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Game Backlog Burner - Part 3

Posted 2020-04-22 Tags: gaming tildes game backlog burner

I've thought more on the games since my edits to last week's threads. This last week was a bit rough, and I spent more time in the evening playing video games than I should have. As a result, I have made it through my April goal, which was to play one game from each of the last 12 months of Humble Monthly Bundles. This was one of the best weeks - Evergarden, Soul Calibur VI, Truberbrook, and a couple of others.

Week 3

Evergarden November 2019

This is a beautiful puzzle game. that I would describe as a cross between the Witness and 2048. You tend a magical garden, combining plants to grow them, similar to how you combine numbers in 2048. Plants can have between 1 and 6 leaves, and combining two 6-leaf plants will allow you to harvest a puzzle piece at the end of the game, which you use to solve another type of tile puzzle. It is simple, beautiful, and enticing. I showed to my 9 year old and she played one game and beat my high score. I definitely recommend if you enjoy small, self contained puzzle games. 8/10

Soul Calibur VI December 2019

This is a fighting game, which is not really to my taste, but it's a pretty good fighting game. Instead of playing Story Mode, I started playing Mission mode - in this mode, you create a character and run through... a story. It should really be "story" mode. I found the dialog and story more engaging here than in the "Story" mode. Character creation and editing is addictive and entertaining. My current fighter is an 8 foot tall living statue that uses enormous zweihander swords to fight. I put a few more hours into it beyond my previous update, and I will play Mission mode through to completion. I definitely recommend this if you like this sort of game. 8/10

Book of Demons February 2020

This is a sort of rogue-like game that has a couple of sort of card mechanics and it's sort of on rails and sort of diablo-esque. The graphic style is very cool, very jagged and a bit stylized. There are a bunch of different monsters, and I think that there's a lot of good individual elements, but you probably noticed how "sort of" everything was. It felt disjointed, and I won't be returning to it. The cards don't make much sense - there's no reason for them to be cards - the rogue-like elements don't make sense when you're on a rail, and the game mechanics aren't that great, again because you're on a rail and can't move freely. The best thing about it is the janky art. I have uninstalled it and will not continue. 4/10

Truberbrook April 2020

I want to start by saying that I love Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango and Full Throttle. If you like those games, you'll like this game. It is pointy. It is clicky. The art direction is beautiful. The dialog is good. The characters are interesting. The story is cool. If you don't like the point and click genre, then you won't like this, but I dig them. Once I'm done with Soul Calibur, I will be going back to this: 7/10

Niffelheim March 2020

I specifically said I would opt for a non-viking based game, and yet here we are. Side note: for a while in university, my nickname was actually "Viking". Amusingly, none of the viking games that I installed and tried are the same genre - this is a 2D sidescrolling game that features crafting, gathering, combat, RPG-ish progression, diplomacy, quests... there's a lot packed in. The art is pretty cool, though I would not call it polished; there's an almost "paper cut out" quality to it that is endearing if not beautiful. I played for a few hours, and I'll come back to this at some point, but it's not got the same draw as some of the other on my list. 6/10

Bonus Games

Since I met my original goal, I played some other games as well.

A Short Hike

I installed this and got to the peak. This game is very relaxing and happy. I smiled most of the time that I played it. It brought delight into an otherwise not particularly delightful week. The graphics are cute, but I had to scale down the window a lot so I didn't feel queasy while playing, which is a first for me - the pixelation, which is intended, was pretty rough at 4k. I played a bit even after reaching the end of the hike, and by that I mean that despite reaching the 'end' I came back the next day and did some more exploring. I will probably do so again. 9/10

Opus Magnum April 2020

This is a cute little puzzle game. You are an alchemist, and you are making machines that have a particular input and create a particular output. I found it somewhat similar to Human Resource Machine, but I liked HRM better. The character that you play as seemed insufferable to me, which is a very minor nitpick, but it was enough to put a bad taste in my mouth. I liked having a histogram of how other people performed, but I felt like it was a bit of a whip to continue playing, which I fought against. The puzzle aspects are cool, though. 6/10

The Deadly Tower of Monsters

I wouldn't typically say this, but this game is an absolute gas! The concept is that the game is a cheesy sci-fi movie, and there's a constant voice over telling you how they did the things that you're doing in the game, and why. The controls are fine, the graphics are okay, the story is whatever, but what a concept! 7/10

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