We've been playing a lot of Void Crew lately. It's a really fun, challenging asymmetric co-op game where you and up to 3 other people crew a spacecraft through a bunch of missions, seeing how far you can get before your hull is too damaged to continue.
I'm a pretty good pilot - I have a good sense of how the frigate moves and how big it is, I can dodge well, and I get compliments on my flying semi-regularly.
But @darkdaemon is on a whole other level. They can make that ship dance in ways I'm in awe of.
One of the boss encounters, Frostmother, is an absolute nightmare. She has a nasty combination of speed debuffs and extremely punishing attacks. I've only beaten her once before under frankly unrealistic conditions, and it still took everything I had and almost killed me.
With them at the helm, though? They made our ship dance. Her attacks could barely touch us, and they managed to get close enough to drop a minefield offensively and get out clean.
She went down in minutes and we took almost no damage.
It occurs to me that a lot of games I played this year were in early access. Either way…
Sons of the forest (early access)
This is one of those games I wouldn’t have played otherwise, but now I have I don’t regret doing so.
What on the surface seems to be a horror survival game, seem to be more like a camping and off-grid living simulator, log homes, nature trekking, caving, and hiking included, now with wacky characters showing up and being uncomfortable to be around… that aren’t myself. Still, I’m they’re very fun to hit with implements.
The sequel to The Forest, now expanded with the ‘Sons of’ Prefix, my friends and I were playing the game during early access, with many plot details not complete. Not that I was paying much attention to that. Unlike my friends, I didn’t play The Forest, but from watching Mandalore’s video, I… know some things?
The plot of the game is not the point for me. Going camping in the woods, exploring the gorgeous forest, and the creepy caves to find cool new gadgets, like a zipline… or a shotgun, or a slightly better axe, working together to construct a log cabin on the lake, and then to construct a zipline system from said cabin, all the way to the top of the mountain, is absolutely the point for me. The game should be out of early access soon, so I’m looking forward to playing it again when it’s ‘feature complete’.
Pseudoregalia
If there’s one thing I was reminded of this year, is that I like 3D platformers. And there is many separate reasons why.
Enjoying the exploration of the wonderful little worlds these games take place in. Or enjoying the mechanics of scamping around a 3D space as effectively as possible.
Pseudoregalia firmly is in the latter category. It is firmly for the fans of movement and traversal.
The game is laid out in a ‘search action’ type of progression, where the items you find in the game add to your options for movement. Not long after you start the game and get past the ‘opening sequence’, and obtaining your slide, and slide jump, your options open up more than you realise at first, but once you know, you find out that sequence breaking using pure movement tech is a part of the game. You really wanna find out what you can get away with.
When I say that the game fits firmly in the ‘about traversal’ side of 3D platformers, it’s also because the exploration is kinda weak, as each area in the world is fairly simplistic and rather samey, while keeping to their theme. Getting lost is easy as there’s not a lot differentiating between most rooms, short of the odd monument. A map would be a small fix for this (and is in the works), but doesn’t solve the issue of the world design itself. Doesn’t make the world any less of a challenge to traverse, however. It’s ‘era-appropriate’ look is sort of grey-box design in a way.
There is combat, but it is easily the weakest part of the game. With how agile your character is, you’d think she’d be capable of brining the pain, but combat is basic, limited mainly to a 3 hit combo, with your other techniques usually used in solving puzzles in the environment. Not even your downward spike you use to high jump is viable, as you just take damage on impact. As a result, combat is infrequent and there’s only a couple of boss encounters.
What you have to understand is for what you get for about 5 bucks, it is actually impressive how much fun this is. I don’t mind getting lost as it means more time with the game. I would call this my top contender for favourite game this year, if only there was more. And all my criticism is because I care about more than most. I want it to do well, and thanks to the barrier of entry being so cheap, I think it has.
In short, this game’s pretty goat butt- sorry, pretty good, but it’s kind of short. Still, not bad for 5 bucks, for the one complete game on this list! And there is pants if you want, but why would you?
I’m of course not referring to the objectively superior professional outfit… yes, even better than nothing at all. So good it’ll give you Covid, yeag!
Volcanoids (early access)
This game’s premise is pretty ingenious, and technically impressive. It’s an open world survival crafting game, with a mobile base!
That said, you’re not there to live off the land and make your own, you’re there on a mission to retake the island from some robots gone wrong, that have been causing the volcano on the island to do a little trolling pretty regularly. So, its laser focused on getting you geared up to take on this threat, rather than living there.
To give you an idea of what kind of operation you’ll have in the late game, you’ll be automating not just processing of resources, but ammo, guns, health, armour, and repair equipment filling dispensers in your staging room, you’ll have mining drones going out to collect nearby ores, gun drones where you can use any of your weapons and deploy them in the field or anywhere on the map, and a really versatile support drone that has cover, health and armour regen, a tesla coil to shoot down projectiles, and a storage area you can put loot in to send back to the drill ship.
Ah yes, the drill ship. Your mobile base is mobile in the sense that you can set up in various locations. To do this, your mobile base can tunnel underground, and pop up in set locations, even into caves. You must do this to avoid the periodic eruptions of the island’s volcano. (Or if you’re out in the open, go hide in one of the many structures.) You can just sit there buried to do some basic prep, and fixes to the internals of your ship, but the modules you install into the slots of your ship require you to be deployed somewhere to function. So, there’s a difference between being safe and finding somewhere safe to get some work done… or having enough defences to protect yourself while you do.
All this comes together to make a technically, and mechanically impressive and fun game. I love pulling up next to an enemy drill ship, assaulting their position, getting inside, and stealing, and breaking everything. And all the tools given to you make taking on the robotic threat a blast!
