Quoting: Doktor-MandrakeI tried gourdlets the other day when I read your article

It was fun to build things but I was expecting more from the ai, they didn't seem to do much apart from weirdly just hanging out in the cemetery

Tried Gourdlets myself too and that's quite accurate description. It's kind of fantasy themed Sims. Gameplay loop seems to be to build something new and see if gourdlets interact with it. If they do, they might evolve and help unlocking something new. At the same time, you can make everything look nice, though gourdlets don't really care about that. Can be fun until you run out of new things to build.

Quoting: Doktor-MandrakeI'll probably try Schim next

I gave it a go and and it's positively weird one. Yes, there's jumping from shadow to shadow, but the world is alive. The world is telling a story, which at times hits right into feels. The objectives are quite vague, they just point to right direction and then there's something to interact with at the end. Not a blocker, just takes some time to adjust.

Worth trying out.

Quoting: PhiladelphusI don't think it's part of Next Fest as the demo came out last week, but I quite enjoyed the demo for Tactical Breach Wizards, the third game from Tom Francis, continuing his quest to make defenestration an integral part of every game he makes. It's a bit like a combination of Into The Breach and XCOM: Chimera Squad, with some great writing and interesting puzzle battles to solve. And watching wizards use Breaching Glyphs to breach 'n' clear is just hilarious.

It was surprisingly fun. Into the Breach inspiration is kind of clear as levels are puzzle like and pushing enemies mechanic is lifted clearly from there too. It's not exact copy though. Giving characters bit different spell set adds to the tactical depth for example.

The story is nice touch too. Lot of bit wacky characters and levels seem bit less random as they have some relevance to the story. The magic in sci-fi setting goes into weird places too.

Worth giving a go if you're into tactics games.

Cats and Seek: Kyoto
Hidden objects games are usually nice diversion and this one is not an exception. Nice touch is that cats have small descriptions. Also the color palette is adjustable. I watched the stream for a while and there's also coloring book feature and jigsaw puzzles.

Vampire Therapist
Ever wanted to be a therapist? This game lets you have a try and it does require some observation skills. There's bit of a story and it's mostly well written enough. Small section are bit oddly written and how one is transformed into vampire doesn't seem entirely logical. I haven't played lot of visual novels, so it's hard to compare it to other games.

I Am Your Beast
Boomer shooter mixed with speedrunning game. There's maybe bit of Superhot influences thrown in the mix too. Basically there's limited time to fulfill the objective and then escape. Demo shows how difficult it will get by throwing in level 17 as last level of the demo. Last level requires bit of tactical thinking and I was able to survive after quite many tries. Too bad time ran out and then I gave up.

Level design is quite nice and story is nice subversion to trope of getting people out of retirement for a last mission.

Worth trying out if you like fast paced shooters.

Top three at the moment for are:
Schim
Tactical Breach Wizards
Dungeon Clawler

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Quoting: NezchanDungeon Clawer (Native): Dungeon crawler with a claw machine mechanic. Your items, plus useless fluff, are tossed into a tank and you get two grabs per round, and what comes out is auto-applied to the enemies. Fun enough, and there are interesting mechanics like filling the tank with water, or enemies throwing poison in for you to pick up. But I think it needs a little more. no combat sound effects, which is odd, and the music is VERY repetitive.

There's actually promise that that there will be more. The claw part seems slightly useless at first, but it works surprisingly well once things get more complicated.

PS: fluff isn't totally useless as for example you can burn it, which makes it apply damage to enemies

Quoting: NezchanTiny Glade (Native): Probably needs no introduction. Works great, designing is intuitive. Very small amount of area or things to do at this point, but it's early days. Nice little diversion.

Can't say much more. Nice thing is how things adapt to parts you build. Hopefully there will lot of more things to build, otherwise it will get boring bit too quickly.

Airship: Lost Flotilla
As far as autoshooters go, it's fine. Short battles and you can choose your own route. Good amount of polish. Ship being on fire makes things slightly more interesting as it's another upgrade path. Still seems like it needs maybe one or two more interesting twists to make it actually interesting. I didn't feel like that I needed to play it more than half an hour.

