Today I checked out Little Kitty, Big City, where you’re a kitty that fell down from their home in a high-up apartment and need to climb back up to get home. It’s not quite that easy, of course, you need to do some tasks and run around and do some platforming to get what you need to climb back up.
The main quest is pretty straightforward, but there are of course a million little things to distract a little kitty. Hats and shinies to collect, fellow animals to help out, humans to pester, and nooks and crannies to explore for secrets, most of which are completely optional, but it’s still pretty fun to just run around and Do Stuff. A lot of it is definitely Very Cat, like finding spots to nap in or boxes to sit in.
Overall it’s pretty short and not very difficult, but it’s fun and extremely cute, and a decent way to kill an afternoon.
Today I finally gave Mouthwashing a try, a game about a disaster happening on board a cargo freighter spaceship and how the handful of crew members are dealing with that (badly!) and what led up to that, in non-linear jumping between different points in time.
It’s very much a horror game, as the things that are happening are, um, not great, and the specifics of the plot are probably best left unspoiled. It does a great job of setting up an extremely unsettling atmosphere and delivering the story in that. The one thing I found odd was that towards the end it starts getting very abstract and…metaphorical?…when it had previously been fairly grounded, and I’m not sure I ‘got’ those parts. Still, highly recommended overall.
Next up on the block is Nubby’s Number Factory, which had been getting some buzz among people I know and is a bit of a ‘meme game’ with its deliberate lo-fi and absurdist presentation.
It’s again a drop-balls-onto-pegs game but with the goal of hitting a target score this time, with pegs whose scores increase between rounds based on how far past the target you hit, and you can buy or earn items that have various effects on the game.
it me fr
The challenge then is to try and get items and buffs that will increase your score faster than the target score increases. Your choices here really do matter, since some items work together better than others, so you can strategize, but there’s still a lot of randomness here since you may get offered options that just don’t work well. Where you aim the ball does matter since the first peg you pop often affects a bunch of active buffs or items, but it’s difficult to predict how it will bounce and can often just go straight down the board.
That randomness is ultimately why I think I’m kind of lukewarm on this game. I did eventually ‘break the game’ (quite literally, as shown below) by gathering a good set of items and perks, which were deliberately chosen, but it took a lot of failed runs that really had no chance, as well.
The kazoo was the key to victory. Really.
And, having hit that high mark, I think I’m done with the game. There are various different ‘boss’ modes and challenges that apply variant rules and restrictions, but eh, I’m good. At its cheap price, it was still a decent way to waste an evening.
Continuing on with checking out recently bought games, I gave PegIdle a try, to fill that void left now that I’m not leaving Idle Champions constantly running.
The concept is fairly simple: it’s Peggle, except that once you start upgrading balls, they drop automatically, so you can just leave it running and have it gather gold and points in the background, occasionally dropping in to upgrade stuff and maybe shoot some balls manually. There are a bunch of different ball types, which have to be unlocked with increasing amounts of gold, and they often have different properties (more or less bounciness, splitting apart, etc.), and can be upgraded to give more gold on hitting a gold peg or drop more frequently. There are different types of pegs, some of which grant gold or ‘prestige points’ or temporary buffs, and buckets at the bottom that grant you gold if you land in them.
The tension here seems to be based around how to optimally gain gold. Higher tiers of balls grant way more gold when they hit a gold peg, so it would seem like you would want to focus on using the higher tier balls as much as possible, even disabling the lower tier balls once the difference in gold earned is too great, to prevent them from bringing down your earnings. But, it doesn’t take long before you realize that the real goal is prestige points, because they’re what let you buy permanent upgrades whenever you decide to do a prestige reset and start over, and those upgrades make a huge difference. So really, you want to gain as many prestige points as quickly as possible, by clearing boards as quickly as possible, and to do that you want as many balls active as you can possibly get, even if they’re low-earning ones. Gold only really matters in getting to the point where you can flood the screen with balls and clear stages in only a few seconds, which doesn’t really take that long.
