As if nothing happened!
Okay, I blacked out for a bit during the holidays and when I woke up I had a whole bunch of new games in my Steam catalog, but we can deal with this, we can work through it…
Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+: This is…definitely not the Pac-Man I was used to. This new edition has a whole bunch of different maps and modes and a lot of them are time-based instead of score-based, and the triggers that cause dots and fruits to appear vary, and there can be tons of ghosts, and sometimes the maps expands…
It actually works really well; the original Pac-Man was just about memorizing patterns, but in these variants you have to react to a changing board, think about what ghosts will be woken up by the path you take, consider how long you can go before resorting to a power pellet in an easy-to-get to place (but in very limited supply), look for shorter paths to reduce the time taken to get that next fruit, and so on. It makes you face a whole bunch of different challenges at lightning-fast speed, but it doesn’t make it feel like an impossible task. Even a scrub like me could survive the 5-minute time attack modes, the true humiliation not coming until discovering that my score ranking on the leaderboards was…lacking.
So yeah, it’s a fun, surprisingly well-designed update of a classic game. And I’m not going to play it anymore. As good as it is, it’s the kind of game that takes a lot of practice to perfect, and with my backlog, I just don’t have the time to spend replaying this over and over just to shave off a few seconds here and there.
Hammerwatch: This game has been described as Gauntlet-like, and that’s pretty apt; it’s top-down maze-navigating monster-killing with simple attacks as one of various classes. There are differences, of course. There’s a persistent stats/skill system that lets you improve your character as you progress. The levels are enormous, so there’s more of a Diablo-ish feeling of exploration and there’ll be a ton of backtracking. There are ‘optional’ switch-hittin’ and button-pressin’ objectives on each floor, but the gold you find for upgrades is pretty tight, so you’ll probably want to make sure you do them anyway, leading to a lot of that backtracking. And if you’re prone to RSI, this game will murder your thumb (at least with the paladin that I’ve tried so far). You can carefully lure monsters in small packs, but there’s a combo system that really wants you to just dive in to masses of enemies and kill everything as quickly as possible, and there are a lot of enemies.
It’s been pretty fun so far, and I played a bit longer than expected due to that “just a little further…” effect, but I do wonder if it’ll start to get too repetitive and thumb-wrecking at some point. I’ve done one of four bosses so far, so I’ll keep going until at least the second boss.