There's a new event, Sprout Spectacle! This event had some cool flower-themed decorations and a foundtain. I converted a farmhouse area to an event display area, but I'm not sold on it yet and will probably fiddle a bit. I needed a place to stash phlox, which were recently added, so that aspect worked out.
Gettin my butt kicked at the dairy yeeah. Playing the cleric was interesting. I (sorta) effed up by evolving my holy water too early (to 4-pt), leaving me with a 3-point card gap for a while. Starting deck is an easy 0-1-2-3 otherwise. Would cleric again however.
Nearly beat the bridge with one of the mages, failed, and used the bone guy to wipe the floor. I unlocked a few relics there, including the Blacksmith, which allows you to pay to add gem slots to cards (max 3), and overkill, which is just a fun way to chuck your remaining cards at a boss for extra coins.
Surprise rave at the tavern! This game keeps giving and giving.
I gave Giovanna a try and was pleasantly surprised how much damage her cats do. I stacked her luck pretty high but it appears the main thing it does is increase potential card draws and gem draws which is cool, but not as useful as some of the other Crawlers's color draw stats.
I keep forgetting to use rerolls, so I'm trying to get better about using that strategically.
I did a lazy L1 run with Mortaccio and absolutely wiped the floor using Bones. By the end of the run, I was really wishing I could at least have a go at the reaper when it showed up and hacked me to pieces. I did a search and figured out there's a boss called Red Death down the road, so I have that to look forward to.
We're in it now, lads.
There's an echo gem effect that allows the card to repeat the previous attack, and it was a beast on Pugnala's level-3 revolver Phiera Der Tuphello. Pgunala starts with Spellbinder, which has got to be one of the most useful starter deck cards you can have for a crawler with a yellow-card trigger to draw, because if you snatch up a few level-1 mana tomes you will consistently hit the spellbinder-tome-2gun-3gun combo, and with echo on top it was just a really good time.
Spellbinder and Unholy Bible can evolve into Vespers, which is a cool card, but in the future I wouldn't sacrifice Spellbinder until I had at least 2 of them or a handful of yellow 0 cards. I haven't unlocked Spellbinder for pickups yet, according to the wiki I need to play runetracer 10 times which I evidently haven't done. Consulting the wiki leads down a rabbit hole... I need Pasqualinia at level 10 to unlock runetracer, and to do that I need to get Imelda to level 20 in the library. I can't remember who I've unlocked but unlocking spellbinder is my next session goal.
This is the best game that has ever existed, or will ever exist.
Hyperbole aside, damn did this thing hit me when I needed it, well done poncle. I've got SO MUCH going on right now my brain is fried by nightfall and I needed a pick-up-and-go game that I could vibe with that still had some strat meat and this thing fits the bill.
Vampire Crawlers is a roguelike deckbuilder from the team behind the much beloved Vampire Survivors bullet heaven, or horde survivor, or OG Survivors-like, or whatever you wanna call it.
Deckbuilding is my favorite card game mechanic and I've played quite a few of these. Crawlers takes the iconography, hyperkinetic bling, combo-based strategy, and achievement storm that is VS and slams it into a deckbuilder fighting mechanic with dungeon crawler map navigation. The game is fun and fast-paced, and if you're familiar with VS, the icons and combos will click early-on. Evolutions create powerful new cards, and chaining combos for damage boosts is ridiculously satisfying. Hitting treasure chests is rewarding, bashing candlesticks and pillars for coins is fun, and the ability to apply gems to cards to upgrade them in a variety of ways is frankly brilliant.
Normally in these types of games, you upgrade a card to a better card. Here the player is given an option of gems that can be "hammered" into gem slots available on each card, meaning you could have a handful of holy bible starter cards with no two being quite the same. I have not seen this in a deckbuilder before, and letting players build their own cards as well as their own decks is A+. Once you start getting the hang of different strategies, every card has the potential to be a good card, and every gem has potential relative to your current run. "All power ups are good power ups" was one of the big boons of VS, and it's lovely to see the sentiment carried over here.
Deckbuilder is a saturated genre and I gotta give the devs credit for making this game feel like a unique play experience. I have never played a game quite like this. I love VS, and I appreciate those sweet vibes are getting overlaid, but lads there's genuinely a lot to love here. From the old-school dungeon crawler graphics and retro dialogue sfx to the unlockable QOL enhancements and the knowledge this here is a poncle game so you're gonna have like 30 characters to play, it's a banger all around.
Let there be no doubt this game was made by people who love arcades and love cats. This is another fun devcat hidden cat game that has extra mini-hunts hidden throughout. The game takes place in an arcade during different gaming eras and the cat-ification of the arcade titles is quite extensive. Good times are had by all.
I can only play partly on Steamdeck because some of the cats are so small, so I switched to PC about halfway through. I forgot the base game is free, and the second half of the game is available through DLC, so I will grab that soon.
I had to add ? handling to my blog engine because of these dumb games.
I was a little fried yesterday so I played through the Ever Seen a Cat? hidden object series (1, 2, and 3), which I fortunately got on sale at a steep discount. There are pretty low effort HOGs and definitely not worth $5 each, no matter how much you love this kind of game.
The art is fun, but they don't have anything else going for them. Like, at all. The first game has "cats" that are prohibitively difficult to find, and they must have gotten some feedback on that because in subsequent games all the cats are indisputably cats and therefore easier to find. I finished most of the levels in the second game within a minute, and finished the full game in 13 minutes. To compare, I spent closer to an hour playing through the first game a couple of times. I got bored in the third game, when I realized they still hadn't added anything interesting to the concept, and bailed. You have to play through all the games multiple times to get the achievements, and a few are weirdly grindy (find 1000 cats? sure buddy), so I didn't bother.
These days, there are so many hidden object games available you can't JUST do hidden object IMO, you need to have some other fun mechanic or interesting aspect to keep things engaging. The devcat games (A Building Full of Cats, etc) are far more enjoyable, as they have silly storylines/characters and a mechanic where you can find truly hidden cats that are hiding in cupboards and whatnot. I actually have a few more of those in my library so if I have a Need To Find Cats that's what I'll play next.
My time with No Place Like Home is winding down, but I'm continue to admire the jank. Take this tea set. Why is it so large? No one will ever know.
I'm to a point in the game where I have some crazy fetch quest I have to do to open the next area and it appears to require backtracking, so my interest waned. In retrospect, I think a game like this shouldn't have gated areas. Quests should be optional ways to further clean up the environment and make spaces green again. I mean, let's be real. EVERYTHING in this game should be optional.
I honestly didn't expect to come back to this one 1.5 years later so maybe I'll pick it up again sometime. But if I wanna just clean for a bit, I'll probably fire up Fresh Start instead. The cleaning and "glow up" nature mechanics in that game are more satisfying.
