Rapidfire

I played Station to Station. You connect different resources together using train stations and rail lines, in an attempt to use the shortest possible lines and the fewest possible crossings, while also trying to avoid cliffs, forests, rivers, etc. etc. It’s a puzzle game that makes a pretty little train set to look at when you’re done. It’s possible to fail a stage, but the par goal is pretty easy. You can go for an achievement score if you want, but I rarely bothered. It’s basically a digital model train set but with gameplay, and I enjoyed that for the ten hours it lasted me.

I also played Dredge. It’s a Lovecraftian fishing game where you sail around a couple of different islands of radically different climates fishing up regular fish, and about 5% of the time instead of a regular fish you get a creepy mutated fish. The creepy mutations are caused by a dark conspiracy that’s nearing the completion of its horrible ritual, which you are unwittingly moving towards completion. As is pretty standard for Lovecraft, you’re pretty much doomed no matter what you do, but in the good ending everyone else is basically fine. There’s a twist in the game that I really enjoyed because of how not hidden it is. There are several clues which are put right in front of you and which are dead giveaways as to what’s really going on if you notice them, but which are sufficiently far in the background that you might not notice them. I also like that, if you get the dialogue that reveals the twist, there’s options to say that you already figured it out, rather than requiring you to be surprised. Part of what makes this mystery work is that the solution is dead obvious once you find any of the right clues, so while the game will sigh and roll its eyes and tell you exactly what’s going on if it has to, it also lets you say “I know” with a thousand-yard stare because you understand the doom that is upon you and you’re here to see things through regardless.

Fabledom is a fairy tale city-builder. You start with a few villagers around a cart full of resources, and you have them dig a well, build some houses, put up an inn, and before long you’re blocking out space for a theater to improve the happiness of the block of rowhouses you’ve squeezed into an awkward place on the map because you want a population nearby the prismatic liquid extraction site you set up because you need more magic juice for your wedding. Also, the main quest line of the game is to get married to one of the other rulers, who emphasize different parts of the gameplay.

The final objective to get married is identical for all of them, and I wanted to see all the content, so I left every single one of them at the altar except the last one, Sir Payne the Dark Knight, because his difficulty was listed as the highest. Sir Payne’s quests require you to build a bunch of structures that make your citizens less happy, but by the time I’d gotten to him I was so overbuilt that maxing out happiness at 100% was easy even for the people I imprisoned in dungeons for fun. I don’t mean the overall population had maxed out happiness because those people were a rounding error or something, I mean I imprisoned fully 5% of my population for giggles and each individual prisoner was still a maxed out 100% happy because they were really thrilled with the even distribution of street cafes in the city. You don’t usually get this kind of kink representation in games like this.

It is a pretty slow game, though. While happiness does impact the rate of immigration, that rate is going to be really slow no matter what you do, and it’s easy to get a kingdom full of empty buildings that spread your workforce thin and chew up your spare resources until your entire economy grinds to a halt. A lot of the time you just have to wait a few minutes, even on the highest game speed. I found this annoying, but it has a really nice fairy tale aesthetic to it, and while that isn’t my favorite aesthetic, I do really like city builders and I can appreciate that the aesthetic was done really well even if I prefer things spooky.

Also, make sure you’re maxing out the size of your farms. Yes, they’re really big and expensive when maxed out, they’re supposed to be. Go slow and save up, the size will make sense when you’ve got a city center stamped down somewhere surrounded by acres and acres of farmland. It looks great.

I played Gas Station Simulator, which is a game that makes me wish for a perfected world where we didn’t need copyright at all. That would be a terrible idea, but Gas Station Simulator is really good at making a dusty old gas station that feels authentic and detailed, and then the only gameplay they have to put in there is managing a gas station. That’s what the game said it was, so I’m not complaining, I just feel like the highest purpose of this game is to be a tech demo of a gas station location that other people could drop into their own games.

I also played Evil West for about fifteen minutes before concluding that this is just a regular linear third person action game that wishes it was a movie. If it had done what most linear third person action games do and laid down to die for me, I might’ve given it an hour, but it had the twin sins of being both uninteresting and hard. Being a vampire-hunting cowboy sounds cool, but ultimately I was just punching zombies to death with a giant metal fist. My cowboy hat wasn’t really translating into any ability to do cowboy things, and the whip was only used at specific spots to do an Indiana Jones style swing across a gap. Cool and all, but they could’ve just removed the chasms from the level design, take out the whip entirely, and no actual gameplay would be lost.