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78: A Very Gamey Game

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What the listener didn’t expect, was to discover that most of the podcast seemed to be about things that had nothing to do with the games mentioned in the usual list of topics. “How queer,” they said. “How very, very queer”.

Episode 78 brings together the talking force of deKay, Kendrick, Orrah and Toby and they use their powers to speak words on subjects such as Embracer’s employee cull, Creative Assembly’s employee (and game line-up) cull, Why Creative Assembly Lost Their Way With The Total War Series, What Ben Croshaw Did Next, and mountains of games including these:

  • Vampire Survivors
  • Lies of P
  • Sketch Share Solve
  • Tokyo Xanadu eX+
  • Doraemon: Story of Seasons
  • Stranded: Alien Dawn
  • The Riftbreaker
  • Homeworld Remastered
  • Spiderhyphenman Remastered
  • Crusader Kings 3
  • Virtua Cop Elite Edition
  • Gunvari Collection
  • House of the Dead Remake
  • Starsky and Hutch
  • House of the Dead III

And, as always, other stuff. Why not listen for yourself to find out exactly what, eh? That’s sort of the point of the podcast.

(Direct link here)

Intro music credits: Theme from House of the Dead III.

Don’t forget, if you want to contact us with questions or comments for or about the show, you can email podcast@ugvm.org.uk or publicly shame us https://mas.to/@ugvmpodcast on the Mastodons.

Sketch, Share, Solve: COMPLETED! (Playdate)

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What is this? A Playdate game? That I purchased? With actual money? Is that even legal? It seems so!

Sketch, Share, Solve is a Picross game, and a $3 Picross game at that. It also has mostly the same (correct) controls as the Jupiter-written 3DS and Switch Picross games, which is good as that’s the only way to play them as far as I’m concerned.

As it’s on the Playdate, it’s all in black and white and the size of each puzzle is a bit restrictive because of the resolution. That said, every puzzle is 15×10, so although it doesn’t reach the 30×20 (or bigger) of the Jupiter ones, there aren’t any 5×5 or 10×10 which often only take 10 seconds to solve. There’s 250 of them too, so definitely $3 worth.

Also unlike Jupiter’s titles, the images you create are 1-bit pixel art representing exactly what you see. By that, I mean it isn’t a representation of a more complex image which is “filled in” with colour and detail when complete like the Jupiter puzzles are. That doesn’t make them any better or worse to solve, it’s just an observation.

What does make them worse to solve, however, is the fact that a handful of the puzzles require either leaps of faith because the logic suggests more than one possible location for filled squares, or they rely on the puzzle’s symmetry to solve. Neither of these are good practice in Picross titles, and although not many suffer from this it is a shame. Mind you, again, $3.

The only other negative I have isn’t the game itself but the Playdate. It’s quite obvious that the screen is Not Great when not in the right light. Natural light, at an angle, seems to give an incredible picture, but artificial light is nowhere near as good and since it’s November, the only real option. It’s the main reason mine has been a bit unloved of late.

Trolley Delayma (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Delayma because it’s like “dilemma”, you see. And autokerwrongt keeps changing it to that.

Trolley Delayma was an entry in a Ludum Dare game jam, where the theme was “delay”. They’ve used that, combined with the philosophical “trolley problem” to make a game which looks somewhat like, but plays very differently to, Baba Is You. “Trolley” is American for tram, in case you were confused why this isn’t set in Asda, and the associated problem is whether to run down one important person or several less important people.

The delay bit comes in to try and not run anyone over at all, as you cause the tram (or trams) to get stuck in a loop of track. Some levels are puzzles, as you try to flip bits of track correctly, and some are a race against time as you have to do them quickly enough – all while avoiding the tram yourself.

It’s a clever premise, which ends up being sort of the reverse of those slide-puzzle type train track games where you craft a route to the end before it crashes. Oh, and it’s also free.

Stikir (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Well this is a bloody weird game. It is, sort of, a game about making a game. Only you play the game and the game keeps changing as you do. One minute it’s a platform game, then it’s a sideways scrolling shooter, then you’re in the dark, then you have to dodge stuff while not falling in holes. Weird, as I said.

In some ways it feels a bit like a Wario Ware game, only with the microgames somewhat longer (mostly) than 3 seconds each. If any more information than this is needed, then I can only suggest you play it yourself.

Rusty Lake Hotel (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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It’s another Rusty Lake joint, like Samsara Room from the other day. It’s very similar in style, only the setting this time is, as the title might suggest, a hotel.

But not an ordinary hotel, oh no. This is one where a number of distinguished animal guests have been invited to attend several consecutive evenings of exquisite meals. Meals where one of the guests is the main course each night.

Your job is to kill each in turn, using standard point-and-click, escape room style mechanics. Poison a drink, behead an animal, that sort of thing, but how? By finding items and using them in clever ways in each one of the guest bedrooms. There’s the usual spotting patterns to trigger things type puzzles, finding keys, and so on, but with a macabre twist. It’s like Lord Winklebottom got a bit cannibally.