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Deep Rock Galactic is a game where you are a space dwarf who must descend below the surface of Hoxxes IV to mine morkite while fending off swarms of space bugs. It’s a 4-player multiplayer shooter with the defining gameplay mechanic being 3D traversal. You can mine out almost any wall like it’s Minecraft except slower and the grid is way less obvious and blocky, and each of the four classes of dwarf miner have various tricks to help make getting around the caves easier: The driller can mine through walls very quickly, the engineer can place new platforms, the scout has a grappling hook that basically lets him fly, and the gunner technically has a zipline but for the most part that is the all-in-on-combat class. Any class can dig through walls at the default glacial pace and sometimes it’s even beneficial to cut a tunnel directly between two important locations if the natural caves connecting them are circuitous and long but the distance between the two chambers is fairly short.

So you and up to three others get dropped into a natural cave system, told to find and mine a certain quota of morkite (or given some other objective related to morkite mining, like finding and salvaging destroyed mining equipment or hooking up a refinery to some extractors to process liquid morkite, or whatever), and if you succeed you get money and other resources to buy upgrades with. To the extent that the game has a main plot, it’s that it has “assignments,” a series of connected missions, but the individual missions aren’t specific missions with some kind of voice acted cut scenes connecting them, but rather certain types of missions. The first mission of the first assignment, for example, is to complete a standard morkite-harvesting mission. The second one is to complete an alien egg hunt mission. The third is to complete an on-site refinery mission. No special voice acting or plot beats, just a checklist of mission types that the game unlocks for you one by one to introduce you to the game.

There’s a progression from here to several assignments that unlock new weapons for your chosen class (you can switch classes at any time, but your level resets, so if your goal is to reach the end of the game, such that it is, you’re better off picking one and sticking to it), and once you max out your level on a class (which does not require unlocking all the new gear, but you may as well), you do a special promotion assignment, and once you’ve done that you can do an assignment for “breaching the core” which rewards you with a special matrix core that can be used to unlock endgame cosmetics. You can then grind that indefinitely to unlock more cosmetics. There’s more to it than that, but that’s the basic structure. It’s the framework of an MMORPG (albeit with the importance of leveling de-emphasized, as leveling up does not make you more powerful, only unlocks weapon options that make you more flexible but no stronger) with basically no story. It’s got great atmosphere and vibes, there’s tons of personality in the miners and mission control, but for some reason they never bring it together into an actual plot.

But Deep Rock Galactic has an ace up its sleeve: A single round of the game is, I would estimate, 10-15 minutes long. This is pretty perfect for breaking up chunks of work, and since each mission is individually fun, I’ll probably end up playing a lot of it.

Duskers is a game where you command a team of drones to salvage dead space ships. Drones can be equipped with different modules, like Gather which gathers up resources, Tow which can tow disabled drones, ship upgrades, or other large, valuable things, and Motion, which is a motion detector so you can see whether or not there’s some kind of space monster on the other side of that door.

The basic mechanic of a salvage job is fun and the aesthetic of remotely piloting drones using a combination of console commands and clunky inputs works really well. It takes the low graphics and mediocre gamefeel and makes it part of the immersion – the graphics suck because you’ve got a bad signal from a bad camera. The gamefeel is mediocre because you’re remotely piloting a drone built to be just good enough and not any better. It doesn’t feel like I’m fighting against poor game controls, but like I’m fighting against diegetic poor drone controls because my drone team is whatever I was able to salvage from whatever derelicts were within range, which means none of them were really built to be salvage drones. I’ve jury-rigged them into that role and they’re doing the best they can.

But Duskers is ultimately killed by two problems. First of all, there’s not really any story to speak of. There are five different explanations for how everyone died, ranging from super-pandemic to killer AI to a vague “cosmic event,” some kind of natural disaster that kills everyone at once. The problem with this choose-your-own-apocalypse approach is that we have no means of interacting with the apocalyptic event at all. There’s nothing to do except sift through wrecks filled with totally unrelated hazards looking for text logs explaining which apocalypse has randomly been selected to be responsible for the end of human civilization this time. Salvaging individual wrecks is fun, but I know I won’t be satisfied when I’m done because it never adds up to anything.

