Supporters (Page 2)

I love building games, but it's not that often that put one down and feel particularly tempted to get straight back into it again. Of Life And Land is one of those, but thankfully not so much so that it threatens to consume my every waking moment.

It quietly does several things in a modest little way, that are all the more impressive for its lack of fanfare. The core one though, is that it takes the kind of simulationist foundation normally reserved for the punishing Dwarf Fortress derivatives or gnarly logistics games, and builds on them an approachable, gentle, even philosophical game instead. In a word: it's lovely.

Have you played Homeworld 3 yet? I have. I thought it was *gestures at review*. I bring it up because, as is often your way, the readership commented me into thinking about something I’ve been wanting to cover: the outdated relic that is the easy/normal/hard difficulty trifecta. "Ohoho," I warbled chuckilishly. "I shall craft a blistering manifesto, sharper than the apex of a Toblerone on the roof of your mouth when you try to eat it as god intended. I will solve this problem." And then I thought, "Actually, no. That sounds hard." So, instead, here are some wazzock-tier ramblings.

There are exactly one million metroidy rogueishy action platform games and that is okay. There's no such thing as too many of an entertaining thing in a world with, god I dunno, at least thousand humans in? Maybe more? Who knows.

They are rarely my thing, though. I try more than I really want to, for you, and games like Biomorph give me the energy to keep going through the many that leave me indifferent. This isn't one of my grudging admissions that a subgenre isn't all bad; it's a game that I can't even think of a way to complain about.

Last week, I watched one of my favourite badminton players Kento Momota play his final match. As he stepped off court for the last time, I found myself welling up. He doesn't know me - of course he doesn't - and I don't know him. But for ten years I'd watch him at every opportunity and see him grow into one of the all-time greats. For me, his retirement wasn't only devastating in the sense he was a great ambassador for the sport: a positive soul, a good speaker, a hard worker. No, it also spelled the end of us being able to witness something impossible to replicate, a 'game' of badminton uniquely his. And for a magical two years, he had the best game in the world.

Like with getting fancy polyhedral dice sets full of all glitter and wool, buying and owning are two different hobbies when it comes to books. I think this has gotten worse (if that's the word?) with the increasingly popularity of BookTok, the book-centric community on TikTok. It's really mobilised young people towards reading (which is good) but in some cases drives a consumption for consumption's sake approach, where one must have read new books to talk about, one must take no breaths between reading, and one must read an astonishing number of books in the smallest amount of time possible (which I think is bad).

Regular Nic Reuben enjoyers, should such people exist, will remember I wrote a supporter post a few weeks back about wanting to spread my personal gaming fun time out among new and exciting games. And by ‘spread it out’ I mean maybe play 15% less Total Warhammer. As is often the way of things, I followed what I thought was prudent advice, and now there are bugs everywhere. Big bugs. Also, robots. Helldivers 2, it turns out, is really quite excellent. Who woulda thunk! Everyone else. Everyone else woulda thunk.

My older brother (as opposed to "big"; my younger brother is my big brother, because he's built like the kind of hearty giant in a JRPG who laughs a lot and carries an anchor as a weapon, while my older brother is a loathsome scribbling wizard like myself) is a gamer in a very normal sense. He was way more online when he was younger, and is the one who got me into the games of Lucasfilm, Troika and Blizzard, but these days he plays the games he likes a lot and does not read specialist websites that tell him why he shouldn't like them. He used to play loads of League Of Legends, but the game he was most into more recently was Hades. This is because he studied Classics.

I won't tell you how many years its been since he was at university, but for many years - and still sort of now, to be honest - "liking Apollo" was a key part of his personality. It's interesting, therefore, to text him about Hades 2. Partly because he wasn't even aware it was happening.

It's not, strictly speaking, a goo. From Glory To Goo's enemy isn't a sinister gunge, but that minor disappointment didn't last long.

Its monsters are individual, blobby little (mostly) purple nasties, but they act as a flood anyway, taking great exception to your base and the resources it pipes back and forth (much like in Creeper World), but coming mostly in waves like They Are Billions. But the thing with FGTG is that there's always a little bit more to deal with than you think.