Too Many Balls (🎵 Too Many Balls 🎵)
So, there’s not really as much strategy to it as it first seemed. The other slight disappointment is that it’s not really Peggle, as it lacks that joy of pulling off that really sick high-scoring shot yourself. It’s really more pachinko than Peggle. It probably won’t last too long either; after a couple days I already have a good chunk of the prestige upgrades, and the rest of them don’t really change the formula too much, just increasing the numbers more, so I may not even bother finishing the upgrades. But, you know, that’s fine too, I don’t need another game that’s going to demand my attention Forever. It has its flaws, but it’s cheap and I got some decent fun out of it for those couple of days.
Update: After playing a few more days, I managed to buy all the upgrades and get all the challenges and achievements. Things do shift a bit towards the end of the game since once you have all of the upgrades, the emphasis is now on earning as much gold as possible, and it actually becomes advantageous to take manual control of the drops for a while and focus on the high-scoring balls, if you want to be quick about it.
Making some more progress through the list of games I’ve bought but not played, I spent some time in Atlyss, a lo-fi action RPG where you play as one of various critter races.
I am but a wee creature.
It’s fairly straightforward, clear out monsters from areas, go on quests to collect stuff, delve into semi-random dungeons, level up and get new gear and skills, etc. What’s distinct is that moving around is pretty fun, with a double jump and dash abilities that everyone gets, and you’re going to be doing a lot of that because the pace of combat is fast. Especially in dungeons, where most rooms lock you in until you defeat multiple waves of multiple enemies, and they’re instantly chasing and right on top of you so you’re constantly moving and trying to make space so that you can tell what’s even going on and when you should block and attack.
It might even be a bit too fast-paced for me, as I’m constantly dying in these dungeons and I feel a bit stuck on a current boss, but there’s only a minor penalty for dying at least (having to run back and the current wave of enemies will be healed). Still, it’s pretty cute and it’s still in early access, so I’ll have to revisit it again later to see what’s new.
Steam keeps track of how much time you spend playing a game, and by far the largest one on my list is, uh…
I’ve been ‘playing’ it for a few years now, but Idle Champions is an ‘idle’ game, so very little of that is actual, hands-on playing of it. Most of that occurs early on when you’re just starting out, where the basic gameplay is to select an adventure, set up some party members in a formation, and then keep buying upgrades for them and tweaking things a bit (swapping members in and out, moving them around, clicking ‘ultimate’ attacks) when things start getting more difficult. It actually requires a fair bit of your attention at this point, managing all of this. Eventually you get some ‘familiars’ which can automate tasks for you, such as levelling up party members and clicking on the playfield, and ‘modron cores’ which can automate setting up a formation and restarting the adventure when you hit a certain point. With enough of these combined, the game then basically plays itself automatically, just continually running an adventure over and over again with no intervention required.
But, you might ask, why would you even do so? Well, there is Stuff to earn… Your party’s strength is affected by a lot of things, including the ‘item level’ of the equipment they wear. The item level is raised by either using blacksmithing contracts, which come from chests, or finding duplicate pieces of gear, also from chests. Chests can be bought with ‘gems’, and gems are earned by defeating bosses, which you do by…running an adventure over and over again. Hence, with the familiars and modron cores you can just set it up and let it run in the background and just check in on it every once in a while to buy stuff.
But, there’s other stuff to keep track of as well. A big source of your party’s strength will also come from legendary items, which requires earning dragon scales, which requires you to interrupt your gem farming and run a special adventure once a day for a week for each batch of scales. New heroes get added on a roughly monthly basis, and you have to run a bunch of adventures to unlock them and get them geared up. Special events occur every once in a while which require you to log in once per day for a week to open a special chest, or keep the game running to passively earn some new temporary currency. There is now a daily login to earn a new ‘platinum’ currency which can be used to buy some stuff that would normally require real currency.
All of this kind of begs the obvious question of ‘why’ though, and that’s where the FOMO starts to kick in in subtly interconnected ways. Why would you want to unlock a new hero? Well, new heroes are sometimes essential for the new ‘meta’ to make for a stronger party that can beat the more difficult adventures. Why would you want to log in daily to unlock a special chest? Well, sometimes you can get valuable things like a Potion of Polish from them, and you have to do so at least four times to get the Bonus reward, and you wouldn’t want to miss out on that, right? Why would you want to passively gather a new currency? Well, it’s the easiest way to get pigment buffs which raise your party’s strength significantly… They’ve done a great job of giving you a whole bunch of reasons to log in and play the game regularly, in order to help you…become better at continuing to play the game. There is no final goal to it all, as they’re regularly adding new campaigns and adventures, so you still feel this constant need to prepare.