The second problem is that it’s a stealth Roguelike. Losing drones means they’re permanently lost, and if you end up with a team unable to gather resources, you just have to start over. The drone modules you start with are randomized and the drones you come across in wrecked ships is also randomized. I could keep playing until I get all five hypothetical apocalypses and there’s achievements for doing so, but starting over and over, hoping for a good set of drones, trying to make a bad set work, just doesn’t feel engaging when I know it’s not really going anywhere. Everyone’s already dead and the mechanism of their death isn’t woven into the game world at all, literally the only difference between the super-pandemic and the AI apocalypse is what logs get left behind. When I discover what happened, I don’t gain a greater understanding of the leaping alien monsters or the hostile security drones left behind. I’m not exploring. I don’t even really feel like I’m salvaging, since it’s not really possible to meaningfully upgrade past what I start with, or at least, not in the first few hours of the game, and if that was going to be the hook, it needed to be up and running by then. All I’m doing is surviving, trying to hold onto what I’ve already got. And that’s boring.

Impire is a dungeon keeper game set in Ardania, the setting of the Majesty series. How does Impire compared to Dungeons 3 and the old Dungeon Keeper games? Mostly poorly, which is too bad, since neither of those were all that great. Dungeon Keeper (and DK2) had promise and Dungeons 3 is mechanically solid but has poor writing and won’t shut up. Impire, by contrast, is slightly more boring mechanically while being just as bad in writing, although they don’t spend as much time on the cut scenes, at least.

In Impire, you play as Baal, a demon king summoned to help the warlock Oscar get petty revenge on everyone who wronged him. Oscar is petulant, entitled, and stupid, and on the one hand that’s a realistic depiction of typical human evil, but on the other hand it’s not super fun to be taking orders from this guy. Baal does at least threaten to skin Oscar alive any time he gets too uppity, but we still spend all our time pursuing this guy’s petty dreams of wealth, power, and lust. You do get a chance at the end to choose between Oscar and Velvet the Phantom King, an ancient ghost you release at the end of Act III (of IV) but who turns out to be good. I went Phantom King because sure, it’s pretty out-of-theme to save the world instead of conquering it, but I was beyond sick of Oscar.

It seems like this was originally supposed to be more of a thing, as a medusa queen and a noble king both make the same offer to Baal at different parts of the story, but he rejects both of them without the player choosing anything. Maybe you were originally supposed to be able to choose between four different factions, the default one for Oscar and then you’d have a chance to swap out for a new one periodically. The last act of the game has two completely different sets of cut scenes (maybe even completely different stages, I haven’t checked what Oscar’s route looks like, but the Phantom King’s route is clearly not recycling cut scenes from Oscar’s because Oscar is dead and the cut scenes feature the Phantom King heavily), so this would require more and more divergent cut scenes the more different versions of each mission there were.

Mechanically, every mission is the same, at least on normal difficulty. First you build up a dungeon, then you send your maxed out army to conquer everything. You’re almost never under any pressure to build quickly, so you can use the exact same army build every time. You have to change dungeon layout a little to deal with different underground terrain, but there’s always enough room for everything you want, so it changes very little.

It’s not unplayably bad, but I wouldn’t have finished it if I didn’t want to play the dungeon keeper genre thoroughly for academic reasons. The only game in the genre I haven’t played (that I know of – indies are hard to keep track of) is War for the Overworld and the recently released Dungeons 4. For the latter, it seems pretty similar to Dungeons 3, so I feel like I gave that series a chance and it’s the best the genre has to offer so far, but its new installment won’t fix its flaws. I don’t know how War for the Overworld will go, we’ll see if its plot is any better.

