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I Was Buried In Steam Games for New Year's
Jan. 7th, 2025 04:49 amI have not even remotely dug myself out of this pile but I'm making some headway!
I have five more titles to try after this, most of them large/lengthy games. Pray for my free time.
Fossil Corner: REALLY GOOD! Something on the "short and sweet" end of the scale, although you're welcome to keep playing the delightful puzzles to get more pretty fossils for as long as you want. And that just told you what the game is. Uhh. The premise is you're a fossil-obsessed retiree, and the easy bite of story is told via emails you "answer" in between sorting more fossils. There's three kinds of fossils and if you're lucky (the luck seems to get aggressively generous over time) you can find special rare ossified ones that sparkle. Had to reluctantly pry myself away from this one to try everything else, I absolutely adore it.
ATLYSS: early access in the genre of "single player MMORPG" although it does have multiplayer. Just not Massively Online. You are a cute little furry thing who beats monsters up in someone else's world that is your afterlife now. Emphasis on action combat, with dodging and parrying being crucial, but has a nice variety of weapons/playstyles. Vertical slice early access being developed by a single person I believe, so there's not a ton of game in there, but what's there is fun as hell. I made my friends come play with me for a bit and everyone loved it.
Garden In!: this is probably a great game if you're not me. The art is great, the plants are cute, and the mechanics are smooth. Unfortunately the way it's balanced landed so, so poorly for me: it's not quite a game you fully idle/put down for long hours, but it's also not a game you can stay continuously active in for long. I ended up feeling like I was supposed to come back every 45 minutes, which is too long a wait to stay engaged but too short an interval to fully turn away to other stuff. Also the way progress is gated, there's a few things encouraging you to go bonkers with Too Many Plants To Sensibly Care For which did not improve the experience. Controls also felt a mild amount of janky/unresponsive which is forgivable if I'm having fun but more irritating if I'm already huffy. So: can you be cool about not optimizing gameplay and just chill with some plants? Give this a look! If you have my damage from being trained by past entries in this/similar genres, this might not be so great though. (But it IS really pretty.)
APICO: my latest entry in playing farmsims that aren't really farmsims! APICO is about bees (yes, the bugs that make honey) and it is A BLAST. The fourth tutorial starts off with "By this point you might be thinking, wait, are these guys trying to sneak in actual biology into a game? The answer is, yes, sorry!" I don't think they're sorry. This is the kind of game that devours your life because you love it so much, and it's all about being a weirdo in a forest unlocking the secrets of magic bees and getting rich bottling fermented honey soda (fermented soda optional, there's seventy other things to do too). Around hour seven I realized I'd stumbled backwards into the genetics to convince rain-hating diurnal bees that they love rain & the night, actually, at which point I had to put this down for a bit to go process the possibilities. If you like bees, raising bees, sensibly complex genetics games or what I will call "contraption gameplay" you should try APICO.
ATLYSS: early access in the genre of "single player MMORPG" although it does have multiplayer. Just not Massively Online. You are a cute little furry thing who beats monsters up in someone else's world that is your afterlife now. Emphasis on action combat, with dodging and parrying being crucial, but has a nice variety of weapons/playstyles. Vertical slice early access being developed by a single person I believe, so there's not a ton of game in there, but what's there is fun as hell. I made my friends come play with me for a bit and everyone loved it.
Garden In!: this is probably a great game if you're not me. The art is great, the plants are cute, and the mechanics are smooth. Unfortunately the way it's balanced landed so, so poorly for me: it's not quite a game you fully idle/put down for long hours, but it's also not a game you can stay continuously active in for long. I ended up feeling like I was supposed to come back every 45 minutes, which is too long a wait to stay engaged but too short an interval to fully turn away to other stuff. Also the way progress is gated, there's a few things encouraging you to go bonkers with Too Many Plants To Sensibly Care For which did not improve the experience. Controls also felt a mild amount of janky/unresponsive which is forgivable if I'm having fun but more irritating if I'm already huffy. So: can you be cool about not optimizing gameplay and just chill with some plants? Give this a look! If you have my damage from being trained by past entries in this/similar genres, this might not be so great though. (But it IS really pretty.)
APICO: my latest entry in playing farmsims that aren't really farmsims! APICO is about bees (yes, the bugs that make honey) and it is A BLAST. The fourth tutorial starts off with "By this point you might be thinking, wait, are these guys trying to sneak in actual biology into a game? The answer is, yes, sorry!" I don't think they're sorry. This is the kind of game that devours your life because you love it so much, and it's all about being a weirdo in a forest unlocking the secrets of magic bees and getting rich bottling fermented honey soda (fermented soda optional, there's seventy other things to do too). Around hour seven I realized I'd stumbled backwards into the genetics to convince rain-hating diurnal bees that they love rain & the night, actually, at which point I had to put this down for a bit to go process the possibilities. If you like bees, raising bees, sensibly complex genetics games or what I will call "contraption gameplay" you should try APICO.
I have five more titles to try after this, most of them large/lengthy games. Pray for my free time.
