I bought a bundle of cute looking games on Steam from a group called Sokpop. They seem to have hundreds on there, but the “Chill Adventure” bundle looked right up my street. Turns out it was. It’s here if you want it too.

After a brief go of some of them, once my daughter graciously allowed me to have my Steam Deck back once she’d played them, I settled on Fishy 3D. You’re a fish who has to grow bigger, by eating plants and fish smaller than you, and sometimes smaller, by swimming through some goo. You can be eaten by bigger fish, and you need to be the right size in order to fit through gratings and pipes and large enough to pull ropes and stuff.

It’s very much in the same mould as Katamari Damacy or Donut County or a million “eat bigger to get bigger” fish games, but with some actual stuff to do. Like most in this collection of games it’s a simple idea with a short game but done really well.

There’s also a Fishy game which isn’t 3D, which I probably should have played first.

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.