You know 2D Soulslike Metroidvania’s? Grime is one of them. It does have a very interesting setting and aesthetic. It’s rooted in the idea of creatures being shaped from clay or soil, like the way Genesis says man was created from the earth. So there’s NPCs with vaguely humanoid bodies and misshapen, boulderous heads, and they make a pilgrimage alongside you towards a place where sculptors (also made from stone) chisel them into more slender, evenly proportioned, human-looking forms. Also, you play as a black hole. I’m not really sure what the significance of that is, if anything, but your head is a black hole and your XP is mass that you get from defeated enemies and you get more powerful as you gain mass. The rest of your body is a sculpted stone humanoid body, and a bunch of NPCs get angry at you because you didn’t have to do all the usual groveling before the cult of the sculptors to get yours, it just kinda happened, but also you have a black hole for a head.

This is a cool theme, but it’s hard to find anything to say about the game besides that it is indeed another Metroidvania and it’s got a cool vibe about stone being sculpted into flesh and also something about black holes whose relation I’m not entirely sure of. Definitely I feel like this game gambled on having a community that cared enough to piece the lore together and lost. There’s definitely some discussions of it lying around, but there sure ain’t no Mossbag videos tying it all together. Still, like most of these games, you can get a rough idea what’s going on just by paying attention at all, even if there’s no obessive lore deciphering looking over every nook and cranny to make sure we got everything.

Granted, it probably doesn’t help that the controls inexplicably broke halfway through the game (the right analog stick is no longer working, which is critical to gameplay – it works fine in other games, so it probably isn’t that the controller is broken), and it doesn’t say great things about it that I didn’t care enough to put much effort into fixing it. Into Regrets because it’s literally unplayable. I’ve definitely played and enjoyed worse Metroidvanias, but Grime isn’t doing enough new things for me to try to fix it for more than 30 minutes.

I don’t generally do the question-as-title thing, because I’d rather be straightforward with my opinions. If I think Cook Serve Delicious 3 is good, my title will be Cook Serve Deliciosu 3 Is Good, if it’s bad, the title will be Cook Serve Delicious 3 Is Bad. I make this title a question because I’m not sure. I liked Cook Serve Delicious 3, but I had a lot of trouble with it the first time I played.

That was before I was trying to actually finish games, and by the time I’d circled back around to it, a different bundle had gotten me the entire series, not just the third installment, and I wanted to play it from the beginning not just because I like seeing a series evolve over multiple installments, but also because I was hoping that CSD3 might be more playable if I already knew some of the recipes from the first two games. I was mostly correct: Significant gameplay overhauls between CSD1 and CSD2 means that a lot of the recipes from the first game were altered, so it turns out I could’ve skipped that one (it was still fun, though, so whatever), but CSD2 has pretty similar mechanics to CSD3, similar enough that the recipes are the same, so my cooking skills from CSD2 translated to CSD3 without issue.

And from the starting point of already having the muscle memory for a lot of these recipes, getting into CSD3 was easy. I think it improves on CSD2’s mechanics by replacing side dishes with holding station food. While side dishes extend a customer’s patience for how long it takes you to prepare a main dish, holding station food is prepared in batches. Some customers order a holding station food, others get a special order. Each special order has to be created individually, but a batch of 10 (or however many) holding station orders can serve 10 customers. Whereas in CSD2, harder menus were ones with very few or no side dishes so you couldn’t extend the timer on your main orders, in CSD3, harder menus have lots of both holding station orders and special orders. I like this better, it’s more satisfying to nail a menu with more foods. The addition of cut scenes with Whisk and Cleaver, your robot helpers, make it more compelling to get through the game. Everything is at least a little bit better in CSD3.

But is CSD3 a better game, or is it an expansion pack masquerading as a sequel? Is the audience for CSD3 people who want a good CSD3 game, or is it people who beat CSD2 and want more? I found CSD3 hard to get into before I’d played CSD2. That was before I was trying very hard to finish games at all, so maybe it was just a problem of mindset, but I seriously doubt I found CSD2’s initial learning curve to be to its detriment. I wrote at the time about how it would’ve been better off if it’d had CSD1’s unlocking recipes, where you unlock recipes for a specific type of food (for example, different combinations of toppings on a hamburger) one or two at a time instead of all at once, allowing you to learn the recipes piecemeal. I did, eventually, after two full games, start memorizing several of the CSD2/3 recipes, but it came much more naturally in CSD1.

