Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £19.49
Where To Get It: Itch.IO , Steam
Other Reviews: Early Access

Regardless of the kind of apocalypse… Well, okay, except for the murderdogpocalypse… Your best friend is a Good Boy. And I should know, because I’ve been meeting a lot of Good Boys in Overland. Some that bork. Some that bite. And some that can just carry things, search through bins for fuel, and drop it where I need it. And I do need it, because I’m trying to get to the West Coast, while crystalline insectile gribbleys are trying to stab my face off.

Welcome to Overland, a game about making hard choices.

Now, at first, you may be confused into thinking this is a survival strategy game, one of kicking the shit out of those gribbleys, and being the badass. No. Attacking these crystal insects, while a thing you will have to do occasionally, is a bad idea. Because it summons more of them. And you can’t stay long, either, because they hunt by sound, and if one of them’s found you (and it’s never just one), you can guarantee more are coming too. Mostly, it’s luring the bastards, trying to keep out of their reach, while grabbing whatever you humanly can.

Alas, sometimes, you risk too much. And sometimes, somebody else fucks it up for you. Because not all survivors are friendly, and the unfriendly survivors tend to a) Attack things if they have a weapon on the first turn, summoning more, and b) Run around like headless chickens, getting in your way. And, sad to say, not all survivors carry something useful, or are useful. On the run where I got to demonstrate both these things, both survivors I’d picked up had succulents, and, softie that I am, I let them keep them. At least one of them got a bobble hat, toward the end. That was cute.

So… Crit. The game is hard. And I do mean hard. I only managed to get to the third area in early access, because the second has creatures that can run two squares, on top of the small ones, and the bigger ones that take two hits to kill. And, even with a feature that lets you go to areas you’ve unlocked, I’ve had trouble. Sometimes, that isometric camera gets in the way of important information, and, while I’ve yet to find an example where it did that to important items, I have seen it when it comes to enemies. Finally, the game does try to incentivise a full run with secret areas unlocked in the next part of the map if you carry a survivor who knows where one is past the blockade at the end of the level. I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t.

Aesthetically, though, it’s quite pleasing. The survival music is tense, but low key, the camping music is wistful, and makes a nice backdrop to survivors who are having trouble keeping it together, and the low poly look is pretty good. Also the clarity of what it takes to kill enemies is very nice indeed, even if killing them most definitely isn’t the point, and you’re not going to have the resources to do so for the majority of the game. Writing wise, the procgen backgrounds are short and to the point, and the same with the conversations. They add a little character, without getting in the way of things.

Overall, while I can appreciate the difficulty, and that puzzle, rather than combat focused gameplay would be turnoffs, I enjoy Overland, even if it doesn’t particularly like me. It’s a game of thought, its aesthetic pleases me, and its encouragement of risk management is fun to me.

The Mad Welshman is not a big fan of hard decisions, and yet… He likes them in games. Odd.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £49.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Content Warning: Although the article has no representations of this, be aware that this is a murder mystery game while the murders are ongoing, so there are bloody scenes of violent death, and several themes including parental abuse, obsessional behaviour and stalking, and the like are involved.

Spike Chunsoft make wild rides. Pseudoscience made real in the fiction, murder, heartbreaking moments, and time being… Fluid are all hallmarks, and AI: The Somnium Files is definitely no different. And oh, boy, it is indeed a wild ride. And one that may annoy, if you don’t take the old adventure game adage of “Save Early, Save Often.”

The general premise, then. You are Date, a Psyncer (someone who can enter someone’s dreams), working for a relatively secret agency called ABIS (Pronounced Abyss, or maybe… Apis? There’s a lot of egyptian deities mentioned, y’see), and a serial killer is on the loose… Perhaps a copycat killer from six years ago. And a lot of things aren’t right. With the case. With your boss. With Date himself. And with Aiba, your AI eyeball friend who’s also… Seems to have the hots for Dante, in the oddest way.

