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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.

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.

Inspector Waffles Early Days (Evercade): COMPLETED!

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A while back I played the Playdate game Chance’s Lucky Escape, which was pretty good. This game, is set in the same universe and is a Game Boy title (albeit on the Evercade). As the name suggests, it’s a prequel to another game in the series – Inspector Waffles. Which I didn’t know existed and have just discovered it has a cameo from Lord Winklebottom. Blimey.

But never mind those games, what about this game? Well, it’s an adventure game where the eponymous inspector solves his first few (linked) cases. A robbery, some arson, and so on. There’s nothing too difficult to deal with, but I did have to play through the whole game twice as I missed completing the (optional) side quests involving “Maffles”, so if you play this, keep an eye out!

Of course, now I have to buy the “main” game in the series to complete the set.

Timber Rush (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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See, Idle Slayer? This is how you make an interaction-necessary incremental clicker type game. It doesn’t outstay its welcome, you make constant progress, and (after a certain point) you don’t need to touch anything most of the time.

In Timber Rush, you are a lumberjack. You chop down trees, wear high heels, suspenders and uh, make lots of money. On Wednesdays you also go shopping, probably. Chopping wood nets you money, and money can be spent on better axes, helpers, and other upgrades to get more money faster. Soon enough, you’ll have thousands of logs flying everywhere, automatically collected and turned into cash.

Unlike other clicker games, you have a limited amount of “chopping time”, so each “run” is only a few minutes during which you try to improve your chopping skills on the fly, much like you would in something like Vampire Survivors. You gain XP, and each level you get to choose a random upgrade that only applies to that run, like a multiplier or a speed increase or a higher chance of getting two logs for a single chop. Get the right combinations of these upgrades (like an increased chance of doing critical damage, and an increase in the amount of critical damage) and you can get a huge payout. After your run, you get buy permanent upgrades and skills.

There’s not a lot of depth, but playing with upgrade combos is fun and seeing numbers go up, especially exponentially, is always satisfying. However, there is a suggestion on the Steam forums that pretty much the whole game is AI generated. I don’t know if that’s actually the case, but you might want to check that out before you buy it.