Playlist (June 2021) (Patreon)

Hello! This month I played, roughly, 260 games. It was, of course, another Game Jam month which meant my life was pretty much consumed by the event for three weeks straight.

But! I managed to sneak in some new indie games here and there. So without further ado, here's some mini reviews of three games I ended up checking out this month. Watch it as a video above, or read it as a blog below - up to you.

Silicon Dreams

We see a lot of games that are inspired by movies. We see hints of Alien and Star Wars and The Matrix all over the place. But how about a game inspired by a single, specific scene from a movie?

Silicon Dreams is a video game version of that bit in Blade Runner where Harrison Ford uses a machine and a test to figure out if someone is a human or a replicant.

And so that's what this game is all about. It's a sci-fi adventure game where you interrogate humans and androids to find the answers to questions set by your bosses.

Before each exam you're given a list of questions: like 'what makes the subject happy'? or 'does the subject show subversive behaviour'. Then, you can fire off questions from a dialogue tree - and will hopefully figure out the right answers.

Your biggest assistance in this task is an emotional read-out chart, which shows your subject's joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and surprise. And so keeping a close eye on this chart - and seeing how your subject responds to different questions - is essential to figuring out the right answers.

Plus, you sometimes need to put the subject in a certain frame of mind to get the answers you need. Perhaps make the interviewee afraid for their life, or get them to trust you.

It's pretty enjoyable - I liked playing detective and figuring out the right answers. And, like the excellent Papers, Please, you're often put in difficult ethical quandaries where you need to figure out what's more important: the truth, your organisation's requests, or the interviewee's rights.

All in all: it's a good'un! I recommend it.

Scoot Kaboom and the Tomb of Doom

This year's best name award goes to: Scoot Kaboom and the Tomb of Doom. Sorry, it's just fun to say it. Scoot Kaboom and the Tomb of Doom.

This is a really tricky platformer with insta-death spikes on every corner, tight timing challenges, and pixel precise jumps. Think Super Meat Boy, but in the claustrophobic confines of a maintenance vent.

The game's got a clever gimmick: the entire game is in a single level. A long, winding, maze-like spaghetti mess of a stage that can be zoomed out to fit all on one screen. Which is neat!

But it's also, like - I'm not sure what the point is? That would be really interesting in a Metroidvania - and I think some Castlevania games did that on Xbox Live Arcade. Like instead of needing a map, you can just zoom out to see the entire world at once. But in a platformer, I'm not so sure.

And this actually leads to what, I think, is a negative of the game. Without the usual end-of-level checkpoint, between-level map screen, and start-of-level wind-up that you get in typical platformers, there's no downtime. No palette cleanser. No end to the endless upward climb of the game's intensity curve. It's just rock hard platforming forever, and that wonky pacing put me off from really getting engaged. It just felt exhausting!

Maybe you'll dig it, though? It definitely feels nice to play and I enjoyed finding secrets. And, as I have already stated: the name is fun to say. Scoot Kaboom and the Tomb of Doom!

Slipways

I'm always interested to see games that take a complex genre and shrink it down to the absolute fundamentals. Like Into the Breach for tactics games and Rydmkapsel for real-time strategy. Slipways is that for one of the most overwhelming and intense genres of all: the 4X strategy game.

So it's still a game about gathering resources, competing with other nations, researching technologies, and building stuff - but it's now a welcoming puzzle game that's mostly about linking up neat little trade routes.

Each planet you colonise needs stuff and creates stuff - so you want to find a planet to supply those needs and another planet to buy those creations. Before long, this has spiralled out of control into a galaxy of interconnected planets all helping each other out.

That's the basics - and you can have fun with that for a few rounds. Unlike a game of Civilization, a Slipways session only lasts about an hour before it's over and you can start again. And that's great - because now you can play with more knowledge and can start digging into more complex stuff. It's hitting on a lot of that stuff I talked about in a recent video on tutorials for complex games.

There are some weird little issues: the biggest one, for me, is a UI thing. Essentially, there are two groups of icons on each planet: imports and exports. And if both are needs are being met then… the left side should be lit up and the right side should be dimmed. Which is something I had to repeat in my head over and over as I scanned my galaxy looking for places to improve my network. Wouldn't it have been easier if you wanted both sides to be lit, or both to be dimmed?

Anyway, that's a pedantic little point but it's something that stuck out to me. For the most part, this game is trying really hard to simplify the genre and 9 times out of 10, it succeeds - so those small failures of UX stick out more than most. Overall, though, I recommend Slipways - even if you've never tried a full-fat 4X game.

Thanks very much, see you in July!