Dyson Sphere?
Mars Horizons
It is Mars Horizons!
Had this in my backlog for awhile and just got around to really digging in. And it’s GREAT. I had played an early demo last year, I think, and liked its approach a lot, but they have done a great job polishing it since then. For me, it hits a really nice sweet spot between being a gritty realistic simulator and being a slick game with the theme stuck on it. It smartly abstracts the challenges of building and launching spacecraft into game mechanics, and makes it all accessible and manageable. Best space program simulator since 1985’s Project Space Station (and its CGA graphics)!
Nice job, @tfernando! Your turn!
Never heard of that one but it looks pretty cool. One of the nice side benefits of this thread is a steady stream of interesting looking games I was totally unaware of.
Mars Horizon is the spiritual successor to Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space. I don’t know if the dev teams are connected at all, but it’s really good. I should have recognized it from two screens back, just from the little DB resource symbol, but I’ve been on my phone instead of computer for the last couple days. :)
I’ll have a new screen up tommorrow.
There was a more direct successor not too long ago–Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Simulator. As the name tells you, it’s trying to me a lot more of a hard core sim. I like Mars Horizon’s approach a lot better.
Me too. That game is right up my street.
If only we had two separate threads about indie games that looked interesting and also, once played, were interesting!
Truly we live in an age of wonders!
That looks quite intriguing. The iconography makes it look boardgame-y?
It sort of is. When you are executing a mission, your success is based on generating a certain number of resources in a certain number of turns. And you’re given a set of commands to use to do so, each one exchanging X resources for Y. You queue up the commands and then it rolls against your module’s reliability rating–a high or low roll can result in you losing some of the resources you were expecting to get, or earning extra.
There are definitely some board games that do something similar with little wooden cube resources. What’s cool here is how the goals and formulas change for different types of missions, and they work in new mechanics like heat (which you can’t get too much of) or thrust (which diminishes automatically each turn).
I remember it being a little tighter in the demo version, and harder to predictably succeed. They’ve definitely made it more forgiving, so I rarely fail, but there’s also a kind of stretch goal you can try to hit for even better results, and that is harder.
Deep rock galactic
Warhammer Vermintide
Stray?
@Lamalo It is Stray! I was hoping that the main character orange cat would be memorable enough that showing his friends from the first chapter would be enough of a misdirection. But there are definitely a lot of pipes and valves in the scenery of the game.
I like the mechanics of the game, but have only made it past the first robot city. I think the story was badly focused-- I don’t care about the drone, the humans that caused the catastrophe, or the robots who are now living in the city, I just want to bring the cat back to his buddies, and most of what the game has me doing hasn’t felt like it’s advancing that.
I only played the game around half an hour, but that half an hour was full of pipes.
Here’s the new frame:
Splendor?
Bejewelled?