Logistics game that focuses on real-world physics, a very interesting mix. The price point is golden frankly, making this more of a sandbox experiment with some interesting mechanics.

The general gist of Mine Mogul is that you’re in a mine, and you need to put stuff in a drop chute, which then automatically sells it granting you cash to buy more automation tools. More complicated items generate more profit, but are also more complicated to make. Straightforward enough, sure. Then you get to the actual implementation.

When I mention physics, I mean that in nearly all practical gaming senses. Collision & gravity most importantly. Things will bump into each other constantly, and most certainly when on a belt. When things fall off a belt, they hit the ground and you need to manually pick it up to get back to where you want it to be. Practical example now:

In nearly all factory games, you transport items through some sort of belt. Things are placed in an orderly fashion and move at a given rate of speed. If you send 15/minute you will receive 15/minute, not matter how many loops and turns you put on. Here, when you take a turn, the item will collide with any nearby item, and respond appropriately. Larger items may not make the turn and fall off. 15/minute in does not ever mean 15/minute out. In fact, most ‘mergers’ here are actually about dropping items onto a belt and hoping it stays there!

The next big deal here is that all mining activity generates multiple outputs, 3 to 5 items. I am sure you guessed that all processes take 1 item, so you need to filter this output. Filters can only process so many items at a time, and items back up and fall off the belt if so. The only way to combat this is to filter multiple times to multiple belts. Iron and Coal in particular are voluminous, so sub-sorting stations are key!

My typical factory has belts coming in, a sorting station (coal, iron, copper, gold, everything else) to some processing (which is vertically dropped), a smelter which produces ingots, whatever machines I need after that to meet progression requirements, a merged output belt for all types of material, a polisher (dramatically increased value) and then dumps in the chute. Simple in concept, but the practical application requires a lot of trial and error. Which is amazing!

Depending on the map you choose, you may have a lot of room to build, or very little. I prefer the big option to make large processing floors, but the small one effectively means you get wildly complicated mini-factories that ship out finished products on a very long and winding belt.

There are some QoL bits that I would personally love to see here, most of them relating to logic gates and improved throughput tools. But these changes would reduce the sandbox feel and then get it closer to the standard logistics games I’ve played a dozen times. As for ‘critically beneficial’ improvements, finding a way to get things to the processing chute from across a map would be my larger preference. As it stands, it can take a few minutes to get stuff all the way across the map, so those with some level of logistics experience are likely to find themselves simply waiting for stuff to happen rather than building stuff.

Still, what’s here is frankly a joy to fool around with. You will never ‘mega base’ here, but seeing tons of ore move around a factory with bits falling all over the place is like being in a kid’s playground. Super fun and relaxing!

In the golden age of point and click adventures, LucasArts was king of the mountain. You could tell it was a LucasArts game just by the art style. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug!

Puzzle games and adventure games are similar, think Golden Idol for a minute. The difference is failure state. You can, and will die in an adventure game, forcing a restart at some key point. Sierra had notoriously bad failure states where you would have to reset to hours prior. Thankfully we’ve learned a lot of lessons on that front, and games today have you lose a few minutes at most.

The Drifter has all these modern mechanics and trappings, wrapped in a deliciously voice-acted sci-fi story. From the first act, you are slipping between reality and nightmares, trying to find some sense. With 9 total acts to get through, and quite a few puzzles along the way, it’s a solid journey from start to finish. As with many of these games, the logic in some of the puzzles can breakdown if you’re not paying attention… but at no point did I think that a solution was completely bonkers.

The pacing is such that you can either dig through the whole thing in a single sitting, or take 1 chapter at a time. There’s no timer, and the act of gradually unveiling the mystery is quite fun. Thankfully, the twists themselves are also super logical, so no real deus ex machina here.

Give it a shot, well worth your time and money. Can certainly use more games like this in the future!

I gave this a shot a year ago, in EA. Last week it hit 1.0, which brought mostly mid-/end-game activities to the table. Pretty obvious I’ve played my fair share of simulation / logistics games and this one still fits that general bill.

Right, to the point here. The start of the game is poorly paced. The tutorial does a good job of explaining the basics, but then you get into the meat and potatoes of it, which is as slow as molasses. Early on, you’re given a quest to prepare your base for the arrival of stranded space folk. To to this, you need to complete about 20 steps and have the ability to pump out an absurd number of materials to construct it all. To use my previous buffet analogy, you are shown all the options, but can only order soup. And you better like that soup, cause it’s all you’re gonna get for 4 hours.

