Nine Parchments

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

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

Desert Golfing

Is Desert Golfing a good game? I’m not sure. It’s certainly a frustrating game. From the physics which make the golf ball bounce just a little too far to the holes designed to infuriate you by making the ball roll just off the screen, the game seems determined to annoy you. On the other hand, it’s not cruel about it – there’s really no pressure to continue, and any goals are really ones you set yourself. This separates it from games like Getting Over It or The Impossible Game, where either the game taunts you (in the former case) or requires such precision that memorizing a sequence of inputs is the only path forward (in the latter case).

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