What do you mean?
Yes, my post is a few days late. Normally I try to post on Monday or Tuesday.
Wallet threat level this week is … orange maybe? I personally had never heard of Swordship until today, but then I skimmed the “Essential” rating Eurogamer review, and it sounds exactly like the kind of game I would want to play. Plus a new Dragon Quest spinoff? That’s gotta be a wallet threat for some, right? Also, I’ve been hearing about Dwarf Fortress for so freakin’ long without knowing what the heck it is exactly. But it comes out this week? Wow. Togges looks like a nice charming 3d puzzle platformer. Alaskan Truck Simulator, I’m sure, will call out to a lot of people here. And Portal RTX might get us to go back to an old classic.
Monday (12/5/22):
- Swordship (PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch)
- Paper Cut Mansion (PS4, Switch)
- Terror of Hemasaurus (PS5, PS4)
Tuesday (12/6/22):
- Impaler (PC)
- Divine Knockout (PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S)
- Knights of Honor 2: Sovereign (PC)
- Kynseed (PC)
- Kukoos: Lost Pets (PC, PS4, Switch)
- Hello Neighbor 2 (PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC)
- Dwarf Fortress (PC)
- Sky: Children of the Light (PS4, PS5)
- Back 4 Blood: River of Blood DLC (PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S)
- Firefighting Simulator - The Squad (PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S)
- Hindsight (PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S)
- Sunshine Shuffle (PC)
Wednesday (12/7/22):
- Ixion (PC)
- Togges (PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch)
- Zombie Cure Lab (PC)
- Alaskan Truck Simulator (PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S)
- Hubris (PC VR)
- Witch On The Holy Night (PS4, Switch)
Thursday (12/8/22):
- NecroBouncer (PC)
- The Rumble Fish 2 (PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch)
- Chained Echoes (PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch)
- Portal with RTX (PC)
- Crossfire: Legion (PC)
Friday (12/9/22):
- Dragon Quest Treasures (Switch)
- Adventure Academia: The Fractured Continent (PS4, Switch)
- Choo-Choo Charles (PC)
- Jitsu Squad (PS5, PS4, Switch)
Here’s the Togges trailer I saw.
And here’s the Swordship trailer.
And here’s the Essential Swordship review from Eurogamer.
And here’s Dwarf Fortress. Very intriguing. Some kind of mine simulator?
If you know RimWorld, it’s like that but far deeper and with a Z-axis.
*or rather, RimWorld is like DF. :)
Witch on the Holy Night is an extreme wallet threat for me. It’s the first time a visual novel from TYPE-MOON (Fate/stay night, Tsukihime) has received an official English release, and it’s the only one that doesn’t have a comprehensive English fan translation already in some form.
This had a really fun demo back over the summer I think it was, when they put out a bunch of different demos for just a limited period. This one is kind of an updated Rampage.
Woah, I totally forgot about this. Huge wallet threat for me.
Though I’ll probably wait for the console version, so maybe not yet.
Oh crap, totally overlooked that! Yeah I’d rather play on console but I’ll probably support the dev with a Steam buy, try it out.
Swordship is GREAT. (Got to try thanks to IGF judging.) Super-juicy, feels incredibly fast, and it’s fun to make baddies blow up other baddies.
Hah - I figured out today what was wrong and why I reacted to your post. Its because you’ve written the dates backwards! 😂
Um…
I thought he was being ironic, acting as if not knowing it…
Alaskan Truck Simulator will not release on the 7th. It got delayed and the new release date is yet TBD.
As for me, Dwarf Fortress is a very real wallet threat. I’m also interested in Ixion and Knights of Honor 2: Sovereign - the former because it gives me “serious Startopia” vibes, the second because Knights of Honor was a pretty good and pretty overlooked game back in the day, and I’m curious to see what this “sequel” plays like.
I’m pulling a rhamorim this week, as I’m beyond the wallet threat threshold, having preordered my second game of the year, and in Lord knows how many years, in that Night of the Holy Witch or something. It’s not a game though.
I have zero faith in the English translation, as the author loves to make mistakes on purpose in other languages in his erudit writings, and the translation I have been told about so far have all either exposed the lack of culture of the ones working them, or a simple lack of understanding of the motives of the author. Learn foreign languages: it’s worth it!
I’ll grab Dorf Fortress because, after UnReal World and Approaching Infinity, I can’t resist my old favourite games showing up on Steam.
SCS is really generous if they are not striking down with lawyers on this one, as it not only copies the title and presentation of their games, but even imply in their presentation they are part of the series and copy their logo.
I was interested in Ixion because of the “space opera” part. I don’t really like Startopia all that much, but this one seems to imply some kind of story along with its space ship base building, right?
I’m also slightly interested in Dwarf Fortress if this new version is easy to learn or something. I’ve always heard of Dwarf Fortress as an ascii graphics game that’s too complicated to learn. So they finally got rid of the ascii graphics, maybe they got rid of the hard-to-learn part too?
So, a visual novel’s most important aspect must be its story, right? What’s the story setup in Witch on the Holy Night? (I’ve never played a visual novel, unless the little stories in Lost Odyssey count, but those were excellent, I loved them and have always been curious about the genre since, but not enough to actually jump in).
It’s about the main character, Aoko Aozaki, as a high school student and mage in training in the 1980s, and tells the story of how she eventually comes to be able to use the Fifth Magic. (“Magic” is distinguished in TYPE-MOON’s settings from “Magecraft” - while “Magecraft” is the realm of traditional mages and is the skill of using supernatural ability to perform things that are technically possible via science, “Magic” is much rarer and can be considered as performing true miracles.)
Note that this isn’t really a spoiler as such - TYPE-MOON’s settings are largely connected to each other in some way, and long before the original version of Witch on the Holy Night was released back in 2012, Aoko had already appeared in the present day in Tsukihime, as the main character’s mentor, then as a playable character in the Melty Blood series of fighting games (itself a spinoff of Tsukihime). Her older sister, Touko, also appears in Witch on the Holy Night, but before that, she was a major character in Kara no Kyoukai, a light novel series that predates TYPE-MOON’s visual novels and that later got adapted into a series of anime movies.
EDIT: Oh, and with all this said: you don’t really need to be familiar with any of those other stories to play Witch on the Holy Night - it’s ultimately one of those “you might miss out on a couple of minor story cues if you aren’t already familiar with these characters from elsewhere” things, and it’s set years before any of those other works anyway. That said, I don’t know if it’d be a good starting point for the genre, if only because it’s a $40 console game and there are various extremely good $10-or-less VNs on PC that have absolutely zero expectation of you already knowing anything about an existing multiverse and its various realized concepts when you start.
To me, the most important part is the writing, which is why i have so little tolerance to the genre. I only like Kinoko Nasu’s works, pretty much.
I have zero idea what the story or the game is about, but Nasu’s’’ writings almost always take place in modern Japan and are fantastic novels, where the surnarural element just erupts into the daily life of the characters.
His writing style is often found pedantic in Japan for reasons I won’t bore you with, but he has got a very unique way of building narration around the name of the characters, and how they echo with other words used recurrently in the prose. This makes reading the novels over and over enriching themselves each time, which is mesmerizing in its own way, but also make his writing especially fitting to the visual novel medium.
as an example: The japanese title of the game is very benign, but given the world building of the author, it is very, very exciting if you’re familiar with the author’s works.