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Kraken’s Curse (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Yes! Another little Sokpop game!

This one has you boating between tiny islands, upgrading your little boat, defeating skeletons, and following treasure maps to get items which will help you destroy a huge sea monster.

The controls are a little fiddly, and it was only by accident I realised you could swap which side of your boat you could fire a cannon from (which until then had meant sea encounters were unnecessarily difficult), but like the other Sokpop titles it’s a sweet little adventure with cute graphics and a simple, solid bit of gameplay.

Kraken’s Curse (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

Posted on Written by

Yes! Another little Sokpop game!

This one has you boating between tiny islands, upgrading your little boat, defeating skeletons, and following treasure maps to get items which will help you destroy a huge sea monster.

The controls are a little fiddly, and it was only by accident I realised you could swap which side of your boat you could fire a cannon from (which until then had meant sea encounters were unnecessarily difficult), but like the other Sokpop titles it’s a sweet little adventure with cute graphics and a simple, solid bit of gameplay.

Bobo Robot (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Another Sokpop game! This one is a tiny Metroidvania where you’re a robot and you have to, well, explore and collect nuts and bolts and fly a little spaceship.

Upgrades include a body (you start as just a head!), a gun, the ability to go in water, and so on. It’s all quite cute and has frogs in it. It’s got chunky graphics which remind me a bit of Atari 2600 games aside from a few bits where they have big, more modern bits which is a bit odd, but it doesn’t affect the gameplay.

Fishy 3D (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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I bought a bundle of cute looking games on Steam from a group called Sokpop. They seem to have hundreds on there, but the “Chill Adventure” bundle looked right up my street. Turns out it was. It’s here if you want it too.

After a brief go of some of them, once my daughter graciously allowed me to have my Steam Deck back once she’d played them, I settled on Fishy 3D. You’re a fish who has to grow bigger, by eating plants and fish smaller than you, and sometimes smaller, by swimming through some goo. You can be eaten by bigger fish, and you need to be the right size in order to fit through gratings and pipes and large enough to pull ropes and stuff.

It’s very much in the same mould as Katamari Damacy or Donut County or a million “eat bigger to get bigger” fish games, but with some actual stuff to do. Like most in this collection of games it’s a simple idea with a short game but done really well.

There’s also a Fishy game which isn’t 3D, which I probably should have played first.

SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech (Switch): COMPLETED!

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As a fan of the SteamWorld games, I’ve no idea why it took me more than three years to get round to buying this, let alone actually playing it. Maybe because it’s an RPG I though I’d need a run up? Anyway, here we are, late to the party.

My first impression was “Oh no, what have I bought”. You see, I knew SteamWorld Quest was an RPG but I didn’t know it was a card-based RPG. And I don’t like card based RPGs. In fact, every other card based RPG I’ve ever played (Lost Kingdoms and Baten Kaitos come to mind immediately) I’ve given up on because I just couldn’t enjoy the combat. You can imagine my disappointment when I realised this was another one of those.

I stuck with it, hoping that unlike all the others, it would click. That the SteamWorld world was enough to get me past the gameplay. And you know what? It did click! And I really got into it!

Now, I didn’t get very deep into card deck strategy or some of the more complex card types. I hoped that wouldn’t be necessary, and as it happens, it mostly wasn’t. The deck I ended up with was much the same deck I started with, albeit with different quantities of some cards, upgraded cards, and a few replaced, but by and large I stuck with the originals. You see, it isn’t actually that difficult a game, and I never lost a single battle. In fact, my characters only died two or three times and I managed to revive them. Furthermore, when I unlocked the two final characters I went back to redo some of the early chapters of the game again, on a harder difficulty level hoping that would level them up quicker, but forgot to change the difficulty back again afterwards. I actually completed most of the game on the hardest setting by accident.

I should probably mention the game itself. The plot is about a wannabe hero, Armilly, who worships Gilgamech, a hero from the past. Today’s heroes, though, are an elitist club who would rather play golf than actually do heroing (and are a bunch of cowards anyway), and won’t let Armilly join their guild. Then, Bad Things happen, all the “heroes” are kidnapped, and Armilly and friends set off to save them. Which kickstarts a larger adventure involving Gilgamech himself, who now thinks his heroic deeds have been forgotten and so he’s decided to resurrect an old evil so he can defeat it again and regain his kudos. And yes, that goes a bit sideways.

Gameplay is a mixture of walking round areas smashing weeds and crates and trying to get a hit in on baddies when you see them, and then a normal RPG battle (with randomly drawn cards) when you do. Some cards require a number of points in order to play them, whereas other cards generate points. Each round you can – points permitting – play up to three cards, with each having varying effects like you’d expect from an RPG, such as healing, physical damage, elemental damage, status effects, and so on. If you manage to play three cards for the same member of your party in one round, then they trigger a special extra (fixed) card. I expected it to be frustrating that the cards I want never came up when I needed them, but actually, if you’re flexible you can work round it and you can discard and re-draw up to two cards each round anyway, so it wasn’t often an issue. Plus, as I said, it’s a pretty easy game so even if you can’t play any cards in a round it’s not the end of the world.

As RPGs go, it’s not a particularly long game. I think I beat the final boss after about 18 hours. I unlocked New Game+, but to be honest I don’t think I’ll be giving it a go. As much as I did enjoy the game despite my dislike for card mechanic role playing games in general, it isn’t something I really want to spend a lot more time with. Not when I’ve got *gestures at pile of shame* anyway.

Oh, but I am VERY excited about SteamWorld Build. I played the demo a while ago and it’s fantastic.