Silverchase

@ silverchase @sh.itjust.works

Posts

258
Comments

256
Joined

2 yr. ago

8mo ago

The 11foot8 bridge opens another big can
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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 8mo ago
For more bridge webcam nonsense, check out Needles Underpass!

8mo ago

The 11foot8 bridge opens another big can

Stopping doesn't make the vehicle shorter! This is a common myth, especially among large oversize vehicle drivers in this area.

8mo ago

Steam Summer Sale is on! Discuss deals in the comments and recommend some great games!

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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 8mo ago

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

8mo ago

Steam Summer Sale is on! Discuss deals in the comments and recommend some great games!

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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 8mo ago

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

8mo ago

a gram of that good stuff

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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 8mo ago

Grenouilles

8mo ago

May I help you, hooman?

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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 8mo ago

Charcoal with the big ears

8mo ago

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is pretty great. Anyone else playing this?

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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 8mo ago

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.

8mo ago

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is pretty great. Anyone else playing this?

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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 8mo ago

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.

8mo ago

Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week?

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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 8mo ago

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

8mo ago

Dreamsettler, the follow-up to early internet inspired browser game Hypnospace Outlaw, has been cancelled

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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 8mo ago

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.

8mo ago

Dreamsettler, the follow-up to early internet inspired browser game Hypnospace Outlaw, has been cancelled

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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 8mo ago

Damn that's a shame

9mo ago

Steam Next Fest has started once again. What good demos have you found?

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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 9mo ago

Day 5

Look Mum No Computer — Twin-stick shooter adventure

Trying the demo purely because of the weird trailer
Very retro PC gaming vibe. SID chip music!
Rough introduction. Big info dump right at the start before I know what I'm doing
Music changes as you change the installed skills, which are presented as synthesizer modules
Struggling with visibility. Hard to quickly tell what's an enemy and what's background art. Also hard to tell what's collidable and what's clear
I'm not finding the combat here very intersting

Pass

Morsels — Action roguelike (Isaaclike?) with creature collecting

Gross and cute
The classics from Rogue: traps, unexplained stuff, retrying a lot until you start to understand
Demo shows a small but varied range of creatures with different abilities, which always come with a randomly selected bonus
Quick switch between your roster of three
At least in this early part of the game, ammo count is really low and even ranged attacks don't go far
Great presentation. Pixel art feels kind of like claymation

Pass. I liked the demo a lot, but I'm already playing a lot of roguelikes and my wishlist already has ones I'm more excited for

ODDCORE — Surreal boomer shooter

Maximalism. An exhilarating force-feeding of the senses.
Liminal spaces but actually awesome and fun. Exterminate the Backrooms! Shoot the jump scare monsters in their faces!
Excursions into the Oddcore only last 5 minutes unless you buy time extensions
Interesting idea: you can teleport home (almost) whenever you want to buy upgrades or more time
Chaotic level progression, like really channel surfing through the multiverse. Sometimes, instead of warping to the next level, you end up in a corrupted level or a bonus level or just some weird, mildly creepy room

Wishlisted

9mo ago

Steam Next Fest has started once again. What good demos have you found?

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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 9mo ago

Day 4 was all black cats

Everdeep Aurora — Exploration-heavy platformer

Really well-executed limited palette art. It swaps palettes between different areas for mood. Maybe that's why the playable character is a black cat.
This demo is really short. I saw a bit of lore and played some hide and seek, then went through the scary door. The cat has a drill but I don't even get to use it!
Didn't get a chance to see any interesting action except for the very last few seconds of the demo
The camera feels unpolished. It always freely drifts behind you, so quickly changing directions often will make the camera jiggle unpleasantly. It would be nice if the camera would stay still or lock to an axis sometimes. That would especially help with aiming jumps, since the camera always jerks upward a bit every time you jump.
The controls feel great. Super responsive movement with no sliding and little momentum buildup. Jump height is also quick to respond to letting go of the jump key.

Soft wishlist. This demo just wasn't long enough to be totally sell me on the full game.

Project Arrow — Puzzle platformer with archery

I found this demo to be good but not great. I'm struggling to identify why it didn't appeal to me more.
Maybe the selection of levels wasn't impressive enough. There were a handful of puzzle ones, but some just felt like repeats with not much new each time. There seemed to be a lot of autoscrollers.
Platforming movement mechanics were simple and straightforward, which is appropriate for a puzzle platformer, but then there are levels with precision platforming and not much puzzle
Cool series of boss levels at the end
Maybe the demo didn't do enough to hint at the possibilities for the whole bow and arrow mechanic for puzzles, so I'm just not getting hyped enough
Maybe I just don't get the presentation of the game? Electronic music and high-tech UI but playing as a cat with a bow in the forest

Pass

Swoosh Cat — Precision platformer

Celeste but with 360° dash
Cool mechanic: dash into spikes to bounce off of them
Slow motion while aiming, but the aim indicator isn't very accurate. Also, unlimited slow motion
Hard to tell when I have dash or not
Something feels off about the air control. I often overshoot or undershoot when trying to land on a small platform
What a long demo! This is a substantial amount of game to give out.

Pass. I had fun, but I'm currently not in the mood for Celeste-style precision platforming.

9mo ago

What game has the best tutorial, in your opinion?

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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 9mo ago

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.

9mo ago

Steam Next Fest has started once again. What good demos have you found?