This is an unfortunate design choice as I can’t see too many people sticking around that long watching 1 tile at a time be constructed. Once you get to the actual factory building part (multi-regolith processing), the game actually becomes an interesting balance between production and advancement. You have, generally, meaningful decisions to make and prioritize to have the game move forward. This is what a good game should focus upon.

It’s a better game than it was a year ago and brings some interesting items to the table. It just happens to have one of the worst extended tutorials I have ever played. A tutorial that would easily be remedied by providing you the construction material to build the quest requisites. Then you’d get the right amount of taste for the systems and make a better choice. Hopefully this 1.0 launch gives them that feedback.

It’s on sale now, I’d give it a go.

Last one for a bit on this game, as it’s more on the conceptual side than the implementation. Again, Zero Company is a solid game, and I’m overly impressed that it does so much while restricted by the Star Wars IP.

A great man once said that a game is a series of interesting choices. A great game is therefore a series of very interesting choices. We can think of a few dozen examples. Zero Company has a fair share of interesting choices, some hidden, some obvious.

Hidden choices, where you commit without any understanding of the possible outcome are generally anathema to strategic games. You are given a limited set of resources to achieve a goal, and you need to therefore maximize them for success. What happens with hidden choices is you alt-tab to a wiki, cause the only other option is to scum-save to get informed. I am pretty sure there’s a mod out now that removes all hidden choices in the game, and just provides you with the info at hand. This isn’t about an easier choice, you still have to pick between spending money, losing bond, or increasing reputation – all which are limited for most of the game. I’d guess this will change in some future patch.

There are some strategic choices to be made, in that you need to think long-term on their impacts. Coil Upgrades are certainly the most obvious, but you have others strewn about. Den upgrades for passive buffs and Bond buffs are choices you cannot revert, and can snowball. Investing early in +intel boost per mission is hugely beneficial if you do it 30 times, not so much if you do it once. There are no choices that are automatic game overs, like in XCOM where you lose massive funding options if you don’t defend a continent. It’s all forward progress and mostly relating to difficulty increments. Now, if you pick a continual amount of + resonance Coil upgrades, you’re gonna have a bad time!

In the missions themselves, all decisions are tactical. Since there’s no Fog of War, you can see every enemy all the time and never get ambushed. This drastically shifts the mindset to an offence-first push, as you can easily optimize line of sight without fear of reprisal. Think of XCOM2, where trying to get a proper line of sight somehow triggers 3 new enemies – none of that here. Additionally, nearly every decision you make has a cost of 1 action point, so you never feel like you’re over-committing resources to a particular set of actions. The net result here is that blaster rifles become the optimal tool for combat, especially at later levels where damage ranges become a bit too similar. The pistol deals too little damage (and is superseded by an insane amount by a Gunslinger), the repeater uses all your AP for linear gain, and the sniper rifle doesn’t scale and has no 1AP options.

Important to note that 90% of all missions need you to reach an extraction point. Further, each map will have continuous spawns so that not only is it rare that you take out all enemies, it will only ever last 1 round. You can’t really go into a defence mindset, you’ll never exit the map.

With only 3AP to use per character, per turn, you have at most 12 actions to take. But wait! You gain advantage points (1 per enemy hit), which can be used for alternate attacks. You’ll quickly math this out, where some advantage attacks are way better than others for their point cost (e.g. 10 advantage rocket attack is worse than nearly all other options). What you’re looking for then is free damage, where possible.

• Backup Assist. Once per turn, you can select an Ally to attack the same target as you, for free. Use this every turn, also increases your bonds. Extremely deadly on elite enemies.
• Knockback. For every hit object while an enemy is knocked, they take 4 damage. Can knock into the void for an instant kill. Grenades do this, most melee, Jedi, and importantly, Cly’s jetpack.
• Fire. If alight, they take the listed damage at the end of their turn, and retain 50% of the stacks. For most purposes, this is useless as the damage is much too low. If it was start of turn, then maybe.
• Jae. Her talent passively shoots enemies below a certain HP, up to twice per round, 100% chance. It triggers frequently.
• Gunslinger. They have an active skill that costs 1AP, shoots enemies for slightly less than a normal blaster, and rewards 1AP if you kill a target. This applies much more than you may think. Oh, and each shot also gives 1 advantage.

