What Did We Play Yesterday?

Wandered into Scarlet Orchard, which is a more dangerous place. Things were a little dodgy for a while. The soil there cannot grow, so you have to forage or buy food, and I was always kinda low. This is the first time I had a villager leave me (sob). In the beginning, I had a LOT of impatience built up but the tide eventually turned.

There's an archaeology feature here, and treasures to be found, but I wasn't able to get into that I was mainly focused on keeping everyone fed and happy.

Exploring new biomes, and starting to get the hang of various production lines. The jungly one is probably my favorite, in part because the trees sometimes offer other resources beyond wood.

Okay, obsessed with this, lol. The tutorial was almost cozy, and I was enjoying making my orderly little streets and putting in decorations and such, taking it easy. Then I start the real game and they drop me into this inhospitable alien landscape and are like GO FOR IT.

The main game is won by building a settlement that meets gradually unlocked orders. With each order, you can choose one of two options, so you can try to steer your city a certain direction. Each time you complete an order you choose from buildings to unlock. There is overlap in what the buildings do, so you can choose based on resource availability and needs. It took me a couple games to get the hang of it, but once I got into it, I really got into it.

The overall campaign proceeds across a larger map and I guess there are 10 settlements to build per campaign. You earn persistent upgrades as you move through the campaign. In between you can return home and talk to your aunt, and I'm not sure what's going on with that beyond learning more about the overarching lore (there is a queen, and you MUST NOT displease her, that's all I know). But this world is cyclically ravaged by a storm, so living there is a constant process of establishing settlements, retreating when the storm comes, and going back out to resettle the land again after it passes.

One thing I appreciate is after you meet your goals, you can continue to work on your settlement. You won't get additional experience, it's strictly for your personal enjoyment, but I can see building up a particularly nice settlement and wanting to play with it a bit. I only explored a fraction of my map when I finished the first round, but later in the game I should unlock things that allow me to explore further on a run. It also sounds like around level 10 you unlock the Obsidian Archive, which allows you to customize runs, so you could set up a sort of endless mode that way.

I haven't played a city builder like this in a while. It's slowly and steadily opening up, and I can see how you'd easily lose a lot of time in this one. It sounds like it has about 10 1-hour runs per campaign. I enjoy it so far.

Tried and failed to unlock a few more cheevs in Vampire Survivors. I've gotten most of the 'get so and so to level 80' ones and now I'm working on some of the more puzzly ones that require map exploration.

Really got into Stacklands and unlocked quite a bit of stuff, including the incredibly useful animal pen and farm. So far I've only managed to juggle 2 villagers successfully. The game can be a little slow to get started, so I'm not sure when I'll do another run, but I'd like to come back to it eventually.

I've been playing caiys's new incremental game, Xenosensory. I'm honestly not sure how I feel about it. It doesn't play great on SteamDeck (which was complicated by the fact I didn't originally realize you had to hover over xenos to explode them, NOT necessarily click the mouse button). It has some interesting mechanics, like a pinball that you can manipulate to strike enemies, and it's short with a steady progression so I've continued to play here and there. But I don't enjoy it the way I've enjoyed their other games, nor do I feel compelled to play beyond exploring whatever's going on here.

The dev notes this was an experiment, and it certainly feels like one. I can't recommend this one compared to their other games, but I'm always up for whatever this dev puts out.

Interestingly, I just realized their first game was Echo of the Wilds. I objectively hated that game! But I loved Voids and Boneraiser Minions, as I've repeatedly noted here, and the prior games are on the list to try.

This card game has been languishing on my wishlist for quite some time. It's not really a card game, it's a village builder with drag and drop mechanics. I'm still wrapping my head around various card combinations to build things (I kept butting heads with the hand limit until I realized I could build a few things that would expand my hand limit). Gives a very slight Mini Settlers vibe.

Unfortunately Ball x Pit must be shelved. I never did reach a place where I felt like I was exercising strategy or genuinely improving, and I'm tired of replaying the first level. I might return to it down the road, since it sounds like development will continue.

This is a cute hidden object game with, surprise, cats! It takes about an hour to find them all, and some are extra hidden in cabinets and whatnot. It's a fun, short puzzle.

Belted out a few levels in Freshly Frosted. The levels are samey enough this isn't a game I'd play straight through, but I may continue to pick it up and play a few levels here or there. It teeters riiiight on the edge of potentially being boring for me due to the lack of variety.

Continuing to kick the tires on Ball X Pit. I'm figuring out some things. For instance, you cause a great deal more damage by bouncing your balls off the walls before strikes, so most of the time you should be aiming at the walls and trying to get the balls to bounce up and behind enemy lines rather than shooting directly at them. Evolutions, which create new balls, and more powerful than fusions, when combine elements of two balls. And typically, if you can collect all the gems and level up before you snag a fusion orb thing you should do that.

That being said, at this stage the game feels more like grinding based than skill based. I beat the first level once fairly early on, but I've consistently gotten overrun by the second mini-boss ever since. I'm still sorting out how to make my base more efficient for resource gathering. The beginning of each round is pretty slow, and things don't really get moving until you get enough XP to snag your first upgrade. But I'm gonna continue working at it.