I don’t know what it is about Roadwarden. It has cool monsters and a focus on exploration and its illustrations alleviate the one thing I usually dislike about text-heavy games, which is that it’s hard to keep track of where everything is in relation to each other which can make the setting feel like a bunch of detached vignettes that you’re teleporting between with no intervening space or geographic relation to one another. About half of Roadwarden’s illustrations are maps (the other half are regular illustrations of small locations like a tavern or whatever, which are small enough you can keep the whole place in your head at once from a good description) and solve that problem completely. And for some reason I still just don’t like it.
It kind of feels like it has way too much resource pressure to allow for reasonable exploration, like I have to already know where important resources are in order to stock up before I run out, but I haven’t actually run out of any critical resources yet. It just feels that way. It feels too rustic and desolate even though it’s far more populated than games like Hollow Knight or Morbid: Seven Acolytes, which I liked (in the former case, which I adored). Maybe it’s because it’s too brown? But the game I switched to instead was Darkest Dungeon, and while that’s not as monotone, it doesn’t exactly pop with color, either. Maybe I’ve come to really hate text games? I used to play them all the time and mostly only stopped because it was getting hard to find good ones (I’d run through the backlog of genre highlights built up over 40 years of text adventure games and spin-offs), but that was a while ago. Liking reading much less in your early 30s as compared to your early 20s is usually the opposite of how things work, but maybe?
Anyway, since all I’m doing with Roadwarden is blinking in confusion as to why I don’t like it, I’m combining it with the August Humble Choice post in order to wring something of reasonable length out.
Disco Elysium is one of the big names used to draw people in and maybe look at the smaller ones while they’re here. I’m starting to enter an era where I’ve been getting new games through Humble Bundle almost exclusively for long enough that sometimes I actually don’t already have the big name, but this is not one of those cases. I’m not getting it because I already have it.
Chivalry II is a multiplayer first person slasher about mass battles in a Hollywood medieval aesthetic. It’s in the second big name slot, so presumably it’s very good at doing that for people who care about that sort of thing. I am not those people.
Road 96 is some kind of branching story paths game about a road trip across a fictitious authoritarian regime in the year 1996 with the ultimate goal of escape. It’s a love letter to a bunch of filmmakers which makes me very strongly suspect this is one of those games that should’ve been an animated film except those struggle to get funding on Kickstarter.
Trek to Yomi is a black-and-white game that’s doing its best to be a playable Akira Kurosawa film. Unlike Road 96, it’s got hack-and-slash gameplay so I doubt it’s an animated film in disguise, but its only gameplay feature appears to be “sword.” This game is selling itself purely on aesthetic and I’m not that into the Akira Kurosawa aesthetic. They’re great films and all, but not so great that filming Japan in black-and-white immediately releases dopamine into my system.
Arcade Paradise is about a bunch of hipsters who start an arcade or something? It’s a love letter to arcade games and I’m not a huge fan of arcade games. Like, they’re alright, but they’re time killers I play on my phone when I don’t have access to a computer.
SuchArt is a “genius artist simulator.” It seems like its main selling point is that you can actually do a art in the game and sell it for bazillions of space dollars to upgrade your space house and influence the war of robots vs. crabs on the surface of the planet. I’m not actually good at art, and while I doubt the game’s AI can analyze that at all, I wouldn’t really enjoy scribbling some random colors onto a canvas and then being told that I’ve revolutionized the art world with my stick figure in blue and yellow.
Tin Can is a first person sim game about being in a spaceship that is having a bad time. The idea is that you have to fix the damn thing by picking up parts and putting them in the right spots, but your health is indicated by audio cues for things like your heartbeat and your breathing, so your first alert that you are dying of CO2 poisoning and should probably make a priority of repairing the oxygen recyclers is that your breathing gets more labored. Exactly one person has played this on How Long To Beat and it took them about five hours, which is long enough for this concept not to overstay its welcome, so I’ll toss it in the backlog as something I can play in a lazy afternoon.
EDIT: And indeed it took less than five hours to complete. Tin Can’s clearly supposed to be a VR game and it might work really well in that context. You’re in a small escape pod grabbing things and plugging them into where they need to go before you run out of air and die. Even as a PC game, it’s okay, but it suffers a bit from the only gameplay mechanic being to pick a thing up and put it back somewhere else. You unplug broken parts to replace them with fixed ones, slowly cannibalizing every system that isn’t absolutely necessary (like taking apart the main lights to rely on emergency lights, or dismantling the main computer and its convenient all-in-one-place problems monitor to instead run around checking each system monitor individually) to use the spare parts to fix critical systems like your oxygen recycler and your gravity generator.
It’s not a terrible concept, but it could use more polish in a lot of different places.
Hot Brass is a game about playing a SWAT officer foiling assorted crimes. You pick your equipment and do some kind of top-down stealthy shooty gameplay. It’s pretty heavily equipment focused and looks like it might be a decent game, but SWAT teams in particular have not exactly been endearing themselves to me lately. I don’t feel the need to give this game a fair shake on its mechanics until someone pays me to do so and I know I’m not going to have fun playing as a SWAT officer in regular real life America (some kind of Judge Dredd cyberpunk thing works out fine for me, both because it’s easy to take the author’s word for it that SWAT teams are a good idea in the fictional world they have created to support that premise and because cyberpunk settings frequently leave it vague as to whether or not you’re supposed to be the good guys in the first place).
The only pick-up wound up being Tin Can, which I finished within 48 hours of picking it up, which has got my backlog back down to 164.
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