Games That Don’t Have a Thread Catch-All

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This is a thread for games that you’re interested in discussing, asking questions, or whatever but don’t necessarily need to have their own thread. Small games, unpopular games, games you want to shout out, games you need to get off your chest, and anything else.

Games!

I played Eastshade earlier this year and really really enjoyed it. First person, extremely pleasant, light puzzle and dialogue game where you show up on the Island of Eastshade to paint some pictures in your mother’s memory. Help the local bear, owl, monkey, and deer people with their daily problems. There’s absolutely no combat or real danger. You can pass out from the cold if you stay out overnight but building a fire or getting a heavy coat will prevent that and increase your exploration time. Build a fire? Why yes there are light crafting mechanics. These tie into solving a few quests and with no inventory limit, it’s just a matter of a little bit of foraging to find what you need.

Initial travel can be a little slow, but you eventually unlock methods to traverse the rivers, lakes, and ocean as well as a bicycle. You basically are spending a little over 10 hours peddling your bicycle around a quaint forested countryside talking to the anthropomorphic inhabitants of the island. Eastshade was relaxing and a great change of pace from pretty much anything out there.

Eastshade has been on my radar a while. It looks gorgeous. I didn't know it had crafting stuff in there, but what you describe doesn't sound too bad.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/oUarYvo.jpg)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/8...

So I kinda regretted passing on Project Hospital (-25%) during the Steam sale then I noticed GMG price matched during their current Summer sale. I took it as a sign and pulled the trigger.

Good gravy this game is the Dark Souls of Management Sims. The level of fine detail in which it explores the medical science field is dutifully impressive. Virtually every medical term, menu icon & piece medical equipment has an accompanied pop-up window describing the function, symptom, illness, treatment & medication as though it were straight from a medical dictionary. It's really expansive.

Digging the attention to detail as well. When a doctor examines or treats a patient, the animation loop has them interacting with the patient, then disposing items like needles in the bio-hazard waste bin, washing hands, putting other instruments back in the medical cabinet. Then they go over to their computer and print out treatment plans/prescriptions for the patient. Feels deliberate & authentic in spite of the graphics being simplistic. (On graphics, the character models are the weak link. Environmental objects are detailed and densely packed in the spaces.)

It's pretty cool that you can either diagnose & treat patients manually or just set it to auto-pilot and let your staff do all the work. Interviewing a patient when they arrive almost feels like a detective mini-game as you compare their symptoms (middle of their chart) against possible diagnoses (top of chart). Many will have hidden symptoms that will only reveal after further analysis sometimes in other depts. (physical exam, x-ray, etc.). The more you check over them the closer you get to a correct diagnosis as the Diagnoses section dials in, hopefully with a 100% confirmation.

What's interesting is the UI keeps a running log of all the patients you've interacted with. So when you preform the initial interview you can follow them through their complete treatment experience. Seeing them through various departments (ER, ICU, radiology, surgery, etc.) and performing all the procedures manually yourself through the affiliated dept. staff. The system feels quite dynamic & flexible based on how hands-on with your patients you wish to be.

And that's not even scratching the surface. There's also the complete tool suite for designing, building out & expanding your hospital. As well as dealing with administrative duties such as hiring, budgets, loans, insurance, etc.

The granularity is insane. This package seems to have it all and I love it.

SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech is a lot of fun. These SteamWorld folks sure are good at making games. I loved Dig 2, Heist, and now Quest.

I just started chapter 16 of 19 and am around 20 hours. There's also an optional gauntlet mode in the story that I've put a few hours in as well. Story is fun, silly, and SteamWorld. I've been playing on Legendary difficulty (the hardest) and other than one barely possible boss fight, it's been challenging but fair.

Finished SteamWorld Quest yesterday on the hardest difficulty. Decided not to do the last two arena battles since they would require too much level grinding and the game doesn't give a good method for EXP at the end. Really loved it and it will be high on my personal list.

Arise thread all for my self.

Anyone play Moonlighter? Roguelike store dungeon crawler. The animation in the first cutscenes blew me away and the early loop seems incredibly solid.

On my Switch wishlist.

Vector wrote:

Arise thread all for my self.

Anyone play Moonlighter? Roguelike store dungeon crawler. The animation in the first cutscenes blew me away and the early loop seems incredibly solid.

I put a few hours into it with Game Pass. I enjoyed the first couple hours, but the loop ran thin for me after just a couple more. Maybe there's more to it, but inventory management started to grate on me, and neither the combat nor the shop keeping systems seemed deep enough to keep me interested beyond those first few hours. I really liked the look of it though.

Ohhh I love this idea for a thread. I can tell y'all about random ass games I've been streaming, like this wackadoo thing.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/6...

Game is total batcrap, but the dev was a good sport about me laughing at his game.

Dyni wrote:
Vector wrote:

Arise thread all for my self.

Anyone play Moonlighter? Roguelike store dungeon crawler. The animation in the first cutscenes blew me away and the early loop seems incredibly solid.

I put a few hours into it with Game Pass. I enjoyed the first couple hours, but the loop ran thin for me after just a couple more. Maybe there's more to it, but inventory management started to grate on me, and neither the combat nor the shop keeping systems seemed deep enough to keep me interested beyond those first few hours. I really liked the look of it though.

I can definitely see that. I'm getting sucked in by the one-more-turn aspect of the loop. I feel like I've upgraded enough different aspects to be making real progress. Secretly like inventory management soooooo...I'm a monster.

I have a good combo with tier 2 of the spear and bow. Only made it to the 3rd level of the 1st dungeon. I do like that the shop aspect doesn't require any upkeep and is only a method of gaining money.

