Bloody Brilliant
There are times you see a game and get mad because they are bundled. Because they are good enough that this shouldnt happen. And you wonder and realize again that most Steam users are idiots (<== obviously opinion of someone slightly mad). So what have I done since my last update game-wise. I bought a new PC but I said that already, and I played a new game and created a guide for it:
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Future Proof
11 hours playtime
16 of 16 achievements
Future Proof: Weird. Mysterious. Strange. There are many words you can use to describe the happenings in the town of Greensvale. But let us concentrate on the important task here. A meteroid is soon going to crash into the town of Greensvale and ….. sorry, did I say soon? I meant in 12 minutes. Anyway, the road out of town is broken down and your chances of survival are not looking to good. But hey, you have 12 minutes. So do something.
Future Proof is in its core a open puzzle game with heavy focus on exploration and deductive abilities. There are 2 main route endings and 12 side endings. Many endings can be reached right from the get go, some other needs some progress on the main route first either in form from items or crucial informations. So there is always something new to discover. Nearly all endings are reachable with some common sense and (a bit weird) logic. The hardest part is probably that you have items and information for 14 different endings mixed in the city. Still, everything is very doable. The game is separated in loops of 12 minutes where you start anew without items everytime. To reduce repetitiveness and to help with your quest there are two game mechanics integrated to help you:
- First, Sean remembers all his previous loops. As such he creates Thought Maps with hints for some of the endings which will persists between the runs.
- Second, as he remembers previous loops, the game asks you at the beginning of each loop if you want to trade some time in return for progress on the main ending.
There is still more to tell, but if you want more information you can take a look at my review which is linked in THIS GIVEAWAY FOR FUTURE PROOF.
To give you a better idea about how the game progresses have here a spoilery screenshot (not a screenshot actually):
If you have the game obtained through a bundle give it a chance. Greensvale is a really interesting town with fun and logic puzzle and some references on the way.
I feel you on the issue of good games worthy of a success getting bundled early do to no sales. But I wouldn’t go as far as calling steam users idiots, nor would I blame it on them. The issue probably lies the most in how difficult it is nowadays to find those gems if they don’t have good marketing and coverage from gaming news sites.
I used to check new steam releases every single day before, back when we had greenlight and I’d end up finding some gems here and there and wishlist them. However after greenlight closed and Valve opened the flood gates on Steam I just gave up from looking at the new releases due to sheer amount of them being added every day, and most of them being absolute garbage that makes you feel bad for wasting your time to take a look at their store page.
Valve needs quality control and indie developers need to focus more on marketing and PR (most don’t have a budget for that, but they don’t need it, they can invest some time and effort instead).
I am curious, how did you find out about this game?
I see you did not click the big fat blue link where this question is answered :P My main source for new games is Steamgifts. Before I hide a game on SG, I first look at the Store Shop so that I can mark it as “not interested” there as well. And while looking at the Store Site I thought it looked interesting so I got it by means of Tremor Games.
As for the Steam usership. I will keep on that opinion. Maybe to clarify. I’m not speaking about specific user buts the faceless mass and also the active usership. So, those who use Steam actively for more than activating their game to play. I mean I am not the only one who came to that conclusion. While they can not say it Valve reached the very same conclusion. Why do you think we have Steam Direct?
Greenlight was in my opinion the perfect system (on paper). Valve removed itself as middle man between developers and community which is the correct answer. So if anything appeared on Store that was “shit” Valve could say “We? No, YOU wanted this game on Steam, YOUR responsibility.” And this is the reason why not even a tiny bit curation was possible which again was the correct decision. Greenlight had just ONE glaring weak point, the Steam community. People voting for keys, for cards, for free games or for some kind of warped national pride. If Steam users would have used Greenlight as intended then it would still be in place and we would have a nice a community curated Storefront. But the users were to greedy. So, now we have Direct.
And the user still try to push their responsibility on Valve, saying they should curate more. But it is just not possible, even when hiring 100 employers just for this. You will either create an artifical bottleneck or restriction. Results depend on a few people where it shouldn’t.
We can argue that they should indeed do more against developers spamming the same game over and over again or games which only built on having cards or many achievements. They did although they didnt in retroperspective. The marketing from indie developers is another story.
Ahh yeah I know that feeling too well. It’s even worse now that I downloaded that leak with precise numbers of ownership based on the achievements. I know it will go out of date, but as of the beginning of the month it was pretty much dead on for any games with achievements. So I’ll search for a game I loved and look at the ownership numbers and go “what the hell?!?! Why does a game this brilliant only have a few thousand owners? Why do people even own computers if all they play is the same damn things?”
For me a recent example was “A pixel story”. It was a well designed platform game that had some really tough challenges in it, but only just over 6000 people own it and I was the first to register a full completion on astats, (not the first to beat it as I know a few speedrunners who destroyed it). The achievements were varied and interesting and the challenge level was such that I felt really good when I was done with it. It was certainly a more worthwhile game than the ‘zup’ games, many of which have over 100 000 owners, or even ‘running through russia’ which has 22000 and barely counts as anything more than an ‘achievement simulator’
I also read your comments above on greenlight, and I agree. I think they should have rather refined that system instead of making it ‘free for all’. I think if they had introduced their current rules about achievements and trading cards to the greenlight system it would have killed a lot of the manipulation taking place as there’s no motive to put a crap game on greenlight and ‘buy’ votes in the hopes of making a profit from the ‘meta’ aspects of the steam environment.
Anyway, this game you’ve mentioned does look interesting and based purely on your recommendation I will seek it out and play it.
Thanks again for bringing this game to my attention, like I said I totally would have disregarded it if it hadn’t been for you.
Congrats on your find! Those little games are sometimes hidden gems. I think many people shy away from more or less unknown games, because they fear to be disappointed, when there are not 1000+ reviews praising a game. And I’m not excluding myself from this.
Also, congrats on the first AStats hundo for the game!