quite there. I'm not a fan of shooters overall, but as an RPG, I would have liked to see more character progress. The stat upgrades you get as the game progresses are minor, and your playstyle never really changes, regardless of what "build" you're going for.
Going through regular enemies in maps feels fine enough, but every single bossfight decided to adopt the design of spawning an infinite amount of minions at you. Most of the fight, you do not have the time to shoot at the boss, because you have to thing the herd of minions thrown at you. This feels terribly frustrating and unfun because it's not really a bossfight.
The game is about 20 hours long overall, which isn't that short, but still on the shorter side for an RPG.

Overall, like I said, it's Dark Souls with guns. Just shorter, with less variety, and worse game design, but it clearly takes a lot of inspiration from it. If that description sounds exactly like what you're looking for, then I don't think the negatives are bad enough to stop you from having fun. But personally, I wasn't too fond of Dark Souls, and I definitely don't like shooters, so I found myself quite bored with Remnant. So, no recommendation from me.

The Signal State

The Signal State is a logic puzzle game. Pretty much programming, but with signals, wires, and modules to manipulate those signals, instead of code. One could also call it a Zach-like, as it definitely carries a very familiar feel as Zachtronics games do, especially aesthetically and from the way the story is presented between each level. It also has a leaderboard for each level, incentivizing tidying up your solutions.

I love Zachtronics games, so naturally I thought I would like this, but sadly the level of quality in puzzle design just isn't there. One of the issues for me, personally, is that isn't really a programming game, nor even a general logic puzzle game. It seems to focus quite heavily on specific signal processing knowledge, which I don't have. Perhaps it's less of a problem for people less familiar with programming, but for me it was frustrating that my tools were unintuitive to use.
More objectively though, the levels don't have a lot of freedom in how they are solved. It was rather rare that my first solution wasn't close to the optimal one (aside from wire length, but that's also a stupid metric to judge solutions by, given how limited your control over it is). This was also made worse by the varying difficulty of the puzzles. Tutorial levels barely taught you anything beyond the obvious, and the next level was already on par with some of the most difficult levels I've encountered in Zachtronics games. And like I said before, there was rarely an option for a simpler solution that did worse on the leaderboards. You either solved it, or you didn't.

Overall, I don't see a lot of reason to recommend it over any Zachtronics puzzle game, especially now that he came out of his brief retirement with yet another game. It's a tough bar to beat, but there are hundreds of hours of Zachtronics games to play, and while The Signal State is far from the worst logic puzzle game I've played, it's too close to the frustration of studying, and too far from the fun of learning.

Jetboard Joust

Jetboard Joust was one of the lowest rated games left on my backlog. But I figured that instead of discarding it, I could give it a try. Maybe the average opinion would be wrong for once. Sadly, that wasn't the case.

Jetboard Joust is a sort of side-scrolling dogfighting game. You have a bunch of different weapons you can find and upgrade, or the ability to "joust", which has limited uses but launches you forward while becoming invicible and dealing a lot of damage to everything in your path.
There isn't really a lot of depth to the game. The worst part is that you can't aim your weapon, nor move properly. I do not understand how the movement was designed, because your vertical and horizontal movement are oddly linked. You don't have full control over your vertical movement, as it acts differently depending on your horizontal speed and whether you're firing. It's really annoying to control. But even if this were not the case, there really just isn't anything interesting here.

So, bad review scores don't lie. At least I haven't seen it yet. It's a short review, but it's a pretty simple game with a non-novel idea. The control scheme may be innovative, but it definitely isn't any good and adds only frustration to the game. I can't recommend this in any way.

Goddess of Victory: Nikke

I considered making this an April Fool's joke, describing Goddess of Victory: Nikke as an action shooter you can play on your phone with one hand, how the characters have great designs with thighs thicker than their waists and breasts bigger than their heads, and how you can experience great storytelling, like having a threesome with a couple of bunny girls. And it's not that any of the above is untrue. I did initially pick this game up as something casual I could play while sitting on the can, because clearly a game that sells itself on fanservice and gameplay consisting of looking at five pairs of jiggling asscheeks can't have any depth or difficulty to it, right? Well, for better or worse, I've been playing this for a year now, and I now take it competitively enough that I can rarely bring myself to play it on a phone anymore.

