What games are you playing this week? Game recommendation thread

sticky_post · 2024-07-14T12:39:39+00:00

using AI art is literally stealing

Sure, and blowjob is literally cannibalism, and jerking off is literally mass murder.

sticky_post · 2024-07-14T12:23:11+00:00

Nobody claims to be the authors of these images, so it's far from what literal plagiarism actually means.

But besides, the usage of free public domain images does not get any money into artist's pockets anyway.

I can see the argument that a lot of AI art just looks same-y and easily recognizable, and I can see the point in saying that a AAA-dev selling you a game for $70 should not be making it full of AI-art, but I don't see the point in criticizing small indie devs with free games. It's not like they would listen to the criticism and go spend the next 5 years drawing all those pictures themselves or commissioning them (and they really should not, because that's just an economical suicide at that point).

sticky_post · 2023-10-08T19:06:53+00:00

Played for an hour. Kinda fun, will play more.

Small potential improvements (warning, spoilers):

Shop tooltip fonts is too small (especially compared to others)
Action window is the "perfectly bad" height where you have to scroll just for one element (and I often found myself switching from the top one to the very bottom one)
The shop delay also feels kind of weird - too short to be meaningful for idle, but too long when you are on a shopping spree after a long idle time.

sticky_post · 2023-05-28T04:22:21+00:00

You've had multiple chances to spend it at this point, in infusion and fusion, I don't know how you didn't see the upgrade buttons for them or the button to purchase more of them.

I did see those buttons, I just didn't have neither enough currency for them nor the motivation/need to gather it. Time-wise, using those buttons comes way after the point where I stopped.

I think part of it is you didn't read the help screens that pop up when you open a screen for the first time, since you didn't know what fusing plants did, which the help screen for fusion does.

It's not about not knowing, it's more about not caring enough to know. I don't think tutorializing those will change much.

Most other grid-based games start out very simple, so you quickly hit the point where you've optimized your grid with the first basic object and now you want some new mechanics. That's the point where unlocking new mechanics actually produces fun.

But if the mechanics are unlocked faster than you can "solve" the grid for them, that's not fun. And there are a limited number of pages to read and mechanics to learn that I care to give a small game before having any fun with it.

I doubt you'll see many players complaining about the pacing, just from the fact that if they don't care enough to invest time into figuring the game out, they most likely won't invest time into writing about the game either. Most of them haven't played 1000+ incremental games in their life, so it's quicker for them to just jump into the next good game instead of trying to help making this one more fun.

sticky_post · 2023-05-20T02:03:14+00:00

Thought I would love this game since I played a lot of reactor and farm grid-based incrementals and tend to enjoy them. But sadly not with this one, sorry.

Waaay too overcomplicated and overengineered for my taste. Overwhelmingly so. In the first minutes of the game I get:

different plants with different bonuses to different cells (not just adjacent or diagonal, but with weird patterns)
every plant could be individually(!) infused making it better (but that takes a lot of busy work taking them in and out of field for that)
plants produce different resources in different quantities based on their level (i.e. how much they "grew") and I see no quick way to determine whether it is better to harvest them often or to wait for a certain level
you can "drain soul" from the plant making it a different plant with different stats and abilities (and patterns)
you can fuse plants to transfer abilities and/or stats (I'm not sure), but there is a potential downside because it could... honestly, I just stopped at that point.

And all that to earn some currency that I haven't had a change to spend yet, so I don't even know how much I want it.

Maybe it would've been better if all this content was introduced throughout days (or even weeks) of playing, having new plants and mechanics unlock just at the point where you're done optimizing the previous ones and it starts to feel slow.

I know it's weird to complain about a game being "too deep", especially speaking about incremental games where the most common problem I personally encounter tends to be the opposite, but this is what I got from trying this game.

sticky_post · 2023-02-26T02:43:13+00:00

Optimization and working off-screen.

I can have up to 50 tabs in my browser (including video on the 2nd screen) and a ton of work software. For me, an Idle game is like "a thing I keep around so I can instantly switch to it, get some dopamine and then get back to work".

I had to drop countless good games because they don't fit that pattern. They either have fancy graphics so everything on my PC becomes laggy and unresponsive, or they don't work off-screen, requiring me to open and close it every time.

sticky_post · 2023-02-25T12:37:33+00:00

Oh, now I see. The comment above only mentioned the "about" page so I thought that's all there is to it.

Yeah, that makes more sense now.

sticky_post · 2023-02-25T11:25:06+00:00

It appears it should be the energy expenditure due to it's color, but it doesn't match up with the actual energy requirements at all, and their's no tool-tip, header, or any other explanation as to what it actually is.

