Category: Tier One

Factorio
by LepcisMagna

Factorio is what happens when somebody like Zachtronics gets their hands on Terraria/Minecraft (though as far as I know the developers have nothing to do with any of those games). Where Minecraft is a medieval-ish fantasy sandbox, Factorio is a game about automation and logistics. It’s a game about crafting, but there’s an achievement for beating the game while crafting fewer than 111 items yourself. It’s also incredibly long – I’ve played for 9 hours, and I’ve apparently only really finished the Phase 2 gameplay (automating your basic science production), though an hour or two of that was getting the right mod list.

It’s hard for me to get addicted to games in the same vein as Minecraft, and I was definitely burning out towards the end of my 9 hours. Still, there are a lot of things to like about Factorio – for example, if you want to craft something complicated, you can just click on it in your craft screen and all the component bits will be crafted automatically in your inventory without you having to worry about it – which is very very nice. I definitely see myself beating it eventually. Tier One for now.

EDIT: It’s now Monday and I’ve played another 16 hours since posting this on Saturday. As it turns out, a game that you can waste a lot of time with is quite attractive when you’re stuck at home.

Steam link

Streets of Rogue
by LepcisMagna

It’s hard to argue with Streets of Rogue. It’s a rogue-lite that reminds me a lot of Heat Signature (though with quite a bit more “stuff” to it) and a little bit of Golden Krone Hotel. The soundtrack is good, there’s a good sampling of fun mechanical interactions, and the various unlockables will mean you have quite a bit of work to do to get everything (whether that’s a good thing or not is my only real complaint). I was going to write more, but that about covers it.

Steam link

Not for Broadcast
by LepcisMagna

It’s not often that I play a game that hooks me so completely, nor one that I buy (pre-order, even, against my usual policy) after playing the demo. Not for Broadcast, though, did both (the only other I can think of, had I known about it before it came out, would be The Stanley Parable). You play some schmuck who ended up in a television broadcast center after the previous editor decides to fly off somewhere and get smashed.

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The Pedestrian
by LepcisMagna

This game is Continuity, but on a bigger budget.  If you’re wondering what Continuity is and why I haven’t linked it, that’s because it’s a flash game.  A flash game connected to a mostly dead website (at least, at the time of this writing it’s mostly dead), subject to the slow rot of internet culture. Which is sad, because it was one of the cleverer games I’d played during the adolescence of the internet. I had plenty of time to play flash games, being both at an age where I still had recess and being a Mac gamer (while Power Pete and Lode Runner are fantastic games, you do eventually get bored).

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Nine Parchments
by LepcisMagna

Frozenbyte have solidified their place in my mind as a solid Tier One developer. I purchased Trine 4 in a bundle during this Steam Sale (which was also good), only to find that the two games also included were both remarkably enjoyable. Shadwen turned out to be a surprisingly good stealth game, and Nine Parchments is turning out to be a surprisingly good magical Gauntlet-like, though it being a co-op game means I can only trust the Steam reviews to tell me that the co-op experience is good.

I do have a few problems with it – the paths are linear, the collectibles don’t really stand out against the cluttered (but beautiful) backgrounds, the upgrades don’t affect your gameplay much (which is usually “keep moving and firing”), and the walking animations are tied to the direction your mouse looks, which can look very strange. Despite this (and perhaps because of some of it), it seems like the sort of game I would pull out at a party without hesitation. If I had parties.

Steam Link

Northgard
by LepcisMagna

Sadly no screenshot because Steam decided to not actually save it.

There’s a simple test I like to apply to strategy games. What reason do I have to play it over Civilization or Age of Empires II? It’s not that I particularly like those games (I actually don’t like Civ at all) – it’s just that everyone has those games, and if you want to play a strategy game with friends, it’s going to be one of them (a part of the reason I never got in to Rise of Nations).

So far, only Homeworld (which I don’t even put into the same category of strategy games) and Endless Legend have interested me enough to play them. I think Northgard will be added to that list, since it not only has a pretty solid campaign, but the gameplay is similar enough to Age of Empires that an RTS veteran can pick it up while still finding cool extensions of the original system.

Steam Link

Zach-Likes
by LepcisMagna

Or: Opus Magnum, TIS-100, and Shenzen I/O

I’m putting the Zachtronics studio and all their games into Tier 1, alongside Obsidian Entertainment (makers of Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, and the only good Fallout). I can confidently say that any game made by those studios will be at least entertaining, if not extremely good. Zach-likes tend to be puzzle games with very similar concepts, but with just enough theming and execution differences to make each one feel unique. Perhaps the best part of these games is the moment when you discover a unique solution that gives you the same feeling as if you’d just solved an interesting math problem or figured out a clever programming solution at work. If neither of those sound fun, I would highly recommend running away from these games.

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