But let's get serious. What kind of game is Nikke? Sure, it's a gacha game, but that only describes the monetization system, not the gameplay. More on that later. If you look at the gameplay, then at a surface level, you could say it's a third-person shooter. You control a team of five characters (Nikkes) crouching behind cover, and aim at waves of enemies, occasionally taking cover to dodge incoming attacks. Some stages are instead boss stages, but they function mostly the same, with perhaps a few slightly more complex mechanics.
But this isn't really what the game is about. You see, each character has a role to play in a party, and has several passive and one active ability. The real game is assembling these parties, depending on the different restrictions, advantages, and disadvantages various game modes and stages have. There are over 120 characters in the game (so far), and I quite actively use about 40 of them. And it's not just about choosing which characters go together, as each character has several different ways to upgrade them, but the pace of aquiring materials for these upgrades is not as fast as the pace of new characters coming out. New characters who may or may not replace one of the 40 I'm currently using and building up. This forces me to also make decisions on which characters I can expect will stick around in the meta for longer, and which will be replaced soon, distributing my resources accordingly.
There is still skill involved in the shooting part of the game, knowing which enemies to target, where the weak spots on bosses are, and when to activate your active abilities, which is why I rarely play on a phone anymore. A lot of the combat is actually difficult, which is rare to see in a mobile game, but very welcome. The difficulty is largely artificial, gated by stats, which is gated by materials, which is gated by play time, but there is still a very meaningful difference in how far someone can get based on their skill. And so opinions may vary, but I do consider Nikke to be more of an idle/incremental management than a shooter game.

Of course, a lot of people are put off by gacha, so I think it's fair to discuss how progression works in this game, and how monetization ties into it. As most gacha games, progress is gated behind daily income, carefully controlled by the developers. You're expected to log in daily if you want to maximize your progression. At first, progression is fast, and you can spend several hours playing every day, but that slows down the further in you get, eventually reaching 0.5 to 1 hours average per day. Mind you, you still get well over a hundred hours of gameplay on the first month, which itself should be enough if you don't care to continue at a slower pace. For me, half an hour is a great amount of time to avoid burnout while still offering variety and something to look forward to each day.
Progression happens by aquiring new characters for gems that you get from many places in the game, and then by building those characters. There's a different game mode for each type of progression your character can have. Campaign has one-time battles and permanent progression in two different difficulty modes that you have to "push" to earn passive income to increase character levels. Simulation Room gives skill level up materials. Interception gives equipment materials. And Union and Solo Raid each give another different type of equipment material. It took me about six months to max out how many rewards I get each day from Solo Raid, nine months for the Simulation Room and to beat the normal mode of Campaign. It will probably take another few months to max out Interception rewards, over a year more to finish the hard mode of Campaign, and for some rewards of Union and Solo Raid, you're ranked against other players, so you'll never get to the top. As time goes on, more and more is added, so it will take even longer if you start playing now. That is to say, you'll feel like you're progressing towards new heights for a very long time, whether or not that is something you like.

While technically almost all of these materials are purchasable for real money, everything except gems is very expensive for how little you get. A 6 euro subscription gets you a bit more than a week's worth of gems each month, and each progression material alone is roughly five times as expensive. A new character you want comes out about every 2-3 weeks, which is enough time to earn the gems to get that character for free because the odds are extremely generous. Duplicates give a very minor boost to power and are not necessary at all. So, for dedicated players, buying gems doesn't help much, and buying other materials will require several hundreds invested each year to see a noticable difference. What I want to say is, you don't need to pay, as long as you play, because very few people are willing to pay enough to beat you by paying more. They mostly beat you by having played longer. I genuinely believe that most of their revenue (excluding the top 0.1% of spenders) comes from selling skins.
All of this isn't too important anyways, as most of the game is PvE. The PvP mode is not very popular, as it matches you with people who started at the same time, leaving you forever out of the top ranks if you ever decide to take a break from the game. The only rewards there for ranking well are gems anyways. So if you're a casual player and don't care about getting every character that comes out, you can ignore PvP, skip dailies as you see fit, and just progress at your own pace. If you're competitive and actually care about your performance, you'll get enough to perform well just by playing every day and planning well.

Oh, and a quick shoutout to the story, music, and art. The characters are lovely animated 2D sprites with insane levels of detail. It feels like they're 4k resolution, with individual stocking threads being rendered at high enough zoom levels, and like a hundred moving parts and small details or texts on the characters' clothes and bodies. I know that's the main initial draw of the game, but it's an absolute pleasure to look at.
The music is easily in the top 3 among game OSTs I've heard, with hundreds, if not over a thousand different tracks. New campaign chapters get their own album. Each boss gets their own music. Each area gets their own music. Each menu gets their own music. It's crazy.
And while the story isn't that stellar, it's consistently enjoyable, and definitely good as far as stories in videos games go. What I like the most though is that it's concise. Other gacha games should take note. Very little filler. No bloated dialogue. No annoying companion overexplaining everything you've just experienced.

This review turned out longer than I would have liked, but if any recent game deserves it, it's this. It is by far my most played game over the past year, and I see myself playing it for at least a year more. I would highly recommend it for fans of idle games who want a bit less idling, and a bit more gameplay, management, and just overall thinking. Alternatively, you can come for the voluptous waifus, I won't judge. Paying is entirely optional as the game has very generous gacha rates. And everything that is not gameplay is well done too. It can be daunting to get into live service games after they've been accumulating content for 2.5 years, but I don't think anyone's too late to join yet. I'm sure the barrier to entry will increase as time goes on, and the playerbase will decrease, as is the norm with live service games, but Nikke is one of the few games that has been slowly increasing in popularity after launch, so I remain hopeful for at least a couple more years.