I am sure its been mentioned before in here, but Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist is just fantastic. Played through it 3 times just to get all the achievements. It was worth my time. Pretzels!
And I just realized we have 2 indie game threads! D:
This released, anyone get it ? It is 25% off right now.
@lordkosc - I’m interested but something tells me it will turn out to be more of a puzzle game than city builder. I’ll wait for impressions and gladly dive in if it turn out I was wrong.
I played it back in early access, and I’d say if the look of it appeals to you, you should consider grabbing it. It does have the feel of a one-man project, but it’s basically well done. Building vertically is challenging and takes planning!
I’ll try to check in with it again now that it’s released and maybe report back with more in-depth thoughts.
Well, lots of new stuff in the release version of Block’hood. There is a short campaign/tutorial, and a new set of systems for attracting people and animals to your “hood.” It’s definitely not a puzzle game. It is a building/resource management game with a focus on sustainability and balancing the input and output of dozens of resources/externalities. Houses making a lot of organic waste? You can build an algae farm that consumes it to make algae. Then put that in a bioincinerator to generate energy… aaaand pollution, so plant some of the right kind of trees. Besides resources and waste products, other commodities you balance are abstract things like community and sickness and education. When you get a lot or a little of certain things, it sets off events that can change the world, often negatively, causing decay in the blocks you build.
Trying to figure out an efficient way to build vertically is still a little funky. Given how hard it is to work with a three-dimensional grid, the interface is pretty decent, but sometimes a little obscure. Why can’t I build there? It just doesn’t let me and doesn’t explain.
I think the core of the game is sandboxy, looking to you to decide what kind of world you want to build. It can swing from nature preserve to commercial wonderland.
At $7.50 I may just give it a shot.
Has anyone been able to get into Beholder? I tried it out last night and while the atmosphere of it did a nice job, the actual game play was pretty weak for me. Unless it opens up later in the game, I found myself just trying to observe people I suspected of wrongdoing be either installing cameras in their apartment or peeking through the keyhole, searching their apartment when they left, and having conversations when I needed some info.
While the atmosphere is good, I didn’t find that it captured the oppressiveness of the situation as well as Papers Please. Also while the game play in Papers Please was also basic, I found Papers Please to feel more “like a game” and enjoyed trying to examine the peoples’ papers for pertinent information. I just found the observation mechanic in Beholder pretty boring.
I found it to be a bit like a cross between Papers Please and This War of Mine. It has the dystopian state and abuse of power themes from the former, while TWoM supplies looking after your family in a crushingly desperate situation.
Like TWoM, it’s aiming to ask how you will respond to the situation you find yourself in, with the gameplay mechanics as a backdrop to the story rather than vice versa. It’s unsurprising that the gameplay suffers in comparison to Papers Please.
Well, as far as I got anyway: it just got too depressing for me after a bit. Unlike TWoM, it didn’t feel as though there were any good outcomes possible.
I liked This War of Mine quite a bit. It had more interesting trade offs.
I am absolutely with you. I guess it would have been weird to have some freedom of choice and actions in a game about autoritarism, but it definitely hurt the game aspect of it.
The main problem was that the pacing was atrocious, and quickly turned me away from the game. Papers, please made me physically sick (for so many reasons, but that’s another matter), I had to stop playing it. Beholder simply made me bored: I had to play something else.
Anybody try this one yet:
:)
I see what you did there.
Nope , haven’t tried it , but its on my radar now!
Oh yeah, it’s hard, but fantastically fun.
For The King (currently in EA) just received a significant update (v1.1.0) that changes the core mechanic of the game (for the better, IMO):
This update is focused on giving players control. As with many features in our updates, we’ve been working on quality of life improvements. This one at it’s core takes away the feeling of being yanked along the questline, and instead throws you in the world you’re dying (sometimes literally lol) to explore and tells you to deal with problems as you see fit. From a development perspective, it gives us a great foundation from which to expand and add gameplay features in the future. Things like Free Adventure Mode couldn’t have really existed with the previous system because the quest line was baked in with the push mechanic. In addition, we can now support future potential features like say - variable main quest lines so you’re not always guaranteed the same story, or new random encounters that could raise or lower Chaos in unexpected ways.
It’s an excellent game by devs that listen to the community and are really passionate about their game. If it’s part of the Summer Sale, I’d highly recommend snagging it.
I bought For the King when it first went into EA but had to refund it because after I played a little bit it would consistently crash (several others had the same problem). I tried several different versions of NVidia drivers to try to get it to work but nada. I and others posted crash logs and info in the bugs section of their Steam forum but none of us could never get any comment at all back from the devs on what was wrong or if they were ever going to fix it. I finally reluctantly had to refund it before the time limit on Steam refunds expired. I suspect it was a Unity issue and to me it looked like the developer was brand new to Unity and just had no idea how to fix it. The crash logs said “can’t load missing asset” so it sure seemed fixable to me. I was very disappointed by their lack of responsiveness.
That all said, the game intrigues me and if it’s on the Steam sale later today I will probably give it another go to see if they’ve finally fixed the issue and I won’t need another refund.
I probably should have clarified that they’re very active on their Discord channel. Have you reported your issue there?
I’ve had this on my wish list for months. Watched quite a bit of gameplay. In the end, I figured this was one more in a long line of things that looked great but I wouldn’t end up playing much. So, how does it play differently with the new changes? Does it still have the time pressure?
They are quite active on the Steam forums and I got an initial response from them in my bug thread asking if I’d tried a few simple things to fix it (turning off various graphics settings). I said yes and that was the end of that. I kept asking if they’d found the issue or had an ETA to fix it but never got another response. So, overall they appear to be active but don’t appear to respond well to issues they have no answer for. I would have preferred they just say “we don’t know what’s going on there” so I could have just gone ahead and refunded it early. They seem like nice devs and are indeed passionate about their game (which is just the kind of game I love). They just seem to have a strange responsiveness blind spot.
The big update they just released removes the time pressure.
Huh, interesting.