Recent reviews by Scriptorum

You know how some games are GEMS and some game are UNDERRATED? Well, this is one is BOTH!

Slipways is a turn-based economy game in space. Send out probes to discover new planets. Tell those plants what to produce. Direct production between different planets. Research new technologies to help your corner of the galaxy thrive. Meet the goals of the council members to grant bonuses and unlock additional trade options. Easy to learn, hard to master, yada yada yada. This is basically what you're doing, optimizing an economy. If this kind of thing is not in your wheelhouse, then this isn't for you. In that case, I bid you well, good sir or madam, and wish you a prosperous future in your strange House of Wheels.

Planets are basically converters, they take in some resource and spit out some others. As planets import and export needs are met, planets scale up production and enable them to reach higher levels of success, which in turn feeds into the council goals. Failing to meet even basic needs lowers moral which is an end score multiplier. Planets are often position inconveniently, leading you to ask, "should I invest in mass lensing to bounce off this asteroid, or use one of my three previous slipways, or just mollify the denizens with some culture?" Or maybe blow that effin planet up! There are not a lot of moving parts here, but there's a lot to think about. There are only five basic resources: food, people, robots, ore, and tech, and as you play you start to recognize certain characteristics and upgrade paths. People tend to need food, Robots need tech. Tech needs ore. Some planets just provide a better exchange rate than others. It's not unusually to start a game, send out a few probes, and then just ... study it for a while ... before making another move.

Also there's a campaign with unique mechanics and daily ranked runs. The standard game lasts 25 years and you try to get your best score. When your plans all come together and you see a field of prosperous planets glimmering among the stars it is very satisfying. Other times you'll be scratching your head how to make the best of the challenge. Works great on my Steam Deck which explains why I didn't get to sleep until 3AM last night. Recommended. I love this game. I might marry it.

I like the Viva La Dirt League crew too, and if you want to support their extracurricular activities, here's a game you can buy. Stop reading. Nice Day is a fishing simulator with a Honeywood storyline attached to it. Unlock additional pools of water to fish, reach greater depths, and acquire equipment and spell upgrades to make fishing easier. It's all pretty linear and heavily gated by the story line.

The process for fishing is simple: row out to your fishing spot, choose your hook and your bait, avoid fish who like that bait until you get to the depth where the fish you like live. Once a fish is hooked, you alternate between reeling it up and blocking or (even better) parrying the fish which lowers your health and stamina. If the fish wins, your health and stamina reset, and your lure is refunded. Eventually you'll encounter fish so strong that parrying alone is insufficient to reel it in, so you find yourself casting spells to push the fish up or heal yourself. It's okay, but I found myself wishing I was playing Ridiculous Fishing or Dave the Diver instead. I did like the exploration aspect, as there are some underwater caves you can reach by careful boat placement and playing with water currents, but don't expect any great surprises in them.

What should set this game apart is the use of the characters from Viva. But .. it doesn't hit for me. The story is flat. The jokes are beaten into the ground. There's a distinct lack of voice over, which I understand, but it's a bummer. The pixel art characters are basic and really don't look much like their live counterparts. It just feels like lost opportunities here. Maybe I'm just in a bad mood. Maybe I'm a poo poo head? Yes, that's it, I'm a poo poo head. I'm glad we got to the bottom of this before this review could ruin any lives.

This is another one of those horror work simulator games. Except instead of Freddy's, you work at a warehouse with no memory of how you got there

I'm getting ahead of myself. First, I should mention, there's a cat. You can pet the cat. You can buy stuff for the cat. You can put a pirate eyeball patch on the cat. For some of you, that will be the selling point. Go buy it. I named my cat Fuzzball. Of secondary concern is you can never leave the cat alone for a long time. If you do, the cat dies and -- according to the text on a screen -- that's bad. You feel super bad about that. You will never forgive yourself, or you will restart the day and try again, one of the two.

Your job is to fulfill orders with an ever increasing daily quota: fetch items, pack them up, and ship them off. The only hard part is the fetching. I mean the products are stored in an efficient manner and are easy to find, it's just that there are things in the warehouse that take umbrage from your presence. Your noisy human stomping tends to get noticed. And you're trying to recall the location of the product cage you memorized and the 4x4 unlock pattern on the lock box. Meanwhile you hear a creature stalking you...

There are things to unlock, such as the basement, and better equipment to obtain, like backpacks, and a utility belt. The early game is dominated by exploration and learning what's actually dangerous and what's scary window dressing. You know, horror game stuff. The warehouse has some areas you can hide under or crawl through; but in the dim light while chased it's not always clear at a glance if you can fit under a space and it provides enough cover to avoid detection. To be clear I'm stating this as a positive. Later game is about polishing your survival technique and fulling high ticket items. By then you'll probably have figured out the how to avoid the dangers and it's more about optimizing your daily runs than any real scares. I enjoyed it enough to play it through and finish my shift.

I would love to see this concept extended. Especially welcome would be story details explaining more about what happened here, such as discoverable artifacts and side missions.

The only reason to play this is to experience the setting of Still Wakes the Deep from a different perspective: at the bottom of the sea. Visit Beira D one more time, in all its barnacled splendor, this time as a saturation diver operating from a diving bell. You are equipped with an impossibly long and almost completely kink-free air hose. I'm serious, this is some pro-grade tubing following you around.

A few new mechanics are introduced, such as an cutting arc that only works on rusty hinge blobs, and a camera that can only photographs corpses. The journey is pretty short. If the main game left you with some questions, it's doubtful you'll find the answers here. There's less monster variety than the original. About the only way it improves on it is the addition of some mementos you can search for. It gives you a little more reason to explore.