Oh, and hidden collectibles and branching paths in a flowchart. Mustn’t forget those. So, anyway: The game is mostly split into two parts: Investigating a scene and talking to people, and the Somnium, the dreamworld of either Date, or… Whoever you’re ordered to PSYNC with, for information relating to the case. And yes, it uses dream logic. The tutorial example has a light switch covered by thorns, and a Winter Iris that cannot be moved nearby, but can still be interacted with because… It’s lit. So you don’t move it. You… Inhale it. Dream logic. But, from this point on, there’s a big catch: You have 6 minutes. The upside is that it only goes down when you’re moving or interacting in the dream world (through your partner, Aiba.) The downside is that understanding the logic of that particular dream may well take a lot of tries, and often, there are multiple solutions that lead to different results.

Aesthetically, apart from some awkward animations, and pink text for Aiba ([check for colourblind options]), the game has a solid visual style, great music, and some good voice acting. The writing is colourful, with a mix of silly references to a variety of things (including other Spike Chunsoft games, The Terminator, and The X-Files), and it drew me in, even when I knew what would come from previous experience with Spike Chunsoft titles, and some solid, foreboding foreshadowing. The humour does fall flat sometimes, and Date’s horniness is… It’s groan inducing a fair bit of the time.

There is a rather sudden shift later in the game, and some paths in the story (Yes, there are branching paths you want to explore to get the honest to goodness ending) are blocked by things you need to get further in the story than I perhaps would have liked, but, overall, I like Spike Chunsoft’s interesting takes on the formulae they work with, and this game is no exception.

The Mad Welshman A unlocked! [Picture of TMW drawn in crayon]

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £8.99
Where To Get It: Steam
Other Reviews: Early Access

Last time I looked at Cliff Empire, it was aesthetically pleasing, with some exceptions, but, honestly, a god-damn mess to actually play. There was a lot of waiting, unclear resource imbalances, poor tutorialisation, and a trading UI that was as clear as mud, with Dead Man Walking scenarios everywhere.

Oh, and let’s not forget that the implicit subtext, with only decades passed since nuclear disaster, the survivors on a space station recolonising, and them recolonising literal ivory towers (Well, okay, some sort of white stone, but still) with the power of actually working for once, and bitcoin as currency… Well, suffice to say, despite the criticisms of the game being legitimate ones, I am much less sympathetic to the colonists in this game than I have been for many others. I have more sympathies for the marauders who occasionally crop up, even if they make my teeth grind, gameplay wise.

So yes, Cliff Empire is one of those colonisation survival games, where you start with limited resources, that you have to use efficiently, because getting more is dependent on several things, not all of which you know beforehand. Is this the tower you start on with 100% Uranium yield, 40% Uranium yield, or precisely fuck all? You don’t know. Is the soil fertile enough for crops to do well? You don’t know until much later on. Can you afford the Uranium from your somewhat richer masters up top, or will you just have to cope with what you can eke out? You don’t know.

What you do know is how much groundwater there is in each tower, how well wind or solar power works there, and, the most obvious, if there’s a big honking pool of water that may contain enough fish worth harvesting, but definitely takes up valuable space which you could have used for one more maintennance panel.

Okay, so let’s briefly take a trip into “This is nice” town. The aesthetic is pretty cool. The music is chill and relaxing, the cities are neofuturist, and the inclusion of a tourist mode, where you can spend your spare time wandering around the city (sort of) is nice. On the downside, the trade UX still has that trap of “No clear input fields, so you butt your head against the lack of buttonage, when you’re actually meant to put numbers in the ‘sell if more’ and ‘buy if less’ fields” I complained about last time. But mechanically, it’s slow, it can be very trying, it has several Dead Man Walking scenarios, even in the early game, and then… There are the quests.

