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Doors: Paradox (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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This game is sort of one of those escape room games. It’s a lot like Rooms, which I played a while back, but each “room” is like a small scene built around a door that you need to get open in order to access the portal behind it. Each one is themed, and features a lot of smaller puzzles leading up to the main one of unlocking the door.

There’s the usual things for this sort of game – pattern puzzles, getting keys, turning knobs and flicking switches. You also have to find hidden gems and a hidden scroll on each vignette (if you want to reveal the plot and access the final levels on each chapter, anyway). In all there are three chapters with about 15 doors in each, and each door has about 8 or 10 puzzles, so it’s a surprisingly long game for the genre.

It wasn’t very taxing, and was certainly much easier than Rooms was, but it’s well made and enjoyable. And free from some online service like Epic or GOG or something at some point in the past, although I’ve forgotten where.

Moo Moo Move (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Jeff Minter tooted about this free game on Steam so I thought I’d have a look. It’s a very simple cow herding arcade game (so probably right up Jeff’s street) with about 20 levels. Some levels have bulls that interfere with your rounding up, some have aliens that try to abduct your cows, as aliens are wont to do, and some have snipers with tranquilisers that put your cows to sleep.

It’s not very hard, although getting 3 stars (i.e. the fastest times) for each level seems near impossible, but it was fun while it lasted.

Planet TD (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Planet TD is a pretty simple, no frills Tower Defen[c|s]e game. I don’t remember how I ended up with it on Steam, or why I started playing it, but it’s… fine? I mean, it’s straightforward. You have loads of levels, and on each you put different types of gun towers down on set locations before a load of baddies march along a set path and you have to make sure your guns kill them before they reach the end of the path.

If you’ve played any Tower Defence games, you’ll know exactly what to expect. Several waves of baddies, some which are stronger or weaker against different types of gun tower, money earned from killing them with which you can buy more towers or upgrade the range and/or power of the towers you’ve already placed down. There are also a few “powers” you can use, like temporarily slow enemies or launch an airstrike.

I did have a couple of issues with it, which may be Steam Deck related. The main one was that sometimes things you need to click on are off the screen. What this means, is that on some levels, you can’t put certain towers on certain “pads” because the option to do so isn’t physically accessible. Luckily, it never caused me to die or anything.

So, it’s a bit janky and simple, but sometimes uncomplicated is good and it was fun enough to play all the way through.

Superhot (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Yes, yes. I’m late to the party. I know. And no, I have no excuse because I’ve owned it on Steam for ages, and it’s been on PS+ seemingly forever. But I’m here now, and that’s all that counts, right?

And, as it turns out, Superhot is bloody excellent. The “things only move when you do” mechanic is so obvious now that you wonder why it wasn’t really done before, and here it turns a first person shooter into a puzzle game. It’s not just shooting, either – throwing your gun with spent ammo into the face of a baddie only to have him drop his gun which you then pick up and shoot him (and his mates) with will never get old.

It’s all so slick and clean and fluid. And, something I didn’t realise, is there’s a weird hacking/uploading-yourself-to-the-cloud plot which plays out in your fake OS front end too. And some additional game mechanics (that I won’t spoil) that come later on in the game. Such a joy to play and near-instant restarts for your inevitable (multiple) retries just removes any friction for just-one-more go.