The problem is that this starts to nibble away more and more bits of your time. You can leave it running in the background 99% of the time, but it still takes a non-zero amount of time to do that dragon scale run, to spend the currencies and buy the upgrades, to unlock that hero, to do the daily chest claim, etc., and if I spend a half hour each day doing these maintenance tasks, that’s a half hour less time for other games or tasks. The interconnectedness makes it difficult to limit your interaction, too. Oh, maybe I’ll just fire it up once a month to get the new hero. Except that I’m going to need chests to equip the hero, so I could just leave it running to farm gems for the chests. But if it’s running anyway, I may as well check the daily login… And before long it’s back to being a time suck again.
So, ultimately, I think saying goodbye to Idle Champions means quitting cold turkey. It wasn’t really a waste of time, but I think for me it’s the only practical way to get off this FOMO ride.
Just as a quick catch-up, here are some more specific comments on games I’ve played in the last year or so:
Vampire Survivors: This game was a bit of a craze for a while, and I was late to the party, but I got addicted to it for a while as well. With a bajillion things to unlock, it has that just-one-more-run quality that has you realizing that you sat down to play it for an hour and it’s been four… I finally shook it when I got to a point where I can just get near-infinite upgrade eggs and brute force past any challenge, but it was still a good 70-odd hours of fun to get there.
Super Lesbian Animal RPG: Despite what the name might make you think, this is a pretty wholesome (PG-13 at worst, for swearing) JRPG story about a group of LGBT friends trying to find their way as young adults, prove themselves, and work out their relationships, while saving the world from an ancient evil, of course.
It’s an RPG Maker game, with the limitations that implies, but the author’s put a ton of effort into customizing it and fleshing out the setting, characters, UI, etc. with her own work, so it doesn’t really feel like one. There’s a bit of extra depth to the combat where you have to build up ‘star power’ points to use more powerful attacks, so you can’t just unleash all your best attacks at the start of the fight. Which can sometimes feel a bit tedious because that generally includes multi-target attacks, so you have to spend a turn just getting the points to use one of those… But it’s not too much of a problem because it’s not very grindy overall; the level cap is pretty low and you only fight monsters by running into them on the overworld.
LOGistICAL: Earth: A kind of puzzle game where you have to unlock industries and roads around the world by delivering goods from sources to places that want them. And when I mean world, I mean the whole world, as it covers 50,000 towns and 590 different industries. It’s hard to get a good sense of progression with this one; you start out focusing on a few small areas, trading resources and unlocking industries and all that, but you can’t really “complete” a region because there’s a deliberate global interconnectedness to everything that forces you to keep expanding and exploring to find new industries and routes because you can’t satisfy everything locally, but there are also barriers to keep you from exploring until you figure out the ‘puzzle’ to deliver what they need.
I’ll play in a region until I reach a point where I feel stuck and then switch to another one I’ve unlocked, and I’ve gone through probably a pretty typical sequence, going through New Zealand, eastern Australia, Germany and Scandinavia, the western US, South Korea, North Korea, and the start of Russia. It’s starting to feel like I’m running out of options though, and that the key to progress is hidden in some singular town or road or something that I’m overlooking because there are ten thousand icons on-screen. There’s a spot in Russia where I could break out if I just had Bricks, but I only have access to one truck and some sand, but I could turn the sand to bricks if I build the Brickworks there, but to do that I need to raise an existing Brickworks to level 3 somewhere, which I could do in Germany, except for level 3 I need Machinery, and I do have Machineworks somewhere, but they need Engines as an input and I haven’t even discovered them yet so they’re in some other country and who knows when I’ll actually find them and when I do I don’t currently have a way to transport them to Germany… It’s…still fun in its own way, but it also feels like it’s constantly on the verge of “okay, that’s enough, had my fill of that”.
Kitsune Tails: Haven’t gotten very far in this one yet, but it’s a very cute take on a Super Mario World-like platformer. And either it’s surprisingly difficult in some places, or I’m just getting old…
Thank Goodness You’re Here: This one has been described as a ‘slap-em-up’, since that’s basically your only way to interact with the world, by running around and slapping things. It’s basically an extended British comedy sketch, centered around you “fixing” peoples’ problems. A bit short at 3 or so hours, but very funny and well worth it if you like that sort of thing.
