Finally caught up to the current month, a Humble Choice ongoing right now which you might hypothetically make a purchasing decision about based on this post! That’s only half the point of these, but I still feel kind of bad about dropping that half for three months. Oops.
Anyway, what’s in the box?
A Plague Tale: Requiem is an A Plague Tale game, so that’s one mark against it already. This is a game about playing French peasants, one of whom is cursed with rat swarms in some way vaguely connected to the Bubonic Plague. It is attempting to be a Sad Game and is also some kind of AAA production? It does look very pretty, but with its paucity of demonstrable gameplay I’d assumed this was just because indie games sometimes look surprisingly pretty. We’re in an era of graphics where you have to zoom in pretty far for the difference in a full console generation’s worth of resolution to be apparent. But A Plague Tale is even less defensible as a AAA production, which should be able to afford both nice graphics and some actual gameplay. I realize A Plague Tale does literally have some gameplay, but it’s so thin that you can’t even really assign it a genre except for something super broad like “adventure game.” So, I’m not adding this one to the backlog, is what I’m getting at.
Ghostrunner 2 is a first-person melee game. It looks cool, and part of me thinks that surely this concept wouldn’t get a sequel if the gameplay was as miserable as it sounds, but, man. A first-person melee game? Really? I can’t shake the fear that it’s as bad as it sounds.
If you’re going to make a Starship Troopers game, you probably should make it about playing as the mobile infantry fighting the bugs in a story that, while it may have some satirical overtones in the background, plays it all pretty straight in the fore. That’s what Starship Troopers: Terran Command appears to be doing, and there’s not really room to do much else. It’s kind of like how the best Jurassic Park video game has the exact opposite message of the movie, except not as extreme: The Starship Troopers movie (and this game is definitely based on the movie, not the book – the aesthetic is straight from the film) also appears to play the premise straight and makes you pay attention if you want to notice the criticism underneath. Here’s the thing, though: Making a Starship Troopers game is not a necessity, nor is playing it, and I don’t particularly want to invest the time to play what looks like a good-not-great tactics game when the ultimate takeaway is that the whole war is the result of incompetent politicians, prolonged by incompetent generals.
Sticky Business is some kind of sticker tycoon/crafting game? I generally like these “imagine having a job that was super chill” kinds of things, but I’m not super into stickers or arts and crafts kind of things.
Zoeti is a turn-based Roguelite and I’m out. For the love of god, indie devs, stop making Roguelikes, I’d play your game if it was shorter.
Figment 2: Creed Valley is real sad that there Inside Out never got a good video game adaptation and has set out to be the change it wants to see in the world. Stage music is important both thematically and to gameplay, and it’s more of a hack and slash game than a literal Inside Out adaptation (it’s hard to imagine Joy socking negative opinions in the mouth). Time comes to the rescue on this one: At only four hours long, it’s easy to justify taking a risk on this game, even though I’m nervous that it’ll end up being all quirk and no substance.
This is the opener for Heretic’s Fork: “Dear Candidate, Thank you for submitting your application for the position of Hell’s Manager. We are pleased to offer you the job and extend a warm welcome to our team. As you may know, we have some overpopulation issues that we believe can be resolved with your help.” That’s really good. It sets a tone, standoffishly professional, none of that insincere “welcome to the family!” kind of corporatism, but the straightforward professionalism of “we’re evil but reliable, you’re in it for the money, let’s make a deal.” It finds room in the boilerplate to give a hint of what the gameplay is about. It has just one flash of the fantastical that pops right out of the page because it’s surrounded by banality. The game is some kind of tower-based strategy game but doesn’t quite seem to be a tower defense. That’s an okay genre, and How Long To Beat gives this one just four hours. I can take a chance on that just on the strength of the writing.
Hyperviolent is a Doom clone and shooters before Half-Life aren’t canon.
After several months of playing basically no games (my stats list Impire, Fallout, Amazing American Circus, and Far Cry 5 as my only completed games since January), my backlog is up to 158, firmly above the 150 I briefly got it below. Partly that’s because I played a lot of Deep Rock Galactic, which is nearly but not quite complete, but mostly it’s because I haven’t played as many games lately. For the first time in a while, though, I have quite a few games with an average playtime of less than 10 hours in the backlog, so I can probably get this back below 155 pretty quick.
Chamomile Has A Blog 