At any given point, you’re given a list of potential targets and actions. You want to maximize your AP usage. Sometimes you want to get closer, sometimes knock them around to get near a gap for an instant kill. Sometimes you know reinforcements are coming and want to set up Overwatch instead.

And then, then you have Cly. When you first unlock her, her toolkit feels weird as it’s not exactly damage focused and comes with pistols. If you invest fully into her jetpack, for 2 advantage you can cross half of the map, and land with an AE knockback effect, about half as effective as your best grenade. This is great for knocking people out of cover, throwing them into pits, or quickly getting to an objective. And then, then you get 2nd specializations for all classes and you truly appreciate the Gunslinger. Maxing their quick shot ability gives you a 1AP attack that refunds the AP on a successful kill, meaning you want to stack damage & crit chance as high as possible. With both these tools, Cly can clear half a map in a single turn, and still find full cover at the end.

While most maps will eventually rely on Cly’s insane movement ability and free damage, there are still cases of tactical choice. Grenades are bad for damage, but fire grenades wipe out defence stats, a big increase in damage. If you knock Droidekas, their shields drop allowing you to deal quick damage if you’ve set an Overwatch trap. Dazed enemies move at half speed (mostly useful for bosses, one in particular), while shocked enemies cannot attack you. So the question becomes, can I take down this enemy this turn, or do I prevent them from acting?

This is different than other tactical games, where you tend to focus on one character, exhaust their moveset, and then go to the next one. Primarily due to fog of war and the sheer risk of moving 1 step forward and unlocking 4 new enemies. Zero Company actively rewards you for swapping continually between characters – one is a set-up, the other the closer, while always knowing where the next attack will come from. These are positive, fair (!!), and interesting choices. The net result is an extremely accessible tactical game with clearly laid stakes in every map. For all the quibbles, this is an fairly impressive achievement.

Straight to it then, this is a good, if not great game in the tactics space. It is not a strategic game, which is what differentiates it from XCOM2 or Phoenix Point. What I mean by this is that the game is driven by story rather than choice, which will reduce it’s replay value a decent chunk. So in that way, it’s a whole lot closer to Mario + Rabbids, which is also great. Noting immediately that 100% hit chance exists here, and always works, no rounding errors. That is a crazy good feeling!

The game gives you a decent amount of control in combat, rewards aggressive play, and even more team dynamics. With the right roster, you can clear out a ton of enemies quickly. Overall difficulty is low compared to other games, so unless you’re playing on a higher difficulty, you won’t need to heal or replace roster. In fact, in most cases it’s cheaper to fire & hire a new person than to heal them (main roster aside).

Which brings me to general balance bits. Tactics games are about maximizing the math. Characters that can replenish their action points are deadly. Characters that can quickly move around are essential. Any character that struggles to use their action points is a hindrance. The good news here is that for almost every character, you can swap their weapon AND their class, so if you like the look, you have a ton of flexibility. The less good news is that a lot of the math is not explained, requiring experimentation to figure out. For example, at no time should you ever use a pistol.

Bonds are a prime example of this. Use characters in a mission, increase their relationship, and get the opportunity to add stat boosts to both. In nearly every case you’ll select +1 damage or +movement, as this continually adds to your power. It’s easy to see how you can end up with +20 damage on your main character as a result, and you can see some of those stats in one specific area in the main base. Not all of it though.

In terms of classes and characters, this is where things get spicy. Some classes just plain suck because the game drastically rewards damage-per-action-point. The heavy is meant to taunt and attract damage, but that’s a defensive move that is only of value against 1 target per mission. Medics are there to heal, not damage. There are many such cases. A repeater blaster uses all your action points, which is wildly inefficient! Pay attention to the skill descriptions.

Eventually you get to unlock a second class, and I would recommend you look at the passives (either ignore 4 defence or add 2 damage) as the first option, and maybe invest in move distance if you need it (assault).

