I had the fortune to have to undergo a bilateral masectomy in June, so I’ve spent months barely able to do anything at all. I’ve played a lot of video games. Enjoy the forthcoming waves of game recs. Not a lot of pans though — the bad ones I played were mostly just boring and bland, not really bad in a way that was interesting (with one notable exception, which I may get to later). I may put up blurbs on the curator page later just to remind myself what they were. Anyway.

Also these got long and aren’t really “quick” anymore but whatever I’m not splitting them now.

Inside: Unholy Heights, Deiland, Wavetale, A Monster’s Expedition

Unholy Heights
Tower Defense, Management

Become the real devil: a landlord.

Unholy Heights is about managing an apartment building in hell, as the devil, who looks like a middle manager. The game is weird and funny, and utterly original in so many ways. The gameplay is part management, part tower defense — because there are always heroes coming to try to slay all the monsters — your tenants — and defeat the devil once and for all. The first half of the gameplay involves filling your available units with monsters and meeting their needs, buying the right furniture, creating the right environment, and adjusting rent based on the income of the tenant. The second half involved taking quests which involve defeating invaders.

I’m at a stage in my life where I’ve found what I want perhaps above anything else in games is something I haven’t seen before. The weirder, the better. Unholy Heights is a delightfully weird game that takes place in a universe unlike any I’ve seen before and I find it delightful; to me, it’s worth playing for that alone. I also really appreciate tower defense games where the gameplay is more complex than “now bloodily defeat these nameless hoards of thousands of units.” Every quest has a backstory, with recurring characters and locations and meaningful reasons for coming to attack you; waves are typically small, with four or five enemies that need to be tackled in thoughtful ways. The game plays with this convention, sometimes sending just one very powerful enemy, or — in one case — like a 15 mediocre ones. Seeing them just keep coming after so many small rounds was really entertaining. I also loved its weird, unique creature types, with evil chicks and guys with a colony of fish on their heads. The designs were great, the art style really helps sell the tone.

My big complaint is that I really wished I could idle it. After clearing a quest, you often had to wait for tenants to recover HP or recruit new ones, but the game wasn’t set up to run in the background, and I really don’t understand why. It was the perfect desktop idler and I would have loved a “run in background” option so I could have used it as a work-focus game.

The gameplay issue is that the tenants are weirdly balanced. I’m not sure how much of this is intentional — the cheepies are supposed to suck, while the tier 4 tenants are supposed to be amazing — but whether this was just my playstyle or what, I tended to find myself recruit the same few types of tenants over and over. The succubi in particular were viable through the entire game in a way that felt a little broken. But this was honestly pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, and something about it weirdly worked in the larger context of a game that didn’t seem to be taking itself super seriously.

Oh, and I loved at the end seeing a record of all my tenants! The ending was more high-effort than I expected and it was a nice surprise.

 

Deiland
Farm Sim

I’ve really enjoyed the ChiBig catalog, and this — their first game — is no exception. The Steam reviews were complaining about bugs, but I 100%ed it and encountered no issues.

Deiland is a small farm sim in which you play as a young boy, Arco, alone on a small planet. You interact with the people who visit your planet — for trade, mostly, but also for other reasons — and learn both who you are and what your purpose in the universe is. The gameplay is simple but smooth and satisfying, and the music is lovely. It also includes combat and even a boss fight or two. There are a couple of sequences where you leave the planet, which surprised me — it would have been easy to have the plots not require you to leave the planet or let someone else do the dirty work, but they seemed to have realized it would be more satisfying for the player to go do things themselves, and I appreciate the extra effort that went into making these single-use environments; it was a nice surprise.

As in most of ChiBig’s games, the solid character writing carries the simplistic gameplay, making it satisfying to complete quests so you can see the next stage of the plots. I also appreciate how evident it is after playing a few of their games how much thought they’ve put into the worldbuilding of the universe — the different planets and cultures are unique and satisfyingly consistent across the games, making it nice to see characters you recognize — it always feels like an Easter Egg, never self-aggrandizing.

This isn’t a game to convert anyone — if you don’t like the basic gameplay loop of farm sims, you won’t enjoy it — but for someone who has played so many of these games, I always like when small games are able to boil the gameplay down to its essentials while keeping it satisfying. Too often the farm sim boom has meant games that superficially look and play as BokuMonolikes but lack satisfying gameplay loops or meaningful extrinsic motivation for the player. Deiland has both, and for me it was a really great game to play after a long day.

