Shardpunk: Verminfall
Thanks, I’ve had fun with this. The systems work well together and the game moves along a good pace. I’m losing interest because the challenge isn’t keeping up with how strong my party is getting but at $10 I feel like I got my money’s worth. If they made the campaign shorter and harder I’d give it another go.
Also, I like how every level is just covered with little pixelated corpses. Things did not go well for this city.
I’m disappointed this has yet to happen!
I’ll have to think up some rules…
I played through the demo, very much liked the experience. Surprisingly rich tactical combat. It is being described, very well I think, as combining the combat of XCom within the resting and preparation of Darkest Dungeon, with a theme very similar to Vermintide. That sums it nicely I think. From those that have been playing longer, I read that the game maybe offers enough variety for an enjoyable 2-3 full runs, making for about 20 hours playtime. That feels like good value.
What about a single shot ridiculously long title replacement? “The game where a white explorer lost in a space-time challenged world jumps over reptiles and scorpions whilst collecting metal ingots, not preoccupied in the slightest about his survival.”
Homestead Arcana is a new game by local (to me) Colorado devs at Serenity Forge.
Be a farming witch! Or a witchy farmer! Either way, there is definitely a cat!
Also on Game Pass today! (Thanks, @Don_Quixote)
also hitting GP soon (now? I don’t remember the exact day).
Yes, added to Game Pass today. That does look interesting. I wish I had more time to try games like that.
It does look neat. But I think I’m more interested in the mech farming/building game- Lightyear Frontier? I think it was supposed to be June, but got delayed. Do I want to burn myself out on this sort of thing? Hmmm. Decisions.
It’s available on Gamepass right now, yes.
Aside from what I consider an unfortunate choice of name, I quite like Necesse.
Well this is unexpected! A brawler starring The Phantom (purple guy? fights crime in the 1930s?) is coming next year. All hand-drawn, looks fantastic.
I remember that dude! Really digging those visuals too.
Do you think it’ll be Steam Deck verified? :)
Edit: wow, everything on that page is a picture.
I’m not a huge side scroller fan, but I absolutely love that art style. not only in the play field, but the UI carries that classic comic style.
I played through the tutorial of Homestead Arcana on Game Pass yesterday. It could be a nice game, but I really don’t like the World-of-Warcraft or Warcaft 3 style art style. So I’ll be passing on that game, sadly.
I like the idea of it. It’s a nice intro movie, the idea of living on the edge of the Miasma, which should be spooky or scary, but with that art style I just can’t take any of it seriously enough to not roll my eyes at it. It’s like the writers were making one game, and the art director was making a different one.
Is this Indie? Isn’t the Phantom a major licence? Or am I just being influenced by watching too many cartoons as a kid?
Still, I’m a big Brawler fan so I’m glad to Know About it.
Well, first, (and with all the caveats about the slipperiness of “indie” as a term) I don’t think the IP is necessarily a factor in indie or not. To me, it’s about the developer and/or publisher and their size and prominence. King Features (a division of Hearst!) is the IP holder. Certainly not small potatoes in the media world, but I’m not aware of other work they’ve done in video games–certainly there’s been some.
Art of Play is the developer. They work primarily with IP, but the games are generally small. Not positive about the size of the team TBH.
Also, it’s 2D. Not saying there can’t be AAA 2D games–I wish there were!–but…
Also, also, no I wouldn’t call the Phantom a major license. How many people on the street know the Phantom??
I bet The Shadow knows…
I just played it for the first time and thought it was pretty good. It definitely didn’t feel puzzley. Mostly about balancing various resources to build from a selection of random projects, with the end goal being to make the planet more hospitable by raising the temperature, increasing the atmosphere and oxygen level, increasing rainfall by creating oceans. It felt like there were a lot of choices one could make to get to that endpoint.
It’s funny because there was a message in the beginning talking about how the player was expected to lose, and it’s OK because you learn from it and take what you know and try again…and it wasn’t difficult and I won. That did unlock more scenarios that say they are harder, so they may provide a good challenge. So @gingerturtle , I don’t think you need to worry that it only has one way to win.
Anyone else play much of this yet?
I played a lot of Terraformers. My recommendation from earlier still stands, excellent board-gamey resource management game.
I also stand by my judgement that it is much better than Terraforming Mars in every conceivable way.
Nominally that one is a group game with a solitaire mode, but practically you are playing a solitaire game either way.
The first scenarios in Terraformers do indeed start pretty easy. Your first few games you will probably win just as your terraforming is getting started.
Harder goals and higher “expectations” (a morale resource that works as the game’s clock) will increase the difficulty notably in the ascension levels though.
I also chatted with someone a couple of times while he played and streamed the game over discord for me, and it is interesting to see different approaches and evaluations. I really like space projects for instance and will as many space ports as I can. This allows me to offload a bunch of terraforming projects in that area. My friend really likes the city buildings (CO2, oxygen factories etc.) instead. I prefer fewer cities that I max out, he likes building as many cities as possible.
