What digital games are you playing?

[Jubal]

I played through a little Brazilian game called Sky Caravan today. It markets itself as an RPG but is really more of a visual novel/choose your own adventure (and it's not 110% clear how different the possible endings can really be). Despite the fact I'd have preferred a more choice-meaningful game and something with more elements beyond the multiple choice, I would absolutely recommend Sky Caravan. Why? Because being in a Brazil inspired Sci Fi world where you do weird transport missions for a capybara to pay off a mysterious loan shark is really good fun.

That's basically the pitch of it: there's something enormously refreshing about being in a SF setting that's so very Latin-America-as-default. The characters are generally well written and I enjoyed the crew dynamics, and the different bits of the setting were well explored in ways that told you what you needed to know without infodumping, which is often a difficult skill for game writers to master but something these guys really had down. It probably doesn't bear a lot of replay value, but I got it on a 75% off sale which is absolutely madly good value for money, 2.5 euros for about 2.5 hours of well written game story is something not to be sniffed at.

[Jubal]

So, in bad need of some comfort material this week, I opted for Melody of Moominvalley, a game where you are Snufkin and play instruments at birds and pull up officious signage, which is very much life goals from my perspective.

It's not a super complicated game, I got most of the achievements on a single run-through, at the start it's fairly linear and there aren't a lot of side-quests. I'd have liked it to keep the world a bit more open and have a few more side-quest stories in there, and/or at least follow one or two of the side-quests up at later points in the game. It tends to stick to its main narrative. That said, it's probably designed to include slightly younger players etc.

Everything else about the game is fantastic. The art is beautiful, and it manages to nail The Vibes which are some of the most important parts of Tove Jansson's work. The plot develops relatively linearly but it's nice having the characters you're fond of playing their parts in it, and they're all very effectively written. Little My is as funny as she should be, Moomin plays a good key role at the end: I'd have liked to see a bit more of Moominmamma and the Snork Maiden, but that's just a "this was good, I'd like more of it" ask.

I also came across a little video essay about it online which I thought made some good points about how it reflects Jansson's work. The core thing of finding inspiration in nature and using that to better connect with and engage with the natural world is something I think was captured especially well.

Some screenshots below

[The Seamstress]

Oh, this looks adorable. Maybe I should finally go and read the Moomin books in the near future.


Don't know if it really counts as a game, but I've been playing with this thing I saw on Mastodon:
https://dennisfriedl.de/programme/alienae_litterae

Basically "improve your historical fonts reading skill" (German, English, or Latin) in Tetris-style. Kinda addictive. Though I don't know what's up with the Leaderboards, it's always the same names from 2021 or so, and mine never shows up even when I break records...

[Rob_Haines]

I went back to Hardspace: Shipbreaker this week, after a while away, and it's still an incredible game.

It's essentially breaking down old starships in zero-g, with a grapple beam and a laser cutter. The ships start off as relatively simple shuttles where you just have to cut a handful of points and drag the passenger seats into the trash, and rapidly escalates into vast tankers with flammable canisters and decaying nuclear reactors that need to be safely - and rapidly - disposed of once they start melting down.

It really hits that sweet spot of learning a repetitive, hands-on task, and falling into that meditative state of doing something that you've become good at, while knowing that screwing up that task could have mildly catastrophic consequences for your workday.

[Jubal]

Oh, this looks adorable. Maybe I should finally go and read the Moomin books in the near future.


Don't know if it really counts as a game, but I've been playing with this thing I saw on Mastodon:
https://dennisfriedl.de/programme/alienae_litterae

Basically "improve your historical fonts reading skill" (German, English, or Latin) in Tetris-style. Kinda addictive. Though I don't know what's up with the Leaderboards, it's always the same names from 2021 or so, and mine never shows up even when I break records...

Oh that's interesting! And definitely a game IMO. Also yes you absolutely should read the moomin books, they're... important sorts of books, I think. Gentle in the way children's literature should be, but with a certain melancholy that always spoke to me.


Meanwhile I have played through Adventures in Castle Heterodyne, the tie-in computer game for the webcomic Girl Genius which I've read for many years.

It's alright! It's a mix of dodge-and-roll combat and puzzle platforming as you go through the narrative of the section of the comics where Agatha claims Castle Heterodyne as her own. I liked the exploration, the puzzles were mostly fairly fun, I particularly liked the sort of hidden doors and paths through parts of the castle, that side of stuff was really nice. I also liked the extended post-game where you could go back and find stuff you missed and check out the vaults etc, though

There are some downsides - not least that it's kinda clunky in the combat, which isn't too much of a problem in regular rooms but two of the three boss fights took a lot of attempts. Also, some of the puzzle gameplay was not ideal: some of the things I had to look up were on the "I essentially tried this already but there's nothing to tell you that's the solution and you need to do it perfectly to even work that out."

