Cozy Grove and Clone Drone in the Danger Zone

Two games starting with C that get old quick.

Cozy Grove

This game has you play as a spirit scout sent alone to a small island that is haunted by spirits! But no, it's not a horror. The silly bear spirits all need help and its pretty cool that as you do help them remember who they are which adds more color to their section of the island, and expands the island to unlock more spirits to help. It's got easy controls and cute graphics but THE WORST collect and deliver quest system I've seen. You'll need to scrounge the place to find things that only SEQUENTIALLY SPAWN. Need three branches? You need to find the first one somewhere before the second one EVEN SPAWNS. That's just absolute shit and a complete waste of time. Not recommended.

Clone Drone in the Danger Zone

This voxel arena battler has you fighting robots using swords and bows with the main catch being that all weapons are vorpal - any piece hit of you or your enemies is easily chopped! You also get to upgrade after each match but one death and you get to start from the beginning again. The robot commentators are intentionally annoying and occasionally funny but the repetitiveness of the actual play isn't great.

Hyper Echelon and Haven Dock

Two games starting with "H" that aren't great. 

Hyper Echelon

Despite the name and the obvious attempt to show "hey, you can customize your space ship!" in the tutorial, this pixel game is just another top down, bullet hell space ship shooting the bad guys and/or obstacles while the background scrolls from the top of the screen to the bottom at a steady and fixed pace. Oh, then you can redo the same missions at harder difficulties to get medals. Yay? Hard pass.

Haven Dock

This base building game has you stranded on a small island but don't worry, by somehow collecting the absolute truck fulls of garbage that float by you can magically create (using stone tools according to the voice over) wooden platforms to establish a base, build equipment to pump and filter sea water, make farms, etc. What kills it for me is you often have to wait for materials you need to drift by close enough for collection. Not a lot you can do to mitigate that and "having to wait to have fun" is always garbage design. Not recommended. 

The Bluff and The Rip

Two decent movies!

The Bluff

In this swashbuckling tale, a band of pirates raid a small island village that happens to have a fishwife with a violent past (played by Priyanka Chopra). While the story is predictable and some of the younger actors aren't great, the action pieces are pretty good with Priyanka really getting into it. All up decent enough flick for those that like fighting and pirates.

The Rip

In this thriller, a police squad (whose leader is played by Matt Damon) suffering from loss of a team mate and low wages, raid a stash house where they find a huge amount of cash and start to turn on each other if they should keep some of the find for themselves. Good acting, a good story, and an excellent use of tension makes this an easy one to recommend. I really enjoyed it!

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank and TOMAK: Save the Earth Regeneration

Two repetitive games starting with "T".

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank

The follow up to "Turnip Boy commits Tax Evasion" continues the story of the cute veggie people, and Turnip Boy has now signed up with a band of crooks to rob a bank. Over and over (yes the same bank)! How it plays is that in the bank you've got to fight off the guards, shake down the civilians, collect loot and... help NPCs in the bank do mundane things? All in 3 minutes. After that the veggie cops show up and you need to get back to the getaway van and back to the hideout where you can spend your stolen cash on the dark web to upgrade things... and then go back into the bank to do it all again. It's very strange and you'll quickly get that feeling of doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result...

TOMAK: Save the Earth Regeneration

Do you like Tamagotchi games? The ones where you have to care for, feed and nourish your pet friend? This is just like that, except your friend is a female head growing out of a flower pot that you need to care for and you have a time limit to prove to the gods that love exists by doing so (or the Earth is destroyed). Sure, it's strange - but what lets it down is the usual repetitive boringness of Tamagotchi games. Not recommended.

Friday Night Survival

Has it really been a whole year since I posted about our Friday night game sessions? It's a case of out with the old and in with the new: we finished 40K: Martyr, got tired of the long loads of 40K: Space Marine 2 and got a bit tired out with Helldivers 2, which has a pretty good run!

We did try Elden Ring: Nightreign where and beat the first tri-wolf boss (and I soloed the sleepy flying ooze) but it runs too poorly on DL's machine so that's been put on the back burner for now. 