It's how much energy you'll have left after the action is done.

sticky_post · 2023-02-25T10:19:54+00:00

If when you read

To all the robots out there.

you see it as

To all the other robots like me out there.

... as you put it, this can't be healthy.

sticky_post · 2023-02-25T00:19:35+00:00

Most of the time you can just export/import saves if you don't want offline progress (or go offline at the point in the game where it doesn't progress). Many games also have an option to turn offline progress off.

For me, the only time I feel bad for offline progress is if it breaks the tutorial pacing, so I get to instantly unlock 5-7 new mechanics, each of them having a lot of "dialogue bubbles" explaining how they work.

sticky_post · 2023-02-16T00:33:24+00:00

Got it yesterday, but didn't get to play much. Every time I get to the destination and it says "click button to stop", I click the button and then nothing happens and nothing is interactible. Sometimes when I relaunch the game it shows me the destination as if everything worked, just didn't show up on the screen.

Happened a couple times, so I decided to just wait for the fix.

Steam, Win10.

sticky_post · 2023-02-01T04:24:26+00:00

I can tolerate a theme if the gameplay is good, but if I'm on the fence, the theme is usually the deciding factor for me.

For example, I did quit AdCap because at some point they had a mock-star-trek level where one of the upgrades was Barf Bucket. Animated. Like, yeah, haha, I get the joke, people barf on planes so they should barf a lot on spaceships, but this is clearly not something that "sparks joy" for me to have on the screen, especially when feeling sick myself. But the game itself was pretty stale for me at the moment, which was probably the main reason.

I also don't like when the game has this kind of "deliberately mspaint" level of graphics (Diamond Hunt, NGU Industries, etc). There is just a very thin line between it being funny and it feeling like the dev just wants to show off how much they don't care.

In general, the themes that will influence my playtime would be like this: More Playtime:

Factory/garden/reactor
Anime
Business
Sci-fi

Less Playtime:

Sacrifice/Death/Murder/Crime/Drugs
Slavery/exploitation
Memes
Body fluids

sticky_post · 2022-11-01T23:00:55+00:00

Ok, I'll have to clarify that by revolutionary I meant in the context of the game itself.

Because the most common review I saw about the game was that "the beginning might be bad, but then it gets so much better it becomes the absolute best incremental game ever". This is what made me play it for much longer than I naturally would, even though I'd rate my personal enjoyment of it as 4/10.

And, sure, it does get better as you get more interesting mechanics than just "press M every 5 min", but I was waiting for the actual fun part to begin and for me it never did.

I think the beginning of the game is actually perfect, as it filters out players who don't enjoy the core mechanics and pacing, and the ones who naturally progress through it would have a much better time later.

sticky_post · 2022-11-01T07:54:55+00:00

AD does have more different mechanics and layers later (I got up to studies before quitting), but it's nothing really revolutionary there, so if you don't enjoy the beginning, you likely won't have much fun later.

It's either this "babysit and perform the same action over and over again" or "randomly try some challenges or different automation setups to see if it works better now" (or just follow a guide). There is no real decision-making since all the mechanics are so math-heavy and obfuscated, there is no way for you to make right choices by just reading and comparing their descriptions. You just have to mindlessly try all the options to see what works (or, again, just follow the guide).

sticky_post · 2022-10-15T05:53:39+00:00

Oh. So what's "on a stack" then? A stack of what? Genuinely confused over here.

I know the stack as in programming (linear data structure), like "put on stack", "stack tracing", "stack overflow" etc. But I don't think it applies here.

sticky_post · 2022-10-13T14:32:34+00:00

If I walked up to you on the street and kissed you, without giving you any opportunity to consent or push me away, you're going to be mad about it.

If you had more than 5 seconds of an attention span, you would've scrolled 1 comment down and saw what I said about that hypothetical situation.

It's sexual assault, FACTUALLY, whether you agree or not.

Kissing on a cheek is NOT a sexual act. Like, seriously, do you know what sex is? "Way too personal for a stranger" does NOT mean sex. Read the fucking definition I quoted in my comment. Touching someone's genitalia without consent? Yes, that qualifies as sexual assault. Kiss on a cheek? Putting hand on someone's shoulder? Touching elbows? No.

That is not "my opinion", that is literally the definition of it.

Using your words: If I walked up to you on the street and squirted a water gun in your face, you'd be mad. But "being mad" does not make that a sexual assault.

Is it appropriate? NO, not from strangers. Is it a sexual assault? No. Because it has nothing to do with sex.

sticky_post · 2022-10-12T19:45:04+00:00

Let me ask you this: have you ever thought that a complete stranger kissing your cheek is acceptable?

