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[nenjin]

I think I've reached maximum jadedness. The trailer was quality 80s satire, the gameplay is pure retronostalgia with modern features and I.....just don't have much of a reaction. It's sort of like my reaction to STRAFE. The trailer was hilarious but the game wasn't actually something I would bring myself to play.

[Kagus]

Well there's a free alpha version available for download farther down on the page, you're welcome to be disappointed by that and at least get a sense of vindication.

I haven't tried it out, personally, so I have no idea how much or how little is included in the alpha.

[Mephisto]

Gleaner Heights, a game I'm surprised there's not already a thread for. I haven't started playing yet or I'd make one.

One part Stardew Valley, one part supernatural horror, possibly one part Town of Salem. Pretty much all you need to know.

[AlStar]

While riding on the subway this afternoon, I idly wondered what had happened to "That Which Sleeps" - the developer had uploaded a couple of impressive-looking videos, and made some promises of trying to keep to a monthly video update schedule (which he'd already blown a couple times while posting those first couple.)

Well, Youtube shows that the last posts on the account were 8 months ago - the same videos I'd watched way back when.

It really is a shame: the game presented in those videos looks great and sounded like it'd be amazing to play.

Not holding my breath, but I'll keep my fingers crossed that maybe he'll return from the depths to post again.

(Note: not a Kickstarter backer, so not nearly as bitter as most.)

[Egan_BW]

Ah. I was randomly thinking about TWS today as well. Maybe it's a psychic echo of a video soon to be released.

[Kagus]

Didn't we have a whole huge thread about That Which Sleeps and how the development process was steadily getting worse and worse and eventually everything devolved into a catfight between those who believed the dev was being honest and would pull through and those who considered the whole thing to be a slow-burning scam that had run off with the Kickstarter money and done fuckall with it?

[Frumple]

Didn't it get itself locked some way or another?

E: Yes, yes it did. Back in march.

[nenjin]

Best to let Sleeping Sleeps Sleep.

[Frumple]

So Blood Card is a pretty neat Slay the Spire style card game, with a couple fairly unique mechanics going for it. It's relatively standard so far as card effects go, but the big twist is pretty straightforward: Your health bar is your deck. Damage discards cards, and when you run out of cards in your draw pile it's game over.

Another neat bit is the two-fold win condition: Your default is to get to the end of the run, going through all the rooms and killing the last (currently third, so far as I've been able to tell) boss. Your alternative win condition is killing the 666 hp grim reaper that (usually) shows up 3-4 rounds into each and every fight to try to murder everything there (including the enemies... which isn't always to your favor), with its HP persisting over the course of the game. Along the way you bash heads with a pretty decently sized host of varyingly difficult opponents in variously irritating combinations, gather your ever increasing pile of cards, and generally do the normal card game things.

Anyway, if you like slay the spire you'd probably enjoy it fairly well, and it's pretty cheap so hey.

... as a parting tip: Any card that automatically or indiscriminately damages enemies, in any way, shape or form, do not put it in your deck. You can conceptually use the things, but by and large they're functionally traps of self-ownage that will eventually get you beat in the face with an integer overflow joke level damage hammer (and that's not an exaggeration; I've seen one particular enemy reach 65535 projected damage). There's quite a few enemies in the game that react to being damaged in ways that not being in pretty tight control of what you're hitting, when, will cause you to get hard fucked.

Incidentally, difficulty wise it seems pretty up there, or at least random enough consistent performance is tough to manage. You can figure out some tricks or rules of thumb to get by (and luck out with the easier bosses -- my first "win" was killing Death during the first floor boss fight :V), but it's real easy to get beat into the ground if you run into the wrong enemy combination. I lost 20 something times before I managed my first victory, heh.

[Aoi]

So Blood Card is a pretty neat Slay the Spire style card game, with a couple fairly unique mechanics going for it. It's relatively standard so far as card effects go, but the big twist is pretty straightforward: Your health bar is your deck. Damage discards cards, and when you run out of cards in your draw pile it's game over.

Pretty significant note: You get your cards back after each combat. Also, by nature of how it works, it also means that equipment-heavy decks are really difficult to work with. Get hit before your steamroller gets going? Hope your key equipment didn't get thrown into the discard pile. And for every piece of equipment you put on... you just lost 1maxhp.

Edit: Just fired this up again... and hooboy, it is just as heavy on the RNG as I remembered. And, despite recent patching, some extremely cheesy strats still work to kill Death ludicrously early (like the 6th room...):

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Stack Wind Feather and Hamstring, dodge everything, use Hamstring to keep the hostiles alive. Pretty much any card duplicator or Waste Picker will help out with getting enough.

