A Green Mushroom

Overcooked is a multiplayer co-op game, one of my favorite genre's ever.  I picked it up on sale and then didn't get around to playing it until over the holiday break. In one night my entire family was hooked. Overcooked sees you take on the role of a chef trying to prepare meals under increasingly difficult circumstances.  The levels get crazy, but in a good way.  Like, having to run across ice flows between different halves of the kitchen.  Or cooking on a ship where the rocking of the waves moves your counters back and forth.  Or having a pedestrian crossing in the middle of your kitchen. Even though the levels get tricky the best part of the game is that it has simple controls so anyone can jump in and be playing decently within a few minutes.  Where we're playing on PS4 one analog stick moves your character, the X button picks up and drops off items, and the Square button interacts with a work station (like for cutting).  That's it. ...

Stellaris is a 4x space game from Paradox.  I've often picked up 4x games only to set them down after an hour or two out of frustration.  It's a genre I've always found interesting in the abstract but I have trouble finding a game that nails the execution. So I was a little surprised that my first play session of Stellaris lasted four hours.  I was learning a lot and made some mistakes but overall it was great!  I came back to that same playthrough another night and played for another few hours before stalling out in the mid-game as all the alien cultures' borders filled in. I immediately jumped over to a new game with slightly tweaked settings (for fun and variety) and proceeded to spend another six hours of so in that game.  And this time I made my own alien race!  That part was super fun.  The second round was much better since I could apply everything I learned the first time... but again I found myself stall out in the mid-game without muc...

Orwell is an indie game from last year that I picked up on the latest Steam sale.  It got a little bit of buzz for end of the year lists so I wanted to check it out. Orwell is about information.  And privacy.  And freedom of speech.  All three of these things havve always been super interesting topics for me so that was a plus in it's favor right away.  But not only was it dealing with issues I care about, it also has unique gameplay. Basically, you're a member of the new Orwell program that has been given access to everyone's digital information.  Once someone has been declared a person of interest you can dig into anything you want about them.  Often this means you need to figure out who they are first.  Sometimes you only have a username to start with, or an alias, or almost nothing.  But you slowly piece together a picture of who these people are by using the data that you find. It's a look at what could be with such an intercon...

Warbands: Bushido is a really cool tactical miniatures game.  I picked it up in the winter Steam sale for cheap and had some fun playing around with it for a day or two.  It's still in beta right now which is why I decided to set it down for the moment, but it's one that I'm going to keep installed and then dive it deep once it hits a full release. It's already obvious that the full release will have some type of single player campaign beyond the tutorial and looks like it will have new single player scenarios rolling out all the time. The multiplayer is the only thing that's basically fully fleshed out right now, but it's fun too.  I would dive into this right now if I weren't worried about progress being reset when the game goes into full release.  You can collect minis to use in building your warband.  The more you level up the more points you have to spend on which figures can be in your warband at a given time. Honestly, it feels a lot like so...

Abzu is a game very much in the vein of Journey.  It's a relaxing exploration game with no real way to lose, but it gives a beautiful world to explore that keeps things interesting. It tells a very light story but I liked what was there. The core moment to moment gameplay consists of swimming around under water on some kind of alien planet.  A lot of the creatures are obviously taken from earth oceans and the mix of familiar and alien is interesting. Abzu wasn't a long game but I liked it.  I played the whole thing in one sitting of about 4 hours or so and enjoyed my time with it.  I would recommend picking it up for cheap on Steam sale whenever it hits a price that looks good to you.

After being hit and miss with the last four or five Telltale game series that I've played I was very apprehensive going into Batman.  I picked up the season pass while it was on Steam sale for cheap but I waited until all the episodes came out before I even started playing.  I've learned that having momentum really helps on these games. I played through all five episodes over the course of four consecutive nights.  I actually ended up loving this game.  It's probably my favorite Telltale game so far.  While I liked Game of Thrones for putting me in that world, Walking Dead for leaving such an impact, Tales from the Borderlands for being so funny... I love this game for letting me be Bruce Wayne and Batman. And that's an important distinction to make.  This game truly lets you choose either Bruce or Batman to play.  While you will be forced into situations where you need to show up as one or the other you are often given a choice whether to conf...

