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Proverbs (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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One massive Picrossy/Minesweepery puzzle which takes about 20 hours to complete? Why yes, sir, I will boogie. Especially at the peanuts-price it was going for.

Imagine a big old painting depicting pictures of lots of proverbs that have pretty much all fallen out of use, made up of groups of pixels all split into areas. Each area has some pixels with numbers in, and those numbers – a bit like minesweeper – says how many yellow pixels are touching it (including the numbered pixel itself). All other pixels are red. Fill them all in correctly, and the area redraws as a bit of the painting, your percentage complete in the top right corner goes up by a minuscule amount, and you might unlock a proverb and its meaning.

And then you do some more.

Like Picross, it’s very relaxing and did tend to make me fall asleep while playing. I wasn’t bored, just zen’d out.

One thing I do need to mention is the horrible default controls on a Steam Deck. After I’d modified them to match the Picross E/S control scheme, and enabled “hold down the button to fill pixels as you move” in the customisation, all was well with the world. The defaults are probably fine if you play on a big monitor with a mouse, but handheld it needs to be Picross-like!

Gambler’s Table (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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It’s another clicker game! How rare.

This one is themed around flipping coins. You click on a coin, and if it’s tails (or heads? I genuinely can’t remember and it makes no difference anyway) you get money. You spend the money on having more coins on the table, and higher value coins, and little helper people to flip coins for you, or upgrades where you just have to move the pointer vaguely near coins to flip them, or coins that flip themselves randomly, or coins that flip other coins, or coins that flip more than once per flip. Flip! Flip! FLIP. And you unlock different tables, which, like the seasons in Trees Inc, have special modifiers for that run.

Like some of these games you get to a point where progressing further is really slow, but you can reset everything and gain some permanent upgrades to make the next run faster and get you a bit further. Oh, and you can unlock pointless hats for your helpers to wear.

It’s nothing new, but it’s well put together and if you’re in the mood for brainless gaming it, like many of the other clicker games I’ve played recently, is perfect.

Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages: it’s a bit familiar

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I mentioned in my last post that I’d started to play Oracle of Ages again, and I’m still working my way through it. It seems to be taking an absolute … er, age … even though it’s very clearly signposted throughout. As soon as you finish a dungeon, the Deku Tree pipes up to tell you where to go next. The thing is, it all seems very familiar. It follows the Link’s Awakening formula quite closely with you having to find eight thingies in dungeons, and the added gimmick – of time travel – just makes things a little more complicated. Usually that would be a good thing in a Zelda game, but Link’s Awakening understood the audience which was there to play a game on a portable system, probably in fits and starts. Step away from Link’s Awakening for a couple of days, and on return you can still see where to go. Step away from Oracle of Ages, and when starting again it’s tricky to remember where things are and how to get there, switching between time periods.

There is a good use of colour to distinguish between areas, though it can be quite garish.

The other reason it might feel familiar is because I can see that I have played this before, getting to a more advanced stage than I managed this time. I don’t think I completed it, though, which is slightly odd given that I was very advanced. That’s my aim for now. I’ve just finished the fifth dungeon, which granted me the Cane of Somaria, allowing me to conjure blocks from nothing. I’m now thinking if there’s anywhere in the overworld where that might be useful – and am drawing a blank. Off to see the Gorons, then.

Trees Inc (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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If I were to describe this game it would sound very much like it was the same as Timber Rush, which I also played recently. And, I suppose it is. Trees Inc is a cookie clicker type game where you chop trees, get money for chopping trees, and spend that money to chop faster, get more money, and buy helpers to chop on your behalf. So yes, it’s the same game.

Well, not quite. It looks a lot more basic, and you grow different types of trees rather than just have one tree, and you have to wait for them to re-grow (although helpers and upgrades can speed that up). Oh, and you unlock different seasons that have different modifiers (like things grow slower or there are lightning storms) that you can swap between. But it’s still a clicker game about trees. And it was pretty good.

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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I tend to claim every single free Epic and Amazon game each time they come up, but it’s not often one catches my eye enough to play. Arrangers, though, looked somewhat different and just happened to arrive when I was between games, and so here we are.

It’s a puzzle game, mostly, where you move by sliding the floor as if it is made of tiles. You know, like those slidey jigsawy picture puzzles you can get. Some items and characters on the same row or column as you also slide with you, and others don’t. Things sometimes “loop” left/right or up/down as well. Initially, most puzzles are just simple navigate-the-room-like-this type, but as you progress you have to move things around, fight baddies, and trigger switches using the same mechanics.

The plot for the game involves you finally plucking up courage to leave the village you have lived in since being found as a baby to try and track down your people. Your only real clue being the symbol on your clothing and, well, your weird movement. Leaving the village means braving the outside world and the “static” – a force which causes things to… get stuck – which becomes increasingly pertinent to the story as the games goes on.

In some ways, the puzzling is a bit like sokoban, only instead of moving the crates you effectively move everything else. I found that when I got stuck, which wasn’t that often, it was because I’d temporarily forgotten one of the core, simple, rules of how the game works, like you can move off the left of a row to appear on the right, or that you can essentially “drag” items behind you from a distance. Other than that, there wasn’t anything too tricky to deal with, although a couple of boss fights were a bit fiddly.