soccr
@soccr
I am here for the escapism.
Exiled (Steam Deck, 53 minutes): A simple cipher, and a word puzzle if you're quick enough. Simple and clean story about eldritch monsters. Good ending and bad ending. A nice relaxing time in the library.
Bura: The Way the Wind Blows (Steam Deck, 3 hours): A gorgeous Ghibli island with fascinating spirits and delightful colors. Explore and collect. Swimming feels good, but other mechanics feel sluggish or unresponsive. Very unpolished. The world is not very interactive. A little boring.
Isles of Sea and Sky (Steam Deck, 20 hours): Puzzles of pushing. An open world with ample room for experimentation. Percussion and flutes. Wordless storytelling. Rewards scattered everywhere with steady nonlinear progression. I was pleasantly confounded.
I had this weird dream that half of a studio was laid off just as their latest project was released to critical acclaim.
Fail Fail Succeed (Steam Deck, 4.5 hours): A puzzle game where you have to fail, in just the right way, to progress. Effectively varied. Enough room for experimentation that it never feels static. There is also a very important dog.
The Beginner's Guide (Steam Deck, 2 hrs): A short story about a series of games and the relationship between their player and their creator. It's one of those stories with an inversion such that one cannot help but revisit and recontextualize the experience.
Senua's Saga: Hellblade II (PS5, 7 hrs): The artistry on display in these is the best case for a AAA budget. Acting superb, mo-cap astounding, music moving, writing and dialogue brilliant. Being privy to every stray thought and doubt in Senua's head offers unsurpassed intimacy with a character.
Live footage of everyone in 33 Immortals except me when they see a Protettore Raro:
Monumentum (Steam Deck, 2 hours): A rage inducing momentum-based precision platformer. Miss a single button prompt and risk losing hard earned progress. But—damn, I have to say, once it clicks, it clicks.
Mina the Hollower (PS5, 29 hours): Brutal and retro, this game is so packed. I feel like I could play it 10 times and not see every corner or meet every bizarre character. Surprisingly punishing but unfailingly rewarding. Defined by limitless variety, customization, and surprises.
Forbidden Solitaire (Steam Deck, 6.5 hours): A linear 90s floppy disk-style horror adventure game with Golf Solitaire combat encounters. The campy audiovisual experience made me endlessly happy. Easy to pick up, put down, and look forward to playing.
Key Fairy (Steam Deck, 5 hours): Is it a game or a dance? Tether through the dark maze-like forest dodging projectiles and collecting keys. Minimal and dissonant presentation. Hard as hell boss combat with cathartic victory. Dreamlike dialogue—in fact, I'm not sure I didn't dream the whole thing.
Raider Kid and the Ruby Chest (Steam Deck, 3.5 hours): Tiny pixel exploraformer with some great upgrades and some awful save points. Youthful spelunking adventure. Cheerful music. Zany cutscenes. Sudden difficulty spike at the end.
Henry Halfhead (Steam Deck, 2.5 hours): A silly game about the life of half a head. Possess objects and manipulate them. Learn the importance of being true to yourself. The gameplay drags some in the middle: a little sandboxy for my taste.
TR-49 (Steam Deck, 10 hours): An arcane machine—a web of archival secrets and textual puzzle pieces to assemble. Searching and analyzing are absorbing endeavors. Brush up on your leetspeak. Voiced dialogue is warm and effective but maybe too frequent. Reality is negotiable.
A Bird Story (Steam Deck, 82 minutes): Isolated and dreamy, a boy grows a relationship with a bird. Minimal gameplay with gorgeously serene piano music. Beautiful. Simply sentimental, especially to one that has loved a non-human friend.
This Game Will End in 205 Clicks (Steam Deck, 12 minutes): A meta monologue from a villain forced to do no evil for a day. There are no choices, or actions other than clicking, and the countdown gimmick does not tie in very strongly to the narrative. Kind of underbaked. Funny here and there.
Under the Island (PS5, 15 hrs): Feel the wrath of my mighty hockey stick. Top-down action adventure with puzzles, dungeons, and upgrades. The world is packed with rewarding secrets. This genre never fails: it's still one of the best.
Death of a Wish (Steam Deck, 11.5 hrs): A cardinally intense top-down action adventure. The art style and sound design and combat are all frenzied in presentation yet deliberate in execution. It feels satisfying when actions connect. Chaotic, beautiful, furious, vengeful, and righteous.
If Dr Pepper will not sell me Cherry Vanilla, I must take matters into my own hands.
Sometimes my friends with large Steam backlogs will ask me why I don't have one. It's because I follow a very simple process when deciding whether to buy a game.
Ratyrinth (Steam Deck, 2 hrs): Challenging, tight, and satisfying Mario-inspired side-scrolling platforming (except the janky and infuriating cling mechanics). Perfectly varied pacing, quick retries, and responsive controls (mostly). Surprisingly anticlimactic ending.