On Friday I met John and Kieron online for an evening of gaming.

We have a great many games that we have played through, and even a few we have completed, most notably Human Fall Flat multiple times (since they keep adding new levels, so we have to complete it again). We haven’t completed Borderlands 2, since sometimes the intensity of the shooting just means it feels too much effort. We have completed Overcooked 2 other than one level where we’ve only got two stars (and the score for three stars seems unreachable). We have completed Halos 3, ODST, Reach and 4, but haven’t really started 5 yet. We’ve started Moving Out 2, Star Wars Squadrons, Astroneer, Plate Up!, and Powerwash Simulator, among others. We regularly play Peggle 2, and Golf With Your Friends.

With so many games left hanging, obviously Friday was all about new ones.

We played All You Need is Help for a bit. It is horrendously confusing on how to start a game, particularly since you can’t start with only three players and one of us needed to control two characters. I accidentally discovered this while we were all pressing random things to try to start a game, which meant I spent most of my time getting very confused over which stick was controlling which character.

We got a notification that we had completed the first set of levels, but couldn’t work out how to unlock any others. So we didn’t, and we moved on.

The surprise hit of the evening was Lonely Mountains Snow Riders, a follow-up to Lonely Mountains Downhill. The Downhill game saw you getting a bike down dangerously thin and steep paths, avoiding trees and bushes and cliffs and sudden jumps. Snow Riders loses the bike, gives you skis, and adds in online multiplayer which immediately makes the mountains a bit less lonely. It seems to control much better than Downhill, from what I remember, and paths are wider and more forgiving. That’s not to say it’s easy; working out how to hit a jump at the right angle and speed so you can clear a river or gully took multiple deaths in almost all cases. On one of the courses we had all died a minimum of 23 times.

The mode we played was a race, but it wasn’t as easy as just holding the crouch button and steering. Getting down the mountain had multiple paths between each checkpoint, some of which may have been faster but which required skill that I certainly didn’t have. When you die you reset to the last checkpoint passed, meaning that each waypoint down the mountain gave a feeling of relief; there were occasions when one of us crashed just before crossing the checkpoint, at which point the silence on the microphone was noticeable.

I may well go back to Snow Riders by myself at some point, but there’s a lot of content there and I can foresee us trying that game again on a future gaming evening.

In many ways, Flock reminds me of Flower, the relaxing¹ and peaceful game on the PS3 (and other Sony consoles) where you gently guide the wind and petals to find new blooms. Guiding your character – someone riding a giant bird – is really easy, with the vertical component automatically taken care of and only the horizontal direction left for your input. This means you can spend time looking in the distance for where you want to go, and also for signs of creatures.

You have to find the creatures, you see. Your aunt is a zoological expert but she can’t be bothered to move from her water tower perch, so instead you have to go out into the world and search for them. When you find a creature, you can observe it for a little while before having to identify it. Is it a bewl (bean-like creatures with no legs), a gleeb (generally those with wings), or a drupe (a bit of a catch-all category)? Once you’ve identified the family, you get more accurate descriptions to compare against the creature on the screen. Why we need to identify the creatures is unclear, since Aunt Jane tells us if we get them right or wrong. Really she should just get down and do it herself.

That would be a bit more of a boring game, though.

Creature hunting isn’t the only aspect though. Evil robber creatures have stolen flutes and knitting patterns and are buried in mounds of grass. You have to find these mounds, and get the flying sheep that follow you around to graze there. Once they’ve eaten all the grass you can see the tail of the awful evil baddie, and you can pull them out of the hole. This is needed if you want to get the whistles for each family of creatures, and once you have the whistle you can get any creature to join your flock, following you around. You can also increase the number of sheep by finding them around, and increase the number of creatures in your flock, and (most importantly) get new clothes to wear.

To start with there’s not much of the world uncovered, and you can see creatures relatively easily. After a while the Emperor Cosmet appears, and when it’s been identified the fog or clouds or mist or … whatever it is clears a bit, and new areas are revealed. Some of the creatures require more of a stealthy approach. Some are really fast and you have to be lucky to see them. Some are just rare. As well as the requirement to find the creatures, some of your Aunt’s friends are dotted around the levels on perches, and you have to find them and carry out other tasks.