Coming back to Legion with my Druid instead of the Demon Hunter was a great idea.  It started out with a bang.  It had a really cool intro with a decent story and fun cutscenes.  Then I immediately got thrown into my artifact weapon quest which is probably one of the best World of Warcraft quests I've ever played. After that I was set up in my Druid class hall and I loved it.  The class hall idea is so good and I've always loved the Druid stuff in WoW so it completely clicked with me. I was surprised to be given a choice of zones after that.  After researching a bit I learned that all the content in Legion scales to your level so you get to pick the order you do the zones in.  There was one that looked Druid themed so I dove into it and played through the whole zone.  It was a ton of fun. After that I had a high enough item level that I started queuing for dungeons while working on the next zone. But that's where I ran out of steam.  T...

After flying through Mists of Pandaria in one play session I jumped to Warlords of Draenor.  The story hooked me much more in this expansion.  It feels like the first time that the World of Warcraft team was actually good at telling a story instead of just setting up a scenario. I bought into the premise and had a lot of fun the first night.  Playing through the start of the story with all the cutscenes and digging into garrison building was a ton of fun. Then night two hit and I was essentially back to grinding on quests and the dungeon finder.  The leveling was slower than Mists so I actually got to sample all the zones.  I think I 100% the first zone and I did random quests in all the others.  But again, dungeon finder became the most fun because the drive of the story got lost in the shuffle. Night three found me almost give up on WoW again.  I was getting bored.  Quests, gameplay, and dungeons were all blending together and just fee...

After my trials and tribulations the first day trying to get back into WoW I dove into Mists of Pandaria with my main Druid who was sitting at the end of Cataclysm content at level 85. At this point it's obvious that they have made the experience grind in Mists of Pandaria much faster than it used to be.  I started shooting up levels just casually questing.  After only a few quest hubs I was able to queue for the dungeon finder and I started shooting up the levels even faster. I liked the setting of Mists of Pandaria, it was nice and relaxing, but the quest design and the zone flow wasn't any better than WoW used to be.  I mostly did the dungeon finder and that rapidly made me hit the Mists of Pandaria level cap of 90 in one afternoon.  I never even left the first zone for questing. But I had a ton of fun with the dungeon finder.  Dungeons were always my favorite part of WoW and it seems like that's still true.  I got to sample all the Mists of Pa...

After finishing up FFXV I had an itch to play an MMO so I bit the bullet and finally resubscribed to World of Warcraft.  It's been five or six years since I last played so I thought the best course of action would be to pick up the latest expansion and create the newest class at high level so I could jump right into the game. That means my first experience back was playing Legion as a Demon Hunter.  It did not go well.  The story was fine but I didn't actually like abilities and the way the Demon Hunter class played.  I did the entire intro which gets the Demon Hunter to level 100 and then I played enough of the expansion content to level up to 101... almost 102.  But the class never clicked with me. I didn't want to give up on my attempt to get back into WoW since I had just paid for the expansion and a month of game time so I moved on to the Paladin I had boosted. You see, to make a Demon Hunter you need a level 100 character on the server that you w...

Owl Boy is a really cool platformer that I ended up putting down. I mean... it's gorgeous, it sounds great, the music is fantastic, you fly but it still manages to be a platformer, and all around it's a really cool take on platforming games. But, it gets really hard.  I think I got decently far into it but I finally ran into a wall where I just kept getting destroyed.  I'm generally a good platformer player too, so it was surprising to find how frustrated I got with this.  I don't mind putting it effort when I feel like I'm learning how to play and slowly getting closer to my goal but some of the difficulty in Owl Boy is a huge spike that seems way too hard to overcome. So, I set this one down.  If I ever want a super difficult platformer I might come back to this, but not in the foreseeable future.  But, I do love a lot of what the developer has done here so I'd love to see what they do with their next game.

Oxenfree is an interesting adventure game with cool ideas that doesn't quite stick the landing. You control a teenager in a group of teenagers who sneak onto an island after it closes for the night to drink and hang out.  Slowly you start to run into creepy but interesting things happening and the plot expands out from there.  It's not a horror game, but it does have some creepy atmospheric stuff going on. Initially I liked it.  But... then some of the execution started to bug me.  Everything is voice acted but it's really easy to accidentally trigger another whole section of dialogue and miss out on the topic that you were in the middle of.  The game never really explains when you're interrupting or when you're just contributing and it ends up making for frustrating and choppy dialogue. I got over that and got an hour or two into the game but then it hits a point where it opens up and slows way down.  Now instead of it being obvious where to go t...

