SD on 14/1/2024 at 19:14
Somewhat shamefully I have around 2,500 games in my Steam library, a legacy of the abundance of cheap bundles and giveaways, and I've played fewer than 10% of them, so I'm on a mission this year to make a big dent in that total.
I have started with One More Island, a decent enough city builder/colony sim that looks like Prison Architect and plays a bit like the Anno series. It doesn't do anything groundbreaking, but I quite enjoyed it as far as it went, and would recommend it for genre fans. It did leave me frustrated at times as the difficulty dramatically ramps up towards the endgame and you need to supply your colonists with ever increasing quantitites and varieties of resource. Indeed, I had more than one worker die on me, despite markets with an abundance of fish, processed meat, bread and sausages, because they "need beer to survive". Ho hum.
Thirith on 15/1/2024 at 08:14
After finishing Cocoon, I felt like something short and fun, so I installed Gato Roboto, having recently read something about short Metroidvanias. When I saw that there was already a save game at 65+% completion, I realised that I must have played and finished the game... and it obviously left no trace whatsoever in my memory. If I'd remembered it fondly, I wouldn't have minded replaying it, but seeing how I didn't remember it at all I just uninstalled it. Too many games and not enough time to replay stuff I found okay at best.
Aja on 15/1/2024 at 15:54
I loved Gato Roboto; in fact I hundred-percented it. But to each their own.
henke on 15/1/2024 at 18:01
I can't remember much about it. But I do remember that I liked it while I played it.
nicked on 15/1/2024 at 19:03
It was aggressively fine, if I remember correctly. Basically Metroid almost exactly just with a cat as a gimmick.
Aja on 15/1/2024 at 19:48
I found it very charming. Cat jumps on the console and crashes the spaceship and then is too scared to go in the water to rescue its owner: classic cat stuff. I also like the 1-bit art style, and the controls were responsive, and it had good music and animation. It also only took maybe six or seven hours to complete. And I think it only cost 10 bucks. I would say it's aggressively pretty good.
edit -- oh, and it has a meow button! 10/10
Sulphur on 16/1/2024 at 03:37
Yup, Gato Roboto was very charming, had good controls and wasn't precious about anything. Charm and good gameplay can carry a game far for me, so yeah, it was pretty good. I haven't finished it, but it's on the list.
Thirith on 16/1/2024 at 07:30
I probably sounded more negative about the game than intended. It's definitely charming, but once I realised I'd played and completed it before I simply didn't feel I had to replay it. I suspect that for me it was the perfect palate cleanser in between longer games.
Anarchic Fox on 16/1/2024 at 13:06
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Yup, Gato Roboto was very charming, had good controls and wasn't precious about anything. Charm and good gameplay can carry a game far for me, so yeah, it was pretty good. I haven't finished it, but it's on the list.
It also doesn't overstay its welcome, a rarity in any genre. (Though I, for one, am entirely fine with a measure of preciosity.)
Jason Moyer on 17/1/2024 at 05:20
Somehow I've never played Skyrim Special Edition, so I'm playing the Anniversary Edition. It's kind of crazy how much stuff is in this game that I don't remember seeing before, and I've frequently found a quest or an item and checked to see if it was part of the AE and nope, it was in the base game or one of the main DLC's. The new content is...well, a lot of it is stupid (the fishing is actually so bad that after doing 1 of the quests I've just let it sit in my journal, untouched) or overpowered (giving you stuff like Dragonplate Armor 5 minutes after you leave Helgen). Some of the callbacks to earlier games could be interesting if they were integrated a little better, or at least had high level requirements or something. Something like the Gray Cowl quest should be unlocked after you become head of the Thieves Guild, for instance. The Daedric items should probably be unobtainable until the main quest associated with that Daedric Prince has been completed. But anyway, I'm mostly having fun I think. Going through tomb after tomb full of Drauger gets old as hell, and somehow they made Dwemer ruins boring. The Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild questlines were fun. The Main Quest is alright, especially going into it relatively blind (it has to be 10 years since I played Oldrim with the DLC). The other factions are super dull. Dragon fights are almost always hilarious, just because they seem to have their spawn points set in areas such that they'll show up at the least convenient times. Doing the relatively short Mage's Guild questline, I ended up killing 3 dragons in the College itself when they decided to fly in and interrupt whatever scripted dialog was supposed to be happening.
It's not doing anything that would make me rank it higher than Starfield, that's for sure, and I think all of these years later the non-modded version is still somehow buggier. I hope SF DLC starts dropping relatively soon, because I'd like to take a break from clearing my backlog and get back to exploring space.