The game has an amazing and consistent art style, and charm by the bucketful. The day/night cycle is quite affecting, and I suspect that the reason that some of the spaces in my catalogue are still unfilled is because I need to look at certain times of the day. I think I’ve unlocked most of the map now, but there are still entire families which are undiscovered.

1. Until the horrendous and depressing last level. ︎

After the success of Rocket League, I’m surprised there’s not been more of a glut of car-based sports. Rocket League itself included modes based on ice hockey and basketball, but the objectives there are pretty much the same – get the object into the goal. It’s taken quite some time for a completely different sport to arrive, and Turbo Golf Racing seeks to do what its name describes – inject a golf game with turbos and racing. The cars look similar in some way to the Rocket League roster, though with large bumpers on the front. The relative size of car and ball is familiar. The speeds you drive, with the possibility of jumping and boosting, are very close, but not exactly the same. You’d be forgiven for assuming this was by Psyonix.

But the driving model isn’t exactly the same, and after having played the PS4 version of Rocket League for over 400 hours, and the Xbox and Switch versions for significant time on top, the differences are just enough to cause me issues. There’s no double jump, for a start, and I have tried numerous times to jump sideways into a ball to nudge it into the hole only to find myself boosting forwards and away from where I need to be. There’s also a different way to get height on the ball when driving – in TGR you need to hold up on the analogue stick to hit the ball upwards, whereas in RL you’d aim your car nose down to get the same effect.

That’s not to say it’s uncontrollable – it’s just a little different. I’ve spent most of my time in the race mode, where you try to get your ball into the hole as quickly as possible, with seven others doing the same. Ordinarily you cannot interact with their balls (or, indeed, them) but there are powerups you can collect such as missiles and ice beams which cause them to lose control. Otherwise it’s almost like a single-player game, with ghosts flying around you. The golf mode, where you have to get the ball into the hole with as few touches as possible, is a completely different pace.

It’s a fun game. Unfortunately it’s full of microtransactions and a focus on cosmetics, learning from the very worst practices of Epic – another way in which it’s like Rocket League. I’ll be content with my purple basic car for now, than you very much; it’s not as if I see anything other than the back of it most of the time.

This has sat on my Xbox for ages, after I saw Matt playing it once on a stream, and I have finally got around to playing it. It takes cues from FTL, I think, but is structured around shorter missions and a roguelike framework where you can build up your crew and plane capabilities but at any point can lose them and restart. You control the seven members of your plane crew: setting navigation points; tagging enemies for the gunners to shoot at; getting the engineer to run around fixing parts of the plane which have malfunctioned or been shot to pieces; deploying bombs or taking recon photos.

It’s a constant juggle to make sure that the guns have ammo, there’s someone available to fire forwards while the bombardier is crawling into his space and opening the doors, and seven hundred other things are ongoing. The first few missions are relatively easy – drop some supplies to a downed Spitfire pilot with a few enemies buzzing around, or bomb some installations near the coast, all of which can be done at low level – but I’ve now progressed to the point where the installations I am trying to attack are surrounded by flak artillery, so I have to fly at a higher level, meaning my crew need thermal wear and oxygen supplies … oh, and I have to peer through clouds to see the bombing targets. In addition, missions are interrupted by other emergencies – needing to shoot down a V2 rocket, a battle with a German ace – meaning that it’s increasingly difficult to get home safe.

It’s the difficulty and excitement that has kept my interest up. Completing missions and getting home safely is difficult, and there have been multiple time when my plane has limped home on two engines, with my engineer frantically putting out fires and my radio operator administering first aid to a gunner who is lying on the floor bleeding. I am slightly cheating at the game in that every time it looks as if I’m going to crash and burn, I’m quitting the game and restarting missions, rather than just accepting defeat and starting afresh with a new crew – but I’ve made peace with that, in that it means I’m actually enjoying it rather than being afraid to actually take off. The financial constraints feel artificial anyway – I’m pretty sure that in WWII the bomber crews weren’t charged to upgrade their engines based on them earning money in previous missions.