Steamworld Quest
“Oh, look. It’s another turn based strategy game. Ya know, for someone who says those games suck, you sure rank them pretty highly.” – probably everyone.
Yea, because for some godforsaken reason, people keep making them. Like how the porn industry is just flooded with incest porn; everyone keeps playing these damn games which creates a market for them. And since most triple A studios are too busy making every different subgenre of first person shooters and battle royales, guess who’s responsibility it is for flooding the market with turn based games? That’s right, all the indie developers. Here’s the skinny: Steamworld is a platforming franchise that has release two excellent titles: Steamworld Dig and Steamworld Dig 2. For some reason, the developers at Image & Form decided “Fuck it, let’s make a deck building game” and now we have Steamworld Quest. It isn’t that bad either, but Slay the Spire is better even though I’ve spent the last 3 days at work playing it and I still haven’t gotten past Act 3.
Cadence of Hyrule
Didn’t think you’d be spending your Thursday afternoon watching Grover from Sesame Street review a Zelda game did ya? (Also, why is it called Sesame Street? They never once talk about sesame seeds in that show. I mean it; I’ve watched every single episode of Sesame Street and I still set an alarm for when it comes on every night so I can learn something about goddamn sesame seeds and all I’ve learned is there are monsters in our trash cans and that vampires can’t spell or count. Anywho, Cadence of Hyrule is a weird Zelda spinoff where you have to move to the beat of some remixed classic Zelda theme in order to kill things. It’s really alot of fun but at the end of the day it just makes you want to play a regular Zelda game without the beat thing. Also, the song start to get old. Very quickly. Like after 20 minutes. Please add more songs to this game.
A Plague Tale: Innocence
Ok before we discuss this, I have a confession. I don’t consider myself a “big conspiracy theory guy”, but there’s a few things in life I just refuse to believe. First, I don’t believe that sugar-free things are actually sugar-free. You cannot tell me that you can make a Coke Zero that granted doesn’t taste as good as regular Coke, but still tastes drinkable without any calories or sugar. They’ve basically chemically created this thing that is basically just sugar with all the same side effects but since it’s not actually sugar, they get away with it. Second, I don’t believe in over half of what we think we know about space. We apparently can see things that are billions of light years away, yet I still don’t own a car that drives itself and Xbox Live still goes down once a week even through the internet was invented over a decade ago. I think there’s a super secret NASA department of Photoshop artists that they go to when the government questions their spending and they say ” hey make a nebula that looks like a dolphin raping a goose”. And finally, I don’t understand why black plague themed media requires over a million rats to have existed in each and every English town. If there were that many rats on Earth in the 1300s, where are they now? What did they all just decide “hey we’re gonna conquer our swimming deficiency” and pour themselves into the ocean? By this rate, the Earth should be ruled by rats.
Anyway, this is a game about two orphans who have to escape from some bad guys by swimming in the sewers with rats. It’s pretty fun, very linear, but for some reason they decided to add boss battles which make zero sense because these are malnourished orphans. Like, your main character is armed with a sling and rocks, and you have to kill a fully armed soldier. Then at one point, you learn how to take control of the rats, and you send your rats up against the enemy’s rats. Because that’s what you want in a game: a rat army vs. rat army battle royale. Outside of that though, it really is a fun immersive game.