Tic Tac Together is team-based recursive tic-tac-toe. When both teams try to claim the same square at the same time, they have to fight for it by playing a subgame. Or a subsubgame. Et cetera. It’s surprisingly strategic. How much board control should you give up to secure a contested square?

I’ve heard good things about Sunderfolk but haven’t played it myself. It has hex-grid tactical combat with co-op done via smartphone, so only the buyer of the game needs to share their screen.

Which ones have you heard of?

• Gauntlet Slayer Edition
  • Good old dungeon crawling. 2014 revival of an 80s arcade classic.
• Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
  • Defuse a bomb with your friends
• CATO: Buttered Cat
  • Puzzle platformer featuring that joke about how cats and toast land when dropped
• Mosa Lina
  • Aggressively randomized puzzle platformer
• Assault Android Cactus
  • Arcade-style twin-stick shooter with pumping soundtrack
• Pizza Possum
  • Very soft stealth game about stealing and eating lots of food
• Moving Out 2 (or 1 if you’re fine with local only)
  • Drag and move furniture onto a truck

Looks like you enjoy retro-style 3D platformers. Get Corn Kidz 64!

Like Pseudoregalia, it’s another N64-style 3D platformer released in 2023 with a goat protagonist trapped in a dream. This is an oddly narrow coincidence.

Here are some “patient” games I’ve played that are on dollar-bin deals right now. Some are actually cheaper off-Steam, so in those cases, I link there instead.

• Black Mesa — 90% off, tied all-time low
  • The fan-made remake of Half-Life
• Crypt of the NecroDancer — 90% off, new all-time low
  • Rhythm roguelike
• Downwell — 75% off (cheaper on GOG)
  • Shmup platformer about jumping deeper into a well
• Gato Roboto — 85% off (cheaper on GOG)
  • Little metroidvania featuring a cat in a mech
• Her Story — 90% off (cheaper on GOG)
  • Freeform detective game with FMVs
• Bastion — 80% off (same price on GOG)
  • Action RPG with painted art, and Supergiant Games’s debut title
• Psychonauts — 80% off (same price on Itch)
  • 3D platformer where the levels are in the minds of interesting characters
  • Note: It’s an old game that works a bit weird on modern hardware, so check PCGamingWiki for tweaks
• Grapple Dog — 75% off, tied all-time low
  • Grappling hook platformer with Nitrome-style pixel art

According to SteamDB, 40% is tied for the all-time low.

I played around with the pixel settings in the Next Fest demo. It’s honestly more of a curiosity than something that really matters, but I’m glad someone on the game thought of this. The most notable change with pixel-perfect mode is the text font becomes lower resolution to be strictly snapped to the grid. Other than that, you’ll find that the backgrounds scroll choppily. I’d imagine it would feel good that way on a smaller screen.

It’s that eternal struggle you may have seen if you play modern games with pixel art. How strictly should the game follow the grid? I think Pipistrello’s default “soft” mode is my sweet spot. Rotated and resized pixels are yucky, but I’m okay with smoother scrolling and sharper text. Celeste is that way as well.

I was super impressed with the demo from Steam Next Fest last year. It’s definitely high on my list for Steam sale purchases.

One neat feature the game has, which was unnecessary but that I appreciate, is the pixel perfection settings. The game uses “soft” pixel precision by default for smooth scrolling and sharper text, but you can enable strict pixel precision, which snaps everything to the pixel grid.

My friends and I love to hum the gloriously CC-licensed main menu music!

I don’t think any game has made me feel so much for characters I don’t even get to see. There’s some real humanity in Hypnospace.

Damn that’s a shame

Day 5

Day 4 was all black cats

I want to shout out Left 4 Dead’s game instructor for smoothly teaching new players the game even while they’re playing with others. Get more ammo here. Use adrenaline to do stuff faster. Give Nick your pills. Rescue is coming - defend yourself! Then, once you’ve played enough, the help messages gradually become less frequent.

I’ll also shout it out for being my favourite implementation of HUD markers in any game. The icon pulses into view close to your crosshair, then flies over to the thing it’s pointing at. If it goes off-screen, the marker returns next to your crosshair, with an arrow indicating which direction to look in to see it again. A lot of other games have marker icons just suddenly appear at the spot and they crawl along the edge of the screen if the item is off-screen. The way L4D does it really draws my eyes.

Day 3

Day 2 of Next Fest is over! Here’s what I tried.

It was surprising to see that it’s rated mixed on the store page. It looks like a lot of the complaining is about how it’s not like Patapon?

That’s a really cool art style! Maybe it could be of interest to [email protected]

My report from day 1

I spent a good long time browsing through the piles of thumbnails to make myself a tall list. It’s a mix of games I’m excited for, games that look interesting to me, and weird games. Since I spent so much time today browsing for games, I haven’t actually played much today on day 1.

Some thoughts on my list

• Bits & Bops has already had a demo for months now, but for Next Fest, there’s a new minigame to play. Also, I backed this game on Kickstarter, so I’m obviously interested in seeing this game be good. And I think it is.
• SourceWorld is a Half-Life 2 mod participating in Next Fest! It’s an FPS dungeon crawler! The Source engine isn’t dying anytime soon.
• Oddcore has a really flashy trailer. I actually first heard of it from seeing it get front page attention on Newgrounds. It could be the first game set in “liminal spaces” that isn’t utterly boring or crap.
• Funi Raccoon Game is on this list because the trailer is stupid and I want to see more of it. I have high hopes.
• Why, yes, those are three games featuring a black cat as playable character.