So on the one hand, Cook Serve Delicious 3 was a lot of fun for me, because I experienced its worst feature back in CSD2, and because that worst feature was a learning curve, that means it didn’t exist for me in CSD3. But I don’t know if I would recommend CSD3 to a friend, because it has that mountain to climb at the beginning, and it’s not actually any fun to climb that mountain. Intentionally failing to make a good difficulty curve does not mean your game has more depth. It means you’re bad at game design.

The Gunk is a 3D platformer game in which you are broke scavengers who land on an uncharted planet, discover an alien civilization in decline, and massacre approximately 90% of their population by destroying their food supply. I’m extrapolating the number based on thematic parallels, but it is explicit to the text that nobody has any idea how all these people will feed themselves once you’ve destroyed their food supply. None of them seem to mind, though, so I guess all’s well that ends well.

The titular Gunk is an evil space amoeba generated as a waste product in the strip mining of the planet’s blue magic life energy, which is used to sustain the alien population in the Garden. You spend the better part of the entire game figuring this out, starting by landing and investigating the Gunk, discovering that the planet’s ecosystem recovers when you clear it out, and then that there are ancient alien ruins here, before finally encountering a survivor who can explain what details xenoarchaeology could not. Then you enter the Garden and confront the Gardener. Twice. The first time it’s a dark night of the soul thing, the second time it’s for real. Which is when he has the dialogue asking how the protagonist plans to feed his people if she shuts down the Garden. She doesn’t really have an answer.

The parallel here is, as far as I can tell, a garbled combination of the impacts of the agricultural and industrial revolutions on Earth and humanity. It’s been posited by a number of economists, political activists, and psychotic murderers that agriculture was a net loss on humanity for most of the history of civilization, that generally speaking you were better off as a hunter gatherer than as a farmer. People became farmers not because they wanted to, but because they got forced into it somehow, and once farming is the only food supply you know how to do consistently, you’re stuck with it. That’s now how you get food, and if you try to wander into the wilderness to become a hunter gatherer, you will probably die before figuring it out even if whatever force compelled your parents to become farmers has since withdrawn or collapsed.

That sounds plausible when comparing a medieval French peasant to a Celtic hunter-gatherer in pre-Roman Gaul (if you’re pre-Roman enough, at least – by the time Caesar was conquering them, they seemed pretty agricultural), but a modern French citizen is in much better shape than either of them. The Gunk (to the extent that it’s making this comparison at all – seems plausible, but it’s not explicit) seems to be aware of this, in that it says the Garden was adopted because it was a more stable and comfortable life. But also the industrial revolution caused global warming which is starting to catch up to us in a big way, and the titular Gunk is probably meant to represent this environmental collapse caused by industrialism and post-industrialism.

But then the Gunk posits no solution to the problem. You defeat the Gardener, shut down the Garden, and all the aliens seem happy about it in the credits scenes, but, like, it’s explicit in the text that there is now an unanswered question of how everyone is going to feed themselves and if we’re going anarcho-primitivist, the answer is that about 90% (if not 99%) of them are going to die. None of the real solutions to this problem have anything to do with abandoning agriculture, but rather doubling down on it with vertical farms and new power sources (well, “new” power sources – our most effective tool in fighting climate change will always be nuclear power, which is ~75 years old at this point). After all, if that doesn’t work, and huge numbers of people die from resource collapse, well, then we can go be hunter-gatherers again. Our primary environmental crisis is that in about 30-40 years we are going to have drastically reduced arable land, so a solution that involves setting all our farms on fire is a lot like incinerating a cancer patient and declaring victory because you have prevented the victim from dying specifically from cancer.

It’s pretty clear the Gunk doesn’t actually want to deal with these issues in depth. It just wants a vague pro-environmental vibe. But its main villain is not an industrialist but the Gardener and its ending thesis statement is “what’s so bad about wilderness anyway?” What’s so bad about wilderness is that the overwhelming majority of the population is going to die in it.