Despite my desire for a real life herb garden, I don't really like farming or gardening games. Distant Bloom could be an exception, except I'm not sure it even qualifies as either, really. It is a little bit about exploration, a little about very light puzzles, and mostly in its heart, about cleaning up and making everything pretty.

Indika is a good game about a good nun, and I’ll talk about why in a sec, but first - a complaint. ‘Low’, ‘Medium’, or ‘Ultra’ graphics settings? Really, Indika? Where is 'High'? Where’s it gone, eh? This isn’t cute when Papa John's do it, and it’s not cute now. You’re lucky you’re an extremely interesting game, Indika. Let’s talk about that instead.

I gave that Pools game a go recently - you know, the first-person traipse through some liminal spaces that happen to be pool themed. At one point it was trending on Steam and since then it's garnered loads of positive reviews, with people saying it's unsettling and drips with atmosphere. Reader, I do think it's quite atmospheric, but I do not think it's all that unsettling. If anything, I find it a bit dull, in a way that's semi-frustrating. Am I missing the liminal space-liker bit of the brain a lot of people have? Am I an anomaly here?

A couple of weeks ago I told you about an aquarium-having simulator that is as detailed as it is janky. I was charmed by Aquarist and it's basic-asset using weirdness, and I intended to write a lot more about it. But our adventures in fish keeping are stalled because, well, when something is adorably janky it might turn out that the jank gets in the way of you progressing or playing the game. In the real world, a bug stops me progressing past a very early point of the story. In the world of the game, my father has locked me in his fish basment and will not let me leave.

I don’t want to strike sweaty terror into anyone’s gentle hearts here, but I’m beginning to suspect lately that the friendly clown emojis I keep seeing as reactions to Steam user reviews aren’t actually a colorful kudos to the writer for being a chucklesome and whimsical individual. I’m starting to fear, actually, that this one icon of a behatted japester may have been widely adopted as an oddly hostile way to single out dissenting opinions, rapidly accelerating the Steam reviews’ grisly metamorphosis into something that more resembles a clout-farming social app than anything with pretensions towards facilitating helpfulness or self expression.

I think the stronger your interest in white goods becomes, that's how you know you're transitioning from a youngster to a slightly oldster. The first thing I did recently when I stepped into my friend's house was compliment him on his new washing machine. "A Samsung! Nice dials on this, eh?", I said as I twisted the dial and it pleasantly bumped from mixed to delicate wash. What can I say? I appreciate the mundane and the useful.

And from the times I've played Lethal Company, I've come to think it's also a game about appreciating the mundane, too.

I went to see Civil War this weekend. I liked a bunch of it, didn't like a bunch of it. One thing I thought was very obvious is that it sanitises its titular conflict of any political context. On the one hand, I understand this as part of the theming, said almost directly into the camera by Kirsten Dunst's photojournalist character: as journalists they're there to observe, so other people ask questions. On the other hand, the civil war being between the government and the Western Forces, an alliance between California and Texas feels extremely "Republicans buy sneakers too", if you ask me.

It made me think about the Fallout TV show. One of the things I like about it is that it doesn't pretend The Brotherhood Of Steel aren't absolute mad lads (pejorative). Like, they're clearly not good news, and there isn't any attempt to make them seem like they are - just that they might seem that way from the point of view of a traumatised child being rescued from a fridge like a tiny Indiana Jones. Many of the video games I like pride themselves on offering choice to the player, but in reality they smooth over any bumps in the road to make the choices appear equal - rather than telling the player they are choosing between bad and good.

It's been a while since I snuck my diary into a column, huh?

Long-term readers might have discerned that I haven't been well for a very long time. I have various ailments, of which we all suffer, and it turns out that a mere five years of clinging on by your fingernails sometimes leads to some actual treatment for... all of them. Wild.

So while there've been a lot of interesting looking games in the shortlist lately, these last few weeks have been entirely too interesting for me personally. Piecing It Together is nothing more or less than 3D jigsaw puzzles. I've never even liked jigsaws, but it turns out that was exactly the kind of game I needed.