But not for long. In its current state there is, I would say… about 12 hours of content total. But development is ongoing, and an embiggening of the island is coming in the future. Still, the 12 hours of content, is still plenty of fun, and I’ve certainly gotten multiple runs out of it. I’d call it, this year’s Signal from Tolva in that regard.
I will mention that playing with overseas friends, with all the lag that entails, makes it very hard to land shots… like, worse than I’ve experienced in most other games. But the recently added Tesla weapons do honestly remedy that. Hopefully that’ll improve over time.
Lethal company (early access)
Chances are you’ve played this one, and/or have seen enough to know what to make of it… or are not interested despite (or in spite of) the saturation.
So, I’ll forego the explanation for this one and get to my opinion.
It’s a funny game, that is very early in its days. As such, I feel after 20 hours I’ve gotten everything out of the game I can currently, and I’m not really interested in playing more until there’s a lot more to it.
Meanwhile, I’ve recently been playing Zeekerrs previous game The Upturned. Been finding it very enjoyable.
Void crew (early access)
Image source: Massively Overpowered, also how did I not take any screenshots??
Y’know, I ended last year playing a ship crewing game in PULSAR: the lost colony. Seems fitting I finish this year playing something similar.
However, this game is not as it seems on the surface. It’s not a game where a group of friends crew a ship and explore space. a game where a group of friends crew a ship, go out, do some missions, and come back and get rewards. It’s much more like Deep Rock Galactic in that sense. Each ‘pilgrimage’ has a set beginning and end.
The loop is lots of fun, crews will be all doing their own thing, and as an engineer, if I’m not helping shoot stuff, or being the only scavenger available, I can take time to wander around the ship (getting lost if we’re using the big ship), tending to the ship systems, moving items out of the scoop and into storage, or the recycler, which involves tossing them down the corridor a lot of the time.
One part of the loop I’m iffy about is at the end of every mission, in order to maximise our alloy bonus, we usually run around the ship, scuttling everything we built and collected, ship modules, ammo, upgrades, and other bits and pieces, sending it to the fabricator to get recycled one by one. I find this part of the loop to be pretty tedious and I feel like it should get a rework at some point, maybe taking account of your assets, and the value you would have if you had recycled everything. It’s not like you keep anything you find between missions. They made it easier recently with their rework of the void jump, allowing a ship to sit in ‘warp’, so that crews have time to prepare the next move, which at that stage is slowly chew through everything, and set the course for home.
Also, the loot in this game… It’s a random cosmetic lootbox system WITH DUPLICATES. At least it’s not monetized at the moment, I’m… weary, but still… just… no. And I cannot tell you how many crappy little visor gifs I’ve gotten… again, in duplicates of. Just let me purchase what I want with a form of in-game currency, and/or add items to progression.
But at any rate, this is still super technically impressive at this stage of development. After some bad habits are ironed out, I’m excited to see where this game goes.
Inkbound (early access)
I’m not normally a fan of turn based games. Inkbound sets out to take everything I dislike about turn based games, and effectively makes them fair. I suppose this makes the fight one sided in a certain way, but that doesn’t make it any less challenging.
To validate my feelings about turn based games, I have recently been playing through the Hylics series again, and I had my first game of D&D. The takeaway from all that being… preparation is key.
Inkbound allows you to prepare on the fly, as you’re making your move. While you’re doing everything you can, that your energy and availability of your abilities can permit, you know what the enemy is going to do, and you can either dodge, or get ready to take it, perhaps even influence them in some way.
One thing you cannot predict is how your adventure will go. If it plays like rouge, smells like rogue, it must be likewise… like rogue… a roguelike. ehem
The progression of your abilities, and the weird doodads you’ll find are randomised each run. You find yourself having to tend with multiple varieties of your ‘absolutely broken’ build. Oh but once you have one, it’s very funny to, say… do absurd numbers of damage concurrent to how tanky you are, like the harder you are to kill, the easier it is to kill others… which does make sense overall, but in this context… it couldn't be closer to the truth.
Or how about the various ways to do DoT, and just watching the enemy die on their own.
Or my personal favourite, outright removing the movement cap and literally running circles around the enemy… in a turn based game.
Also, it should be worth mentioning, in the antithesis of what Void Crew is doing, in more ways than one, the game started out having a premium currency to unlock cosmetics with, but they soon done way with that, and now you just earn the currency in game… as it should be. It’s unfortunate that it started that way, but I’m happy it’s where it’s at now. And they’re still offering paid Cosmetic DLC packages. Infinitely better than a random lootbox with dupes!
Cylva is WAY up there in "top ten side characters I want voiced" because I love her and she has so so many good lines! Like, the entirety of Team Norvrandt wrecked me on impact, but the execution of Cylva's story and her grief was wonderful. She's a foil to Ardbert in that they're both good people who doomed the First in their desperation to save their home, but all he could see was the Shadowkeeper's atrocities and he still chose to love her! He chose love, and she was undone: doomed to eternal youth on a shard alien from her own, to watch her friends' legacy be warped and broken until you give her the chance to set things right.
Which is all to say that Cylva is good and more void quests would be a blessing unto this earth. (And also that if they can do Omega in Ultima Thule without making the raids mandatory, then surely they can do the Thirteenth without making the quests mandatory!)
CYLVA IS TRULY THE SIDE CHARACTER OF ALL TIME!! literally so many good lines. her "he chose love, and then i was undone" line? fucking chefs kiss. leave it to the dark knights to have the most baller lines out there.
i looooove foils and i love all the parallels between cylva and ardbert's situations. everything about her character is so tragic and i want to see more of her so bad!!
