This was supposed to be October 2024, but I clicked the wrong one by mistake, and it doesn’t really matter what order I go in, so fuck it, April 2025.
Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered is a historically interesting set of games, but I already know I won’t play these to the finish. They use clunky mechanics on purpose in much the same way Silent Hill 1 used limited draw distance on purpose, creating platforming that required a slow and methodical parkour, which was cool for how realistic it was. But, also, it was really hard and I don’t want to bang my head against it when I have so many other games to play. Also, I guess Lara Croft was a sexual awakening for a lot of twelve year olds back in the day, but I was eight, so it didn’t land for me at the time, and the cone-boobs definitely haven’t aged well. The remaster isn’t quite as geometric, but it definitely doesn’t look good.
Dredge is a game where you captain a fishing boat through treacherous waters to dredge up some kind of sunken mystery. You dodge danger in your little boat while hauling up spooky treasures of some kind. At 5 hours, this would be well worth a look, at 10 hours, I’m hesitant, but I’ll try it.
Aliens: Dark Descent is a xenomorph blasting real time tactics game that features persistent changes to levels and some amount of squad management. This is another entry into I’d Play Your Game If It Was Shorter, because at 25 hours, I’m nervous about the possibility that this game is going to be frustrating to do in real time. It’s got all the ingredients I want for a good XCOM-style tactical game, and it’s definitely possible to have a UI responsive enough and a pace moderate enough for real time tactics to work, but this is the kind of thing that could be really frustrating if it’s done wrong. Maybe it’s just got the ick from Colonial Marines way back when.
1000xResist is a game about Iris, the sole survivor of a mega-plague that came when giant humanoid aliens arrived on Earth, and the society made purely of her clones that struggles to survive even a thousand years later. It’s a heavily story-based game and also seems really horny, what with every single character being a literal clone of the exact same cute girl and the apocalypse brought about by fifty-foot tall alien women. I like horny, but there doesn’t seem to be anything else here, and I don’t like it so much that I want it by itself, and 1000xResist shows no sign of interesting gameplay nor does its plot particularly intrigue (apparently the story I summarized above isn’t totally accurate in some mysterious way, but, I mean, so?).
Nova Lands is off-brand Factorio. It’s got a pixel-y aesthetic that’s kinda cute, but I don’t love this genre enough to go chasing after also-ran titles when I already have Factorio and Satisfactory.
Diplomacy Is Not An Option is a game where you are under attack from twenty thousand orcs and have to build defenses to kill all of them. This feels like it has about as much depth as a really good Flash game from 2010, and that’s not worth a 25 hour time investment.
Distant Worlds 2 is yet another space 4X game. These are relatively easy to make from a graphics and programming perspective, so I get why they crop up a lot, but it’s practically impossible for the worldbuilding and game design to set it apart from Stellaris, Sins of a Solar Empire, Galactic Civilizations III (and maybe IV, which I just learned exists while doublechecking I got the name right), Endless Space 2, and, for that matter, Master of Orion III. Precisely because this genre is so easy to do computationally, a lot of the most ancient games in the genre still hold up. Distant Worlds 2 is already doing one thing right by being a numbered sequel, which seems to help, but the games are too long and the genre too densely stacked for me to take a chance on an also-ran.
Nomad Survival is off-brand Vampire Survivor. I never really got why Vampire Survivor was so popular. It’s alright, I guess, but there was a real craze for it and I never really saw it as anything but an adequate time-killer when I’m stuck on the bus with my phone.
Chamomile Has A Blog 