In terms of the main roster:

• Hawks – You always have to use them, they can be any class. Their unique ability increases assist and defence, super useful at the start, much less at the end.
• Kabb. Their uppercut, if it executes and enemy, restores AP, but can’t be reused that turn. You can change their class.
• Trick. Auto-revives in combat, and at max level (21 points!) won’t require healing after battle. You can change their class. Trick as a character is amazing. As a combatant, ugh.
• Jae. Right, OP much here. They automatically execute, and 100% hit chance, a target below a certain HP, up to twice per round. Pretty much mandatory in every battle.
• Droid. This is all about utility, not about damage. I can think of no case where you would want to use this character, which is unfortunate.
• Tel-Rea. The only Jedi character, and with a completely unique kit. Extremely weak until you max their Padawan Training, and then they start to shine. Their second class is wildly strong. They do not shoot, they are a strong melee character and can push enemies from a distance… this means their boost from bonds are often less useful.
• Cly. A unique kit as well, though the wild thing here is Combat Jump. It’s dirt cheap to use, can cross half the map, knocks back enemies (often 1 shotting them into an open pit), and has an AE damage attack too. You can clear out fields of enemies with her. Her second class should be Gunslinger, trust me.
• Luco. Their unique is practically identical to a regular sniper skill, but feels worse as you lose the buff when you hit targets, and can’t re-apply it. You gain this character later in your playthrough.

If you recruit someone, you can customize their talent + class, so there’s a ton of flexibility here if you want it – making them arguably better than Trick and Luco right out of the gate. That said, Jae and Cly are so incredibly useful that it’s hard to not use them. Tel-Rea starts very weak, so you’re likely to avoid her, but I will say by her 2nd class unlock she is a damn monster – just remember to invest in movement speed.

Which brings me to the final early thought here and that it relates more to balance. Tactics games are notoriously hard to balance, impressively so when you think of all the possible combinations there are! XCOM2 was a buggy unbalanced mess at launch, we only really remember War of the Chosen being the real masterpiece. Pheonix Point took nearly 2 years of patching to get to a decent place. Zero Company starts off in a much, much better place than either of those but there are still some significant tuning pieces to go. There are a few bugs, sure, but nothing game breaking I’ve seen. But balance… there are some rather wild swings here if you’re not paying attention – like Coil Upgrades (resonance chains are death).

With that, my initial thoughts are very positive. The tactics portion works quite well. The story is a solid Star Wars romp. The art and characters are very well done. And you always want to take on another mission (or another turn), which is truly the right spot for praise.

This is an odd topic, so bear with me.

Logistic games function on the premise of making a factory grow. You generally start off hand mining some metal ore, and eventually build spaceships that shoot laser beams and ponies. There are steps to get from start to finish, and typically that comes through researching the next batch of things you can build. Conceptually, they all work the same way: construct a lot of basic things, put them in a kajigger, now you can make more complicated things.

The practical application differs between games though. Some games create intermediary products that are then processed, while others simply take the base items themselves. The former takes more planning as you need to build these products, especially if you need those intermediary products all the way to the end of the game. A key balancing piece is the ratio in that construction as well, some products are much more complicated than others. Some future research products need the first intermediary as well, creating exponential needs for products. Satisfactory has a system I personally don’t enjoy, as all research builds are temporary (best to put it in a box). Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program have a better system that scales to mega factories.

The next piece is the actual items that get unlocked, and their dependency. The worst case here is that you somehow research an item you can’t actually craft because you need to research something else first. Most games offset this risk by grouping unlocks, ensuring that if you unlock it, you have all the pieces available to craft it.

Factorio absolutely rocks this one, where if you unlock oil processing, you get everything you need to process oil. While I’m sure it’s possible, I have not ever found a situation where I unlocked a piece of research and was not in a situation to use it.

Satisfactory is middle ground of sorts, as the research packages unlock multiple items at once, and generally there are few of them. It’s generally well thought out so that you’ll only need to unlock one extra bit, reducing thumb twiddling time.

DSP is the worst case – you’ll have a dozen+ examples where you won’t have the dependency unlocked as typically you get one item per research. As a result, you get research paralysis, where you need to research a dozen items in order to get the actual product you want. Warpers a good example, where Particle Colliders are a pre-req. To build those, you need space structures, which are a completely different part of the tree with 4 extra steps of research. From yellow research to purple, the entire tree is filled with these cases, a balancing pass that hasn’t been done in years. This compounds if you have Dark Fog enabled, as the military buildings have their own dependencies. I get the design principle that each research step is unique and meaningful, but the fact remains that there are simply so many intermediary products and steps that it greatly diminishes the joy of meaningful progress.

