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 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.

From the outside, Figment looks like the sort of game I’d really want to play (and, of course, is why I did). Interesting graphics style, the promise of puzzles, some weird story about being in a person’s subconscious, great voice acting. All of those are true. But, it’s just so, so dull and tedious.

The main issue is the puzzles are often of a disguised Sokoban nature. You have to flip a switch to activate a thing, but you have to do another thing first, then you have to unflick it and move and then do another thing then go all the way back to the start and flick it again before you can access something. In a game like Zelda, these are fun. Here, it’s just slow and annoying. There’s also less disguised Sokoban type puzzles, with actual things to push and pull in the right order. Just boring. There’s an awful lot of the same thing as well – you always need a battery or a handle, it’s always the other side of a puzzle, it’s always needed to get to the next bit. For a game literally set in an imagination, there’s not much on show in terms of item use variety.

Then there’s the combat. It’s not difficult, it’s just clumsy, imprecise and doesn’t really seem to fit with the rest of the game. You’re often in a confined space when attacked, and you don’t have many moves and move too slowly to effectively dodge and counter. I also found the perspective sometimes screwed up my depth perception.

It isn’t all bad. The graphics are lovely and the voices and range of accents and silly comments are to be applauded. I also enjoyed it enough to play to the end and it did improve when you get to the “steampunk robot train” bits later on, it was just somewhat disappointing and uninteresting for much of the rest.