I got the remastered edition of Skyrim for free on Steam since I already owned the original, so I thought I would give it another playthrough.  It's been years since I touched it and I was excited to jump into the world again. And the first night was great!  I wandered, I got familiar with the world again, and most of the game kinda came back to me.  But after that first night the magic quickly faded. It's not a bad game at all, it's just a game that I've already spent hundreds of hours with.  I was able to have fun for a play session or two but that seemed to jog all my memories of the game so after that point it felt like I was just going through the motions in a game I already knew. I'm really glad that Skyrim Special Edition exists for those who missed it last console generation.  It's a great game if you haven't played it before.  But for me I think Skyrim has already taken up enough of my life.  I'll just wait until the next Elder Scrol...

Do you want a game that messes with your perceptions of what a game is?  A game that starts out as an endless runner but slowly devolves into madness and the inexplicable. Then Pony Island is for you. It's a really weird game where you play games inside of a game.  It gets very meta and interesting.  Kind of in the vein of The Beginners Guide or Undertale, but with more interesting gameplay. I don't want to tell you too much more about the game because figuring it out and seeing what happens is most of the fun.  It's normally $5 on Steam but tends to go on sale a lot.  Seriously, pick it up if it sounds even vaguely interesting to you.

This is a fun little game I've been playing.  It's a PC game where you have to make it to the goal without touching the ground while running along the tops of tons of semi trucks. It's been really fun to play between other PC games as a palette cleanser.  I haven't ever sat down and played it for hours on end but I am consistently coming back to it. If you like weird platformers you should probably at least take a look at it on Steam.  I waited for it to go on sale and I recommend you do too, but on sale it's definitely worth it's asking price.

Civilization VI is a weird one to talk about.  I've played it a bunch but not nearly enough to feel like I can write a review about it.  Civilization games have a ton of depth and this one is no different.  But I have played through multiple games all the way to the end and I have won a few different types of victories.  So I do have some thoughts. Mainly, Civilization VI is another Civilization game.  If you've liked them in the past then chances are super high that you'll like this one.  In the grand scheme of things it's not all that different. But then again, the difference is in the details. There are now more victory types and then can be achieved in new ways.  Your city is no longer one tile but instead you build out districts and improvements that impact, expand, and limit one another depending on how you configure your city.  Resources are handled differently.  So are diplomatic options.  Units can now stack in small...

I've been playing Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander off and on for the last two weeks and I still don't quite know what to make of it... which is odd for me. Generally I can get a feel for a game within the first half hour.  I have enough gameplay experience under my belt at this point that it's pretty quick for me.  But Halcyon 6 has so many elements that come together that I don't know what to make of it. It's a space game where you have a starbase that you're exploring, fleets that you're sending out, missions you're trying to accomplish, alliances to make or break, but underneath it all is this vein of JRPG turn based combat.  Both the ships and the on foot fights are a spin on that typical JRPG combat system. Part of the game is also resource management.  Where do you want your officers focusing their attention?  Should we explore this ancient starbase more to free up space to build and expand or should we send them out on missions in the ...

This is the last of the games I picked up on the Steam Summer Sale that I've been sampling.  It's kind of a mixed bag for me. I typically like South Park's modern episodes and I thought Stick of Truth might be like them but instead it relies a lot on the crude humor and in-jokes of South Park which are kind of the weakest part of the show. The combat system is decent enough and the base of the game is structured like a typical RPG.  But, that's one of my problems... it's just typical.  It doesn't do a lot to break genre conventions or add something new to the game.  The only unique thing about it is that it has a South Park skin slapped on top of it. And that's just not enough for me right now.  Maybe some day I'll come back to this game but not right now.  That being said, if you're a huge fan of South Park I bet you would really like this game.  If you're more of a casual viewer like me... not so much.

This has been one of the biggest hits for me that I picked up in the summer Steam Sale. Chroma Squad is basically Power Rangers behind the scenes of the show but as a turn based strategy game.  Your squad breaks off from the main show and forms their own studio.  You get to start making episodes of the show and it's hilarious. It includes all sorts of RPG mechanics like buying new gear, crafting, and upgrading.  Along with this are some unique things like studio upgrades, marketing agencies, and growing your fans to get a bigger audience watching the show. Battles are fun not just because the core of the turn based strategy is solid but also because you always get "Director Notes" of certain things you should do in battle to make for a better show which will in turn get you a bigger audience.  It's actually a really fun mechanic that pushes you to complicate battles while having fun with it. As of writing this I'm a little past the first chapter of the...

This is another game that came highly recommended so I picked it up on Steam sale.  Unfortunately, this was another flop for me. I think the underlying systems could actually be interesting but the theme is so depressing that I just don't want to spend my time in the game. Making prisons for inmates is dreary and sad. So, if you can get over the theme and aesthetic this game might be for you.  But, if you're like me and find it off-putting then just skip this one completely.