While trying to keep vaguely up on both games discourse and terminology over long periods of time, I frequently find myself noticing terms enter common usage, get used a bunch, then fall out of favour again. I think this is partly because games discourse is cyclical, and partly because writing and talking about the same things a lot means that when a neater phrase for something complicated pops up, it gets assimilated quickly. Mostly, though, I think it’s because of my brain doing the thing where, say, you notice a yellow car on a walk and then see dozens of them. I was going to write a car make there but I don’t know any. Uh, (looks at monitor), Asus? Do Asus do cars? The 1994 Asus Gremlin. What a ride!

I sometimes struggle with what to write about for supporter posts (a contender this week was "why does Fallout the TV show insist Walton Goggins' character is from California when he talks like Foghorn Leghorn?"). And then we got an email about a game called Ants Took My Eyeball and I was like "Man, games need good names more often." I played the Steam demo for Ants Took My Eyeball (which is a 2D action roguelite where you go into an anthill to fight ants, who took your eyeball) and I very much liked the design, weapons and idea, but not the controls so much. Not my cup of tea, but have a go of the demo. But you know what got me to play an action platformer roguelite when those games aren't really my cup of tea? That godamn name is what!

"Very little Bela Lugosi" is not a criticism I ever expected to level at a game. It's not entirely unexpected considering he's dead, but I'm still grumbling at you, Carpathian Night Starring Bela Lugosi.

It is, as it appears, an unabashed homage to Castlevania, but with none of the -vania, making it much more like the original (or the game boy ones, and possibly a few others in the series I don't know about): a straightforward, linear platform game about whipping monsters and not stepping on spikes. Ten a penny, right? But CNSBL captures it so well that it had me looking up old game boy tunes it vaguely reminded me of.

Nationalism is obviously weepingly dull, even when it’s not being genuinely harmful, but the UK does have a few special things you can’t get anywhere else. Nik Naks, for example - the only crisp without at least one inferior flavor in the multipack. If I’m even vaguely patriotic about anything, though, it’s the sort of colloquial variety for such a comparatively tiny landmass that means you can drive an hour in any direction and get in a guaranteed fistfight with a stranger over what one of these is called*:

I know some of you will quibble with the headline, so let me confirm straight away that, yes, technically Aquarist is not a game simulating being an aquarium. An aquarist is someone who builds and manages aquariums, which is your principle task in the capital A Aquarist game. It recently left early access, which is sort of unbelievable because it's very janky in the most adorable way. You can tell it was made by someone who bloody loves aquariums, but taken at face value the career mode tells a strange tale indeed. For example, you have a very unsettling father.

Ever since Lords Of The Realm, I've had a soft spot for feudalism sims. Although faux-medieval games are common, there aren't all that many about regular people and regular concerns. Even LotR was increasingly about battles and armies as it went on, rather than the unique management parts.

But in Under The Yoke, you're just a serf. You want to make something of yourself, but it's about a regular person managing his life, not some unlikely "adventurer", whatever that means. So you'll mostly be toiling, and foraging, and genuinely having way more actual skills than us superior modern folk. And despite some UI issues and rough edges, it's weirdly compelling.

As a valued RPS supporter, you’re likely aware that you possess legal ownership of the fleeting thoughts I have right before falling asleep at night. It’s actually in the T&C, right under the bit about Horace’s claim on your organs. Good news: such interruptions are plentiful, and so too will be content. Here's my latest:

Am I doomed, I asked myself, to live in wishful longing for the myriad gaming experiences I could have had if I didn’t tend to get obsessed with a few specific games, both digital and tabletop, that take up all my leisure time?

Obviously I didn’t phrase it like that. It was more like ‘whawhaohhnoo’.

Windowkill is the most inventive arcade shooter I've played for years.