The final fight part 1 (there's basically a run of two boss fights against the same character, the first with a giant plant complicating things and the second with robots in a library) was interesting to me because it felt narratively successful whilst being ludically the worst thing I faced all game. The opponent is a smoke knight, and it really felt like fighting a smoke knight! You're ducking the giant plant and she's dodging in, whizzing discuses at you, or stabbing you, then vanishing out the way again. There's only one of her attacks where she stays around long enough to get hit by a plant tentacle, which can stun her long enough for you to do damage, but you also need to line her up to get hit without getting hit yourself. The thing is, that isn't much fun. Most of the fight you are just trying to wait things out for a chance to line her up for the next round of attacks, and it takes ages. It feels like fighting a smoke knight, but making the player feel slow and clodhopping is tiring and kinda sucks.

To end on a more positive note, the other thing I really liked was the mini-clank sections: you get to shift focus to be one of the main character's little clockwork robots and explore the map from the view of this tiny foot-high thing, with lots of extra holes in the walls etc that are important for solving some puzzles (and you can unlock a drill and a fan later on). These for me were the most fun part of the whole game, I really enjoyed them and it was very cute. And you can collect little friends for the tiny clockwork robot. It's wonderful.

[Jubal]

This is just a copy of the review I left on steam for Arco, which I've just finished playing, but it says the things I wanted to say, which are in short that Arco is a magnificent game, and you, dear reader, should play it.

The fundamental reason is the storytelling: it combines the vibes and pulpiness of a vengeance western with a nuanced and very human look at colonisation and the price of resisting it. It also does it in a world that is not portrayed as a sort of suffering grimdark horror tale, but as somewhere with real joy and hope and silliness and therefore a much more real sense of pain when the story shows how fragile those things are. I laughed at a donkey braying at me when I petted it too much, and a little creature that wanted to make a shop but only accepted sticks as currency, and at digging for supplies and finding an anachronistic toaster... and, equally, it hit hard when major characters died or you saw a burned village that you'd been talking to everyone in not so long before. People in the story are human and treated as such, and that in many ways makes the villains more frightening: the invaders and colonisers aren't zombies or a faceless horde, they're people. Which means they, in some way, and for myriad reasons, *chose* this. It's very good writing.

The storytelling is also backed up by absolutely drop-dead gorgeous landscape pixel art. It's genuinely stunning and enormously evocative, and honestly part of me wishes there was a post-game where I could just wander the whole game world as a surviving character to go "ooooh" at the pretty scenery and make some bits of money and chat to the NPCs. Having a setting for a fantasy RPG (including fantasy creatures, ruined temples, quests, the works) that is so heavily rooted in south America is really refreshing rather than another implicitly pseudo-late-medieval-Europe knockoff, and I say that as a professional medieval historian!

The combat gameplay is the bit that takes a little time to get used to, especially the meta-level where the expectation is that you might need to "rewind" from failed combats to rejig your inventory and skills before having another go - but the reason it takes time is mostly a good one, which is that the mechanics are very locked into how the game works and work with that. The gameplay is fun once you're used to it and offers quite a lot of pacy tactical puzzling as you go. Actually mechanising the characters' hope and guilt in manifested ways was also really interesting and I liked it a lot.

So, yeah. This is probably one of the best indie games I've seen released in the last couple of years, and I really strongly recommend it to anyone who's inclined to have a go.

[Rob_Haines]

I've been playing a bunch of Core Keeper the past couple of weeks, playing co-op with my wife. She played a chunk of it in Early Access, then convinced me to give it a try when it hit 1.0 release, and we've been having a great time.

It's got a lot of Terraria vibes, but top-down and for me it feels a lot more intuitive. Unlike most of these digging and crafting games I haven't felt the need to break into a wiki or look up all its secrets to understand the nuances of basic mechanics, and the core progression through forging different metals and unlocking new technology has been satisfying.

[Jubal]

Speaking of digging and crafting, I played a little bit of Dwarf Fortress, a game everyone always assumes I have played but which I actually really haven't very much. I was using the new Kitfox games version from Steam with its graphics upgrades rather than old ASCII DF.

I feel like I ought to like the game more than I do. I like complex world simulations to interact with in games, I like building things, and I definitely like dwarves. And it's not that I dislike it either, it's a fine way to spend a few hours. I think I kinda always wanted a bit more narrative and a bit less management out of it in places: the visitors to my hold's tavern always seemed to be off doing interesting things while my dwarves were just tootling around waiting to be told to make a bunch more chairs or chop down another couple of trees.

It may just be my lack of mastery of the systems, but I never felt I had a hugely clear idea of why some bits of my economy were booming and others weren't, so there's definitely a lot I stil haven't learned. I don't know if the new version stops the Dwarfs doing objectively stupid things more than older versions, but the fact that they'd stop digging when reaching a high cavern below or when reaching a damp wall meant I really didn't have many catastrophes, and my fisherman just seemed to be single-handedly feeding the hold despite my failures at establishing agriculture. I guess I wasn't finding much of the deadly chaos that DF is sometimes reputed for: nobody died, nobody fought anything bigger than an angry wild bird, I made a few nice little temples and a pub and some overly roomy bedrooms for everyone and it was fairly chill but I wasn't super sure where I was next going with it all. I may go back to it sometime and see where I next get to, though.