Lol! That was a fun 5 minutes. Nice find.
Giant update for Raft and it has left early access! One of my favorite water-based survival games outside of Subnautica.
Oh, interesting. I’m not normally a survival game person but this has been on my radar for a while. Might have to wait until I dip back into Grounded to see how that turned out.
RAFT starts out so strong, but it feels like the developers didn’t really know what to do with the game after a certain point. It starts off as a nice, relaxing building game but sort of veers off.
The combat is horrible, and I am not a fan of platforming puzzles. That said, the co-op is good and if one treats it as a more casual experience, it is fine.
Circadian Dice has a ton of QoL issues, some of them pretty stupid, but it seems really solid in other ways. RECOMMENDED. BIYF!
… biyf?
Buy It You Friendly people
Did you just make that up? If so, that’s very good. I’m using that. If it’s already a thing, then maybe not.
Oh, it was already a thing (on Qt3), coined by the inimitable @BrianRubin. Well, the saying was. The acronym may have been first seen in my post. For when typing out “Buy it, you fucks!” is too arduous.
Edit: Oh, JoshL bowdlerized it by the way. It’s Buy It, You Fucks
Could also be “Buy It, You Folks!”
BUY IT YOU FREAKS
There. You’re welcome.
So for posterity, and because this thread was locked when I posted my impressions up on the other indie games thread, I’m collecting those thoughts up here and adding a few more:
Anyway it took me about 20 hours in total to beat all levels on all difficulties and the hardest difficulty (Ecstatic) is intense. TLDR: anyone who’s a fan of bite-sized play session arcade shoot 'em ups (with a twist) should absolutely check this gem out. Some post-game general thoughts:
I love the horizontal and vertical axes on the crosshair so it’s super easy to find your pointer. I love the dash ability and how it gets stronger with each successive lock-on (great with fangs upgraded for an aggressive dash bite). The dash is a really smart way of offsetting standing still to target enemies and feels great. I love the glowing abdomen when a bullet is nearby (it also shows what part of your spider is the bit to watch out for). I love the clarity of the bullets to avoid. The sound and visual cues on enemies like the mage flying or the sniper zaps, and of course the pick-up barks (‘heat sink!’ ‘freeze!’) go so far in helping you prioritise targets. I love the colour grading on pick-ups and how they slowly gravitate towards you. I love the craters in the background. I love how the different enemies counteract different upgrade weightings. I’m amazed how ‘drill’ expanding the arena makes it feel like a very different experience: zero drill is a dogfight in a cupboard whereas max drill feels like outer space bullet hell. Freez is so satisfying, particularly with the audio slowing down (the explosions sound so crunchy). The music and visuals are, of course, fantastic. I initially found that the click-hold movement fatigued my hand but I think that muscle built up fast and I quickly forgot about it! The mouse movement and aiming is a revelation though and I love the friction between the two. The result is an incredibly fluid almost gestural system that made me feel like a bullet hell wizard. So good. My only real criticism is the tooltip roll overs in-game can obscure the action when you’ve upgraded drill. I feel like that should be in the pause menu or tutorial only. Also the spider is rad and crawls around beautifully.
That does look good. I hope it comes to consoles.
I should do a search somehow to find out if I already own it as part of a couple of bundles I bought on Itch.
I just did a quick search and it appears that The Wratch’s Den and Antecrypt are the only Punkcake games in the itch bundles, specifically the Ukraine and Abortion Funds bundles. Given how good Ecstatic is, I’m keen to know what their other shooters are like now.
A core part of Ecstatic is the mouse-only aiming and movement, and specifically the tension between the two, that is: move or aim. Maybe it could work on a controller but I think some of the snappy aiming and fluidity would be lost.
This is a pretty good video covering the game:
Honey, I Joined A Cult emerges from the cocoon of EA today. I’ve been checking it out sporadically since grabbing it last year, and it’s a good little builder/business simulator in the vein of Prison Architect. Looking forward to diving into 1.0
BIYF is Frecnh for cockslapping, by the way.