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.
I bought this based on how much I’ve liked the previous games by Klei Entertainment and the good things I’ve read about it. I don’t think I’ve ever tried a turn-based stealth game either. Unfortunately it didn’t quite sink in for me that this is really a kind of rogue-like game and my personal gaming history has taught me that I simply don’t have the perseverance for this type of gaming experience. When I make gains in a game, I prefer to keep them instead of trying and failing over and over again. Invisible, Inc. really does play like that which is why I shelved it in short order.
So this game was free on Ubisoft’s platform for a month recently so I took the chance to snag it. I’ve actually had this on my Steam wishlist for a while now, ever since Tom Chick named it as his game of the year a couple of years back. As is the norm for Chick, this was an unconventional choice and he was duly lambasted for it but I remember being intrigued as he called it the best CarPG ever made. What I didn’t realize is that in additional to its RPG elements, this is also more akin to an MMO than any single-player game. It’s an online-only game that requires you to log onto the servers and you’re constantly sharing the game world with other players. Playing it was certainly a novel experience for me.
Broken Age is easily the most high profile adventure game in years due to its massive KickStarter game and Tim Schafer’s name. I don’t consider myself a fan of the genre and I’ve never even played the famous Grim Fandango, but I have to admit that getting people like Elijah Wood and Wil Wheaton to do your voicework can still get my attention. Seems to me however that it’s just a way to make your game a lot more expensive than it needs to be.
I had Elite Dangerous on my Steam wishlist for ages but it never dropped in price enough and many people complained that it’s pretty but rather boring. In the meantime, this little gem is both cheap and widely praised, including by Broken Forum’s space game aficionado, I decided to give it a whirl. It was basically made by only two guys working out of a garage.