The game also states (admittedly, through the mouth of a character who doesn’t necessarily know, but the Gardener doesn’t deny it) that all life on the planet is going to be wiped out if the Garden persists, and in fairness to the game, this pretty much reverses the moral calculus from the real world situation. In the real world, we may as well try to make agriculture work and save everyone because if we fail, we’re going to experience the kind of drastic population reduction necessary to return to hunter-gathering anyway, and in the Gunk, they may as well shut the Garden down and try to live off the land, because whatever percentage of their population they’re going to lose it will still be less than 100%. So if I take the game as a work of fiction, then none of what I’ve just written actually matters. But the game pretty clearly wants to be a defense of actual anarcho-primitivism. It draws a decent amount of attention to its thesis statement of “what’s so bad about wilderness?” and nobody, not even the practical-minded voice with an internet connection character, brings up the massive death toll. And it is a fairly common misconception that global warming is going to be a human extinction event (it’s not – killing the first few billion humans in the least habitable areas of the planet will reverse climate change long before the last few million humans in the most habitable areas have died).

The game itself is pretty fun and I didn’t hate it, but you can tell by its ubiquity in this post that its messaging really dominated my experience of it in the end.

Two Point Campus is a university management game in the general Sims style of bearing surface resemblence to the modern world, but then also there’s some robots and vampires dropped in anywhere it would make things more interesting. You set up lecture halls, libraries, major-specific rooms like science labs, kitchens, and jousting grounds, and things to keep student needs satisfied like dorms, bathrooms, cafeterias and vending machines, and student lounges that host rock concerts.

When I picked it up I said that I was disappointed that it wasn’t a magic school manager rather than a regular one, but Two Point Campus is almost a magic school manager. You can teach wizard classes and there’s no strong incentive to expand into a wide variety of different classes rather than doubling down on just one or two, so you can, if you like, have every student at your school be a wizardry major and there’s even a campaign mission that encourages this. There’s even two separate wizard-related courses, regular Wizardry and the Dark Arts. It’s still pretty barebones compard to what I would hope for from a full-fledged wizard academy game, but much more than what I expected from a university game.

Two Point Campus also has majors like Funny Business, Archaeology, and Spy School, so in addition to a regular university and Hogwarts, you can also run a clown college, Indiana Jones’ school, and…was there ever a secret agent high school themed YA book series or TV show or something? I feel like that happened at some point, but the closest thing I can think of is Alex Rider, who is a teenage James Bond-style operative but I don’t think he ever went to a special spy school. Anyway, you unlock different majors with points you get from leveling up your campus, which you do by buying things and hiring people and generally playing the game successfully. The amount of points for unlocking majors goes up linearly, but the amount of effort required to get them goes up exponentially, so there’s no hard cap (that I’ve reached, at least) for how many different courses you can offer, but the more you have, the harder it is to get more still. Instead of getting new majors, you can instead upgrade the ones you have, increasing the number of students who attend for that major and maybe also improving their grades or something, I’m really not sure. The cost on improving majors goes up with each level of the major, so you’re encouraged to diversify at least a bit, but only in marathon mega-schools will you ever reach a point where it feels like the game is trying to drag you into a major you don’t want to support.

This is almost exactly the kind of thing I was talking about with Spacebase Startopia, although only almost because there’s still only one kind of university to run mechanically. Some of the majors do have slightly more complex room requirements than others, the simplest ones requiring only a lecture hall while the most complex require multiple different laboratories and are high enough difficulty to tax your mastery of things like libraries and private tutoring rooms, which increase a student’s grade, something which is less necessary on easier courses and more necessary on harder ones. There aren’t really different builds for different kinds of university, though, some of them are just harder than others. Still, you can at least have the appearance of different universities, and the difference in difficulty isn’t nothing.

The game also has a sense of humor that is, in stark contrast to Spacebase Startopia, present. It’s not hilarious or anything, but it’s actually doing the sardonic British wit thing that Kalypso so desperately wishes it could do. Honestly, the broad theme of Two Point Studios so far is that they’re like if Kalypso were actually good at all the things they attempt. They should make Two Point Dungeon just to really rub it in.