April 21, 2023
Greetings! Welcome to our regular feature where we write a little about some of the games we’ve played over the past few days. This time: cards, horror and draggable wreckage.
If you want to check out some older versions of What We’ve Been Playing, here’s our archive.
WildFrost, PC
I beat a daily commute! This is the daily challenge version of the game. And I can’t tell you how happy I am about it. Well, I can actually – I’m happy about that. the red one.
I’m happy about that because WildFrost is tough, and that’s one of the things I love about it. It may look cute but it sure is better not to play cute. And the daily challenges sure are the hard part of it. You get a pre-built deck as far as you can carry, and you can add to it your way, but the base construction is the same for all, and there are a few modifiers in play.
This means that you need to look at what someone else has made, in general, for a particular reason, and find out what they’re trying to do with it – and therefore, what you can do with it. can do. There’s a synergy there, you just have to try and see it.
I love that the game has me talking like that. This means that the strategic possibilities at play are there and they are deep. And what I like even more – I’m more than happy to continue the topic – is that those possibilities very much feel like themselves. And that’s not something you often say about card batters these days. I am happy
Bertie
horror world pc
World of Horror’s original pitch is surprisingly niche in its uniqueness: what if Arkham Horror is a roguelike version of the board game, but with an aesthetic inspired by manga artist Junji Ito and filtered through the retro lens of an Apple Macintosh Has gone? Still it works beautifully.
The basic gist is that you are one of a select number of characters (each with their own astral abilities) investigating a number of narrative mysteries in a city bound by some malevolent cosmic awakening. Success comes when you solve five mysteries – from a haunted bulletin board system to a fertilizer of questionable origin, all inspired by a different brand of Ito – without succumbing to a gruesome death.
Each playthrough is randomly generated from a pool of pre-written mysteries, and each of them is diversified by a random pile of possible events that you’ll encounter along the way. Most of the mysteries have their own subtle structural quirks – for example, you might need to perform a ritual before dawn – but all unfold by visiting different locations and whatever horrifying random occurrences make them less likely to happen. attempt to do, whether it’s an incursion of insanity from another plane of existence, an unsettling monster attack, or just a little flavor text proposing a useful item for later use.
There are more wrinkles than that, from hireable assistants and a post-mystery hub where you can plan and prepare (or take a shower!) for your next investigation, and it doesn’t always gel — events of The random nature may mean you’re suddenly investigating a classroom in the middle of a haunted house – but the overall effect is surprisingly atmospheric, making for a more-ish reprehensible horror yarn that lingers throughout. Manages to be unsettlingly off-kilter. Better still, it’s brilliantly modular, with bags of potential for expansion even in Early Access thanks to some increasingly robust mod support.
Matt Wells
synthetic, pc
There’s no shortage of new and upcoming space games right now, but I wonder if we overlooked a budding subgenre of games set inside comets and asteroids, like Ghost Ship’s Deep Rock Galactic, or Artifact from solo developer Ondrej Angelovic. Is.
I’ve been playing the Steam demo of the latter, and am impressed by how different it is from your Callistos and your Dead Space. Each separate loading interior is a small green cavern filled with draggable, throwable debris. It’s first person and you have a helmet HUD that gives the environment a beautiful, scratched-glass texture. I’m less keen on the riddles or the world-weary radio guy who walks you through them, but still – that’s the point on the Venn diagram between “Mines of Moria” and “Event Horizon” that I didn’t know existed. I need it .
Edwin Evans-Thirwell
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