I think this is small enough to be here. This game reminds me of “Overcooked” co-op gameplay with “Portal” homicidal AI humor. I’m this case it’s robot block homicide, so that’s a little more family friendly.
Local co-op only sadly, but it has unique puzzles for 1-4 players. Worth the Switch price of admission, although it’s on every platform.
PC game disappears, three years later iOS version emerges.
iOS version disappears, three years later, Steam version emerges.
What a mysterious game!
It’s on Game Pass for Xbox too.
Medieval Dynasty
I told @Nightgaunt I’d play this a bit today and report back on it. Here goes!
This game feels sort of as though Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Stardew Valley had a baby.
I played for a few hours. Though it’s in Early Access I did not encounter any bugs, and it felt like any performance issues were pretty much because of my machine! I’m using a Radeon RX 480 from 3+ years ago so I had to turn the graphics down from Ultra to High to Medium/Low but the game still looks great. According to my Radeon software panel the game was getting 30/35 ish FPS on my rig.
This is a survival/crafting game where the overarching goal is to found a settlement by recruiting followers, get a wife and produce some offspring. Your character ages so eventually you’ll die off and I guess if you don’t have an heir it’s game over.
You can craft the standard types of things as in axes, knives, spears, etc. You chop down trees and pick up branches and rocks (and eventually you can learn to make such advanced things as shovels and picks!). You get XP in a number of different areas by performing actions in those areas (harvesting, farming, building, etc). That XP gives you something called Technology Points you can use to buy blueprints for more items. You also are earning Dynasty Points which is a separate track used for establishing and expanding your settlement. I didn’t get a lot accomplished in any particular area.
The game seems to follow a pretty realistic ruleset. You can die from hunger or thirst if you ignore them too long. You can definitely get killed fighting things like wolves and boars.
There are quests, which show up as exclamation points on the map but not in the game world itself. The game uses a HUD compass like Skyrim to show you POIs and quests on the top of the screen. For instance, here’s what you see when you first come out of the woods at the start of the game:
The game is gorgeous.
Here’s a view from my front door at night. It gets really dark at night!
NPCs have their own schedules (though there is a lot of aimless walking also). For instance, I was trying to find one NPC to give him a stick, since he complained his hoe was broken. I could never find him until I figured he would be out in a field. Sure enough, in the middle of the day he was out working in a wheat field!
At night many of the NPCs gather around a fire in the village:
The building interface is pretty nicely done. When you plop down a structure, the foundation is created along with some ghost images of the walls. You then have to construct each wall and as you do so, it turns greener and greener as more ingredients are added to it. When you’ve used the last ingredient it pops into existence. One of the nicest parts about this interface is that you can ‘Edit’ the wall to change it from a blank wall to a doorway, or to a wall with a window. You can even change it from a wattle wall (sticks) to a wooden wall to a stone wall. So you have a lot of flexibility in how your dwelling looks. Plus, when you complete the house, it comes prepopulated with two beds, a cooking pot and a storage chest (don’t worry, there is still plenty of things to construct).
The passage of time is modeled as passage through the seasons of the year. Each season is 3 days of in-game time (which is maybe an hour of real time? Not sure). The game does a pretty good tension between you things and you also feeling like there isn’t quite enough time to do all the things you really want to do. I have stayed up “late” most days trying to cram in those last few things I wanted to accomplish (find a quest giver, cook some meat, etc).
It just came out in early access but I’ve seen a couple of hotfix patches so the dev is still working it (actually it seems they have put out three hotfix patches just today). Right now progression feels a bit slow but not sure if it’s due to the game or due to me not really knowing what I’m doing.
Thanks, Charlatan! Those landscapes really do look nice, don’t they?
I admit, this sounds pretty intriguing! And most importantly, the devs seem competent and organized. That’s a great sign.
I finished In Other Waters the other night and followed it up with A Study of Gliese 667Cc (an epilogue PDF further exploring the planet) and the whole thing was such a treat. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes the sound of a (mostly) text-driven Waking Mars by way of Subnautica. I found it be a beautifully evocative experience with an intriguing story and some very nicely written (and sketched) taxonomy entries for the different creatures of Gliese 667Cc. I’m also a big fan of the clean presentation–the sharp graphic design, typography, shifting colour schemes, icons, maps and UI. The soundtrack too is gorgeous. Amazed that this was mostly done by one guy.
I jumped onto this kickstarter because (like a lot of the recent kickstarters I’ve done) it was relatively inexpensive and the developer seemed to have a solid and unique vision. Meaning, I wasn’t necessarily expecting it to work, but I could afford to be hopeful.
Like you, I ended up playing it to the end and really enjoying it. I wanted a little more out of the part of the game that is about fiddling with an interface to figure it out (if you want some of that action, try Observation or a little game called Mu Cartographer!), but got a lot more out of the writing and world design than I expected. I think I said this somewhere else on the forums, but writing hard biology or geology and producing something both comprehensible and interesting seems really hard, but this game pulled that off. And the visual design was just perfect for what the game is.
I endorse this endorsement!
Yes, Mu Cartographer was in the itch bundle and Observation is on my list! Both sound intriguing.
In total agreement. The epilogue PDF was such a great way to cap the experience off and some of the paintings (again, done by Gareth Damian Martin) are very cool to see after imagining the creatures in your mind, then seeing the sketches, then finally seeing them in colour. There’s also a bunch of creatures that aren’t in the game too that are fascinating and very imaginative.
Related: I’ve just watched a sci-fi/horror/thriller that deals with microbial algae blooms and life in extreme conditions (ie. on the seafloor)–not something that happens every day and the movie even started with shots of hydrothermal vents! Weird coincidence.
Got two minutes? Fancy an atmospheric experience? Enjoy a good dark folk ballad? Maybe some Nick Cave or Bonnie Prince Billy?
You should go here and play this now! Literally two minutes, but it seems perfectly constructed, if you ask me.
Pretty cool. It did bring to mind quite a few murder ballads, even Hendrix’s Hey Joe, but mainly I guess Nirvana’s cover of Leadbelly’s ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’ which I’ve always been a big fan of. Nice recommendation.
On Game Pass, by the way. Definitely worth a look, though I can’t honestly say I understood it.
This is a fun, dumb little Battle Royale. You can join your friends via the social button at the top using an absurdly long friend code.
I turn 40 today and in addition to this caliente chess game I’m playing vs @Juan_Raigada I shall go a few rounds in Crypt of the Necrodancer
I used to dream of Starflight! Starflight made me buy my first IBM compatible PC. After owning a Atari 4800 and a C64 my cousin conned me into buying his Tandy 1000ex after I played Starflight on it all weekend. Tandy, What a POS but man o Man I had Starflight so who cares!
Happy Bday! Have fun storming the Crypt.
What a coincidence. I have a shirt that turned 40 today as well.
Happy birthday
You could have just bought Starflight for your C64 though right? I mean, that’s what I did.
The C64 did get Starflight? Man, so unfair…
The Tandy 1000 is my dream computer: an Amstrad CPC with the library of an IBM PC, so you take that back, sir :O
Bah, like 3 years later once it was ported. I did get a Genesis version eventually though.