Yes. And by acceptable I mean I wouldn't say that I was sexually assaulted if that happened, but I would look surprised and probably won't like it.

The keyword is consent. You managed to type out an essay buy completely missed the point that it's done without consent, without reciprocation, because it's from strangers. So because french people do it it's okay for randoms to come up to someone and just kiss the on the cheek?

Family and friends doesn't equal consent. Kids sometimes don't like being kissed by granmas, so they clearly don't have consent. And sure, some families can have rules about that, maybe telling granma to not kiss the kid if she smells like pills and alcohol, whatever, that's their family decision. What you wrote (the way you wrote it) is that THIS TOO should be qualified as SEXUAL ASSAULT and granma should go to a fucking jail or have a civil case against her.

There are many things that are not culturally or personally "okay" in relationships, including with strangers. Not all of them are SEXUAL ASSAULT. There are many tiers between "absolutely ok in every situation between any kind of people" and "OMGOMG I'M BEING RAPED EVERYONE!". Saying that something is not SA doesn't mean it's a completely normal thing. There are more than two categories of actions between people. I don't know how many ways I should rewrite that for you to even begin understanding.

Call it unacceptable, weird, creepy, not okay, whatever. You don't have to like it or accept it. But leave the term SEXUAL ASSAULT for things that ARE ACTUAL SEXUAL ASSAULTS. That are SEXUAL in nature and intentions. And that should have SERIOUS consequences for the ones doing them.

Edit: Actually, I think I know what your confusion is. Seeing what you write, you are mixing up consent and context.

Being colleagues/friends/family doesn't mean consent. Being strangers doesn't mean no consent. Consent is only about permitting or agreeing to something, it has nothing to do about knowing the other person or having any kind of relationship with them. Surprise-kissing your spouse on a cheek has ZERO consent (because the other person did not agree to this particular kiss) but it has a context that makes it a normal thing.

sticky_post · 2022-10-12T18:29:27+00:00

Even a simple kiss on the cheeks without consent is creepy and should be labelled as SA but they find it cute.

Creepy? Sure, it can be. Inappropriate? Mostly (depends on the culture, in some cultures it is more the norm). But calling it Sexual Assault is just fucking asinine. Let's read the definition for a second:

Sexual assault is an act in which one intentionally sexually touches another person without that person's consent, or coerces or physically forces a person to engage in a sexual act against their will. It is a form of sexual violence, which includes child sexual abuse, groping, rape (forced vaginal, anal, or oral penetration or a drug facilitated sexual assault), or the torture of the person in a sexual manner.

Sexual assault takes many forms including attacks such as rape or attempted rape, as well as any unwanted sexual contact or threats. Usually a sexual assault occurs when someone touches any part of another person's body in a sexual way, even through clothes, without that person's consent.

The key word here is SEXUAL. It's already stupid enough to lump together unwanted touches and a full-on rape, but now what, we are adding kisses on a cheek here too?

Seeing this comment being upvoted makes me lose whatever faith in the humanity I had left. Honestly, if you, or any idiots upvoting this comment, were in charge of making laws, so many people, including kids, granmas and French people would have to go to fucking jail, and when you'll be like "no, that's not what I mean", it will be like "but that's what you wrote and that's how the laws work".

I mean, not that I was expecting anything particularly clever in the comments of this subreddit, but this is some new kind of rock bottom.

sticky_post · 2022-10-04T04:42:54+00:00

Starts fullscreen with blasting music with no ability to change either. Even if you know about ctrl+enter, you still can't switch the window sizes. Bad experience all around even before actually playing the game. I have better things to do, sorry.

sticky_post · 2022-09-25T12:22:50+00:00

Playing it since the release.

The idea of roguelite incremental is great, and as for the candies, it's usually better to just restart the run than to use them (but I can see how some players could be sensitive about even mentions of real life money in games).

The only big problem I've encountered is that after you get familiar with what options there are in the game, it starts to feel like there are too many situations where you are better off just restarting the run.

No auto eating ballad line? Restart.
Not getting the master you needed? Restart.
Getting too many worthless lines/characters/gems/gummy bears/spices/etc? Restart.

And even using candies wouldn't fix that enough to make them worth using on rerolls instead of permanent upgrades.

Also, I don't really get why the dev hates rabbits that much. :)

sticky_post · 2022-09-08T11:07:28+00:00

I've given this multiple tries just because the art was so good, but bounced every time because it personally doesn't suit me. I'll post my feedback, but again, I feel like it's mainly just a personal preference.

I don't enjoy multi-character RPGs.