The main issue with balancing the DSP tech tree is that you are limited in levers. If you group things together, you need to add the costs together, or you’ll just get them too fast. And let me tell you, when you get to green science, balancing research and productivity is not super simple. If you restructure the tree itself and build new (and proper) dependencies, you’ll end up with tiers, rather than a tree (closer to Satisfactory). If you truly wanted to balance it, you’d actually end up removing a ton of intermediary items, which means a near total re-balancing of all logistics, pretty much a new game at that point. And that’s without addressing the 6 super-not-obvious degree upgrades to even build a Dyson Sphere.

This is more a gripe about general game design than specific to DSP, and the concept of gradual reward for effort, while staying busy. I am fairly decent at logistics game, with a general eye for optimization. The ‘lulls’ in action felt here are more a result of smart early decisions by me, where instead of finding issues in hour 4, I solved them in minute 30. It’s a very weird balance where if you’re good at the game, there’s way less to do. If you’re so-so, then the time you’re spending fixing things is the time research ticks away. I’ll get into the reason why you can’t do much about this in a future post.

To sum, progress in these types of factory games is primarily gated through research. That system has it’s own balance of investment (resources & time) to feel meaningful. How you manage resources and time… well the factory must grow after all.

I’m giving a new playthrough with the experimental build of 2.1. There are things that work well, others are more frustrating. Quick thoughts…

• Mods: None work, which is less. I really miss having the Burn Stack mod which allows burning gas/fluids.
• Mod Toggles: You can disable quality, if you want. I opted not to, though didn’t invest in quality until I was heading to Aquilo
• Blueprints: 98% of them work as expected. 2% seems small, but there are issues you will need to troubleshoot. Chasing gremlins.
• Fluids: Measuring volume in pipes is great! Being able to flip Pumpjacks is also a very nice QoL bit, allowing much tighter builds.
• Landing Pads (extract directly from them): For regular builds, no real impact. For Aquilo, or massive SPM builds, this is a fairly significant change that speeds up a LOT of activities.
• Radar: Scanning the entire galaxy is possible now. I’ve yet to find a practical use for it, in fact, turning it on in my blueprints caused issues in reading too much stuff I didn’t actually have. What really sucks is that you can’t change a radar setting while on another planet (yet).
• Labs/Biolabs: You can set research based on available research packs, based on priority. Primarily useful for Gleba, as you waste time when that material isn’t available. It does help with Aquilo research later on. By the time you reach Prometheum, this doesn’t mean as much as you’re effectively always researching with every component.
• Rocket Logistics: The game will automatically distribute the amount of items based on weight to meet demand. So if you need like 2 collectors and 8 crushers, that will come in 1 rocket instead of 2 with a ton of excess. This is an absolutely massive QoL change for the mid-game… I figure it’s cut the distribution load in half, at least. Any ‘first landing’ logistics request is going to be super fast, and shipping stuff to Aquilo long-term becomes ridiculously efficient.
• Space Logistics: You can now request items from ANY planet or from another platform. Shipping from any planet rarely makes sense, as rarely are you producing an item at volume across all planets, so that’s actually caused way more issues. Shipping between platforms, that has extremely niche use cases – like having a space platform above Aquilo making extra rockets for another transport ship. There are many odd behaviours here though.
• Visual Uplifts: I do like this. Assembler and Rocket Silos look a whole lot better.

Space Casinos

Bye Bye Space Casinos. Important to note that a major piece of Space Age is that all materials are either infinite in harvesting, or infinite through alternative means, your challenge is in the design to get infinite output. Space Casinos leverage the infinite material nature of asteroids, along with quality modules that result in legendary base material (iron ore, coal, or calcite).

So let’s math this out a bit.

• Asteroid Reprocessing has an 80% output chance, with 2 mod slots (12.2% chance). Rough math, 9.76% chance per event to move up a piece. When you get a legendary asteroid, you can then process it for up to 300% output. At legendary levels, this thing spits out material.
• Recyclers have a 25% output chance and you can add 4 modules to these (24.8% chance). Rough math is 6.2% output from harvest to end. Same end result of 300% productivity. The net effect is 50% as efficient as crushers, per step. This part is important!

