A quick look at games for March from James
🆕 On the Shelves
🕳️ A Game About Digging a Hole
by Cyberwave
A minimalist game about digging a hole in the garden of a newly purchased house. Collect resources, sell them, upgrade your equipment and discover a mysterious secret. Costs you only one coffee!
Basically a clicker-game (think Cow Clicker, or Cookie Clicker) but digging a hole deeper and deeper in your garden. Compared to clicker games though, you DO have to do something in this game. You dig the hole. It's not automatic. Dig → find stuff → sell it and buy upgrades → dig some more.
According to this Polygon review, there is an end to the game, but they do not reveal what it is.
🏘️ Civilization VII
by Firaxis Games
The award-winning strategy game franchise returns with a revolutionary new chapter. Sid Meier's Civilization® VII empowers you to build the greatest empire the world has ever known!
A hugely complex game, getting all the more complex as they add new systems. It's currently getting mixed reviews on Steam, so it seems like there is some room for improvement of those systems.
Having not played the series in too much depth, I can't personally tell you what new content this chapter in the series provides, but according to this ScreenRant page, some big changes are terrain, tech and culture, cities, and armies.
🪖 The Undermine(d)
New World of Warcraft update
Goes live on Feb 25th. It features a ton of goblin-related content, and a new dungeon with cars, and a theme of blowing up a dam.
I was a big WoW player… 20 years ago. And played pretty hardcore up to the Molten Core dungeon which required 40 people to pool their resources and skill together in order to take on the bosses.
I've flirted with it here and there since, but nothing like the heyday of 2004/5 when I was still a university student with time to burn… My only contact with the game now comes from watching Twitch streams of the "world's first" dungeon runs (which are incredibly entertaining, I have to say).
Personally, I'm glad that the franchise is still going. It's good to know that people are still playing this game and it has a following 20 years after launch.
💗 Magenta series
Card games from CMYK
They include Fives, a thrilling trick-taking game in the style of Hearts or Spades, from Taiki Shinzawa; Duos, a team-based Rummy-style card game by Johannes Schmidauer-König; Figment, a novel card game based on optical illusions by Wolfgang Warsch; and Fruit Fight, a push-your-luck style game from the prolific Reiner Knizia
👹 Enshrouded
You are Flameborn, last ember of hope of a dying race. Awaken, survive the terror of a corrupting fog, and reclaim the lost beauty of your kingdom. Venture into a vast world, vanquish punishing bosses, build grand halls and forge your path in this co-op survival action RPG for up to 16 players.
Enshrouded was released in January 2024, but I never heard of it then. It popped up on my radar through the website Guess the Game which I had forgotten about, and just started playing again as a way to improve my game literacy. It's known for its base building and monster hunting elements.
⚔️ Avowed
by Obsidian Entertainment
The game was featured heavily on a podcast that I listen to often – the No Clip Crewcast.
The initial, instant comparison that people make is with "Skyrim," though the No Clip crew shun this. Compared to Skyrim, Avowed has less of a sense of an open-world vibe, which is could be considered a positive or negative depending on the type of player you are. Want to go off and have your own adventure? Perhaps not great. But, want a polished, combat-oriented RPG? This one's for you.
The game's combat system is one of the main draws, which again according to my No Clip listening is surprising for an Obsidian Entertainment game, as they are usually more much reknowned for their storytelling. That is not to say that the story or cast of characters in this game are bad, but rather that they got the combat system so right!
📡 On the Radar
🃏 Magic The Gathering - Final Fantasy
Coming soon, the first(?) Square Enix and Wizards of the Coast collab. Looks like they have all the popular FF content in there, including my favourite FF7.
🗺️ Prologue: Go Wayback!
New game from the PUBG creator
Prologue: Go Wayback! is a single-player open-world emergent game within the survival genre. With classic survival mechanics and machine learning-driven terrain generation resulting in millions of possible maps, it challenges the players to explore their limits.
📱 Ludocene
Not actually a game, but more of a video game recommendation app. In the Indiepocolypse, this is perhaps what people need to find a game that they will enjoy.
🎮 In Rotation
🍃 The Legend of Zelda - Tears of the Kingdom
I bought it a long time ago but never finished it, but I am playing it again (in full force) with my son. Some of the bosses can be quite frustrating and there are a lot of hoops to jump through to get to the actual fights.
It's a lot more difficult than BotW. My son (and I!) has a tough job figuring out what to do, especially with some of the shrines. So in that regard, the game is… educational? It really pushes you cognitively.
🧑🚀 Sphongos
by Michael Koloch
You are an astronaut(?) in a research lab. Go and collect fungi, sample them and use them as resources to upgrade your equipment. That's the core game loop!
Aesthetically wonderful, great sound effects, really polished, and has an excellent post-mortum blogpost showing how it was developed here
💺 Is This Seat Taken?
by Poti Poti Studio
Window seat or aisle? Booth or table? Lone wolf or life of the party? In Is This Seat Taken?, your mission is to organize groups of people according to their preferences. It's a cozy, no-pressure logic puzzle game where you're in charge of who sits where.
A puzzle game about one of life's anxiety-inducing moments.
It plays like a logic puzzle. You have to place people into a seating arrangement that ends up with all participants happy. Some want to be alone, others only care about where they sit (window, aisle, etc.). As the description says, the game has no time limit, and there's no major problem if you don't please everyone. As it is described – cosy.
🙀 Still Wakes the Deep
by The Chinese Room
1975. Disaster strikes the Beira D oil rig off the coast of Scotland. Navigate the collapsing rig to save your crew from an otherworldly horror on the edge of all logic and reality."
I watched a full play-through of this game, as I was interested in picking it up. The story is full on body horror with jump scares galore.
One of the things I noticed early on is that the game is very linear. Almost walking simulator levels of linearity. Coupled with that is the large amount of yellow paint to guide the player which, for me, is a bit too on the nose. It's VERY VERY obvious where to go without the extraneous splash of color all the time. Did the play-testers really not know where they needed to go?
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