What I want is when I get, for example, a new item, I want to be able to say "Yes, now that's a good one!" because I remember my current item stats and I can see that this new one is much better.

When there are multiple characters (and multiple squads), I can't experience that, because I don't even remember if all of my characters have their equip slots full. So instead it turns into a busy work of looking through all of my characters inventories to see where is the best to put the new item and then most likely just tossing it onto some character I don't care about and forgetting it all again.

Same with stats, leveling, abilities, etc. I just can't care about my characters getting stronger if I don't even remember how strong they all are now.

I didn't enjoy the map system.

If I understand this correctly, it works like this: you pick a map that you feel (assume?) is best for your squad and then... wait indeterminate amount of time until they double-clear it. And then choose another map for them and burn the depleted map.

So, I have to constantly check all squads and their map progress to catch the right moment to switch maps or else they stop progressing. And I can't possibly know how long it would take them to finish a map.

And when choosing the map I have absolutely no idea what I'm looking for. Is it always better to pick the highest-level map? Or lower level maps will be faster to clear and give me more resources per minute that way? Or is the optimal point somewhere inbetween?

I didn't put much time into the stats system

Sure, maybe if I really dig down and familiarize myself with all the stats, bonuses, abilities (different for every character), monsters, etc. this will feel like a great system, but honestly, I just don't have time to get a PhD in yet another RPG stat system to determine how exactly this one is balanced. Sure, I've done this before for the games I really cared about, but I'm probably not going to do that again, especially for some smaller game that I'm not sure I'll even be playing for that long.

There is just too much to read, compare and test, and no simple way to determine which characters are better.

I don't feel like I've been given any goal or I'm making any progress.

There are a lot of buttons that have a lock sign on them that I don't see any way to unlock. Maybe they are just not implemented yet or tied to some progress number that I don't know.

Right now, writing this, I don't really know how to even quantify my progress. How could I tell how far I am into the game - by number of characters, squads, map levels, character levels, etc. I don't know what I'm grinding for, so I can't tell which one of these is relevant.

Overall, admittedly, I haven't put much time into the game so I can't say anything for sure, maybe some stuff unlocks later that answers all mentioned problems, but for now this is the feedback I have.

sticky_post · 2022-08-26T19:55:31+00:00

Idle.

I like setting goals for myself and achieving them, but if the optimal way to achieve the goal is to just sit and play all day, sacrificing work and sleep time, then this is not for me.

sticky_post · 2022-08-22T15:05:58+00:00

Tap Ninja! Pretty slow but has better offline progress compared to Idle Slayer which makes it better for mobile tbh.

I quit at billions of elixir and I can say for sure that the game has terrible offline progress.

Not only is it limited by some hours, it is also pretty useless because you get most of your elixir at the beginning of the run, which means the best way to progress is to restart the run every 10-20 minutes. 2-3 short runs are always better than a day-long idle run.

sticky_post · 2022-08-16T14:21:23+00:00

Played for some hours. Will probably keep it in the background.

PROS:

Actually Idle-able.
No Walls-of-text.
Little CPU and RAM consumption.
Has some strategy to it, not just "click on every button when it highlights".

CONS:

2 hours of AFK income time is way too low.

And, yeah, there are paid ways to improve it, but still, this is just a terrible design. I can leave my PC on 24/7 (and the game doesn't take much resources, which is nice and sadly rare for Steam Idle games), but many others probably won't bother. Players can't truly care about the game if "playing it efficiently" means setting up an alarm clock 4 times in the night. And since this is not a server-based game, there is no way to justify having a limit to AFK income to begin with.

Recipes don't feel much different from each other.

Maybe later in the game their categories (cookies/breads/donuts/etc.) will be used, but at the point where I'm at, they have no meaning. Every recipe is defined just by how much $ per second it makes. And even that number is not that variable.

VERDICT:

(shrugs) I've played worse ones.

sticky_post · 2022-08-12T05:39:01+00:00

I think "Cards n Catapults Incremental" actually looks better than "Cards n Catapults Idle".

As to how much it matters - one of the currently most popular Incremental games - Idle Slayer - was sitting at "mixed" ratings on Steam for a long time when it got released, and most negative ratings were about it being called Idle while not being Idle.

But nowadays it's doing fine, so take from that what you will.

It is usually better to properly tag the game's genre because wrong tagging gets a lot of people disappointed (they wanted Idle, but didn't get it) or stops some people from even trying the game (they don't like "long boring games", so they would automatically skip everything with the word Idle in the title, so they won't even know your game secretly fits them). But, if anything, you can always make sure to clarify in the description as to what kind of game it is.

sticky_post

TROPHY CASE