This looks sorta fun, wishlisted for now.
Big update today for Legend Bowl that adds a lot of the ongoing franchise type elements into the game itself, so you don’t have to use the third party tools any more.
Stacklands is a card driven city builder.
It is controlled similar to Cultist Simulator, via placing cards, different decks and countdown timers. There is combat against animals and bosses.
I haven’t tried the game as I personally deeply hated that design in Cultist Simulator, but if you do like the control mechanic and want to see it in a simple city building frame this might be worth a look.
Aah, this is the latest Sokpop game! Their games rarely end up being long-term plays, just because of how they’re made–Sokpop releases a game a month–but one of the guys there does a lot of strategy/building games and I almost always find them interesting to noodle with for a few hours. And of all the Sokpop games, they tend to be the ones that can have a bit more legs than most. Think I’ll have to grab this (on itch.io, of course–all the $ goes to the devs AND you get a Steam key!).
Speaking of Cultist Simulator, I haven’t played in a long time, but I noticed some patch notes recently on Steam that indicated the game code got deeply refactored and it was really not received well by players (something interface-related), and the developer had to scramble to reconstruct some of the lost functionality.
Checked the recent reviews and saw a negative from somebody who had a Cultist Simulator tattoo. After the developer was outed as a sex pest, I felt bad for having bought a poster – I can’t imagine how I’d feel with a damn tattoo.
Hmm, how to separate the art from the artist and the art from my body…
Hey, Stacklands is real good! There’s clearly an end to it, so it’s not going to challenge your Elden Ring obsession for longevity, but it has lots of fun little interactions and a ladder to climb while you’re juggling more and more elements.
It’s mostly about combining the right cards into stacks that make new cards and then managing those cards as resources that either feed your villagers (of which you can make more by assigning two of them to a house to make a baby) or can be sold for gold to buy new booster packs of random cards to supplement what’s already in your playfield.
But there’s also animals and monsters that show up as cards that stomp around that playfield making a mess of things and potentially killing your people. And there’s cards that show up and explain a card combo you might not have guessed yet. (Once you’ve gotten one of those, the recipe is permanently in your “Ideas” list, even for future games.)
It has a lot of the fun interactions of Cultist Simulator, but since it’s not dedicated to the idea of “occultism,” it’s much more transparent about what you can do and how you can advance. Pretty neat, though definitely a small game. (Hence the small price.)
I’ve been enjoying Forward: Escape the Fold when I have a few odd minutes. Not particularly challenging, at least at the standard level of difficulty, but lots of twists and interesting unlocks so that it isn’t too repetitive.
Great way to spend a half hour.
Heavily influenced by Julian Gollop’s Rebelstar which I had not heard of but came out before X-COM. A demo will be available prior to the initial release.
Some game play.
Damn, yet another CPC game I never heard about :O
The Chippendale’s space marines. They’re serving an under-recognized demographic, no doubt.
Looking at the screenshots, you needed that box art to know that it was a scifi game about war.
It’s not about goitres?
Wow, this sounds even more sexy to older me!
ding ding ding! well it’s really Leeder Krenon but yeah.
when i was very young i used to look at this artwork (they used it for advertising the game in magazines) a lot and wonder what the game would be like, it fascinated me.
yeah they uh, kind of went with a different vibe with Rebelstar.
Insurmountable, a mountainclimbing… roguelike (sic) is free this week on EGS.
I had never heard of it, and I love mountainclimbing games (well, all the five of them released in the past 30 years).
Sadly, the mountain part feels like a mere skin on standard semi-hardcore roguelike tropes. The mountain feels like the board of a board game, with floating icons, hexes and unrealistic sights everywhere. But the really aggravating part for me has been the interface.
It started with empty text boxes placeholders for what must, obviously, be the event system of the game, which means narration, and I don’t like narration when I’m mountainclimbing, I’m normal!
But the game features a totally broken camera system that got stuck without hope of going around it all the time. The slight issue is that you can only interact with the board by clicking on it.
Now I know why I had never heard of it.
Maybe you’ll have better luck and the interface won’t make the game unplayable for you.
I had better luck with Insurmountable but watched Retromation and Splattercat’s videos first so knew what I was getting into.
Camera is … painful, but part of it seems to be an intentional replacement for “fog of war” - it seems to use also use that in addition to the lighting and weather effects to directly limit what you can see - it does mean that you might navigate to certain locations just to get better camera angles so you can see things and click on things. Kind of wish there was a first person mode? But also see that wouldn’t work with respect to clicking on hexes.
In the end, it’s a cute (relaxing?!) solitaire turn-based boardgame of keeping a bunch of resource meters from dropping off as you navigate through a hex grid, with a sprinkling of “choose your own adventure” mini events that happen. Also, I’m not a mountain climber at all haha so I have no idea if it’s remotely at all related.
Have you been playing with a controller? I didn’t try one, but with the mouse my camera got stuck (after it told me I could move it holding the V key, ironically!) behind a wall with no way to do anything but quit the three games I started successively.
I have litterally no idea what the game is like, beyond its look and this terrible repeatable fumble on my end. I guess I’ll check the video you kindly linked and save myself some frustration!