Wavetale
Adventure, 3D Platformer

Wavetale tells the story of Sigrid, a young woman whose world was destroyed by flood and explosion when she was too young to remember. She is the granddaughter of the lighthouse keeper, who is in charge of the beacon that keeps the deadly black smog away from the remaining habitable regions. When Sigrid meets a strange shadow that grants her the power to run on water, she must traverse her flooded world to find the truth of the catastrophe and her mother’s role in it.

Wavetale is something of an odd game, because I don’t think I’ve ever before felt compelled to recommend something based on the controls alone, and looking at other reviews, both positive and negative, I’m not the only one who thought that the way this game felt, physically, was its best feature. Surfing around as Sigrid was just so fun and freeing — the motion was so smooth and satisfying.

That’s not to say there’s nothing else here — the gameplay was fun and the story and characters were well-conceived and written; the world was unique and original. I liked the look of it very much — the character design and colors of the world were cohesive and appealing, and the voice acting was solid. I 100%ed it in about 5 hours and that was the right length; any longer and I think it would have overstayed its welcome.

As a 3D platformer it’s excellent; the amazing feel of the controls coupled with the level design involving ruined buildings gives platforming a kind of satisfying feel that’s unusual in the genre, and the levels are forgiving enough that I think anyone could enjoy the challenge.

The $30 list price is kind of insane, though I’d say anything under $10 would be more than fair. It routinely discounts down to a dollar or two if you want a low-risk, high-reward experience.

A Monster’s Expedition Through Curious Exhibitions
Sokoban

This game is absolutely wonderful.

I sometimes think puzzle games — especially ones that revolve around one type of puzzle, eg, sokoban — have a weird review disadvantage, because for me at least, there’s only so long I want to do one thing over and over. Even a game as brilliant in design as Baba Is You has this issue — I never actually finished Baba, because after the first couple worlds I just felt like I’d seen what there was to see. Yes, the puzzles added new elements and got more complex, but for me, it’s still fundamentally the same type of puzzle, and once I figure out the basic logic, I feel like I’ve “finished” the game, and the rest is just accoutrement. This is made worse by the typical structure of puzzles getting more complex and difficult as games go on — they don’t get more satisfying for me, so the returns diminish and I can’t stay motivated to keep playing. (I’d be curious to know if people who don’t have ADHD also have this experience.)

This lovely little game combats this fatigue in a couple of ways. First, it imparts narrative beats which provide extrinsic motivation. You play as a “monster” vaguely resembling a sasquatch exploring an outdoor museum punctuated by exhibits of human relics the monsters have found. The exhibit descriptions are funny, cute, and generally just a delight. Secondly, it varies difficultly along the whole route. I don’t know why more games haven’t figured this out, but it’s a lot more enjoyable to have a couple of easy puzzles, then a really tough one, then a couple more easy ones as a palate cleanser. It prevents you from wondering if the rest of the game is going to be bashing your head against impossible puzzles, and prevents the diminishing-returns burnout. It also adds a kind of ancillary rewards system — doing a few easy puzzles quickly after a hard one feels even better than doing them on their own, because you feel extra smart and competent blowing through a couple puzzles after figuring out a hard one. You feel a bit smug. Until you hit the next hard one. And the puzzles were just so amazingly well-designed.

The lovely visual and sound design also give you something to do besides just try to get to the next level. I really enjoyed the boating sequences where you just looked at the scenery as it went by. In fact, my biggest criticism of the game is the fog of war — I really wish it was possible to see everything because the environment was so serene and appealling, and seeing things I couldn’t yet reach was motivating. I was really disappointed the fog didn’t autoclear from the whole map after the ending. I think that was a big missed opportunity.

The other problem is that, apparently about a year after release, the developer (who I will now follow religiously tbh) released a content patch with 100 new puzzles… which sounds great in theory, but for me caused the game to overstay its welcome. I think even 50 would have still felt natural, but 100… with about 35 to go, I found myself starting to think, “I must be close to the end, right? How long could this go on?” I just think it made the game become unbalanced. If the extra content had been sequestered off somehow — you maybe enter a separate map from the menu — it would have been a much better way to go. To me it ended up as a real “kill your darlings” situation, which is a shame since 90% of the experience was just wonderful.

Anyway, having now played the two best games in this genre, I have nowhere else to go, and presume I’ll never be able to play another sokoban game without feeling bitter disappointment.