Mechwarrior 5: Clans has pulled majority of the time for us with good gameplay and an interesting story on top of the usual optional customization of everyone's mechs. We've won it now, including the Ghost Bear and Tukayid DLC expansions because it was that much fun! Definitely recommended for co-op sessions, but solo might feel a bit grindy and long.

We've also sailed on Void Crew which is a pretty neat "fly your customized spaceship through an array of roguelike challenges that include enemy ships and multiple space walks into space ruins for salvage". It's also a bit repetitive and I think there are only three bosses currently but we might go back into that in a bit. It's lack of story lets it down.

Green Hell is what we're hitting hard at the moment. Nice graphics, easy enough controls, and a story to boot have sucked us into this jungle survival game that includes hostile natives, deadly jaguars, and cool lessons on why not to drink untreated river water. It's not a style in our usual wheelhouse, but its very fun so far. Again though, seems it would be a drag in single player but three person co-op is just fun. For a tiny sized game it's got a pretty big map, so lets see how long it keeps us lost in the jungle!

Keep the Heroes Out!

This cooperative board game has players each taking control of one group of dungeon denizens (all of whom are cute) as they try to do what the title says: keep the heroes out! Especially from the treasure room, because if they loot the treasure, the game is lost! This is a campaign style game, so the dungeon tiles are arranged based on the scenario you are attempting (20 provided). 

On your turn you have five cards in front of you from your own deck which you can then use to command your things around. Move, attack or action which means use the room's special action like get a gold coin from the treasury or use your group's special power. The mercenary gnolls can attack more, the imps can just pull traps out of their butts, the singular dragon can regenerate HP and the ratkins can spawn more ratkins as an example.

After that, you pull hero cards which determines who spawns where. Each hero type has one special power that only applies when they first appear, afterwards they all behave the same which keeps it simple. Rogues disarm a trap where they spawn. Warriors destroy resources. Archers shoot towards the treasure room. Wizards wake up people in the prison. What? Prison!? Yes, on your turn you can "push your luck" and draw three more cards for the low cost of putting a "tired" hero in prison. Unless you pull a wizard in which case, they all wake up!

Managing tired heroes is all part of the game. After the special spawn move any active hero will first try "wake up" all tired heroes who then all get to do stuff! This will be try kill a monster on their tile or try open a chest on their tile. If they do any of those they get "tired" and are basically dormant until another hero (or special effect) wakes them up. Active heroes with nothing to do all advance to the next tile leading towards the treasure room and repeat this process.This can cause a hero cascade if you have too many dotted around the place which is dangerous. At the same time, the only way to win is to go through the ENTIRE hero deck 2-3 times (depending on your difficulty level).   

It's a pretty fun game, though you might only have a few turns depending on the player count and not all the monsters are equal, both in complexity and usefulness. 

Styx: Master of Shadows and Styx: Shards of Darkness

Being a sneaky rakash is fun!

It's been awhile since I've played a great stealth game and both these Styx games definitely fall into this category. In it you play the titular goblin who is agile, quiet, and has an assortment of skills to deal with the many foes. The main one being that you can barf out a clone of yourself!? Yeah. That's actually a main one in the first game - Master of Shadows - that ties closely to the really cool story.

Having a good story and a funny, sarcastic protagonist ticks a lot of boxes actually. But having maps that you can approach in a multitude of ways is even better. If you want to play non-lethal, you can. If you want to play complete non-detection, you can. If you want to murder everyone, you can... almost. That last one might be tricky as there are people harder to kill than others, but patience, luring and handy environmental stuff can defeat even the most armored enemies. It's a little easier in Shards of Darkness that lets you craft some nasty things and unlock skill trees that can bypass some defenses.

"I see you..."

Usually though you want to remain hidden as many enemies can insta-kill you (and on the hardest "goblin" mode, all of them can insta-kill you), and even those that don't slay you out right have a decent chance of taking you out if your parry timing isn't good and/or there's more than two of them. Sure melee combat might feel a bit rough but I think that's intentional. All up these two are super fun for those who enjoy the sneaky thief type games. Highly recommended!