Author: LepcisMagna

RymdResa is a game about floating in space.  That space is mostly empty.  I’ve been trying to come up with a blanket term for games that try this – like Sunless Sea, Kentucky Route 0, or Voyageur, and to an extent FTL.  These are games where mechanics are usually simple but interact well, the focus is on the exploration of an other-worldly place, there’s typically a lot more text or audio clips than NPCs, and the music (if it exists) is solidly in the “ambient” category.  I’ve settled on the term “sublime-like”, but it doesn’t quite have the ring to it that I’d like.  In any event, being a sublime-like is a tough mood to pull off.  RymdResa tries, but doesn’t quite make it, I think.

At first, RymdResa had potential.  You float through mostly empty space looking for a new home – avoiding asteroids and suns.  You can explore planets and locations you come across for a chance at resources.  This is a solid start, but there just isn’t enough variety in the random generation to make things interesting.  Worse, when you die, it’s usually out of your control: when an asteroid comes flying at you ten times faster than you could ever hope to fly, there’s little you can do.  What really rubbed me the wrong way was the lack of a real sense of space.  Asteroids with WWII-era planes ten times larger than you embedded in them float by right after you flew over a galaxy only twenty times larger than you.  But worst of all is that there are immovable walls in space – an unforgivable sin in a space game.

Steam link

I’m afraid I can’t recommend a Virus Named TOM.  It feels more like a portable or flash game than a full desktop game.  I also don’t have any screenshots, because neither Steam nor Greenshot would take one (and somehow I turned Windows into High Contrast mode while trying).  You play as the eponymous TOM, and you are used to infect the inventions of a Dr. X, who has been ousted from his company and wants revenge.

It’s a pipe puzzler, of which there are many on Kongregate and iOS.  There isn’t really anything to recommend this one over any of the free ones you could find online, and you could likely find a more intriguing puzzle game like TIS-100 that doesn’t have an annoying time-based element.  I am typically biased against time constraints in puzzle games, so perhaps I was doomed to dislike this game.

Huh.  Another point-and-click adventure game.  While I’d like to say that I enjoyed my time playing Nikopol, three things prevented that.  (As a bonus problem: the game supports widescreen resolutions, but doesn’t actually render the game in widescreen – I’ve never run across that before.)

First was that the game was actually too detailed.  It’s hard to figure out what is a thing you’ll need and what is a thing that exists only for background.  This is made worse when the things you can pick up change as you go through the game.

Second was that the puzzles I encountered in the first level were… not terribly intuitive.  In fact, I think it’s the fastest I’ve looked up a walkthrough since I didn’t want to waste my hour. It turns out that was unavoidable.  The puzzles that exist, beyond being unintuitive, also don’t make a whole lot of sense story-wise.  For example, I was supposed to bring a portrait of my father, as seen above.  However, instead of just bringing the reel of film, I have to actually paint the portrait.

My third trouble was that the little story I did run across didn’t seem particularly engaging.  This game is apparently based on a series of graphic novels, so I would recommend reading those rather than playing this game.

So sadly, this must go to Tier Three.  It’s only a dollar right now, but I can’t even recommend it when there are games like Broken Sword 5 I have yet to play.

Steam link