[Frumple]

Oppression's even better than hamstring if you have a way to get it back out of your discard pile (flash heal is stupidly good for that, generally), heh. More than one helps on that front, too, though even the one is fairly unlikely real early on. Still, much more consistent/sustainable than hamstring, since it doesn't do damage and is multi-target.

... still yeah, killing death is probably easier than trying to fight through to the third boss a lot of the time. 'Till you hit death level five or six, anyway (I just now hit four, heh). 5's when hamstring et al stops working, 6 when it starts stacking attack+ when damaged. No clue exactly what max level means, but I can guess it means slow kill strats stop working all that well

E: Oh, though far as equipment go, I will say I'm developing a pretty serious appreciation for necromancer robes. You really want more than one pick, but if you can get three (or more) in play it's pretty stupidly sexy. Basically makes it so you can fire off 1 cost cards indefinitely, which is... nice.

[Aoi]

It's hard to get a lot of Oppression though; Hamstring is a basic card so you get 3 at once, and you'll want some way to inflict damage too. (I think it was my ONLY damage card in my recent win.)

I think my exact loadout would've been okay with a fairly high level Death-- if it managed to get started; with all of my card duplication effects, by the end of the fight, I was getting something like 9 attack, 50 armor, and 10 energy every turn, on top of 100% evasion, 8 cards back at the end of my turn, and who knows what in reflect damage.

[Yoink]

...You play as GRUFFY MCSPIT, real name "Johnny Dice", who woke up on the wrong side of the gravel pit this morning and seems to have stolen Crocodile Dundee's hat. There's even a cute little cutscene in the trailer where he eats a balanced breakfast of PILLS HERE!, so I feel like he's got an interesting and complex backstory that builds up into the multifaceted individual he is today.

You should write gaming reviews. No, really. I'd read 'em.     
It would be nice to read articles on gaming and actually have a good chuckle whilst being informed, rather than scraping through clickbait-ridden muck for any shreds of actual information whilst gritting my teeth and sweating from the heat of the blazing hatred I feel towards the author... actually the weather might just be hot, I'm pretty sure I don't get that worked up over sub-par games journalism. Probably.

Fractured

I just can't help getting excited about this, never mind that they're highly unlikely to deliver on so much as half of their lofty promises, not to mention even if they did I wouldn't be able to play it without a computer upgrade and I probably wouldn't end up enjoying it half as much as I expected after all that anyway.
But still.
Hype.   

I want to assemble a motley crew of demonic sleep-deprived powergamers and built huge, gruesome temples to the dark god(s), forged primarily from the bones of the peace-loving furry degenerates whose painfully cheerful world we can apparently teleport into with a li'l bit of magic.
I'm gonna have a name with, like, twelve syllables and as many horns and spikes as I can jam onto my body during character creation. 'Sgon be sick.   

[Kagus]

...You play as GRUFFY MCSPIT, real name "Johnny Dice", who woke up on the wrong side of the gravel pit this morning and seems to have stolen Crocodile Dundee's hat. There's even a cute little cutscene in the trailer where he eats a balanced breakfast of PILLS HERE!, so I feel like he's got an interesting and complex backstory that builds up into the multifaceted individual he is today.

You should write gaming reviews. No, really. I'd read 'em.     
It would be nice to read articles on gaming and actually have a good chuckle whilst being informed, rather than scraping through clickbait-ridden muck for any shreds of actual information whilst gritting my teeth and sweating from the heat of the blazing hatred I feel towards the author... actually the weather might just be hot, I'm pretty sure I don't get that worked up over sub-par games journalism. Probably.    

Well that snippet actually was a pretty good example of modern games journalism, since it was almost entirely based on just a few screenshots I saw of the game without having played it, and it included false information (you're not forced into the specific boots of someone named Johnny Dice or Jack Steel, you actually name and create your own character to some extent... Those were just the examples the devs managed to think up for showing off the game).

I did end up starting an LP of Hellsign to give it a proper chance, and it's... Well, it's honestly about as bad as I'd expected it to be, but it's at least playable.

You should definitely take a look at the LP though, I make sure to horribly mangle as much strine into it as possible, just for the sake of making any Australian readers uncomfortable.


In other news, has anyone looked at Occupy White Walls? It's a free, multiplayer sandbox where you design and build an art museum and then populate it with real-world paintings and sculptures.

"Free, multiplayer sandbox" immediately sets off all number of warning bells, but it's miraculously got a reasonably good response on Steam. I'm starting to wonder just how bad it is, and how much renaissance-herpes I'd get from logging in to someone's museum.

[Yoink]

Oh my. I see where all that OOCQ thread material's been coming from now!         
I totally thought you were gonna name 'im Steve Irwin for a moment there.