malvasia bianca

Some short notes on five games I’ve dipped into over the last few months:

Magic Research 2

A pleasant clicker game. Or clicker plus autobattler game, you’re building a magic school and exploring dungeons. I liked the first game, I like this one; on the “you’re almost always doing stuff” side of clicker games rather than the “you’re spending a lot of time waiting for stuff”, which means that it can suck up time, but it didn’t take too many days for me to beat the game. (For some value of “beat”: I chose to see credits, retry it with the two story focused alternate endings, and then I did some but not all of the challenges.)

Slice & Dice

A dice-based roguelike. Took me a little while to get into it, but there’s depth there once you get past the first few battles. Lots of stuff interacting together: your characters’ classes provide dice with different possibilities, you’re upgrading one class after every battle so that’s always change, you also get equipment after battle giving you further tweaks to what’s going on, and within each battle, you’ve got choices about when to accept dice and when to reroll them, and then the order and targeting of dice.

Which gies a fair amount to do? The early battles are straightforward enough, but it doesn’t get to be too long before you’re having to think hard about when to push your luck on dice rolls, what order to apply effects in, what order to target enemies in, etc. And the class trees give you a pleasant amount of possibility space to explore, too. At first I thought rolling dice might give a little too much randomness, but, as you upgrade your classes, most of the sides start doing interesting things, so between that and rerolls, it’s fine.

Having said that: it never quite grabbed me? Listening to the Eggplant Show folks, I’m sure there are depths here that I didn’t reach, but I somehow ended up watching Slay the Spire videos again and deciding that I’d rather replay that game instead. (Still a very good game, it turns out!)

Cookie Clicker

An early clicker game; I’d never gotten around to playing it, but a mention of it on a podcast reminded me of its existence, so I figured I’d give it a try.

And it’s okay, I guess? Pretty basic, though, the genre has come a long way since this one. There’s really just one main type of currency (cookies) in this one, and all the buildings just let you make more and more cookies. Which, in a weird way, made my initial run through the game kind of fun, because it put the question of optimizing which building or upgrade to buy next front and center; so the fun in the game turned out to be building a spreadsheet to try to more-or-less optimize that. (Though, weirdly, I couldn’t get the numbers to work out perfectly; not sure what was going wrong? I would think that, if I’d been missing something big, they would have been more off than they were…)

And then I restarted, and stuff got faster, pretty soon fast enough that my spreadsheet wasn’t useful. And the game got odder, which was pleasant; once I got used to the oddness, it didn’t give a ton more to think about, though. I stuck with it for a while longer, following a guide for a recommended upgrade path; but then I decided I’d had enough.

Also, one aspect of Cookie Clicker that I wasn’t entirely thrilled about: you can play it without spending too much time actively paying attention to the screen, but clicking on the periodic powerups and then, if you get a lucky draw on the powerup, clicking a whole bunch on the big cookie, really does make a difference in your cookie acquisition. But that means that the game takes enough of your attention that you can’t really do much else (or at least much else visual, you can probably listen to a podcast), and I’m not sure there’s enough meat in the game to justify that.

Little Dig Game

A cute little clicker game, with a visual component because you’re clicking to produce workers who are digging through a sequence of planets (or asteroids or whatever they are). And you’ve got an upgrade tree to make the workers more efficient, and then a plot thing that starts appearing. Not much going on, but that’s fine, I’m not sure it took me 30 minutes to finish the game, and what’s there is well done, happy of spent that time on the game.

Paradise Killer

This had been in the back of my mind as a game that I should maybe get around to playing at some point, and then it got selected for our July VGHVI game. And I was out of town at a Nei Gong workshop for a little over a week in the middle of June, so it was convenient to have something I could play on the Switch on the plane and during evenings.

Didn’t really click for me, though. It’s an open world detective game, and honestly I would have preferred a little less open world and little more detecting. Especially since the open world included a fair amount of noticing random optional items in the environment (e.g. the game’s currency); as far as I can tell, I don’t actually need to use the currency, but I don’t want to spend time looking for it or thinking about what to use it on? And I really did not like it when, after finally deciding that I had enough currency that I could start unlocking fast travel locations, it turns out that you need to pay to use the fast travel system as well; that makes no sense to me.

Also I think that it didn’t help that I was playing it on the Switch. It’s a stylish game, I think I would have enjoyed seeing it on a TV screen; and maybe looking for stuff would have been less grating on the larger screen, too?

At any rate: I saw stuff that I liked, enough so that I’m kind of hoping Liesl will decide to play it and I’ll be able to see more of what’s going on there. (And if I had twice as much time as I actually do to play games, I probably would fit in time to play it.) But enough aspects of Paradise Killer were grating that, even while I was on the trip, I decided I’d rather watch basketball games or read books, and when I got back, other games (Metaphor: ReFantazio right now, but there are others after that) have priority. So, unless the discussion on Thursday is significantly more interesting than I expect, I don’t expect to come back to this one.