The good news is that recyclers are significantly faster than crushers, so you should need much less of them (rough math is less than 10% of the previous crushers), which is good as each recycler takes 100% more quality modules to work. The footprint is tiny.

This means that existing Space Casinos can be repurposed using recyclers instead of crushers, needing only a fraction of the modules to function. New Space Casinos can theoretically be built with a much smaller footprint – the tradeoff being less collectors and less input of asteroids… so it may end up being a horizontal line as a result.

I’ve built a few processing plants for legendary material. The math here per step is substantial. To get to legendary material, on average, you need to run through 4 upgrades (uncommon, rare, epic, legendary). With each step being 50% less efficient, that 0.5^4 which ends up being around 3% of the prior model. I ran a test, with legendary modules (25% total per recycle) between Gleba and Vulcanus four times. Zero legendary. In fact, it took 10 trips to get 1 legendary item. So this model doesn’t work anywhere close to prior.

I also tried to pre-process the items in crushers and then recycle, for higher volumes. Legendary productivity modules means you need 3 recyclers for 2 crushers (yay!), and you need stack inserters too, or the belts stop working. Reprocessing asteroids is an option if you’re overweight on any given type.

And to clarify, you don’t need more crushers, you can see that even just having 6 is enough to saturate a belt. I guess you could build another first recycling line, but the results remain very similar. The output is simply atrocious. Maybe 2 legendary items per run.

So seems pretty clear. The previous space casino model is broken. Getting iron, calcite and coal… the volumes are cut tremendously. Iron has other options. Coal and Calcite, you may just need to manage expectations for a bit and run multiple versions of these space harvesters. More investigation required!

This is more of an expansion pack than a DLC, surreal amount of content here and strongly recommended if you have the base game.

Dave the Diver has a solid gameplay loop. Dive, find fish (or fish like), farm, run a sushi restaurant, and embark on a zany quest with bosses. I spent many an hour exploring the depths. In the Jungle takes that model and then goes ‘watch me’.

The core loop of diving + restaurant still exists. You still have weapons (though the interface is much improved). But now you play in semi-real time, need to manage friendships, collect and battle bugs (ala pokemon), explore with a turn-based RPG, actual fishing (!), Duck Hunt, and decorate a tiny shack. The whole game takes place in a different area, so aside from your diving gear items, nothing else transfers here. There’s a solid 10 hours of extra content though, which puts this in expansion territory.

The new stuff:

• Friendships: You need to feed them certain meals or give certain gifts. They end up coming to the restaurant and at max friendship, give you some rather useful item. I like that there are more than 6 characters this time, makes the world seem much more alive.
• Bug Battles: Rock / Paper / Scissors with a stupid amount of RNG. This is the only part of the game that is not fun as the random is too random for my tastes.
• RPG: This is very weird. Super Mario RPG like actually. I mean it sort of works, but it has no real long-term value.
• Fishing: Basic enough and provides some fish you can’t get elsewhere. About time I say! (Also, don’t bother upgrading your rod, trust me).
• Duck Hunt: Pretty much exactly what you think it is. Gives bird meat, which is a mid-tier ingredient.
• Decoration: No in-game value other than looking neat.

The old (but improved) stuff:

• Diving: You still have the RNG of the map but the fish themselves are always present. You want a caiman, it’s going to be top right 100% of the time.
• Gear: You start with a purifier for the dirty water and the minute you upgrade it, you no longer need it. If you’ve maxed it all in the base game, then this seems very strange.
• Weapons: Ahh, this is so much better. You get access to all 4 weapon types from the start now, at the same time! Upgrading them is the same structure as before. The large area wave gun is life, prioritize that if you can!
• Restaurant: Some minor tweaks here and there. You need to shoo monkeys away from time to time, making one of 2 servers mandatory. Cooking skewers has replaced the Wasabi mini-game where you are needed. Recipe ingredients are harder to come by as dispatching gives less and there’s no real farm this time. From a practical perspective this only means upgrading recipes takes a lot longer.

The way some systems are presented, this seems like the foundation for more content. The ‘bones’ here are generally improved from the base game, so I’d certainly welcome it. Give it a shot!

