malvasia bianca

I am way behind on my video game blogging; I actually haven’t blogged about any games I’ve played in 2026. Hopefully I haven’t forgotten too much about those games; at any rate, here’s a post talking about a few different games that I dipped into and don’t have a lot to say about. (I went through a phase where I tried out a few games that Instagram was showing me ads for, most of these came from that.)

Pixel Flow!

A puzzle game with a good mechanic: there’s a picture made out of different colored pixels, you’ve got guns that are moving on a track around the picture, and each kind of gun can shoot away a single color of pixel. You can only have a limited number of guns on the track at a given time, and each one can shoot out a certain number of pixels. (20 red pixels, say; it disappears after destroying 20 reds.) Also, at any given point, you only have access to three different new guns at any given time. So, basically, if right now the outside of the picture has a bunch of red pixels, then you want to get a red gun out there to clear them away; but the red guns might not be one of the three guns on top, so you might need to get some other colored guns out there first; and then you might use up your slots, and would be in trouble. So there’s a sequencing puzzle which turns out to be decently fun.

There are a lot of games like this out there (as Instagram was happy to let me know once I watched a few such ads); Pixel Flow! is a relatively good one. But, still, it’s a free-to-play game. So that means that they have various gating mechanisms that don’t particularly align with the goal of me having fun figuring out a puzzle; and there’s also a little more of a “one more try” mechanism than I’d like. (Which, admittedly, can also happen in non-free-to-play puzzle games.) Those mechanisms didn’t really get in my way, though: I can’t remember the details, but I might have gone through about 200 puzzles and had fun doing so?

But then I hit the puzzle-free-to-play kiss of death: a puzzle that I’m fairly sure (not 100% sure, but at least 80% sure, and the energy mechanics made it hard to be more definite than than that) wasn’t solvable without using a powerup. (I.e. wasn’t solvable with the default rules.) The game gives you some powerups for free once you progress, but having to use them both removes the fun of the puzzle for me, and also opens up to a situation where the game will give me more and more puzzles that need powerups, at which point it’s not free to pay. And, while I’m happy to pay for puzzle games (I must have given Conceptis hundreds of dollars by now), I want to pay for puzzles to solve, I don’t want to have the puzzles be free and then pay for the ability to bypass the rules on a single attempt to solve the puzzle. Solving the puzzle according to the rules is where the fun is at, not banging my head against a hard puzzle and then deciding that it’s not solvable!

The Tower – Idle Tower Defense

A tower defense game with one tower. Which you can level up over the course of a run in the game, and then you can earn a couple of other currencies to give you access to more ways of leveling it up and to change the leveling power curves.

Which could work just fine, but this game had two real problems. One is that the cross-run leveling up process was very slow: I’m used to that sort of thing happening later on in games like this, and honestly I kind of appreciate it because I don’t want to spend all of my time staring at my phone waiting to be able to level stuff up, but at the beginning it’s nice to get improvements relatively quickly. And the other is that, while you can let the game play on autopilot, you do worse that way, and also I think that the game has to actually be running on your phone screen. So you just don’t get the incremental game “come back in two hours” mechanic, you have to pay too much attention to it.

Some of that might be fine if I were looking for something different; but I feel like the growth curve is tuned towards spending quite a bit more money than I’m comfortable with. So I stopped playing this one quickly.

Whiteout Survival

I played this one because the ads looked fun: controlling a dude who wanders around gathering resources, then comes back to base to turn those resources into money, which the dude would then spend on something that makes part of the loop more effective or more automated, and then repeating that for a minute until you’ve built up something neat. Which is fun to watch, though even watching that, I couldn’t figure out how to turn that into a game that would actually work well: it seemed like the loop would power up way too quickly.

The answer turned out to be that the ad has nothing to do with the actual gameplay: you literally never see something in the game that looks like what the ads were showing. You do do some amount of base building / resource production in the game, but it’s much more abstract, in a way that removes the fun part of those ads.

What’s left is something that turns out to be essentially identical to Last War: Survival once you get beyond the skinning; that was an interesting game to play, but I didn’t need another time sink, and seeing all of those mechanics a second time would be much less interesting than it was the first time. (Makes me wonder which game came first, or if there’s some other earlier game that they’re both copying.)

Tiles Survive

Basically, just repeat everything I wrote about Whiteout Survival; I realized what was going on and gave up on this game quickly enough that it didn’t even make it onto my list of games I’ve played recently.

Dragonsweeper

If you’re going to play one game from this post, Dragonsweeper is the one; not coincidentally, it’s the only one that isn’t an iPhone app found via Instagram adds. I just don’t have a ton to say about it, so I’m not putting it in its own post, but it’s well done: it’s kind of like Minesweeper but with enemies of different strengths (so the numbers aren’t the number of enemies next to the square but rather the sum of their strengths), and where you have to defeat the enemies instead of avoiding them. And doing so uses up a life bar in proportion to the strength of the enemy; but there’s a leveling up system, so while you’re weak enough that the strongest enemies would kill you at the start if you tried to defeat them, eventually you’ll be able to beat them.

Nice idea; well done, and it leads to a game that’s much more solvable than Minesweeper while still being interesting. But also there’s basically only one interesting emergent strategy to figure out (assuming you’re already good at Minesweeper), so there’s not a lot of depth here.

Idle Obelisk Miner

An idle game; better in that regard than The Tower was, you get some benefits from clicking if you want to pay attention, but it’s happy to burble along on its own. Also, unlike The Tower, the progress curves are pretty reasonable; or at least they are if you buy some basic permanent powerups. Which is a form of game design that I support – paying for games is good, if a game presents itself as free to play but with some permanent powerups priced at a few bucks, then I’ll treat it as a paid game with a demo. If you do want to spend lots of money on Idle Obelisk Miner, you can, but you don’t have to, at least in the part I played.

I actually played this one for a while, probably longer than all of the other games on this list put together. Not my favorite incremental game, and the theming in particular is really bland, but the progression curves were interesting enough.

Then I was starting to feel like I was spending too much time on the game. But, actually, at that time I hit a progress barrier that made me think my progression would slow down in a way that would cause me to spend less time on it, which would be good! Unfortunately, it turned out that there’s a whole second game mode within Idle Obelisk Miner, the second mode just only shows up something like every other month of calendar time, and purely by chance it hadn’t been available during my first few weeks of playing the game. And the problem was that I could see that second mode sucking me into the game and having me continuing to spend too much time on it; good for people who are looking for a time waster, bad for me. And ultimately I decided that, rather than try to ignore the second mode, I’d just stop playing the game; it wasn’t bad but it wasn’t clear that it was good enough to cause me to want to invest much more time into it.