It's twin-stick shooting in a tiny window that temporarily expands in that direction when you shoot its edges. You have to actively manage and maintain the play space itself for that to even be an option. Soon static monsters appear in their own isolated windows you'll have to shoot your way towards (their attacks can cross the void between), and before long there are the horrible hateful little blue bastards who sit there passively, soaking up shots and never attacking but actively pulling the edges of the window towards them.

It's a clever and great little thing and I sort of hate it as much as I like it.

So, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, eh? I liked it a lot. 150 hours a lot. I big cried at least twice and welled up, much like a well, many other times. As much as I’d like to wax emotional about the plot and characters in an endless lifestream-of-consciousness ramble, articles need both headlines and subjects (truly an act of conspiratorial violence targeted at my personal dadaist instincts). So, let’s talk about just the minigames, because I think they’re wonderful for all sort of reasons that might not be immediately apparent. Naturally, big spoiler potential ahead if, like me, you consider everything you haven’t experienced in the RPG game a spoiler.

I think one of OG Final Fantasy’s 7 best tricks is how it doesn’t just dish out its strangest distractions as a palette cleanser to the main meal of its action and drama, but actively works them in as an indispensable part of the menu. It also does this all without a shred of shame or self-consciousness, resulting in a cinematic video game with no inner turmoil or resentment toward either part of that equation - a characteristic I feel is suffered from by many of the games for which FF7 lead the way. Take the Gold Saucer. It’s an excuse to dick around and ride motorbikes, sure, but it’s also an essential story beat while the party takes time to relax and enjoy each other’s company away from the stress of travel and battle.

Graham wrote about WitchHand last month when the game came out. He compared it to Stacklands, and I can see where he was coming from. It's a cute, deckbuilding strategy game where you're a witch building up strength to take on some horrible void-y demon-y things. It has much higher stakes than Stacklands, but most importantly, you summon cat familiars in it, and they go 'meow!'

After its gorgeous Steam Next Fest demo last month, tiny little house builder Summerhouse has now arrived on Steam in full, launching just a couple of weeks ago on March 8th. I've been having a swell time with this over the last few days, particularly as I noodle about in the other big backdrops that weren't available in its earlier demo.

But there's been another Summerhouse development this week that has arguably delighted me even more. Solo developer Friedemann took to Xwitter on Monday to detail all the games that inspired him to make Summerhouse in the first place, and there are some really surprising, but fascinating call outs in there, including Stronghold Crusader and Sword & Sworcery. I love it when developers go in-depth about things they've seen in other games and tried to riff on in their own creations, so please, let's make this a tradition for all new game releases, yeah?

Airships have an odd place in games. They pop up as a central idea in a fair few games, but there hasn't really been a definitive one about actually piloting your own.

Passing By - A Tailwind Journey isn't aiming for that, I think, but it nonetheless captures a key part of the appeal such a game should have. It's the sense of drifting, both with the wind and with life more generally, and the stretches of not particularly much happening. But in a good way. This is a game about taking it easy, choosing to sail by the less remarkable things unless you happen to fancy stretching your legs, and having only the trust that the currents will take you where you're meant to go when they get around to it. It's not a purely vibe-based game, but you'll definitely enjoy it a lot more if you can appreciate the mood.

I usually know right away when I'm going to enjoy interactive fiction. But I don't always know why. Isle Of Maligree is a bit of an all-rounder, as pretty much every part of it is doing something right, but it's the sense that you're making your own version of its story that marks it out.

People are going missing on the island, and you've been sent to investigate. Only, it seems this isn't the first time, because some sinister magic is causing everyone to forget the whole thing ever happened. If you don't figure it out in time, you'll have to make a new character and try again. And if you're an amazing genius who figures it out on your first try... you'll want to try again anyway, to play it a different way and see what you missed. Maybe one day I'll even do it without getting stabbed.

My time with Dragon's Dogma 2 for review was neat, mainly because it's a good video game and an anecdote generator. But it reinforced one thing for me that I've increasingly come to realise about myself: I actually can't cope with character creators that let you like, tweak the finest details. I do not want to define the curls of each individual nose hair or adjust the angle of the mole on one's forehead. I'm far too indecisive for any of this! Let me roll the dice, please.