Sure whatever, I can put ten game in a single post, because that's how many I managed to play since the last one. Only for like an hour each on average, but that was enough to finish multiple of them and decide the others weren't really doing it for me.
Clickolding was pretty good. I don't usually play stuff right when it comes out, but it was a couple bucks and I feel like I can trust Xalavier Nelson Jr./Strange Scaffold to do something interestingly weird at this point. It's the most about sex work anything's ever been without explicitly stating it's about sex work, and it will do its best to make you vaguely uncomfortable about that and the mundanity and boredom and desperation and detachment that can go along with it. It's also about the impact our actions have on the lives of people around us. A decent way to spend like an hour of your time.
I had a bit more mixed feelings about the first DLC for Voxelgram. On one hand it's good because more Voxelgram is good. On the other the larger puzzles don't really make it more challenging or anything, just more tedious. The last couple took me a bit over an hour each, and I saw someone else saying the last one took them significantly longer than that. I think I would've been happier if they were a bit smaller and didn't go on for so long, and they'd also fit on the screen better that way.
Something I didn't have mixed feelings about was Strawberry Vinegar, which was kind of disappointing because I tend to enjoy ebi-hime's stuff even if it's never my favorite stuff ever. This one I just got through the bad ending and stopped though because I had no interest in seeing what happens in any of the other routes. The way the characters were written just didn't feel right to me, like this is not a nine year old girl despite you telling me it is, and the vibes were definitely off. Oh well.
I have mostly positive things to say about Seraphim Slum though. It's very not afraid to get weird with things, and I mean Capital W Weird, not lolrandom rawr xd. A tagline/pitch like "Play as sapphic Lucifer and corrupt angels to fall...in love with you." is a good way to get my attention. It's at least initially on the surface "date cute angel girls", but it very quickly leans heavily into corruption = love = freedom/release/relief. Overall I definitely enjoyed the vibes and presentation and where it went with stuff, and I only have a couple issues with it: one is that some of the auto-advancing text is borderline unreadable on certain backgrounds, which is unfortunate but can be worked around by reading it in the log, and the other is that the routing/structure of it is pretty incomprehensible to me and I have no idea how to get to a couple parts of it I haven't seen yet. Maybe I'll check the DLC guide at some point when I can justify spending more money on stuff.
An Arcade Full of Cats was ok. Not my favorite Devcats game but fun enough that I finished it. As someone who remembers most of the eras it represents (not the DLC ones though) it was fun seeing the terrible cat puns on old arcade games and various other things they snuck in. There was definitely some artistic liberty taken with some of it, but they did a surprisingly good job capturing the feeling of a bunch of stuff I hadn't thought about in a long time in a hidden object game about cats. I feel no shame about using the cheat button for a few things in this one though because some of them were genuinely bullshit. Even after it pointed out a couple of them to me I could barely recognize them because they were so small they didn't look like anything. I don't remember having that problem in Building or Castle, at least not to that degree.
Gorogoa took me forever to finally try out. I really like the idea of it, and they do some clever stuff with the presentation and ways you interact with things that let them do fun stuff with how puzzles work. I don't really like actually playing it though. It does a bad job sometimes with letting you know which things are interactable or in what ways, and as a result I feel like it kept deteriorating into the typical point and click adventure game problem of rubbing every object on every other object until something happens. It's just not very enjoyable to know what the end goal of a puzzle sequence is but have no idea how to get there because it's looking for a very specific sequence of very specific events, and you tried something very slightly different that didn't work, and there's no useful feedback why.
TET's alright though, if a ten minute cooking game about preparing food for Vietnamese Lunar New Year sounds like your kind of thing. It's cute and funny and even includes recipes. Also it makes me want spring rolls. Also also it feels much better to play with a touchscreen.
I was extremely underwhelmed by Muse Dash, which also took me forever to get around to actually trying. The gameplay seems fine. What I saw in my brief time with it didn't really stand out to me, but there also wasn't really anything wrong with it either. What definitely is wrong with it though is that it kept pestering me to create an account even though I was just trying to play by myself offline, and also the UI seems completely unmanageable. Like the song picker would work but be mildly clunky if there were 20 songs in the game. It appears to have hundreds though, maybe more, and it's just really not suited for that. Yeah there appears to be a filter, but it's just a bunch of incomprehensible icons and very inaccessible for a new player. The art and music seemed ok though.
Speaking of ok, there's also Luna's Fishing Garden. It had some better than ok moments, but overall...it's ok. The default/challenging fishing minigame did not feel good to me at all, and the relaxed/easy mode was a bit boring, but I got over it because it turns out you don't actually have to do it all that much once the game gets going. It's pretty chill, and there's some cute pixel art and characters. Shout out to the "you caught a fish" animation in particular for being adorable. Most of the time I felt like progression was pretty well balanced, but toward the end there was definitely a significant amount of waiting around to get enough of certain resources that dragged it out longer than it really needed to. Aside from that though? It's ok!
And then since I said ten at the beginning, uh...Townscaper exists? Let's include that even though it wouldn't be hard to argue it's not a game. I'm pretty sure I got it in a game bundle though, and it's on Steam, so let's just go with that. It's fun to poke at for a little while and see what you can build with it. And that's about all there is to it.
Video games ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
