I can’t resist these little games with 2D side-scrolling cartoon art. My wife certainly agrees that this is one of the most appealing looking games she’s seen in a while. Naturally I’d also heard that it manages to tell a moving story about the First World War and I’m always interested in games which try to tell decent stories in a new format.
So I bought this by mistake. I have fond memories of a game that I eventually remembered is actually called Necromunda from my stay in France and thought this was the videogame adaptation. Same squad-level tactical game by the same company, wrong setting. This one is based on the Warhammer Fantasy setting, not the Warhammer 40,000 setting. Being stubborn, I decided I’d play through it anyway though it ended up being a real chore.
Yeah, so the only reason I would ever play this is because it was included as part of the bundle of narrative games and I’m still a completionist at heart. That’s a good enough reason for me to avoid buying those huge bundles. This one is a traditional adventure game with an original setting and production values that are meant to evoke the 8-bit era. I don’t much care for the nostalgic value of this style but I guess it does help keep their costs down.
Way late on this one and it wasn’t at all certain that I’d even get around to it. I’d skipped the second game after even if I did like the first one. As I grow older I find myself more and more reluctant to play the big AAA releases. My playthrough was further hampered by the realization that this is really more of an action RPG, that it absolutely requires a gamepad and by the sheer length of the game. I did end up completing it but I’m not sure that it was worth the time.
I’ve been playing a lot of these small independently produced games lately. I guess I should move back to AAA-games soon. This one ticks a lot of boxes for me: exploration theme, turn-based battles, text-based adventures and a deep upgrade system. It’s no wonder that this one was a hit on Broken Forum as well.
This one was hot stuff on Broken Forum for a while and I thought that the idea of combining substances in a factory to make pharmaceutical products was pretty novel. It’s really just a matter of running the inputs through the correct sequences of machines and it plays out on a two-dimensional factory floor, so it’s not anything too complicated. With all of the conveyor belts going everywhere and the strange shapes of the machinery, there’s even a Rube Goldberg quality to the art style.
This is once again a tiny game that was part of the Humble Narrative Bundle and that I would never have noticed otherwise. This isn’t really a game at all. It’s basically an attempt to tell a linear story using a bunch of unconventional elements. It’s told from the point of view of the game’s creator, Nina Freeman, and is apparently based on her real life. She’s a college student who feels insecure and seems prone to self-denigration. She likes playing video games and this story tells of how across a number of months spent in a fictional MMO called Valtameri, she falls in love with a boy she meets online.