Balatro: eh, it’s alright
Those actually aren’t the games where I’ve spent the most time, but those will really deserve posts of their own…
(No, seriously, Balatro didn’t really grab me in the same way everyone else seems to be obsessed with it. *shrug*)
I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age and I’m right at the end, just running around cleaning up sidequests, hunts, high-end gear, etc. I couldn’t remember how deep into the endgame stuff I’d gotten when I played the PS2 original though, so out of curiosity I fired it up to take a look and they were actually pretty close: both 88 hours in, very similar gear, and I’m currently level 57 versus 59 in the old save.
And then something suddenly hit me: I’m not sure now if I actually finished the original FF12, even though if you’d asked me before today I’d have sworn that yeah, of course, it’s one of the few Final Fantasy games that I have actually completed! My old saves were certainly ready to finish the game, but none of them were in what I’d consider a ready-to-head-to-the-ending spot; the most recent saves were just off in random zones in the world where I’d been doing hunts, not even by any teleport stones or the airship that I’d typically park myself by for the ‘final’ save. I don’t even really remember the ending, though I’d have chalked that up to it just not being very memorable, but who knows now. So did I actually finish it and just not leave an obvious save file for it, or did I get so caught up in endgame stuff that I just plan forgot to actually finish the game? *shrug*
I hadn’t played WoW in quite a while, but I wound up buying Legion in the recent Black Friday sale and have been working my way through Pandaria with my shadow priest (with xp disabled once I hit 90 so I don’t overlevel too much), and it’s been fun in that comfortably-scratches-an-old-itch sense, but I’m still feeling kind of unsatisfied overall.
I think that’s more on me than the game, though. For a while now I thought I’d just been temporarily “burned out” on MMOs and would eventually come back to them refreshed and ready to go again, much like other gaming genres at various times, but it just hasn’t happened. I think I just don’t have room in my life anymore for the social and time commitments for raiding and regular grouping, and past that, sure there are some new sights to see and new mechanics to play with here and there, but an awful lot of what’s left is just more bear ass collection and faction grinding.
And I could apply that equally well to Guild Wars 2, LOTRO, EQ2, etc. Sorry MMOs, you were fun while it lasted!
(Wish I’d realized that before buying expansions for some of these that I never even reached. :P )
So another Steam sale has come and gone and I bought a few too many games (as usual) and I haven’t really played many recently, so it’s time to start working through the backlog again…
Infested Planet: I’m not terribly good at RTSes, but this one is more up my alley. You’ve got a squad of soldiers on maps full of enemies and the goal is simple: eliminate them all. The tricky part is that you’ve only got a small handful of soldiers and there are massive numbers of those enemies constantly spawning from hives, so you have to plan out where to strike, proceed aggressively enough to push the enemy back but not so aggressively that you get overrun, protect your flank and bases so the enemy doesn’t take them back, buy the right upgrades for your current goal, etc. Enemy mutations can happen mid-battle so you suddenly have to adapt to something new, rethink your approach, and redeploy your resources. It gives you tons of choice and so far has let me proceed at pretty much my own pace, which I really like.
Super Amazing Wagon Adventure: Remember that old game Oregon Trail? Now imagine it as a scrolling shooter. With unicorn stampedes. And narwhals. And a whole bunch of other random, silly scenarios. It gets repetitive rather quickly, but it was only a buck and it’s great fun while it lasts.
GRID Autosport: A brand-new entry in the GRID series, this one leans more towards ‘serious’ racing. There’s not as much choice or career persistence as in something like Forza, but it’s nice to have a wider variety of racing disciplines (it includes endurance and open wheel races as well as the usual sports cars). I’m terrible at handling the RWD cars so far though; I just keep spinning out… I’d gotten kind of tired of GT6, so this should scratch my racing itch for a while.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons: An adventure game where you control two characters (the brothers) simultaneously, each one on a different analog stick, and many of the puzzles depend on coordinating the two. It’s really short and not very difficult, but it’s very well-done and moving. To say more would be spoilery, but it’s definitely recommended.