The bougie masters up top demand resources. And if they do not get those resources in time, you will lose some of the money you desperately need, and only have limited means of generating for yourself. Oh, and your colonists, if unemployed, despite being fed, given furniture (never enough), gadgets (never enough), appliances (never enough), and parks and other nice little perks, will steal from your coffers. Hell, sometimes, if you haven’t provided enough for the pampered little darlings, they’ll steal from your coffers anyway.

There is definitely potential in Cliff Empire, and maybe, one day, that potential will turn up, subtext of the narrative aside (Honestly, there’s not really any redemption on that front, especially in the current climate.) But it’s such a frustrating grind of a city builder, that I’m not having a good time, even with the relaxing music and nice aesthetic.

The Mad Welshman’s stance remains the same as it has been for quite a while: Eat the rich. Well, eat the rich who fertilise plants, the rich are quite unhealthy meals.

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Source: Review Copy
Price: £15 (Game has a free demo)
Where To Get It: Steam

Space is big… But it does seem like, whenever there’s a horde of aliens, mindless or otherwise, infesting somewhere, it’s somewhere we are. This time, in Blast Axis, it’s interdimensional, pink and purple beasties, who just seem… Well, aggressive overall.

At first, I have to admit I wasn’t enamoured of the 6-degrees-of-freedom shooty spaceship-in-a-space-station funtimes of Blast Axis. I enjoyed some things, like the bio-luminescent, odd entities that infested the station, and even found that bright green nightvision mode more tolerable than other games I’d seen it in (I’m just not the biggest fan of bright green night goggles overall, sad to say.) But the map, at first, confused me, and as I wandered through its first (zeroeth) level, I felt… Somewhat of a lack of cohesion. Wait, why is this tunnels and junk, tunnels and ju-

And then I hit the second level, and I started seeing a little bit of the scale. An avenue of buildings, big honkin’ walkways, doors… This used to be a place where a lot of people lived, and seemingly, in the grand tradition of such games, mined rocks, and presumably explored things where “Should” was probably a better start to their sentence than “Could.” And I also answered the question for myself I’d also asked in that first level. Where was the difficulty?

Well, let’s digress into limits. There are more than 10 monsters, but not more than 20. There are 6 weapons, 10 ammo types, a couple of firing modes… At first, it seems a bit limited. But those ammo types, those firing modes, do introduce interesting things, and, even on Minor Hazard (the game’s equivalent of “Easy”), it’s… It’s surprisingly easy to get blindsided, and from quite a ways away, by even a moderate group of gribbleys. Some fire swirly trails that hurt. Some fire lots of odd spikey icicle looking things that hurt, like a machine gun. But one of the first enemies you encounter is both the most interesting… And the one that blindsided me the worst.

They’re inoffensive, squid like things, with a single large eye, and glowing some blue/purple/pink shade like every other enemy (I actually like that, it makes for better visual distinction, and the glow makes them easier to spot in the dark too. The very common dark.) And, until they notice you, they really do seem inoffensive. Hell, in the first level, you rapidly chunk them before they do. But when they do notice you, and you don’t notice them… That’s when it hurts. Because they’re suddenly fast, attack with headbutts, and then vanish into some corner, until they spot you again. And again. And again. Projectiles, you can see. The mine like enemies… You can blow up, easily. But those little sods? They did more damage to me than even some of the more powerful enemies later on, overall.

So, from an unpromising beginning, Blast Axis started winning me over. Cyclopean machinery, long dead… The axis of the outer wheel, so far away… The aesthetic started to win me over. The music is filled with low key dread, the station and the machinery of the game feel worn (even the ship is clunky and battered, and I love that.) Aesthetically, it pleases, even the slightly clunky menu, and the oddly 70s style title.

This is not to say the game is without flaw. There is a dash boost, and it’s all too easy to trigger when you don’t want it to (the trigger is double tapping, but even “tap…tap” can sometimes trigger it, which is annoying when you’re being cautious.) The keys are rebindable, but I found it odd that Shift is the default “go down” key (normally it’s Ctrl.) And the map is… Hard to get used to, as it’s not your normal map, but a map centered around you. So using it can sometimes be a distinctly confusing and irritating experience.

