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Latest Comments by Anza
Micro-strategy and base building game Kingdom Eighties is out now
26 June 2023 at 4:15 pm UTC

Based on demo it's is bit confusing for the veterans, but there are somewhat familiar analogues of the old buildings, though they don't work exactly the same than before. I'm not sure if the changes are big enough for me to instantly buy this, but still quite refreshing change to the old gameplay.

Steam Next Fest June 2023 is live now with lots of games
26 June 2023 at 4:01 pm UTC

Quoting: Nezchan
Quoting: Anza
Quoting: NezchanPaleo Pines You can pet the dinosaur. What the heck else do you need to know?

There's bit more to it. It's kind of Stardew Valley, but you tame dinosaurs. Wasn't exciting enough for me to actually finish the demo, but maybe for bit younger audience...

Honestly, I was being pithy. I bounced off it too, in the end, although I can see the charm.

Two things I didn't like were not the greatest signposting, like where I got a quest to search the pen at someone's house with no clue where their house actually was (I never did find it before quitting). The other is how it taught me dino taming before setting me up to have somewhere to keep it, so the poor thing was dreadfully unhappy as a result. I think that would frustrate a kid playing.

There are actual signposts, but they tell you about one place and that's it. Graphically they look like that you would be able to find direction to many places with the signpost.

I think you're supposed to find the right houses by seeing the person in the map. Though the grandmas house you're tasked to visit is behind blockage and could be outside the map. I had to follow all the roads in order to find the right blockage. I'm not sure if anybody told me the right direction, but I might not have been paying attention.

Also I think the map is mirrored, can't bother to start the game again in order to test it properly. More playtesting needed seems to be the theme of the game at the moment. Luckily it hasn't been released yet.

Steam Next Fest June 2023 is live now with lots of games
25 June 2023 at 8:27 pm UTC Likes: 1

Again, ordered from most exciting to least exciting.

The Invicible
Sci-fi walking simulator with bit of soviet aesthetic. If you have played Firewatch, you might have general idea what to expect. These kind of games are more of a vehicles for experiencing the story, there might be just enough gameplay in there to aid the immersion. I do like the lore and the story though and that's what matters. Most worrying thing might be the linearity.

Little Kitty, Big City
Non sci-fi version of Stray. It takes a while to get hang of it, but once you get hang of it, there's few cat like things to do and some side quests to do. Cat like things include dropping things that are in high places, hunting birds and tripping people over. There's some risk of things feeling grindy as tasks involve doing same thing over and over again. Though I don't know if some of them are actually necessary for completing the game. Might be there just for achievement hunters and completionists.

Battle Shapers
Another roguelite FPS. Levels are not that graphically diverse, but game mechanics are solid enough. Another worrying thing is that game seems to missing certain oumph that for example Doom games have (there's certainly some Doom 2016 influence in there). Fighting robots instead of demons might give some disadvantage in that department.

Might need bit more hints what all the abilities do and how to activate them. There's quite many of them and some of the are bit vague what they do.

Also boss battles are bit underwhelming. There's some build up where boss makes sure to let the player know who's the boss, but then you can't really be sure which of the enemies is actually the boss. Bosses are usually bigger than rest of the enemies, but not here.

Some potential in there, though needs more work to be the best roguelite FPS out there.

Quoting: PhiladelphusStation to Station: this one got to what I surmise is the main menu, but was all blurry so that I couldn't make anything out. Clicking around made it sound like I was clicking buttons, but I couldn't figure out how to un-blur it. I'd similarly appreciate if anyone figures out how to make it work.

Worked for me without any twiddling. Puzzle game about transporting resources via railways. Seems solid enough (assuming you're lucky like me and it works without issues).

Quoting: NezchanPaleo Pines You can pet the dinosaur. What the heck else do you need to know?

There's bit more to it. It's kind of Stardew Valley, but you tame dinosaurs. Wasn't exciting enough for me to actually finish the demo, but maybe for bit younger audience...

Van Hellswing
Roguelite FPS with retro look. I like the aesthetics, nice usage of colors and resolution is not too low. Demo though doesn't seem to involve procedural generation, so it gets boring quite quickly. Based on trailer there's at least second level, where movement mechanics seem to be bit more essential.

Steam Next Fest June 2023 is live now with lots of games
24 June 2023 at 11:30 am UTC

Again, I try to arrange game in from most interesting to least interesting. Though with better quality games, things are quite subjective.

