Wishlisted, “Morrowind but weirder” seems like winning art direction to me!
Ah, the plight of the Mac-using gaming fan. The 1980’s (when there were lots of Mac games) are never coming back. When they slowed to a (always late, always expensive) trickle over the course of the 1990s, I’d had enough so I “went over to the Dark Side” in 1999.
A developer (I think Bob Saunders?) had explained to me why maintaining Mac builds of games was calling for troubles on Steam: there is some tighter and tighter as OS revision goes launching rights rules, and as a small game dev, the headache of having to tell users individually to go look for the game executable, right click it and launch it manually as to tell the OS to not block it wasn’t worth it — especially since a not launching game usually ends up with a thumbs down opinion and a refund, I am guessing. It’s really a shame.
Well… it does save me a lot of money.
Probably. I admit I went a little nuts back then, being in my late 30’s with a good job and being able to take advantage of the white hot PC gaming scene at the time, and places like GoGamer.com that would send you a second game for free with whatever game you’d ordered, and older games available for cheap via mail order, and used PC games also from Electronics Boutique.
Oh that looks interesting, thanks for the tip!
I still think about Northern Journey. That game had such a distinctive vision and atmosphere.
That looks pretty neat. Thanks!
Some of you might have played the free game Seedship.
link for the free browser game:
It has a small thread here as well.
A short “procedural narrative experience” about a cryo-sleep colony ship. You arrive at various planets and decide whether to colonize them or not. While travelling random events improve and degrade your ship.
The developer released Beyond the Chiron Gate as a greatly expanded implementation of the same idea, still mostly text based.
Annoyingly only available on itch.io for PC, and in the usual mobile stores:
You control an exploration ship with a small crew and traverse an unstable, newly discovered gate network.
The lineage from Seedship is very noticeable but the mechanical interactions are greatly expanded.
The whole experience still works on some level but also suffers due to the loss of simplicity. Events are more numerous and more elaborate but also more punishing and random. Your crew will get hurt a lot as you fail 30-50% chance rolls.
Surface level interaction with various extinct and alive alien civilizations at different tech levels is the game’s best part even though it quickly bumps against the boundaries of the design.
As a whole it still works as the aimed for “procedural narrative experience” and is quite unique. Its frustrations however make it less enjoyable than Seedship despite/because of the mechanical expansion.
I was just thinking about Seedship yesterday. Thanks for bringing this up. Could have easily missed it completely!
I am playing seedship now, unknowingly I just enslaved an entire planet!
Thanks for sharing this! I was just wondering why Seedship wasn’t spun out into a bigger game. I played this to the end and really liked it.
The thing that frustrated me with the original was how much was outside the player’s control, to the point that it was more of a toy than an actual game. There weren’t many meaningful decisions – you could pick the least bad option when the game gave you a pair of choices, but you couldn’t influence the dice rolls that gave you those choices.
Beyond the Chiron Gate is all about risk management. There’s still a lot of randomness but it lets you mitigate that risk in a number of ways. Discovering how the risk economy works is much of the fun, but broadly speaking you can make yourself better at certain challenges, and you can find ways to avoid challenges you know will be difficult.
Most importantly, both your crew and ship have replenishable health so it’s usually safe to absorb a few failures. Much of the game’s tension comes from choosing whether to push your exhausted crew to make one more discovery before returning to base.
Definitely recommended if you liked Seedship.
Ubistore is having their summer sale too apparently. “Up to 80% off”.
An interesting little dice-based worker placement game. A bit ‘dry’, but there’s a demo available.
I looked at the demo. It’s no Axes & Acres :).
Sounds like I need to check out Axes and Acres!
This looks very cute - haven’t played the demo yet but one is out for kickstarter backers at the $1 level
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ronintrail/ronin-trail
Skillup played a few dozens demos from the Steamfest so here it’s a video about the most interesting ones
Mulling around the idea of picking up this John Wick-like top-down shooter during the Steam sale.
I like the DMC combo meter, and the animations/overall vibe seem really well put together. Still in early access, with an update focused around melee and close combat on the way.
Saw a playthrough of this on my Youtube feed. It’s a puzzler city builder in the same vein as Mini Metro. By the same (Ukranian) developers who are working on Ostriv. Just a couple off bucks.
Here’s the video I saw - the pieces you get are randomly generated so no real spoilers here.
