Fnord

Is it already time for another update? You bet! I’ve been able to take down one game per day in the last few days. This month’s theme is about cleaning out your steam library, and I’ve been committing to playing some of my oldest unplayed games, and it turns out that those games are also really short. I guess that should come as no surprise, most of these are from the first generation of bundles, and indie games back then were, generally speaking, a bit shorter and less involved than modern indies. This was also before we started seeing non-indies in bundles to any greater extent.

People who stalk my Monthly Themes post might have noticed that what I consider to be “games I bought early” to cover quite a big time span. Well, truth to be told, I did not get a lot of games on steam before bundles, and bundles came in at a far slower rate early on, so I had time to play most things that I got. It was not until around 2012 that things really started spiraling out of control.

Anyway, this is what I ended up playing:

Lugaru HD

1.2 hours, no achievements

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Lugaru was in the first ever Humble Bundle, and was actually made by the guy who created Humble. It's a martial arts game with rabbits, that's known for its flashy combat.

The story is a simple one, your tribe of rabbits gets attacked by raiders, and everyone except for you gets killed, so you're out for revenge. But it turns out that things are not quite what they seem.
The story is basically what you would get if a teenager watches too many kung-fu movies. The writing is so edgy that it almost gets cute. It's a bad story, not helped by how poorly paced it is, and how incoherent the writing ends up being. Sometimes it feels like you missed a few lines of dialogue, and sometimes it feels like you missed a few scenes. This is not a game you play for the story.

The combat system is pretty good though, although the front-loaded tutorial ensures that you'll forget most combat moves before the game even starts.

This is not exactly a glowing review, and there's a good reason for that. Lugaru is simply not all that well put together. If you take your time to really learn the combat system, I'm sure there's a lot of fun to be had, but the game seems to actively work against you at times.


Blueberry Garden

0.4 hours, no achievements

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And here we have a game that I just did not get.
In Blueberry Garden you play as a wingless bird-man, who flies around and collects things that he can then build a huge stack of. There are some fruits that helps you get special abilities (like the ability to fly higher, or breath underwater for a limited time), and by using these, and your ever growing stack, new parts of the level opens up.

As time goes on, the water level rises, so you need to hurry up, and collect things as fast as you can, before water makes the items inaccessible. Is this an allegory for global warming and the rising sea levels? Possibly. Or it might not be. Truth to be told, I don't really get it.


Bunch of Heroes

2.2 hours, 17 of 59 achievements

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I'm not even sure if this game deserved to be played. This game was a real stinker. It's a slow paced twin stick shooter, filled with unfunny jokes, tedious levels and poor audio-visual feedback. Look at the achievements for this game. 12,3% beat the first world, and 2% beat the entire game. That should give you an idea of how poor this game actually is.

There's really not much else to say about this one. I guess the graphics was nice, but other than that, no elements in this game were above mediocre.


NightSky

2.5 hours, 12 of 22 achievements

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Going straight from a poor game to a really good one! NightSky is a simple game, where you control a marble that needs to get to the end of the level. Different levels give you slightly different abilities, like the ability to speed yourself up, break, invert gravity and so on. It's another short game, but NightSky does a good job at mixing things up, and the game never ends up feeling repetitive.


Critical Mass

0.1 hours, 0 of 27 achievements

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Some of this games progression is broken due to its servers being down. Yay for always online requirements!


Traqie

So Lugaru is just poor man’s Overgrowth?

Fnord

I’ve not played Overgrowth yet, but yes, I would imagine so. When looking up reviews for Lugaru, I noticed some people saying that Overgrowth has Lugaru’s main campaign in it, so I guess as long as you’ve got a computer that can run Overgrowth, you’ve really got no reason to play Lugaru.

JaffaCaffa

With Critical Mass do you mean the online leaderboard achievements are broken or is the game itself unplayable? After watching TB’s review I was looking forward to getting to it one day. :/

Fnord

According to the popup that shows up when the game starts:
“Online ranking, Skillpoints and achievements are unavailable in offline mode”
The game also does not like not being able to connect to its main server, and so gets stuck on the initial login screen for a while.

It’s playable, just with any features measuring your progress turned off. It kind of killed my will to play the game, as I like seeing how I get better at puzzles games over time.

JaffaCaffa

Yeah I see, thanks for the heads up. Bummer. Guess that’s I get for putting games off too long. :( It never even crosses my mind that servers will disappear until it’s too late (unless it’s a multiplayer only game ofc).

Fnord

This month’s theme has been a bit of an eye-opener for me. I’ve already had time to try 11 games, and 5 of them were unplayable, or at least not fully playable. Just having a large library of games that you save for a rainy day does not seem like such a great idea anymore.

JaffaCaffa

Man that’s such a high ratio, definitely surprising. I played AudioSurf for the theme which I was worried about, as you’re competing across global leaderboards and it was released back in 2008 but miraculously the servers held strong.

It seems another big problem with waiting is that when a sequel comes around the devs completely abandon the original, even breaking it. I was perusing a bunch of store pages and saw 3 games where all the reviews said the newest patch after a console edition/sequel was released totally made it unplayable and was never fixed, even years later.

Fnord

That happened to me with one of the games. Gish had a patch that added achievements, but broke the game physics, back in 2014 or 2015, and they never bothered fixing that.
Glad to hear that AudioSurf worked. I’ve heard that that game is supposed to be quite fun!

Mskotor

:sadness: