“Whatcha Playin’, Pixels?” – #022
7 min read
A weekly roundup of games enjoyed by the writers of The Pixels
What a wild week this has been! First, there were the announcements revealed in the Final Fantasy VII 25th Anniversary presentation. It coincided with the release of Shredder’s Revenge, a glorious return to form for the TMNT franchise. There was also the start of Steam Next Fest event, which our friend, Wandering, will talk a lot about in the coming weeks. And yet, there’s still more to come with July rounding the corner! So with that said, let’s check in on our writers to see what they’ve been up to this week!
Steam Next Fests are starting to become my favorite time of the year. In this batch, I’ve installed around 35 games mixed between things on my wishlist, things I’ve heard of, and things I found while browsing the list. It’s a fairly mixed bag. I’ve barely made a dent in the list, but so far, here are my top three, in no particular order:
- The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo is a wonderfully surrealist point-and-click game with incredibly smooth animations. Made by a former Ubisoft animator, it’s a short demo that promises a lot of wacky charm.
- Cult of the Lamb is a Hades-like roguelite with base-building elements, you play a literal sacrificial lamb whose deity decided it wasn’t your time yet. Build up a cult of followers and turn the tables on the gods who tried to kill you. Extra upside, everyone’s cute animals!
- Necrosmith is an undead-army builder that reminds me of the old Majesty games with a bit of Loop Hero mixed in. Literally, build undead from parts you’ve found, send them off to explore the world and protect your ever-growing tower from the forces of good. I loved Majesty years ago, so having something new to scratch that itch as well as indulging my inner undead fan is a pleasure I didn’t expect.
As of right now, I’ve still got twenty more games to try on my list. These three are hardly the only ones I’ve added to my wishlist of the many I’ve tried, but they’re the top ones on my list. Maybe I’ll do a full write-up when I’m done and share a top ten list with you next week or so.
Once again it’s been quite a busy week but I did have a little time to sit down and enjoy a good chunk of The Quarry. As a fan of Supermassive’s work, I’ve been eagerly anticipating this one.. and interestingly it has a little more in common with Until Dawn than any of their Dark Pictures Anthology series.
Sure, they all act in very much the same vein: a bunch of (mostly) unlikeable characters are thrown together to fend off some form of evil, while a creepy narrator periodically judges the player on their decisions throughout. It’s a tried and tested formula but it clearly is working. As the Dark Pictures series keeps experimenting with new and unusual settings and ideas, The Quarry takes us right back to Until Dawn‘s ’80s slasher-movie stylings, and I’m currently loving it all the more for it.
I’ve not yet made it to the end of the story – I believe I’m around the halfway mark, and currently, all of my characters are alive… for now! I’m really excited to see where it goes from here and whether I can save everyone on my first attempt. Highly unlikely, but we shall see!
Since I have finally gotten a little time to settle down and hop back into games, I decided to start streaming again. Even though I am staying on a light schedule, as there are major demands on my time, I am still able to help developers mull over their games. I had the opportunity to play a fun and rather well-fleshed-out alpha demo of an upcoming Switch/PC title called Little Nemo and the Guardians of Slumberland. The developer, Diesoft Games, joined me on stream to watch me play through their colorful and adorable game. Borrowing from both the original game and comic strips, this game is a standalone platformer wrapped in nostalgic flair. As of this writing, their Kickstarter campaign is still going on, so make your mark by supporting this great project.
In preparation for my upcoming interview with Red for the MAGE CAST, I have picked back up Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town. It is one of my favorite Game Boy Advance games and a title that I have a lot of fond memories of. Just playing through it again, meeting the people in the game, and developing relationships, brings back into my mind the very reasons why I became a farmer myself. Of course, you will have to hear about that on the podcast when it hits airwaves!
Another week in the books! Finally got somewhere with Phantasy Star IV on Sunday. It felt like forever since I got into it! I was thrown off by the carnivorous, immortal trees that I suddenly ran into on Dezolis. Once I figured I could escape, my travels led me to a nearby town. Alas, disaster struck! One of my party members came down with a sickness that, if not treated soon, would be fatal and turn him into a zombie! So, I had to get that fixed P.D.Q!* From talking with the locals, I learned that the only way to clear the sickness was to head to the mysterious Gaurberk Tower. To get there, I needed to get past the immortal trees. To get past the trees, I needed a sacred flame central to the Dezolian religion. Sadly, to get the flames, I needed to travel to a castle that somehow resides on an asteroid and take it back from a bunch of Dark Force zealots. Fun. *Editor’s note: Pretty Darn Quickly*
From sick party members to sick, wicked and nasty passwords, I transitioned to Oracle of Seasons next for my Tuesday and Thursday streams. I had reached the third dungeon when something more disastrous than a gravelly ill party member occurred: I died midway through the dungeon! My deathless run was ruined! Oh well… You win some, you lose some, I suppose? Anyways, I finished dungeon 3, gained some sweet passwords (Master Sword, anybody?!) and am heading to #4 now!
Off-stream, I’ve been working towards gathering the Secret Reports in The World Ends With You. Most of the endgame enemies are TOUGH. If you don’t have good threads and pins on hand to take these things down, you’re in for a world of hurt. Which, naturally, happened to me! I have some serious level grinding and item farming to do before I’m ready to take on the latter challenges the game has to offer.
Finally, I started TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge and OMG, it’s fantastic! They nailed the nostalgic feel of the beat-em-up series and captured what made the Turtles franchise so beloved all those years ago. Now, I gotta find a way to watch the classic cartoons, hopefully with Kid Espresso along so that he can get in on the Turtle Power madness! Cowabunga!
As I mentioned in my full review of Shredder’s Revenge, I was completely floored and delighted by its dedication to authenticity and preservation. It’s a time capsule back to a more innocent age, my age, of CRTs, pizza arcades, coin-op cabinets, and cartoons, cartoons, cartoons. It is a lovely game that loves its source material enough to avoid “updating” or otherwise mangling it to get with the times under the guise of it being for “new fans”.
Beyond that, oh I forgot about Bloodborne! My playthrough has stalled, unfortunately. Sometimes I share my gaming interests with folks and they go “these are all kiddie games”. Yeah, cuz I have kids and I can’t play your average gory zombie shooter adventure until after dark, and frankly, I just get too tired these days! I refuse to let Bloodborne go quiet into that good night and so I’ll resume my playthrough… soon.
In the meanwhile, there’s always trying to figure out how to enchant frickin tools so I can face the frickin Elder Dragon in Minecraft and cross that off the list!
~Red
So, what were you playing this week?
Ryan Cheddi – our friendly, neighbourhood caffeine addict – is a man of many talents: an engineer, a gaming historian, a fiction writer and a streamer. He is also a self-avowed Sonic the Hedgehog fan. You can check out his cool beans at his site – Games with Coffee – or find him on Twitter as @GameswCoffee, and Instagram as @games_with_coffee. He streams on Twitch, also as GamesWithCoffee.
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