Category: Tier One

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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Living Card Games
by LepcisMagna

I dislike Collectible/Trading Card Games (CCGs/TCGs), and in particular Magic: The Gathering (MtG). CCGs feel like the microtransactions of the board game world, and all too often are quite expensive to keep up with. Yes, there’s Pauper format, but simply removing all the more powerful cards to preserve rarity feels cheap, in more ways than one. Admittedly, some of my distaste for CCGs comes from a desire to have complete collections, which is pretty incompatible with the roughly 19307 cards (x4 copies of non-lands) printed for MtG. However, the artificial rarity is what really turns me off of CCGs. MtG is one of the worst, with “white border”, “black border”, and of course the “holographic” or foil cards (not counted in the above count). The rarity is there to preserve the secondary market, which forces WotC to ban proxies at official events. There are arguments for banning realistic proxies anyway (counterfeit cards), but I tend to disagree.

What luck, then, that Living Card Games (LCGs) exist! A way to have a fun, extendable card game without the hassle of a secondary market or being unable to purchase a specific card you want from the manufacturer. But there’s a lot of card games out there, and most are terrible. In this article, I hope to catalogue the ones I’ve either played or heard good things about and review them as I get to play them more. I’m going to try and focus on mechanics over flavor, since I’m pretty setting-agnostic when it comes to my preference in games.

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Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines
by LepcisMagna

What’s this? A review that’s almost topical? If this keeps up, I might play Sekiro before it goes on sale. Probably not. Well, remarkably, I started playing this game before I had even a clue they were going to announce a sequel, and happened to finish my playthrough the day they announced it. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (hereafter just Vampire, for the sake of my own sanity) is a very special game, to the point that I’m having difficulty putting my thoughts into words. All at once, it is almost perfect and completely terrible.

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