Saturday Casual Gaming 233: Pride of Place

Pride of Place from Rubble Games

I explore a lot on Kongregate. It's lead me to a lot of really cool, fun games, like NGU Idle or Realm Grinder, and that's basically what happened with Pride of Place.

What a cool game!

This is a fun little game from Rubble Games out of Sheffield, UK. With a fun pixelly style and great bleeps and bloops mixed with cartoonish screams and grunts, as well as a fantastic score, this is a great game both visually and audibly, though you may want to turn the sound down a bit, as the bleeps and bloops may be a bit jarring for the unprepared.

The story of Pride of Place is basically this: you are a put-upon drone desperate to protect your intellectually lacking master as the two of you fly through space. Since you're flying exhausted and un-maintained, due to your master's inability to stop napping, you fly the spaceship right into an asteroid belt. Now, to be fair, humans need sleep, so I'm not going to give PoP Guy a lot of trouble over this. Especially when you consider how cool this all looks!

Is it showing my age if this is how I think games look when I think about games?

You crashland on a strange world and are almost immediately thrown into the combat system. It's a match-3 system, but you don't swipe or drag, you click the adjacent pieces you're swapping. That took me a hot minute to figure out and I got a littttttle frustrated there. I think that's more on me for trying to figure out simple gameplay elements at 4AM while struggling with acid reflux... Regardless, combat is automatic and pretty easy to grasp once you understand the "click to swap" thing.

And you are going to swap a lot as you play.

While you're swapping, sometimes you'll find different shapes (a gray rock, a gold rock, money, hearts, red diamonds, etc) - these are your resources, and you need them to buy upgrades. Do not skip out on resources - PoP Guy will shoot baddies automatically (albeit not as powerfully, I think?) while you gather resources. Once gathered, you take the resources back to Town and sell them to the various NPCs (who you have to rescue). Sell enough of each resource they ask for and you'll find they've made you weapons or armor or other upgrades! Then you buy the upgrades from them. Yeah. I don't really understand their economy either. I'm also reasonably certain that you are being taken advantage of by the NPCs.

I'm really enjoying my runs through Pride of Place, so if you're looking for a fun, odd RPG to play, and you like the idea of playing as basically Skeets from Booster Gold, this'll definitely be great for you, too!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC