It’s the first Tuesday of the month, ish, and I’m coming off of October, when I decided I didn’t want to bother with any of the month’s games, and September, when I got Foretales and Autonauts vs. Piratebots and they were both kind of okay but they both badly overstayed their welcome. I had to go back and check a few of the earlier monthlies to confirm that this is a good idea, and it does look like I just happened to have two dud months in a row. How does November compare?
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is about breaking ships apart for salvage in zero-G. It’s got some kind of plot about debt slavery and unionization, so it’s not quite a space having-a-job simulator, but it seems kind of close. Disassembling spaceships with a blowtorch sounds kind of fun, I’ll give it a try, but I might bail out long before completing what How Long To Beat says is a 30 hour long story if the charm of the mechanics wears off after the first two hours.
WWE 2k23 is a game that you already know whether or not you want, and I do not want it.
Unpacking is a zen game about unpacking. You pull stuff out of a box and put it into a room until the box is empty. As you unpack in several new locations, an implicit story is told based on what things are kept, what goes away, and what gets added. I get why some people would want this, but I definitely don’t. I’m not a huge fan of block puzzles and if I’m going to customize a space, I’d rather be in charge of what goes into it than where exactly it goes, so Unpacking has my preferences on that exactly backwards.
Friends vs. Friends is a PvP game. I’m honestly not sure beyond that, seems like some kind of shooter? Cards are definitely involved somehow, but seem to be more of an upgrade system than the primary mechanic. I’m not looking super close, though, because being a PvP game means I already don’t care.
Prodeus is a Doom-style shooter, so I don’t care about that, either. I enjoy certain shooters, but Doom and its progeny is not generally amongst them. The weird exception is Doom 2016, which was cool, but it also emphasized recreating the vibe of Doom with modern mechanics rather than copying those mechanics.
The Legend of Tianding is a sidescrolling beat-em-up about Taiwanese Robin Hood. The bosses have “dynamic abilities and brutal attacks[,]” which is a problem because I like the style of this game but I’m not big into sidescrolling beat-em-ups, so my willingness to play this is pretty strictly limited to it being easy enough that I can breeze through without getting super invested in the genre. How Long To Beat says it’s only 5-10 hours long, so I’ll take a chance on it.
SCP: Secret Files is a collection of games whose only connective tissue is the SCP setting. That promises uneven quality, none of the games look very interesting mechanically, and I generally find the SCP tone to be overtly grimdark anyway. SCPs have no unified origin story and the basic SCP format strongly discourages portraying the Foundation as a faction fighting a war against an enemy rather than a catalogue of weird stuff they have locked up. Since the Foundation is supposed to exist in what is otherwise the real world, that suggests that the stuff catalogued in the SCP wiki is all the weird magical realism/urban horror stuff that exists in the universe, not just stuff sufficiently dangerous as to require containment. But there’s very few SCPs that aren’t designed to cause human suffering, which shows the author’s hand in a bad way. Rather than a universe that is both bizarre and indifferent to humans, the SCP setting taken in aggregate is a universe that hates humans specifically for no better reason than “because creepypasta.”
Some of the foundational anomalies are things like 682, the invincible monster, which has two notable attributes: It is invincible, and it hates humans. No particular reason. It just does. Even 387, the Lego pile, couldn’t escape having some horrific interaction with MegaBloks, concealed behind [DATA EXPUNGED] which is sometimes used for good effect, but is usually used for “I can’t think of anything interesting so please imagine something scary.”
And for every SCP-387, there’s ten like SCP-1459, a box which murders puppies for no reason. 1459 briefly gets close to being interesting when the method of puppy murder given by the user is “nuclear detonation,” but the detonation is entirely contained by the box, so what could’ve been someone jailbreaking the puppy murder box to do something potentially useful (but killing themselves and obliterating the box in the process) is scrapped in favor of just being a puppy murder box.
There are a lot of individually good SCPs, but they are all worse for existing in the SCP universe. Even SCP-682 is a decent regenerating troll monster by itself. The reaction of “oh, of course it hates humans for no fucking reason, just like everything else” only happens because, y’know, everything else hates humans for no fucking reason. Mix SCP-682 with a bunch of weird anomalies that are only situationally dangerous or totally harmless and suddenly its spite for humanity in particular stands out. Still a C-tier monster but not one I’d be embarrassed to use as a backup dancer or even as a monster-of-the-week.
The SCP wiki is all released under a Creative Commons Sharealike 3.0 License, so nobody needs permission from their community to use any of that content in any way they like. In theory, I could pick out a specific set of SCPs with the right blend of the strange but harmless, situationally dangerous, and unambiguously deadly as to suggest a universe full of bizarre anomalies some of which, by happenstance, are very very bad for humans. But the odds that any of the people who contributed to the Secret Files did that is basically nil. People who make SCP content tend to be pretty invested in the SCP community and want those guys to like their work first and foremost, and what the SCP community wants is not what I want.
Anyway, Souldiers is a Metroidvania, so I’m getting it on the basis of that alone. It’s also got a fun 16-bit fantasy style that I like, emulating 2D pixel graphics in the SNES era when they were getting really good rather than the NES era when they were easy to replicate in MSPaint.
That’s three pickups bringing my total up to 162. Legend of Tianding is a short game that should be easy to unload from the backlog in a weekend, and I’m nearly done with Zeus: Master of Olympus and getting through StarCraft 1 pretty quick. My pivot towards games I played but never finished as a kid (well, I finished StarCraft, but not the Brood War expansion, which is basically the second half of the game) probably has something to do with how dogshit my Kickstarters have been lately, and those games tend to be pretty long. Not only were games longer in general back then, but if the games were short, I would’ve finished them back in 2003 and wouldn’t still be wondering what the last levels are like. For similar reasons, if something from my childhood made it into the backlog, it’s probably a strategy game, becuase twelve-year old Chamomile didn’t have much trouble putting together how to beat Sephiroth in Kingdom Hearts, so it was just a matter of building up the muscle memory and reflexes to pull it off.
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