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Quoting: JarmerOut of these, I've only played the Lego racing game. It's a perfect little game for the Deck! Runs well, and is very arcadey and fun which is great for short sessions. Definitely recommend.

Looked at the reviews out of curiosity and it's full of microtransactions and grinding. The bundle is actually great deal as it contains the costly DLC, which probably make the game probably much better. I wonder if they're using the bundle to get some positive reviews to balance out the current negative ones.

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It kind of gets worse with this bundle. Some of them are not meant to be installed, they're meant to be printed out. I guess most people do have common sense not to do that.

I actually don't install or even activate lot of the keys on Humble Bundle right away as I'll try to keep my list of unplayed games small (100 at the moment). Downside is that the keys might might become stale at some point (I do have one game which has been waiting for keys for quite long time), which hopefully doesn't happen that much on itc.io.

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Quoting: basedWith all the DLCs their games hare I vant help but compare them to drug dealers - yeah at rare occasions you can get a great deal or maybe a small free try depending on the drug, but spirals out of control soon after

I get bored of games long before the DLC stream stops. I haven't played Stellaris for a quite a while now, so I can't easily justify of buying more DLC. New content would be otherwise tempting. I don't remember when I would have bough cosmetic DLC, but at least Stellaris doesn't have lot of DLC going into that category.

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Quoting: Luke_NukemI have no idea what the actual gameplay is like from watching that.. Is it top down, isometric, first person, chase what?

I have seen most games have two trailers because of that. One cinematic one and then one that focuses more on gameplay. I have vague memory that it's both chase and first person and the gameplay trailer supports that.

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Quoting: chrEither some update in the last 2 months broke my Index setup somehow or the cable finally died. I spent an hour today trying to get it to work. Funnily enough, it worked on the worst attempt except for the sound. And then it never worked again no matter in what order I rebooted or connected the components 😕. Currently. I'm hoping a future version of me can be bothered to update my Ubuntu and hopefully any software issues may disappear.

I have had some random issues too, but last time I solved it by resetting the headset. If I remember correctly, it doesn't need more than unplugging the USB cable so it doesn't get power.

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Quoting: denyasisOoooo, with the key bind to switch it, i hope it's only a matter of time till they implement alternate hands for us cross hand/eye dominant people!!

Or I could just do it with the key bind manually!! Lol!

The key binding probably is there probably help competitive play a bit. Gun model can block the view, so learning when to switch the hand can give a competitive edge.

That I don't know what what was Valves actual motivation behind the change.

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Quoting: whizse

Quoting: slembckeHuh, so one nice thing about SDL is that it mostly "just works". Why did they need to add the Wayland protocols into their source tree, and link with libdecor themselves? I predominantly test my SDL stuff on Wayland and I've never had to even think about that. Is it because they are statically linking maybe?

I only skimmed the post, but I think these were all issues involving compiling SDL from scratch. Not compiling the game against SDL.

At least the libdecor issue becomes mostly moot unless you hobble yourself with a castrated version of SDL.

Not sure why they link statically though. SDL still advises against doing so.

Probably they are compiling SDL from scratch because of the clipboard enhancements.

In general static linking or bundling the libraries is needed in order to resist changes in the environment. Open source games would probably fare better in environment like this, but that's not the world we are living in right now. Even then somebody has to care about old game to provide a patch, most games will be most likely left to rot.

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Quoting: basedIts the company that made me hate zombie games, and I still don't want ANYTHING zombies anymore. Dead Island 1 and Dying Light were a suffer to go through with bad gameplay design and glitches.

Technically you're blaming Techland. Dead Island 2 was in development limbo for long time after Techland departed and started developing Dying Light. Dead Island 2 was handed over to different developers (Yager and Sumo Digital) few times before Dambuster studios finished the game. AFAIK Dead Island 2 is more tightly focused and level based compared to Techland games that are more or less open world games.

That I don't know if you would actually like it. Based on the review some people hate the Epic Online requirement as it's unstable. Or just because it's from Epic. I would add annoyance of having to create Epic account. Connection problems will probably be sorted out, not sure about the other things.

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