September 26 - October 2 | Gamers With Jobs

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IMAGE(https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/files/pictures/pictures/picture-13445.jpg) Felix “Fox Trot” Threepaper

Welcome folks, and happy “55th Anniversary of the theatrical premiere of West Side Story” week!

West Side Story was a Broadway smash in 1957, and the 1961 movie version won 10 Academy Awards. It was 8 years in the making and almost didn’t happen. It featured more dancing and more acting (and therefore more rehearsal) than Broadway shows usually had at the time, and producers were worried that the themes were too dark. You may all celebrate by playing a game where it’s a long grind, but you win out in the end.

FIFA 23 is the big release this week. It’s the first entry to feature womens’ leagues. Ted Lasso and AFC Richmond are also in it, as well as 21 football “heroes” who are included because EA did a deal with Marvel. Marvel owns image rights for ex-football players now? PC and latest-gen console versions will include HyperMotion2, a feature from FIFA 22 that turns real match footage into in-game animations, and Technical Dribbling, which I’m assured is better than ordinary dribbling. EA is walking away from FIFA after this—FIFA was asking for over a billion dollars in licensing fees for the next 4 years. EA will make its own football game next year and FIFA will probably end up trying to license players as Fortnite skins and to make NFTs. To be fair, EA wants to make NFTs, too. None of this will matter to fans, who just want to play as their favourite team at their favourite stadium.

Let's Build a Zoo looks like Stardew Valley, but with a zoo. So … Starzoo Valley? It’s a tycoon game where you build and run your zoo to make numbers go up. There’s a lot of micromanagement, down to selecting the amount of seasoning in the food you sell. Don’t let the pixel art graphics and breezy soundtrack fool you, as things get pretty kooky, pretty fast. You’ll be presented with a series of binary moral choices that could turn your zoo into a renewable energy powerhouse, or an industrial abattoir. For example: a visitor loses their dog at the zoo. Do you try to return it, or keep it and dress it up as a lion to attract more visitors? Then you unlock the ability to gene-splice animals and things really escalate.

Grognards get Hearts of Iron IV: By Blood Alone this week. It’s an expansion to Paradox’s WWII grand strategy game that fleshes out Italy, Ethiopia, and Switzerland. Paradox games generally package expansions with quality-of-life updates, and this is no exception, with tweaks to peace conferences, managing air units, and naval combat.

These days, Castelvanioids (or Metroidvanias, if you will) include Soulslike or roguelite features. Moonscars is a Castlevanioid with Soulslike features. Your grimdark hero drags around a hefty 2-handed sword as she explores a 2D dungeon, fighting critters and unlocking areas with her special abilities. When you die, enemies respawn and you drop your unspent currency. Moonscars adds a wrinkle: if you die before you reclaim your currency, the moon becomes hungry and makes enemies stronger until you perform a moon rite, which involves fighting a doppelganger of yourself. The spell tree is promisingly branchy, even though you have limited spell slots. This suggests potential for different builds and approaches, although it’s hard to gauge from previews how deep the systems actually are. It’s got a striking, if gloomy, pixel art style: subdued, mostly grayscale tones with flashes of red.

If Moonscars is grimdark, Lemon Cake is cutelight: a colourful bakery management sim with the cheery aesthetic of a mobile game, but without free-to-play features or microtransactions. It’s more about time management and cost effectiveness as you’re running front and back of house: serving customers and working the kitchen to bake your scrumptious pastries, not forgetting to clean up as well. It sounds frenetic, but you can’t fail too hard, so it’s actually pretty chill. There’s no multiplayer, so it’s geared for one person to be able to do all the chores.

Bunny Park is another cutesy, cheerful management sim, by the same devs who made Lemon Cake—this time you’re trying to breed bunnies. I was led to believe that rabbit-breeding generally takes care of itself, but apparently you have to make the conditions just right. On the sliding scale from “management sim” to “clicker game”, this is definitely way down the “clicker game” end.

Otherwise, there’s a console port of Blade Assault, another Castlevanioid in a sci-fi, cyberpunk setting, and Tunic comes to PlayStation and Switch. Tunic is interesting: it’s an isometric Zelda-type game with an old-school, in-game manual. You find pages of the manual as you explore, and they can reveal new mechanics or other secrets.

While Moonscars looks pretty solid, I’ll give a delayed-action GOTW to Tunic. It first came out in March 2022, when Elden Ring was still looming large. I was intrigued, but it was an XBox ‘sclusy so I thought, “I’ll check that out later.” Well, now it’s later.

Here's the list, in release-date AND alphabetical order!