I’m glad someone knocked some sense into these guys and convinced them to add a little bit to the name to make it searchable. Just “Mouse” would have just doomed them lol

That’s how I felt seeing the trailer on Steam.

I played this during Next Fest. Best spreadsheet game.

Cassette Beasts is a creature collector with a substantial single-player campaign and a permadeath difficulty option.

You could also have permadeath as a house rule, which would let you play singleplayer games with traditional campaigns. For example, you could play Elden Ring or Borderlands 2 and commit to deleting the character upon death.

A weird suggestion: Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a co-op puzzle game about defusing a bomb. The player who’s streaming will have the bomb but stream only audio, not video, and everyone else will have to use the defusal manual to guide them to safely disarm the bomb. You’ll have to advance level by level.

You want us to sell fewer controllers?!

I clicked on this post because of the jazz in jazzstronauts.

There actually is something that could be called jazz, but you’ll have to finish the entire story for that.

How did you get all the images at once, upload beforehand (whether to Lemmy or somewhere else offsite) and that is how you have a link? Repeated editing so Lemmy accepts each new image upload?

I actually published a mini-site on yay.boo containing this post and all of the media. The pictures in this Lemmy post are hotlinked from yay.boo. The video is hotlinked from Imgur because yay.boo did not like it when I did that. In my previous posts, I did directly upload everything to sh.itjust.works, but I wanted to try a different way this time.

For my previous posts, like this one on Gunfire Reborn, I went to the “Create a post” form and used the “upload picture” button on the toolbar of the main body text field.

I have actually been playing multiple cat-themed games in recent months but have been too lazy/busy to bother writing about them.

Will you be waiting at the finish line to cheer for the 365th?

You’re buyer!

I was really impressed with the demo during a Steam Next Fest last year.

The plot of Mankind Divided ends oddly abruptly, which is a real

Denuvo. Shame.

I’d say it’s a step more “serious racing” than Kart. Transformed had more complex drifting and boosting mechanics to emphasize good racing skills. There are still powerups, but they’re relatively weak. The closest blue shell equivalent is the swarm, which summons a swarm of giant wasps to sit in front of the race leader, but it’s always dodgeable with good steering. The medium-level pickups require good aim or awareness of who’s near you. The Kart strategy of only caring about the last lap is still possible in Transformed, but trying to get ahead as far as possible is also a doable strategy.

Really hoping this can be a worthy successor to Transformed

I’m sure someone at Valve also had fond memories of that toilet.

Amazingly, I played this game when it came out and discovered it has Steam Controller binds out of the box!

At this point, the fact that Portal is in the Half-Life universe is just a fluke. The plots of Portal 2 singleplayer, co-op, and PTI are very “distant” from anything happening with Half-Life. The two series are tonally very mismatched. Their strongest connection is that Aperture bumbled their way into possessing Half-Life plot-critical stuff and then losing the boat that contained it.

I hope the developer commentary is on.

The maps aren’t generated inch-by-inch, if that’s what you were hoping for. Each stage has a bucket of unique rooms it stitches together to create the level geometry. The devs did a clever thing and made rooms with multiple doorways, with two chosen at random to be part of the path, so you can traverse through the same room in a slightly different way each run. At this point, I’ve seen all the possible rooms, but the combination of character upgrades, surprise challenges the game springs on you, weapons, and enemies keeps it fresh. There’s a lot of replayability in just character builds alone, since you can find multiple ways to make each character effective, depending on what perks you got first and what risks you take.

The co-op works well. Gunfire Reborn is a lot easier in co-op because friends can revive each other with unlimited tries, whereas in singleplayer, you get only one revive by sacrificing the character-upgrading resource. Recently, they’ve added a Left 4 Dead-style bot co-op mode so you can have that experience instead of the pure solo one. I’ve actually ground myself into a weird corner where I’m way better than everyone else I play with and can carry a whole team, dealing like 80% of the entire team’s damage across the whole run. I’ve not actually tried public matchmaking, just playing solo or with friends.

In terms of DLCs, each comes with two new characters and a handful of weapons. Each DLC character has a different mechanical focus in case you’re getting bored of the characters you already have. The base game is just fine to start with. I have the first two packs, but the latest one, the third, I skipped during the Steam winter sale to buy more games. The character I was playing here, Zi Xiao, comes from the second pack, Artisan and Magician. His counterpart in that pack is Nona, who is pretty much the red panda version of Gaige from Borderlands 2 (no anarchy stacks, though), summoning and commanding a combat robot. The first pack, Spirit Realm, has a monkey who aggressively upgrades his guns and a fox who, with the right build, can just stop using guns and drop fireballs on enemies instead.

Okay, here’s my final pitch. The game is on sale as part of the launch of the new season. It’s not the all-time low, but it’s pretty close.

By the way, my main is Qing Yan, the other bird boy.

The WADF soundtrack sticks with me

Valve tried trackballs with the Steam Controller but ditched them for trackpads that emulate trackball physics. They found small ones felt bad but big ones were too bulky and heavy. Clearly they like that idea, since every controller-like thing they’ve designed since includes pads.

If you haven’t done so already, I suggest you start taking notes while playing the game. You’ll need to keep track of what you have to come back to a place for.

I completed Psychonauts recently on my PC. There’s a Linux native version as well, and both it and the Windows+proton versions seemed to work… adequately. It’s pretty janky, which I mainly attribute to it being an old PC game.