With the cleansing ritual of excusing a number of physical games from my Game Pile, I decided it was also time to make a ritual of making it clear a number of 2019 digital games that had definitely, definitely left my Game Pile. Presented here is a lightning round of Games that I tried in 2019 and didn’t feel I had anything to say about them. These games largely went unfinished, unless something provokes me to give ’em a second look – which can include you specifically asking me about it!
It’s a Greek Myth Zelda-like kinda top-downy ‘lost kid goes on adventure ordained by a missing dad’ which is fine enough as I suppose but it also really keenly drives home how the Zelda form is defined by execution and this one’s just not executed that well. This is cornflakes of a game, absolutely good for some volume of videogame.
It’s a over the shoulder shooter and I have memories of playing it, but I don’t have any time logged on it on Steam, which means I may have dreamt it, or played it all offline, but whatever the case is, the fact I can’t tell is a sign this game is a little lacking in its impression on me.
It’s a moderately decent puzzle game that isn’t so interesting that when I found the puzzles hard enough to do that I cared enough to become good at it. You probably got it for a dollar on a Steam sale and wonder ‘was it worth it?’ Just consider the dollar lost value, this game is extreeeeemely basic.
This is a digital version of a card game. I’ve played the card game, I’ve played the physical game and I really prefer the physical version to the digital version. It isn’t to me the same kind of thing as Star Realms – a game with which it shares a lot of DNA – because this is on my Steam library, and not my phone. If I wanna play Star Realms, a five minute game on my phone, easy. Ascension (and Cthulhu Realms, which I also have on Steam) has to compete with, oh, say, Far Cry 5.
Oooo I’m gunna be mean to a videogame! I have sunk a few hours of trying to get going on this game over the course of two years, and you know at a certain point where I spend hours of my life trying to engage with a game about its systems and relate to its characters maybe the problem isn’t with me, per se. I bet if you love the way this game looks and makes you feel it’s great, but I found this whole affair boring and alienating, and knowing that there are people who matter to me who think of this as an unappreciated classic mocked by ‘the gamers’ parroting things that sure seem to be just true bothers me. I talk about how games need onramps, and this game has a wall – in front of a ditch.
Do you want a pop-and-drop cover-based shooter version of Diablo where all the women look like the same stock model tity elf? Good news? You can have it for a preposterously low rate? There’s nothing to complain about here, at least, you’re getting pretty much exactly as much game as it promises you.
Satellite Reign was advertised and kickstarted as a spiritual sequel to Syndicate, and a game with the kind of depth Syndicate could never really live up to because its interface was also designed to handle a two-button joystick from a 1993 Amiga. I was super hype for this, because I remembered liking Syndicate and then I got it and I was surprised by something, so I went back and bought Syndicate and I bought Syndicate Wars and you know what? I suck ass at these games, and nobody should care what I think about them.
This game is really good and really cool and I do not want to show my ass about how bad I am at it. This game is just so haphazard and reckless and failure prone when my flipper hands pilot it that I just don’t feel like any take I have on it will get deeper than ‘wow, this is good, but also super complex!’ Go ask Clay!
First of all, this four year old b-grade game is still trying to command a price of $50 on Steam, which I mean, dress for the job you want I guess. Still, while I have this game and I’ve installed it, I’ve uninstalled it recently, because I just don’t want to talk about it. Not because the game did anything, but because it’s not a remarkable game, which means talking about it is going to involve looking for something to say, and that means bringing up the fact that this game was created by the Duke Nukem Forever people, who it’s pretty clear kind of suck ass.