What Did We Play Yesterday?

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.

Don't mind me just putting sombreros on my cows.

The desert area is fun because the quests let you recreate oasis, lakes, and greenery, which is the whole dang point of this here game. I got stuck in a drainage canal and ended up falling out of the level, so there was a bit more jankiness here wrt the map design, but it was a good time and you can befriend fennics.

One big advantage of this game is you can set up camp and build stuff anywhere there's level ground, which is something I really should have been doing from the beginning, so I set up a mini camp at the entrance of the desert to grow area crops and I'll set up a goat pen out there as well. You can actually create WAY more resources than you'll ever actually need from the billions of seeds you loot and the abundance of machines you can create, so--for example--having 1 or 2 bee hives in an area where you can recruit pigs is more convenient than returning to the farm, even if you can fast-travel. At best, any given crop is used to befriend a handful of animals and maaaaybe purchase an upgrade or craft an item, and after that there's not much practical use unless you're angling for certain achievements.

What I'm saying is you can declutter your farm with impunity. It will be fine.

I was warned the storyline for this game is dumb and I won't lie, the dialogue is tedious and boring as shit, so I tend to skip through all that and consult my quest ledger to figure out the specifics of what I need to do to advance the game. I have a lot of spare quest items lying around because the game provides more than you need, presumably so you don't have to hoover up every scrap of trash to complete your objective since quest items are usually hidden in piles of junk. So I've got a bunch of quest items I probably don't need but this game is so janky I don't want to trash anything just in case I need it later and end up breaking the game. I haven't actually tried to trash quest items but I'm assuming it's possible, considering everything else. IMO the best way to handle this sort of thing is to have quest items be "collected" in a separate inventory that cannot be manipulated, so they don't clutter up the main inventory and can't be accidentally removed.

We continue. As you can see, my farm was a hot mess. I tidied up by removing all the extra animal pens. This puts the assigned animals in limbo. After you place the pen elsewhere, you have to befriend all the animals again. Realistically, you only need one pen of each type at your farm, and it's best to construct extra pens at convenient waypoints.

I forgot you can plant fruit trees just about everywhere, so I've been scattering them about. I spent some time going around in circles for a few quests I couldn't remember how to handle but I think I've got it now.

I decided to fire No Place Like Home up and see where we're at. It took me a few minutes to reorient because my farm is absolute chaos, this game is truly inventory management hell. I scampered about, cleaning, befriending animals, and experiencing the jank. IIRC I stopped playing before because I got tired of cleaning, but right now, cleaning is the point, so it's working out for me.

This game has a known save issue bug that I stumbled across. The problem is the game doesn't correctly overwrite the manual save slot. Fortunately, the game keeps multiple autosaves and you can convert one of those.

Users/User/AppData/LocalLow/Awaken Realms/NPLH

Find the autosave backup (e.g. autosaveslot1.nplhsavebackup363) that reflects your most recent save and rename it to one of your main slot saves (e.g. slot_1.nplhsave).

I have a lot going on right now, so I decided to chill with a cleaning game. This cleaning game looks nice. Hmmm. This vacuum mechanic seems awfully familiar. As well as this music. And the way the trash looks...

Surprise! This was made by the No Place Like Home devs. They basically took the most satisfying parts of that game, which is the cleaning loop, and made a game that focuses entirely on that. Personally, they are different enough for me. Fresh Start Cleaning Simulator focuses on cleaning the environment and growing plants and being a generally chill experience, and in NPLH you're running around fighting spider robots and dealing with whatever the heck is going on with the farm mechanics and the jank is on full display.

So I ran to the blacksmith and offloaded a bunch of iron bars and coal, and scuttled back to buy a building permit. The bishop agreed to expand the church, but then that little shit had the audacity to tell me I had to buy YET ANOTHER permit thing before I could actually preach at the church, effectively cutting off a significant source of revenue until I do. It's 3 silver so it's not a huge deal, but I obviously don't have it and... c'mon man, lol. I feel so nickel and dimed by this damn game. And I didn't even get a bigger cemetery! Ugh.

But I'd forgotten I get a little over a silver for burying corpses, so as long as I stay on top of the gravedigger business I'll get there before sermon day rolls around.