Quoting: PhiladelphusJumplight Odyssey: a bit like FTL: Faster Than Light, as you flee from jump point to jump point in front of an encroaching indomitable enemy. Except instead of an 8-crew-max ship you've got a capital ship which can hold dozens of crew members; my ship started with 68 people and I rescued several more during the demo. There's also a bit of ship-design as you can build new rooms in some empty areas of the ship, so there's some long-term upgrade and strategy. I didn't let the enemy catch up with me so I don't know what combat looks like (from the trailer there's hostile boarders, at least!), but I like the feeling of captaining a large ship and keeping watch over a bigger crew than you could get in FTL. I didn't get great FPS from it (~15-20), and there weren't really video options to change, but I'm willing to bet that'll improve as the game develops.

I don't have that much to add. Tutorial and user interface could be bit better. Keyboard shortcuts to the decks would be nice, though I din't check if it's already implemented. During the short demo there's maybe four decks that you actually care about.

Animated cutscenes are nice touch. Hard to say if there's enough story to warrant more of them. Smaller nice touch is that some of the notifications come from the crew.

Have to see how the final game turns out. Lot empty rooms might indicate that building stuff in a hurry is the norm, so might have do custom ship if you want to plan things out bit better. Kind of almost wishlistable. Though I should get back to Space Haven, it has had lot of progress.

Quoting: NezchanKingdom Eighties is basically the same old Kingdom game loop, except you play as the leader of a group of teens on bicycles recruiting kids to do chores for money and fight the monsters. It's a fun reskin of the concept. One gripe, there's no way to quit and you need to hit close from the Steam library page.

I had same quit problem. Also some of the game mechanics have been changed around a bit. I couldn't figure out at first how to attack the gates, but apparently you have to first hire "knights" and then push the dumpster close enough the gate so attacking force gets protection behind it. Without the dumpster attacking force might advance in direction of the gate, but retreat behind safety after a while.

Game was typical for me. Just built everything I can. Took too long and got overrun by from opposite side while I was attacking the other side.

Quoting: NezchanLies of P (Steam Play) For a lot of people, this is the star of the show this year, and certainly the highest profile. Basically Pinnochio as a Soulsborne game. Runs surprisingly well on my admittedly not-so-cutting-edge machine, no problems at all. About what you'd expect: stylish, ruined environments, interesting enemy designs, stamina management and a lot of combat rolls. I'm not great at it, but it seems solid enough.

Like the souls games, this might be bit of acquired taste. Took a while to familiarize myself with the controls and when I finally figured out how to block, I blocked in wrong direction. At that point I gave up. Probably if I played it again, I might do better.

Aesthetics are indeed quite nice as said.
Quoting: PhiladelphusOne Lonely Outpost: I couldn't get this one to run. I tried the latest half-dozen Proton versions, and the best I could get was 6.3-8, where it ended up on a loading screen forever. Otherwise I just got a pure white screen and some sounds that sounded like a logo splash screen. I'm not super-competent at fiddling with launch options, so if anyone finds out (or has some suggestions on) how to run this I'd appreciate it.

Worked for me for some reason. I didn't even fiddle with anything. Could have just changed the Proton version to latest (I had Proton 6 as default, no wonder some games didn't work with the default version)

In the demo there's farming, mining, dusting archaeological artifacts and crafting.There's also surveying which is just wandering around the area and hoping to find the target locations.

While it's kind of Stardew Valley with protagonist being stranded in space, it didn't totally click for me. Stardew Valley didn't either, so it might be that I need more exciting tasks and more plot development which is what Graveyard Keeper provided. I'm bit worried that this one might be bit forgettable.

Quoting: NezchanMoonstone Island doesn't work on Linux (Steam Play) or Steam Deck as far as I can tell. Pity, it's the main thing I wanted to try.

Didn't work for me either. Didn't dig deeper.

Steam Next Fest June 2023 is live now with lots of games
21 June 2023 at 8:50 pm UTC Likes: 1

I don't bother to write down if something is actually native or not. How things work out usually is native build might be planned, but if you actually try to play it, it's missing the Linux build. These days I have Proton enabled by default and checking if something launches via Proton or not can be bit of detective work, if things work smoothly.

Quoting: NezchanWizard With a Gun (Steam Play) is a twin-stick shooter with a great aesthetic, mostly made up of mashing Bastion and Don't Starve together. That said, it's got a pretty cool gameplay loop involving progressively going back in time, and taking repeated jaunts into the gameplay area on a timer before you have to bail and return to your home base. Could be something really fun.

I gave it a go myself too. It seems bit more relaxed than Bastion and Don't Starve, but I can see the references in there. There's gathering of resources and crafting. It has been great fun so far.

Rest I'll order from fun to less fun.

House Flipper 2
Clearly a dad game. Basically game about renovating houses. I can see why some people like these kinds of games. There's certain satisfaction in seeing progress. Only gripe so far is that if you for example accidentally paint over something that you want to, finding the original thing that was there is far from easy, so it might actually be easier to just switch the look totally. In general though. if only actual cleaning and renovation would be this easy...

Rise of the Triad
I might have played it more than I played it when it game out. While impressive for its time, the engine limits level design too much.