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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 9mo ago

Day 3

Bloodthief — First-person parkour/speedrunning

Crusty brown gothic look, like Quake
Gameplay really grabbed me. Sometimes, I was leaning forward and holding my breath!
More and deeper movement mechanics, compared to other first-person parkour games, like SEUM or Neon White. Building up and preserving speed is a big deal
Challenging levels, with actual enemies to fight and a quickly-rising difficulty level. Levels are usually 1-5 minutes long — lengthy compared to Neon White's 10-30 seconds
I managed to wall jump off of a deadly spike wall, and I'm still not sure if that was intended

Soft wishlist. I definitely enjoyed this demo, but I currently don't have an appetite for this type of game.

Dice Gambit — Tactical RPG with dice

First thing after the intro cutscene: a detailed character creation screen. That's pretty overwhelming.
I like the art style except for the subdued 3D character models
Throwing the dice and watching them settle is satisfying, as it is in Armello
Gameplay is clearly focused on battle grid combat, since the "dungeon crawling" is just clicking on a map, like Slay the Spire
Do team management and watch the plot in the downtime between jobs
There is an appreciable amount of role-playing in this RPG

Wishlisted

9mo ago

Steam Next Fest has started once again. What good demos have you found?

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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 9mo ago

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

Good Luck — An absurdly dangerous walk to work

Just walk to work
Slowly walk through streets full of deadly things, like exploding garbage bins, loose signpoles, and falling signs
No checkpoints! No dodging! This is a rage game.
There's online co-op, apparently. Have Fun with friends!
This demo is silly fun, but I don't need to play more of this

Pass

Öoo — Puzzle platformer with bombs

This guy also made Elec Head, another charming puzzle platformer
Puzzle platforming with exploration
Cute pixel art
Wordless teaching. Actually, the only words in the game are the credits!
Puzzles all revolve around clever use of bombs: launch yourself like a rocket jump, blow up one bomb to push another

Wishlisted

PANIK — Chess-like grid puzzles

Has that Flash game feel, but in a good way. Quirky idea, simple design. It's built to quickly get you in and playing.
The puzzles are like connecting circuits. The figures can only move if they're connected to a crown-wearing figure.
An interesting take on grid-based puzzles. Like a fusion of Sokoban, chess puzzles, and "Chinese" checkers.
PANIK's cute demo trick: just have a quick line of super-simple levels to show off mechanics in the rest of the game!
I'd actually love to play this on my phone instead

Wishlisted

SourceWorld — Dungeon crawling FPS in the Half-Life universe

Deus Ex-like cutscenes for a story set after the Combine invasion! You join a company that raids the multiverse
Doom screen melt transition, holy crap
The familiarity and comfort of Source engine physics, movement, and weapons
Game crashed a bunch for me, so I'll have to stop early

Soft wishlist (I'll keep an eye on this)

::: spoiler !mrak — Super stylish immersive sim

BTW, "mrak" is Russian for "darkness"
Super rough, gritty introduction to a setting drowning in crusty old tech
Unfortunately crashes early in the game

Soft wishlist

9mo ago

Steam Next Fest has started once again. What good demos have you found?

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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 9mo ago

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?

9mo ago

Steam Next Fest has started once again. What good demos have you found?

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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 9mo ago

That's a really cool art style! Maybe it could be of interest to !shmups@lemmus.org

9mo ago

Steam Next Fest has started once again. What good demos have you found?

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Silverchase @sh.itjust.works 9mo ago

My report from day 1

Orbyss — 3D puzzles with spheres

Thoughts before playing: Pretty, abstract 3D puzzle game. But what's the killer feature? Like the portal gun from Portal or the camera from Viewfinder?

This is what it would be like to play the PlayStation 2 boot sequence as a puzzle game, with floating cubes and coloured sparks whizzing around in an abstract void. You get to control some balls, rolling them around the level to press buttons and zoom through pipes.

This demo shows some early levels, featuring some fairly stimulating puzzles, but it failed to really grab me. The slow pacing and pure abstractness of the game's setting aren't getting me excited to play more. I just never got to that "aha" point where I realized what made the game special. In comparison, another puzzle game demo I played in a past Next Fest, The Art of Reflection, didn't waste any time showing off its key feature of jumping through mirrors.

I'm going to pass on this game, but I know someone is going to like it.

Panta Rhei — Atmospheric top-down adventure with time manipulation

The game produced an error when launching it, which I fixed by forcing Steam to run it with Proton Experimental.

2D animated cutscenes? Hell yeah, I love that kind of effort. The in-game 3D art also does a good job capturing that illustrative feel of the cutscenes. Atmospheric top-down adventure with cool art and light RPG elements? I liked Bastion and Tunic, so maybe this could be up my alley, too. The game's premise and worldbuilding interest me. You play as a young guardian of time and use your time powers to fight the monsters ravaging the world.

But gameplay-wise, this demo is rough. I found the melee combat to be unsatisfyingly sluggish. There's a bug where falling off the world makes you permanently faster when you respawn, and I was definitely running way too fast by the end of the demo. The game is tagged as a roguelike (aka "choose some randomly drawn upgrades") on its store page, but there wasn't much time in the demo to really appreciate any of those upgrades in action.

I'll pass. It's really unfortunate that this demo disappointed me, since this game still might grab me if it gets in better shape.

Wander Stars — Turn-based combat anime

The key selling points for Wander Stars are its loud inspiration by anime and its word-slinging combat mechanic, the latter of which got me to try this demo. I thought it was an interesting take on turn-based combat to line up words that customize an attack, and that old anime style presentation is indeed charming.

Wander Stars is also very heavy on the visual novel-style dialogue and cinematics, which is probably necessary to evoke that anime feel. It felt more like a visual novel in disguise than the more mechanically involved turn-based RPG that I was hoping for. I'm just lacking the patience to read so much between active gameplay, though the gameplay near the end of the demo does show potential for depth in the turn-based combat.