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Scream Collector (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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With a thousand PC games to choose from in my Steam/Epic/GOG/Itch libraries, mostly unplayed, you’d think I would never need to even look in the Steam store for something else to pass the time, right? And, if I did, you’d expect I might be picking out some high profile or highly lauded title that I don’t already own, yeah? Well, no. For I stumbled across this shambolic looking free-to-play clicker game instead, and then spent THIRTY HOURS completing it. No, you’re an idiot.

The theme here is a haunted house, so instead of cookies or paperclips you buy gravestones and pumpkins with which to bump up your scream income. The mechanics are the same as most other clickers – the more you buy the more you earn more quickly and the more the next things cost. It’s a Numbers Go Up game.

What’s different, is that there are a few minigames that make up part of the game. You get prize spinners to boost your income a bit or give you free items, you can play a game of Simon on the windows of the house, and there are ghosts to catch and witches to melt. There’s also two more clicker games within the clicker game – one set in the basement where you earn “preparedness” by hoarding water and food and toilet rolls and other pandemic stuff, and another which opens up after completing the main game where you deck out the interior of the house with candles and spiders and other spooky things. I also completed the basement, but I draw the line at the house hallway – many of the “jumps” up to the next power-of-ten are missing, so it just takes even longer to get anywhere.

It’s mindless, somehow addictive, and although it has IAPs I had no need of them at all.

World of Goo (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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It’s been a long time since I last played this on the Wii. I blame not having another machine with a suitable input device, as it only really works with touch screens and pointers, not control sticks. Yes, I know I could have managed on the Switch or even on the Mac, but anyway. Trackpad on the Steam Deck it is.

I’d totally forgotten about most of the “story”, and have no recollection of the Information Superhighway “world” at all. Which is good, because I didn’t want to remember the solutions to the levels! That said, I didn’t have any difficultly whipping through the whole game in about three hours

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 (PS5): COMPLETED!

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I’ve been eyeing this up for ages but it never really went cheap enough. Sure, I’m a fan of the series (although THPS3 is the best one), but I couldn’t bring myself to pay more than £20 for it. Then PS+ gave it away as a free rental, finally, so here we are.

It’s a remake of the first two THPS games, mostly as I remember them, only in much higher resolution and with some of the music missing because Licencing. It doesn’t feel quite the same in terms of speed and physics, and it lets you do things like revert and tweak lip/grind tricks which didn’t come into the series until later games, but it’s close enough. I had always played Pro Skater 2 much more than 1, so found running through that much quicker than the first game – plus I’d already got all the upgrades from the first game by then.

As (mostly) always, it’s great. It’s better than the previous “best of” remake from 2012 which had terrible reviews but I really liked. THPS3+4 now please and thanks.

The Norwood Suite (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Another PC-locked, Steam Deck-freed game! Who knows, one day my huge Steam backlog may finally be dented. (Narrator: it never was)

The Norwood Suite is one of a series of first person narrative discovery games set in the same universe. I don’t know the order they’re in (if indeed they are), but I think this is the first one? It doesn’t really matter though, as it’s utterly mental so even if I did get some references, the rest is nuts anyway.

It’s set in a hotel, and filled with staff and residents who are all a bit unusual. Many need you to perform simple tasks (make a sandwich, fetch drinks from a car) but the bulk of the game is uncovering the story through exploring the hotel and, ultimately, gaining access to The Norwood Suite.

It’s difficult to describe the story past “Norwood was a musician who owned the hotel and the hotel is a mecca for musicians” without spoiling anything, so I won’t. But, it was bafflingly enjoyable, janky, confusing and silly in various quantities.

Arcade Paradise (Switch): COMPLETED!

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In which you run a launderette, put washing on, tumble dry, collect it up, and pick up rubbish. Only! In the back room of the launderette is a mostly forgotten and unloved video game arcade with a handful of machines! So when you make laundry money, you buy more arcade machines, and then they make you money, and then they start to make so much money that, actually, the laundrette starts to just get in the way so you oust a few washing machines for more arcade space. You can see where the endgame comes. No washing!

It’s a slog to get to that point though. Like a clicker game (such as the same dev team’s game Vostok Inc), you slowly build up money and spend that on things which let you earn money a bit faster, and the cycle goes on – supplemented by laundry, and a bit of cash from collecting trash and occasionally unblocking the toilet. However, there’s more to the game than just getting more arcade games. You see, you can play all the arcade games too.

And there’s loads of them. Most are a spin on existing games, or a mashup of classic arcade games. You’ve got the Not Canyon Bomber game, the Not Puzzle Bobble game, the Not GTA Crossed With Pac-man Game, NotQix, an air hockey table, table football, an Out Run/F-Zero hybrid and loads of others. Many of which are excellent games on their own too, and I especially like the twin-stick Zombie shooter game and the cute RPG/Candy Crush one.

Playing the games is fun in itself, but doing so has a purpose. Each has a number of achievements, and hitting these makes the machines earn more. Just playing them makes them more popular for a time too, again increasing income. Unfortunately, near the start of the game you can’t spend much time Arcading because the laundry requires your attention (and time passes when you play games), but you soon start being able to purchase upgrades that do away with some of the laundry chores (and some of the arcade ones – like emptying the coin hoppers).

If the 35 or so arcade games aren’t enough, then your office PC can also be upgraded to play a couple of desktop games – Not Minesweeper and Not Solitaire. And even some of the menial tasks, like chucking bin bags in the skip and pulling gum off tables, are presented as a minigame. It’s games all the way down. There’s also even a story about your overbearing father who thinks you won’t amount to anything and hates the idea of you having an arcade, just in case there wasn’t enough going on already.

When I first started playing there were a handful of bugs, like a crushed can that you can’t collect, some cut scenes which crashed the game, and some bizarre lighting issues, but they all seem to have been fixed now, along with some tweaks to the games making them a bit easier and/or playable, so it’s hard not to recommend Arcade Paradise now. I mean, it’s worth the cost of entry even for just a handful of the cabinets you unlock, but to have this many and a metagame on top? Bargain, mate.