Fortune's Run
Immersive simulation inspired by System Shock and maybe it of Deus Ex. It's Janky as System Shock and is graphically about the same level, it just doesn't have the same charm and aesthetics. Everything is brown and things are bit hard to see among all the brown. Didn't try though if turning up the brightness would have helped.

Got stuck quite quickly as two of the routes were blocked and probably the route I should have taken was too dark.

Demonic Supremacy
Tutorial goes through probably every single thing game has to offer, which is why completing it takes forever. After all the trouble, you get thrown into boss battle. I couldn't beat the boss and couldn't be bothered to keep trying.

Steam Next Fest June 2023 is live now with lots of games
20 June 2023 at 6:17 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: PhiladelphusViewfinder: this one was fantastic. It gave me some real Superliminal vibes, as the core mechanic allows you to place photographs in the world which become real, allowing you to walk into them. The trick is all in the perspective – I needed a bridge, and had a photograph of the side of a building, so I rotated it 90° and it turned into a bridge I could use. Later in the demo you get a camera, allowing you to make your own photographs to solve the puzzles you find. There's a nice reverse mechanic you can use at any time which allows you to easily go back to before you do anything (with easy bookmarks for things that significantly affect the world, like putting down a photograph), making it easy to try different solutions to things. Finally, I was going to praise the game's artstyle, when a puzzle late in the demo had me jumping between different pictures with very different artstyles, from watercolor to crayon-drawing to 90's pixel shader, all of which were executed just as competently. And finally, this one had no problem running at 60 FPS the entire time.

I played it too and I don't have that much to add. For me it was buggy with the default Proton version, horizontal turning had quite lot of resistance. Forcing latest stable Proton fixed the issue.

I played also SteamWorld Build. Quite solid entry into the series. Build houses for workers, build infrastructure to meet their demands. There's also Dungeon Keeper like mining added in (there seems to be enemies as well).

New Beta for Valheim adds in world modifiers letting you customize your game
19 June 2023 at 4:58 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: GroganSome of those settings don't actually work as advertised yet.

I got killed by a bee hive, spewing toxic gas (or something greenish). I found a perfect shelter, with a roof and working door and everything, but it had a beehive outside at the back. It was a cool spot, kind of on an islet in a creek, I'd have marked that as my home. So I thought I'd burn the beehive with a torch. Oh no, of course you can't do that, that would be too sensible for it not to be a flame retardant bee hive. I stood there too long trying (it didn't take that long) rofl!

Easiest way to get rid of beehives is to shoot them full of arrows or throw a spear at it. With flame arrows you can set them on fire like you wanted. If you're lucky, you'll get your honey production started soon after that.

Of course in order to get those items, you need a workbench for start and then all the materials to make the items.

Battlestar Galactica Deadlock is free to keep this weekend
8 April 2023 at 7:46 pm UTC

Quoting: Purple Library GuyFor the record, since so many people it works for are stressing their AMD kit, I'm also using an AMD GPU, so this isn't an "AMD works, NVidia has problems" thing.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyFor the record, since so many people it works for are stressing their AMD kit, I'm also using an AMD GPU, so this isn't an "AMD works, NVidia has problems" thing.

I'm in the camp where it works and my setup shouldn't be all that different.

There must be something different though. Just in case if it's some kind of Mesa issue, my Mesa version is 22.2.3. Kernel is 5.15.94 (should remember to update to latest 5.15 kernel).

Big Ambitions drops Native Linux support shortly after the Steam release
21 March 2023 at 8:18 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: RomlokUn-wishlisted :(

QuoteThey saw a "very high amount of non-gameplay-related bugs (random crashing, high VRAM usage, file access issues, etc.)"
Given that a large number of Unity games with native Linux versions seemingly don't experience random crashing, high VRAM usage, or file access issues, I would classify these as likely "non-knowing-how-to-use-Unity" bugs, which will probably bite them in the Windows sooner or later anyway.

Oh well.

There were symptoms of things like that in the demo. First version of the demo didn't have crash issues, though it had some kind of menu glitch. After that was patched, I got to experience the crashes. I might have mentioned that to the developer, but I don't remember getting new releases to test.

Though to be fair, some developers don't have much experience in low level things if any. Exporting to different platforms might be easy, but figuring out what to do when things don't work is another matter.

I guess if you find developer that's willing to learn, keep throwing money that way.

Slick tactical space RPG 'Relic Space' is out in Early Access
14 March 2023 at 7:05 pm UTC

I played the Steam demo when it was available and Relic Space is kind of space simulator for the impatient.

I haven't had patience for the space sims, so I can't compare properly. But everything is closer together, so completing missions doesn't necessarily take that long.

Also as a bonus, Relic Space most likely releases before Space Citizen.