I finished The Pedestrian… it took me a little under 6 hours, though I played it in short bursts (with pauses when puzzles just didn’t seem to make sense) so it took a couple of days. Fun game, and I can see myself going back through it at some point. I got the achievements, but I’m pretty sure they’re all unlocked just by going through the game.
Just got the ending in Superliminal, which took a little over 4 hours. Which sounds really short, but boy was it ever a mind-bending experience. The only analogy I can think of is if Portal and The Simon Parable had a baby, with M.C. Escher handling the delivery. Not as story-focused as either of those games, and optical illusions and sudden perspective shifts are the order of the day.
Now the question is whether I try for the achievements for Superliminal, since game completion only got me 22% of them.
Antichamber is a mind-bending psychological exploration game where nothing can be taken for granted. Discover an Escher-like world where hallways wrap around upon each other, spaces reconfigure themselves, and accomplishing the impossible may just be the only way forward.
I haven’t tried it yet, but might be something you’d like. I put Superliminal on my list too.
Looks like I played Antichamber back in 2013. I know I finished it, and that there were bits that were rather brain-bending, but it’s been long enough that I don’t remember much of it.
I had an excellent night in Shadow of Death recently. My Mount Raventhorn faced off against a more powerful Mount (Titanas.) I expected to get creamed, but for the first time ever, we fought until time ran out-- a full 10 minute match. It went down as a loss for me, but I’m not even mad. It was so much fun!
(I could post stats, maybe even a capture of the match replay, but I’m not sure if anyone would be interested.)
I have never played this apparently preexisting game before, and I haven’t played this implementation of it either, but I can’t really resist the idea of online multiplayer competitive solitaire from Zachtronics.
Yeah, I just started a new Skyrim game. Even my magic heavy characters tend to end up sneaky snipers, somehow.
Plus, with Dawnguard, Fire or Sparks enchanted Dwarven Crossbow, with Fire or Sparks enchanted bolts (whichever the crossbow isn’t) paired up with Weakness to [element] poison and/or frostbite venom really hits my “lets be prepared for anything” buttons. Slap in the 3x damage perk in the Stealth tree, and even against Dragons it becomes “Resist this!”
Yes, sometimes I just want to be able to cut a swathe through my enemies and retire to the pub. Is that really so bad?
Also, I find it my moral duty to refuse to join the Stormcloaks. Not a fan of the Empire, and the Thalmor can stick themselves in a bin, but spend even a few minutes listening to Stormcloak rhetoric and… look, it’s not subtle, people.
This adapts the Pathfinder rules and their Rise of the Runelords campaign to Savage Worlds, which will make it easier to adapt other Pathfinder campaigns, AmE campaigns, DnD campaigns, etc.
I like it. Mazes can be based around different shapes (squares, triangles and hexagons so far) and can involve different elements (portals that zap your light from one area to another, dark mazes where you only see a limited distance around you.) Each time you complete a maze in one level, another level is unlocked. How you proceed is up to you-- you can progress through all the mazes of one type until you defeat them all, winning a star, or skip around and try different types to see what you like best.
The trickiest so far are the timed mazes and those where you only have so many spaces to complete the maze, and any wrong turn means you lose. I’m still struggling with those. But the game praises you when you solve a puzzle with encouragements like “well done” or “you’re a star!” Later areas in the level tree combine different elements, so you might have to use portals in the dark, or fight against time and space limits. But there’s enough branches in the level tree to pick your own path, and I like that. You can even choose your maze size-- small, medium, large and extra large puzzles are available.
Caveats: the game is free to play, but you get ads between levels, unless you pay a small fee to remove them. It’s a little irritating, but easy enough to ignore if you want to. And advancing through the different puzzles of one area can feel repetitive, but since you’re not required to complete, say, all square mazes in one area before advancing to triangle, boredom can be easily avoided.
This hits a sweet spot for me between the simplicity and the gentle encouragement of I Love Hue and the maneuvering challenges of slither.io (without all the pesky other players who keep killing me. ) And the setup lets me jump in, play a few mazes, and jump out again, as time and my patience levels permit.
Sometime in the last few months I’d picked up a time waster of a mobile game and thought to myself it was nice to pick up a game for free without ads.
Today must have been the first time I’d played outside of home. And therefore off my network. And therefore not protected by my Pi-Hole. The ads were frequent enough to make my not play. But, back at home, no ads.
Sometimes just playing offline will stop the ads (or at least, it used to. If ads are cached on the device, it might not work.) In this game, you can usually hit a fast-forward button five seconds in to skip the rest of the spiel… which is still annoying AF, but I can tolerate (ignore) it well enough. But I know not everyone will put up with that, which is why I wanted to mention it, just in case.
I picked up the game after reading this article. It’s an interesting take on a run-based game. I’m not quite sure how to strategize yet, and I haven’t made it through all 12 payments yet.
Also, landlords and the U.S. healthcare system suck.
I finally got around to playing two games I think I got for Christmas…
Donut County was a very low-demand puzzle game. The story is weird, and some of the grammar is odd, but it’s still cute. I finished it (with all of the achievements) in 2.5 hours, so it’s not much of a challenge… but it was a fun, relaxing 2.5 hours.
Timelie is a puzzle game based on seeing the future and planning moves out accordingly. This one starts out simple, but it adds in more puzzle elements as it goes and things start getting trickier. It’s also organized into segments that are strings of puzzle levels, without clear pausing points - there’s an auto-save that I think hits at the start of a puzzle, but it’s still easy to feel like you should keep going to the end of a segment, which can start to get exhausting. I’m about 2 hours into it, and it’s pretty fun so far.
Yes, another puzzle game. Go figure. And, hey, Steam links are working again!
It’s a little bit of a sneaky tutorial on electronics, wrapped up in a premise where you are basically in a bomb defuser’s hell - handed bomb after bomb to defuse, never ending (until you finish all the levels, of course). Most of the time you need to get to a special combination of signals that "disarm"s the bomb, but there’s times when the best path is to just make it impossible to detonate or cut power altogether. The failure mode on each puzzle is, considering the subject, predictably startling but still understated with just a brief flash and a bang.
Based on real electronic components, but with some creative license (no need to worry about ground, capacitors are pretty gamified, etc). I felt like it does a good job of introducing one new component at a time, going from basic switches and buttons up to and/or/xor gates and flip-flops. I did feel like it could have been a bit more varied in the win condition from level to level, but things were still open to at least consider the possibilities.
I got about an hour of play through on it, so not extremely intense puzzling.
I know there are a few Enigma simulators out there. Does anyone know of an Enigma simulator which saves the output text? And a bombe simulator to try to decode text? It might be an interesting challenge.
) And the setup lets me jump in, play a few mazes, and jump out again, as time and my patience levels permit. 
