Nogamara

Played some non-MMO games this week. Shocking, I know.

First up is Ironcast, which I found in my Epic Games library. (Still gonna link to Steam as well). It’s basically a match-3 but you’re in a Victorian Steampunk Mech and the match-3 is only to grab resources (Ammo, Energy, Coolant, Repair) – you have only 3 tries to match per round, and mostly you need to survive and shoot the enemy. Or collect X crates on the field. Or salvage. And if you die you keep your level, but not your unlocks. Oh, and you can upgrade your mech with abilities and better weapons etc. It’s really fun and I played for a few hours.

Then there’s The World Next Door (Steam) which also seems to be a match-3 but kinda realtime. The story seems a bit thin, but I was excited to try this – unfortunately I can’t play it without a controller. When you enter battle you move with the arrow keys and when over a match, you press C to attack the closest enemy with that match. This would be fine, but if you need to swap tiles you need to stand on it, press X, move to the target, press X again and then C to attack. I gave up in the second fight because I find this impossible to do with the keyboard alone, and I don’t have a controller.

But I did find another gem here, Death Coming (Steam). Here you play the Grim Reaper’s pixelated assistant and you need kill (nearly) all NPCs on the map by causing accidents. This is so fun!

And it reminded me of The Incredible Machine, a 1993 DOS game I loved. I found a site where you can play it in the browser, and then I also spent a while on that.

As I wrote in 2020, I’m not big on any of these things:

• being hyped up for future games
• buying a lot of games
• actually playing the games I own

But for some reason right now I’m a little obsessed (compared to my usual mood) with looking for other games to play and also what’s coming up this year. And what I missed in 2021. It’s weird!

So I’ve been scouring YouTube for some of these “lists” videos. Upcoming, best of 2021, overall or per genre and so on. And I actually went through my whole Epic Games library of 99% “got this game for free” list and wrote down some notes and watched the trailer, and I even identified a few I want to play, and most surprusingly, actually have played one for a while.

I am not sure where this comes from, maybe it’s coincidence or maybe I’m not 100% enthusiastic about leveling all the jobs in FFXIV atm. Which in no way means I am drifting away, surprisingly – it means I’m doing my roulettes every day (or some of them), I am raiding Savage – but I don’t feel like spending my whole evening on FFXIV. Maybe it is actually true that this game values your time a lot more than WoW does. There’s always something to do in WoW, but here I can more easily feel “done for the day”.

Anyway, here’s a list (in no particular order) of upcoming games I am at least moderately interested in:

• Weird West, Adventure/RPG, March 2022, on Steam
• Two Point Campus, May 2022, Simulation, on Steam
• Forspoken, May 2022, ARPG, on Steam – 80 EUR, WTF?
• Anvil Saga, RPG?, 2022, Demo on Steam
• Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, FPS, 2022?, on Steam
• Nightingale, Survival?, 2022? Trailer on YouTube

Do these twothree even launch on PC?

• Redfall, Summer 2022, FPS, Trailer on YouTube, some gameplay (Xbox Series S?)
• Triangle Strategy, 2022? Trailer on YouTube (Switch?)
• Horizon: Forbidden West, 2022?, Gameplay Demo on YouTube (PlayStation?)

Now the ones that look interesting but have already launched:

• Before We Leave, Builder, May 2021, on Steam
• Wildermyth, June 2021, RPG, on Steam
• Timberborn, Strategy/Builder September 2021, on Steam
• Gamedec, RPG, September 2021, on Steam
• Dorfromantik, Builder, EA 2021, on Steam

And then there are some “big” upcoming releases and to my non-surprise none of these sound in any way interesting to me, no matter how highly anticipated or awesome they are supposed to be:

• Elden Ring
• God of War
• Rainbox Six
• Pokémon Legends
• Sifu
• Total War
• that Warhammer 40k FPS
• Gran Turismo
• STALKER 2
• Kirby
• Mario and Rabbids
• Sonic

Some notable mentions:

• Ratchet and Clank – that upcoming title looks a bit meh, but I’ve always wanted to play the older titles
• Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2 – not really interested, but maybe I should look at the first one?

Finally, because this post isn’t long enough already, some games I own and have yet to play:

• Transistor
• ARK: Survival Evolved
• Bad North
• Cities: Skylines
• For the King
• Frostpunk
• Moving Out
• Neon Abyss
• Pathway
• Salt and Sanctuary
• Surviving Mars
• The Messenger
• Totally Reliable Delivery Service
• Prison Architect

I know I’m late to the party but this week I played Among Us for the first time. I’d actually gotten it via Epic at some point, so no 3 EUR for the developers, boo.

It’s a fun game, we played with 7-12 people, and I already knew around half of them.

My main gripe is that it doesn’t seem particular beginner friendly, or maybe I’m just not the right audience. Sure, I knew the premise and I grasped the basic game play.

But two important things – first I hadn’t already developed a sense of how a dead body looks (I was moving fast to do my tasks) and it happened twice that I arrived at a body at the same time as someone else and clicked it (like you click your tasks) and in that exact moment the other person had reported. So I learned “click to report”, which is wrong though. The second thing is the loud alarm. No one told me and I did not notice you had to run to a certain room and do something, the others just did it and the alarm went away. It might have even been in the short ” how to play intro” you can click through, but it’s like 5 screenshots and as exciting as a powerpoint presentation. So I managed to get through like 3h of game play without noticing some key elements, which is a bit bad. I think we would have noticed with a smaller group, but because there are SO few rules I am still a bit puzzled.

I liked that you can just choose a name per game and also that the cosmetic options are good enough for starting out.

Anyway, it’s fun and I’ll join if they play again.