Well, Kurosawa did become famous in the 16th century for shooting his samurai documentaries in B&W, right?
I’m still very early in Norco but so far it’s been about 95% story/mood and 5% puzzles, so I’m definitely getting Kentucky Route Zero vibes more than anything else.
It’s definitely a narrative game, but at the very least, I was expecting a purely narrative experience with maybe choosing what order to do things in, but there are more gamey sequences than that, and there are obstacles and dependencies. Kentucky Route Zero had gameplay in a sense, but it was almost all bespoke to a particular moment and often subverting your ability to understand and interact with the systems. Norco feels slightly more conventional than that (if still very light-weight in the gameplay department), which was a surprise to me.
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.
Therlun
6042
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.
DoubleG
6044
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.
orald
6048
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.
Rebelstar was an absolute classic tactical combat game, really the origin of the X-Com formula.
It might not look too flash these days, but the tactical gameplay was there and had that awesome addictive quality. It was two-player, I played it for years with my dad, and occasionally with myself because there was enough randomness in it for that to work. It was the origin of the 90% hit chance going awry, except in Reberstar the laser beam would sometimes go off at comedy angles and you’d end up hitting a gas tank and obliterating your three guys hiding behind it.
There was an earlier game called Rebelstar Raiders which Rebelstar iterated upon, but the entire map was on screen, the units were tiny, and it was more like playing a board game.
I never had that box art though, it was originally avaiable by mail order and that’s where I got my little audio cassette. Julian released an expansion with a new map, and you had to mail order that as well. Later Firebird released it on their budget label, with the Chippendales.
Oh yeah, looking forward to ArchRebel. I’ve always enjoyed that aesthetic.
I’ll read the post in detail later, but this just jumped at me: this is @moss_icon !
Finally, someone else has noticed. :)