Veloxi wrote:

Ohhh I love this idea for a thread. I can tell y'all about random ass games I've been streaming, like this wackadoo thing.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/6...

Game is total batcrap, but the dev was a good sport about me laughing at his game.

How does this game, which at "looks" competently done have less user reviews than my own Steam game?

Hahahaha competent....

Rebuttal:

IMAGE(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/521320/ss_f6cbac052fbfbf8f7bd453875c0398464dd27ebf.600x338.jpg?t=1523554432)

Hah, no idea what that is.

So Beast Agenda 2030 leaves early access next week. I've been toying with it and it is a bundle of fun. I'll be streaming it next Tuesday as well.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/9...

Veloxi wrote:

Hah, no idea what that is.

That’s the game I made! And I even put it on Steam!

Beast Agenda looks very interesting. The procedural generation looks to add something that other similar style games don’t.

I want to give a shoutout to Speed Dating for Ghosts. It's considered a dating game and lovely example of interesting short fiction. This is one whose stories haunt my waking thoughts from time to time.

My only word of caution is the discussions often speak directly about death and dying. Steel yourself if it's a tender subject.

Amoebic wrote:

I want to give a shoutout to Speed Dating for Ghosts. It's considered a dating game and lovely example of interesting short fiction. This is one whose stories haunt my waking thoughts from time to time.

My only word of caution is the discussions often speak directly about death and dying. Steel yourself if it's a tender subject.

IMAGE(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/746400/ss_1a31523b3966ae2b14ebd3158dc182b639313e01.600x338.jpg?t=1561506773)

Really enjoying the Moonlighter loop still. It's relaxing and easy. Settled on a spear/bow combo and armour focused around speed. Just reached the desert dungeon so I'm probably about 50% through the game.

The music is really good.

Moonlighter is wonderful, it's a game I keep meaning to get back to. The two different methods of operation counterbalance one another so nicely. If I start to find one tedious, I can switch to the other and still derive satisfaction from progression.

I bought Moonlighter in a switch eshop sale a while back, haven't dug into it yet. You are tempting me to finally fire it up!

Just to give this thread something other than Moonlighter to talk about. I give you:

Crying Suns

It is a beautiful chunky-pixel style FTL-like game. It gives you an immersive choose-your-own-adventure style story telling, encounter by encounter. There are tactical space battles (real time with pause), and some planetary exploration. I've only played a little bit so far but I'm struck by its beauty and style.

Finished Moonlighter and it's DLC. Really enjoyed it. Definitely fit into my yearly theme of games I can relax with.

Decided to be a little frugal and go for a cheaper game next.

Disc Creatures!

It's basically a spinoff of Pokemon Red/Blue on the gameboy. Main difference being you only have 3 creatures on your team but they all attack during your turn. They are also sentient and you are using digital copies of them. I'm only at the very beginning of chapters two.

I have no idea how long the game is but there are 200 creatures and I have about twenty 3.5 hours in. It's made by a Japanese indie developer named Satto with RPG Maker VX Ace. I have no idea how they managed to bend that old engine to make this game.

IMAGE(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/1083190/ss_b8330272e7538671c5a595f08275726eae6c57a2.1920x1080.jpg?t=1575358581)

IMAGE(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/1083190/ss_dfe628fe5fab7805f38c52ed95c25d9ea0082121.1920x1080.jpg?t=1575358581)

I bought Moonlighter earlier this year, and was expecting it to click with me more than it did. I made it to the end of the first dungeon, but wasn't finding the loop quite as enjoyable as I expected. But I bet this will be the sort of game that I have to be in the right mood for, and if I go back to it sometime next year, I'll love it and push on through.

Now that I'm several hours in, I'm quite surprised that Outer Wilds doesn't have its own thread. This tiny indie game has already left me awestruck as much as any AAA game I've played this year.

Dyni wrote:

Now that I'm several hours in, I'm quite surprised that Outer Wilds doesn't have its own thread. This tiny indie game has already left me awestruck as much as any AAA game I've played this year.

I was surprised at first, but I kinda get it. It's an adventure game with Newtonian (-ish? I dunno, how good the flight model is, but it's definitely more difficult than the typical space game) physics. That's gotta be a pretty small niche. For people who are into it (it's my favorite thing I played this year), it's amazing and definitely should have had a thread, but I wonder how many people here actually played it.

Also, on the PC it was Epic only, and as we saw in the repeated threads that got closed around here, a lot of people will treat a great game released on Epic as if it doesn't exist at all.

Outer Wilds is weird because it’s gotten no talk here but is an absolute darling with games media.

There was some good conversation about Outer Wilds here when it released, but it was in the Xbox Game Pass thread. The same goes for some other indies that launched on that service, like Ashen and Void Bastards and Blair Witch.

On these forums, conversations about smaller console exclusives like that tend to fall into the platform catch-alls. (Pulling another example from the header image, there was lively discussion of SteamWorld Quest but it was all in the Switch games thread.)

I'm more surprised that Disco Elysium has no dedicated thread here. Especially since it has been discussed in the Conference Call - which says something about our C-levels absence in the forums apart from Amoebic - and in the GOTY thread.

I didn't realize this thread till now. Thanks for it

Adding Post Scriptum and Hell Let Loose. Two good WW2 shooters for those tired by BFV antics.

I think Dicey Dungeons doesn't have a thread. Its a fun game at a good price right now, $10 with the winter Steam sale. Its sort of Slay the Spire with dice. Would be a great fit for Switch or Mobile but isnt on either yet.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/8...

Also +1 for Disco Elysium. Extremely creative Point and Click adventure game/RPG. I think its closest to The Longest Journey, or Quest for Glory (without any combat, I think)

Tagging thread because I'll probably have stuff I'll want to discuss later that won't deserve or have its own thread.

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