Attacking the Pile

[attackingthepile]

Fallout 4: Nuka World

All I really wanted was a ride in a theme park. Fighting my way in was hard, but kind of fun in a shooty sort of way. You have to run a booby-trapped gauntlet to enter the Raiders' domain.

The goal then is to lead the Raiders, navigating the various factions and trying not to die.

The trouble is, the game then puts you in diametric opposition to the previous game goals: if you've spent the past 70 hours rebuilding the post-apocalyptic wasteland and turning it into a thriving hub of trade and agriculture, you'll be more than a little reluctant to kick it all over.

This is all by design: the DLC was created because players wanted to delve more into the world of the Raiders, so it makes sense for this to be geared at being bad.

For those of us wanting to maintain the approval of Preston Garvey and his ilk, his video shows you how to take a wibbly background path to complete the DLC and still be good.

I, on the other hand, spent most of my time playing on the rides because - dammit! - I wanted a theme park!

The rollercoaster at the end is schweeet.

[attackingthepile]

Slime Rancher

Slime Rancher is a cute Tamagochi-style game where you have to look after little cutesie slime blobs.

Your joy and patience will be directly tied to how many other look-after-this-thing games you have played.

It’s well executed, intuitive, simple and cute.

I’m clicking Uninstall, for the pure reason that (following Viva Pinata et al) I have no need of other games of this ilk. If this ilk is what you’re after, you’ll love it.

[attackingthepile]

Fall Guys

It’s Ultimate Beastmaster, only you’re a Minion.

You are dropped into a server with 60 other players and have to race, jump, dodge and generally wiggle your way around a series of assault courses, avoiding elimination until one person wins.

I am just as chubby, clumsy and generally incompetent in this game as I would be in real life, only I make endearing whoops and squeaks and people are laughing with me.

I might be yelling “GET UP! DON’T JUST ROLL ABOUT THERE, GET UP!” but the Minion is having none of it, bumbling and bungling about until SOMEHOW I make it through to the next round.

I get to customise the character. I dress up as a pink wolf.

My shriek of delight as I make it through to the next round scares my eight-year-old. Now, she wants to play.

[attackingthepile]

Terraria

It’s a lot like Minecraft in survival mode: you are thrust into a beautiful if rather fuzzy world and have to craft your place in it.

So, here we are, squinting at fuzzy 8-bit characters and trying to work out what to do. There are no instructions.

The character creation menu is clunky and a battle of its own.

Once in our procedurally-generated world, I am in a ditch. It takes me several minutes to work out that I can jump/fly by pressing the space bar and W. You can only move sideways or up.

A quick google tells me that I need to start chopping down trees and collecting wood as the world gets dangerous at nighttime. Only just in time, too - I am still building my shelter as the enemies start to attack.

I have to build a workbench and put it in my house, then craft walls and weapons. I am not sure which are the floor-parts, ceiling-parts or wall parts - it all looks the same to me. I have absolutely no idea how to remove anything I have misplaced.

Still, it keeps the zombies out. I am under attack every minute of the long night, but thankfully safe until dawn.

Terraria comes with a learning curve, but I am hooked enough to want to spend the time.

[attackingthepile]

Lara Croft: Go

The Tomb Raider mobile game has been ported to Steam. It’s not very good.

While the graphics, puzzles, mood and wrapping are all in order, the gameplay is not: players can only advance by dragging the mouse, which quickly becomes wearing.

Uninstall.

[attackingthepile]

Glass Bricks

This is game is absolutely ridiculous. I found Glass Bricks, by gadgetcrafts, while searching for Klax at the Google Play store, and while it’s not quite the same, it’s an absurdly satisfying match puzzle that is every bit as addictive.

Instead of coming down, you have to click up on the bricks that are slowly descending, and match them to other bricks of the same colour to form a line of four. So far, so Bejewelled(ish) - but it’s the details that make Glass Bricks stand apart.

When matches are made, we hear a satisfying glassy tinkle, and the level transition music is hummed rather than played. Each level is loosely presented as a boss fight with something that’s far too cute to kill. It’s all rather endearing - mobile crack, in the same way as Bubble Witch Saga.

I’m about halfway through its 69 levels and I’ve only had it since yesterday.

Ridiculous.

[attackingthepile]

Oxenfree

I’ve only completed the first level, or I think so: an autosavepoint after climbing over a bin to reach some cliffs.

Oxenfree is one of those cartoony indie games that looks all point-and-click but has much bigger ambitions. It is endearing from its opening scene and persuades in under five minutes that this is a game I want to keep on playing.

The dialogue is cool and convincing, the landscapes both lush and low-key. Simple pencil drawings and a lot of thought and detail.

I’ll look forward to the rest of this.

[attackingthepile]

Old School Musical

Old School Musical was offered free with Amazon Prime. The trailer was promising, so I was looking forward to giving it a whirl.

On loading it up, it said that it would like to configure the speed for me, so I had to tap the enter key in sync with the pulse it was showing on the screen. It would tell me when to stop.

So I did.

Over and over and

over and over

and over

and

over.

After several minutes, I alt-tabbed and ALT-CTRL-DEL'd (my only options, other than continuing to tap like a lazy Sisyphus condemned to hellish servitude).

Uninstall.

[attackingthepile]

I’m going to play every game I own

Between Steam sales, The Humble Bundle, Epic’s weekly freebies and Amazon’s weekly freebies, I own a lot of games.

Most of which I’ve never played.

It’s shameful, really. A big old Pile of Shame.

So, I’m going to play every game I own.