I like puzzle games, particular those focused on deduction. Return of the Obra Dinn remains top of list for me. A recent addition to the genre is The Incident at Galley House, which is a remake of a text only gamed called Type Help.

The challenge with describing any of these games is that the plot and the mechanisms to uncover the plot are so intertwined that they can’t really be talked about without spoiling the other. Going in blind is all but required to fully appreciate the art. In that respect, I’ll try to avoid as much as I can.

The GODOT engine can do a lot of things, and puzzle games is one that it really does well. Voice acting, interactive buttons, simple animations. Puzzles are about how your brain perceives data, so generally less is more from a visual aid perspective. Well… more is more I suppose as if the effort was made to visually present something, there’s a reason for it. That is certainly the case here, as the presentation is extremely well done.

The game starts off simple enough, you’re sent to investigate a slew of deaths at Galley House and through various presentations of key data, you piece together a timeline of characters, locations, and events. A few times I thought I was playing ‘And Then There Were None’, as it feels as though the characters all have something to hide, yet have a common thread. The act of discovering a name, or an avatar to show the character is as much fun as figuring out how they all interact within the timeline.

This timeline acts as a branching spiderweb of sorts, and some are hubs connecting to a half dozen threads, while others are simply dead ends. The good news is that you don’t have to discover all the threads, just piece enough of them together to get the major beats from start to finish. My obsessive part wanted to find all the bits though, and there are handy indicators when a thread is left to be found. In fact, the UI itself is a really an amazing tool as compared to the text only version. The visual aids are a tremendous help when you’re trying to keep track of key bits of data – it even comes with a search feature! I wouldn’t consider it difficult in any way, and if you do get stuck on any bit there’s a free hint system too.

By the time I closed the book on the mysteries of Galley House, I was somewhat amazed at how the story itself was constructed. All the logical breaks actually made sense, and seeming dead ends turned into new roads. Time, memory, and perspective are all key pieces of any puzzle, and they are wonderfully done here. It’s good to have closure.

Also worth noting, it plays great on the Steam Deck. Strong recommendation!

Do I need to explain this game? It’s from 1999, so I guess there are folks that don’t recall it. I picked it up again on a Steam Sale, like less than $10 type of deal. Nostalgia I guess.

It’s a sort of Chrono Trigger in 3D, a spiritual successor with next to no thought on the lore conflicts between both games. In order to collect all the possible characters, you need a minimum of 3 playthroughs. The difficulty level isn’t really there (aside from 2 specific fights), making it a rather weird game in the SQUENIX repertoire of JRPGs.

There are 40 characters to start, which is an absurd number with very little meaningful purpose. Feels like every NPC with more than 2 lines becomes someone you can recruit. Each character’s set of abilities is determined by their elemental grid. Some have a lot of low level slots, some more near the end. You can more as you level, which is realistically only occurring when you defeat bosses… so no point in grinding for levels! Combat is a mix of melee + magic. The first playthrough favors magic, in fact the ‘perfect’ ending requires it. Eventually you become so strong that a small knife attack is enough (the final boss is balanced for level 48, you can max at 99). This could have been a rock/paper/scissors type of system, but it lacks the mechanical depth to do so. I mean, how could you with 40 characters and find any semblance of balance, right?

The story is convoluted and hard to follow, especially with the final twists and turns. In fact, I’d argue you are better off not having played Chrono Trigger to make sense of it all as there are too many conflicting plot items as a result. Time traveling, fate, destiny, and warring reptiles all play a big part. There are some interesting, though short, side quests throughout. That part is actually a lot of fun to run through! The thing about RPGs is that the plot needs to have some sense… but this feels more like ideas were thrown on the wall without any thought. Which is a real shame.

The good here, is that it plays really well on the Steam Deck and is bite-sized enough to playthrough in small sittings. My 3rd replay was maybe 20% of the time of the first one, just because I knew what I was doing and there was no real combat challenge.

The less good is that the plot makes little sense, the meaningful moments are hidden in a diluted cast, and that we’re unlikely to ever see a Chrono Trigger 3.

Rose-colored glasses were certainly part of the purchasing decision. I have spent more on a bad coffee, so no real complaints here. In fact, it’s a great marker in the SQUENIX journey of RPGs. This experimental game worked in some areas, didn’t in others, and the next game out learned a ton of lessons.