Otherwise, though, this definitely isn’t a bad 6DOF shooter, and it starts you on the easy difficulty, which is nice (even if, judging by it, medium and hard are going to be utter bastards. Minor Hazard is challenging, tense at times, but definitely not unbeatable.) I wouldn’t exactly call it a good introduction to this subgenre, but it does feel like it has a solid place within it, with its own touches that make it interesting.

For cross dimensional invaders looking for a good space station to inhabit, please contact TMW, care of… Well, we’ll find you when you’re ready for an offer…

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Source: Hard parted with Cashmoneys. Worth it though.
Price: £41.99 (Look, there’s DLCs and a Season pass…)
Where to Get It: Steam

Space Opera is, in a way, a high fantasy all of its own. Want space elves? You can have space elves. Want space dwarves? Sure, no prob. Want a monolithic evil empire? Well, we all have those days. So Age of Wonders: Planetfall is not, strictly speaking, that big a leap from the fantasy shenanigans of previous games. Spells are now Tactical Operations, roving monsters are often NPC factions (Not all of which have a player faction equivalent), and overall? There’s a lot of interesting changes here, all of which seem to improve that AoW experience.

For those who don’t get the fuss about Age of Wonders, it’s a long running 4X franchise which has boasted many factions, asymmetric gameplay elements in later instalments, and some cool worlds of high fantasy. Well, now it’s science fiction. Turn based, with a hex based combat system when you get into it with units, and… Well, let’s talk systems.

As noted, there’s a lot of changes, but the two biggest, to my mind, are the Mod system for units, which extends the utility of units, especially Tier I units, quite a lot, and allows a fair amount of customisation, and the ability to research both your military and social researches at the same time, which… Really streamlines play, and I like that! In addition, factions and classes further mix things up both in the unit and research side of things (Species who choose the Voidtech class, for example, get Void Walkers, beings who can clone themselves before a seemingly unwinnable fight, and if they die? Well… Their clone is now them, because they were time travelling, and you had the bonus of doing damage to a creature outside of your current strength)

The system of base building has also been rejigged, and I also quite like this. Before this, it was done in a slightly more traditional 4X manner, with building cities, expanding them, and the main difference was in Outposts (to extend your territory without building another city) and Watchtowers (Extend the vision range of whoever owns them.) In Planetfall, it’s a collection of territories, and expansion is through exploiting a sector within range (preferably connected), and then building an exploitation on that point. Forward Bases can pre-emptively claim a territory, although anyone who wants to either destroy that or take that claim for their own can certainly try, so defending forward bases is… An interesting dynamic, since the game doesn’t generally encourage hordes of units, overall.

It’s somewhat refreshing, after the hullabaloo (enjoyable hullabaloo, but hullabaloo nonetheless) of Age of Wonders, to see the turns just… Glide by, relatively speaking. And it helps that, aesthetically, Planetfall is very much on point. The UI remains the same, and is mostly readable and well organised (occasionally, there’s a button or two that confuses a little, but it’s easy to learn), the music is fitting and gets the mood going along with things, and the worlds are, again, clear about what’s what. There is also hotseat, always a favourite of mine, for anything up to 12 players (Which is a fair bit more than the current number of factions, but the existence of a DLC Season Pass implies, as with Age of Wonders 3, that more is planned.)

So… I don’t really have any gripes about Age of Wonders: Planetfall. Some folks might get turned on by the extra login (as they might have done with Age of Wonders 3), but many a 4X or Grand Strategy player already has a Paradox account, so… Overall, it gets a recommendation for 4X players, with the only advice for those new to AoW being “Save often, but especially before fights, so you can learn how it all works without as much frustration.”

The Mad Welshman is torn between factions. So he spends most of his time with Planetfall banging his toys together and making “pew pew!” noises in Hotseat. He absolutely will not apologise for this. More 4X’s need hotseat.

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