Let's get it out of the way. This game is linear as hell. There a couple of stealth segments that are a bit of hide and go seek, but mostly you're just following the path. A walking simulator. And swimming simulator. And a good deal of drowning simulator. No collectables, fairly basic puzzles. If that bothers you, you should spend your time elsewhere.

It's a decent story with lots of great Scottish swearing, which I now understand to be an important element of any decent story. Some thrills, some chills, just enough of both, but still it was fun to ride the rails (metaphorically speaking) in a deep sea oil rig. There's a pretty cool "melting film" shader effect which they hope you like because you'll experience it a lot. Running is occasionally janky to trigger, meaning some jumps you'll have fail a few times.

Overall, I enjoyed the story and got immersed in the setting, so I didn't regret any of my time here. But I didn't spent full price either.

"Have a nice slay!" the locals say.

Do you like magic? Because there's magic now. And monsters. Also dungeons. All three of these things are now in Hinterberg, a quaint Austrian town whose tourist trade has exploded because of these fantastical new attractions. You are one such visitor, hoping to fill your stamp book with all 25 dungeons completed. Your day is split into four slots:

1. In the morning there's usually a dialog to push forward the story.
2. In the afternoon you visit one of the biomes and pick a dungeon to explore.
3. For the evening you pick someone to socialize with.
4. And at night -- if you're smart -- you go straight to bed. But you could read or watch television if you were curious.

I found most of the combat and puzzles relatively straightforward, but still enjoyable. A few puzzles were head scratchers. A few fights were too hard and I had to come back later after getting better gear. Each biome has its own set of magic spells to leverage in order to escape the dungeons, giving each biome a distinctive flair. Instead of tackling a dungeon you can visit a scenic spot to rest and raise your skills. I liked the social aspect: you meet new locals and tourists, and you can decide who to spend time with. Each one has their own story to tell and benefits for interacting with them.

Of course there's something amiss in Hinterberg, which you find yourself caught in the middle of. What's the true meaning of magic, and why is it here? What is the mayor keeping secret? Which friends will you make and who will see you off at the train station when your trip ends? Will you go back to being a lawyer? And why can't I stab those german tourists wearing monster masks no matter how many times I try???

There are some action sequences. Notably in the winter biome you can summon a magic snowboard and ride the rails or do slalom trials. This game reminds me a bit of Sable, particularly the art style. It was a fun romp. Yes, I said romp. How often does one get to say romp? Romp. Romp romp romp. Now the word looks weird...

It's not the best factory game out there (that's Factorio), but it is the best in 3D. And it's still under development! Giant map with lots of verticality and hidden areas. Easy on the eyes. Many ways to get things (including yourself) from here to there. Unique terrain to explore while hunting slugs or hard drives. Lots of flexibility in base layout. Not really a survival game; no sleeping; eat to increase your health but it'll do that slowly on its own. There are creatures to encounter, and some of them (see giant spiders) can be exciting to fight, especially when you unlock the cluster bombs. :) Death just means you leave a death crate. There are bugs, sometimes the crates fall into an abyss or dead area. Connections can sometimes be tricky. Managing ratios and preventing bottlenecks is harder than it needs to be. The tiering means some stuff you want to play with will take time to unlock, but if you like goals, there they are! In summary, prepare to lose a ton of sleep.

You are a terraformer! Of planets! Well, of one particular planet, and it's kind of a crappy pile of rock, but it's yours. Well it's not really yours, and the corporation who sponsors your presence sends you periodic emails to remind you of that.

It's starts out like a survival sim. You're sort of fond of food, water, and air, none of which is in great supply. Not that death is an issue, you drop half your stuff into a magic box you can retrieve at your convenience. The exploration is fun. Initially it's about your limited oxygen supply, and building air stations to extend your range. However, it's a static map (with the exception of a late game portal to procedural wrecks), so after you see some of the pretty sights you aim for agility boots, jetpacks, and teleporters that will let you get around faster.

And then you get to the business of turning this hunk of garbage planet into a livable place. The best thing about Planet Crafter is observing the changes you make to the planet. Rain, lakes, blue sky, breathable atmosphere, moss, trees, butterflies, frogs, fish, mammals. If that doesn't appeal to you, this isn't for you. It doesn't happen immediately, so there are these moments when you realize hey this is a lake now, or woah look at all the trees that popped up here.

There is backstory about a precursor race, and three endings (all of them depressing). And there's a goodly amount about base building, because you need places to put stuff. All in all, I had a good time.

This is Assassin's Creed: Irishman in France featuring GTA, but I guess that name was taken. Harken, my friends, back to 2009 where they invented not only Bitcoin and the Swine Flu, but also this Parisian WWII resistance simulator. Sure, you can climb most buildings, steal any car, and set explosives which explode as you are casually walking away, yeah, but can you strip a Nazi soldier down to his underwear and steal his pants? Yes, yes you can. There's also some car racing, a story with a love quadrilateral, and a fair number of anti-aircraft guns that can be trained downward and used to shoot German observation posts and fuel tanks. All in all, a fnarkin good time.

This is a coming-of-age exploration and climbing game. The game world is interesting. Puberty comes with the ability to glide, so before you choose your mask and therefore your career, you leave your village and go for a little sci-fi Rumspringa. You meet lots of people, go on quests, and upgrade your bike and your personal abilities. You see a lot of things in the distance and wonder "can I climb up there?" and the answer -- if not "yes" -- is "give it a shot!" There are puzzles and backstory elements that tell you about life on this planet and how what came before. Not all quests and achievements and collectible elements are interesting; I was particularly bored with sand fishing. But overall I enjoyed the being immersed in the world. Not a single time was I harmed by a sweet baby.