Saturday Casual Gaming 247: Little Idle Monsters

In Which I Play A Fun Little Idle Game!

I was going to do a review of a nonograms game (it's an art game) this week, but the game is still unfolding and there's a shockingly deep story, so instead, I'll be telling you about a gem of a game called Little Idle Monsters from developer Junjo, who you may recall from earlier reviews I did of their Farm Rush and Farm Idle games!

A simple concept, yet still lots of fun!

So the basic story of  Little Idle Monsters is that you're the bad guy and you're summoning hordes of critters with your magic deck of cards to terrorize the townsfolk around you. You draw cards from your deck, building fear in the hearts of your enemies. Fear is your currency, here, and you use it for everything from building up your creature arsenal to building up the dread you cause to conning the deck into letting you pull multiple cards at once to training your monsters to cause mayhem and slaughter the uppity peasants.

All against an adorable SNES/Sega-style background!

The game is pretty simple to play - click on the deck to deal cards faster, click on highlighted buttons to purchase upgrades, click on the town button to raze the villages and outposts.

Which is really quite fun!

If you're looking for a way to release some frustration without causing real-world harm, definitely give this game a play on Kongregate or mobile, since it's available on the app store now!

So yeah, give this game a play, guys!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 245: Incremancer

In Which I Do Crimes And Raise The Dead

So I have this bad habit of not finding a game I want to play until Thursday or Friday... which means I never get very far in these games. I did, however, manage to get the gist of this one.

Incremancer is a game by JamesG466 on Kongregate where you play a necromancer who is raising zombies to devour villages. As you massacre the innocents, you are granted (so far) three forms of currency: Blood, Brains, and Bones. Blood and Brains you start out earning when the first zombie you place begins to chew up the people of whatever little burgh you've ended up in. Every attacked villager earns you 1 Blood, every killed villager earns you 1 Brain. Eventually, you save enough Blood/Brains to start building, and once your graveyard is finished, not only do you automatically spawn zombies, you also now can collect Bones when your victims die!

Bones are just another currency, giving bonuses to your energy renewal speed (every zombie costs 10 energy, so keep an eye on your gauge!), how much energy/blood/bones/brains you can carry, etc.

I think one of my favorite things about this somewhat idle game is that it looks like an old Atari or Commodore game! We're talking super pixellated low-end 8-bit. The Zombies and Villagers are stacked blocks in a vaguely human shape. The houses are boxes with big open entrances. The trees are squiggly sticks. It's all very charming and very fun to look at.

It's also very easy to play - basically the only things you do are click buttons, choose where to drop your zombies, and hope that they don't send more cops... until you've got your zeds properly leveled-up, then you can pull a Return of the Living Dead...

Regardless, Incremancer is a really fun game, and I can't wait to see what later stages look like with more structures built and more blood, brains, and bones poured into my reanimated marauders :)

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 237: Farm Tiles

Farm Tiles by the_exp

For me, September = Fall, so let's go full harvest-time and play a farming simulator! Real talk, I love super casual games where you grow stuff and nothing can die. I'm pretty scattershot when I play games, so I don't always come back to a particular title fast enough for crop survival. Heck, I hadn't played this game in years by the time I got around to this review. That being said, it was exactly as cute and fun as I remember!

What a sweet little farm simulator this is!

From the moment you start this game up, you know it's going to be a good, chill time. It's silly, it's cute, and it's pretty straightforward. You are a farmer (in Lancashire, if the info on the Kongregate page is to be believed), and you are starting up your farm. Grow some clover. Raise some cows. Make some cheese. Now, there is a goal:

You're preparing a picnic.

That's it. That's your goal. It's how you go about making your picnic that's fun!

Yes, all of these came from hours and hours and hours of gameplay... I suck at gaming.

In order to do anything you need the proper resources. To plant seeds, you need the right amount of gems, which you can get from selling things. The two easiest resources to sell are rocks (which you get from clearing new tiles) and water (which regenerates automatically, or you can get ponds - more on that soon). I like to fill my water completely before selling all of it for a cool 120 gems - 1 gem per water unit.

Eventually, you'll have enough gems for various Seeds - clovers, corn, carrots, radishes, and... worms? These crops can be used, along with water, to feed your Livestock - cows, turkeys, pigs, sheep, and fish. Livestock are an excellent investment, since they're perpetual. As long as you have food and water for them, they'll produce, and milk, eggs, meat, and wool fetch a far better price than water, rocks, or crops.

Of course, if you want to make some real bank, you buy Cogs.

Cogs are machines that take the items your Livestock produce and turn them into other items. You have three milk? Now you have cheese. Three eggs? Fried egg. Three meat? Meat pie. These are worth big money.

They're also the ingredients for the last Cog, which would put together your picnic. It should tell you something about how bad I am at video games that I have never gotten that far. I'm impatient. Regardless, I'm looking forward to finding out if there's anything after the Picnic Cog.

The last little tab is for Upgrades. Your upgrades include Ponds (which produce water when clicked on), rain clouds that help your water auto-generate, boxes to store more things in, and Donks, a cute army of donkeys who help you do things better (they increase how much progress each click is worth). There are other upgrades, but I haven't got them yet :)

If you're looking for a fun game to keep you preoccupied a bit, definitely give this sweet, silly game a go!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 236: Scrap Quest

Scrap Quest - an idle management RPG by localhero

Sorry about the sleepy nature of yesterday's blog, but I was wiped. I'm still pretty sleepy today, so an idle RPG where I just send adventurer's to their doom is an excellent place to start.

Scrap Quest is one of those games where you're basically playing the Questgiver NPC in any RPG - you select a hero to go on an adventure, you outfit them, you upgrade their town, and then you send them on their merry way to die horribly in the swamp. As far as menu-based RPGs go, this one is exceptionally pretty, with some sweet 8-bit style graphics and a streamlined look.

It's a pretty in-depth game, too. This is just the screen for equipment...

You end up with a lot of upgrades to buy, and while I'm told in-game that there's a prestige system... I don't know how it works or how to activate it. All I know is that I like having purple backgrounds on my items, sometimes characters come with items, and the more scrap I get in the smithing screen, the more upgrades I can buy. That's all on me, though, I wasn't paying enough attention to the text as it popped up on screen.

Behold the tavern, a lovely place to hire adventurers. This Castout Chemist Pyro came with a free sword!
Bargain!

Your goal, in the end, is to buy all of the upgrades and unlock and clear all of the areas in  the Battle area. You recruit your adventurers from the Tavern (which is located under the Town button, or, conveniently, you can just click on the Talents button and it will take you to your choice of three different adventurers), pick their Talents, Equip them with weapons and items you've already found (if any), and then send them to die in Battle. There are no survivors.

Items are sent back from the field to be examined by you. If you like the item, you can equip it to the next fool you send to die. If it's a garbage item made of garbage (indicated by red markings on the item portrait), you can scrap it in the Town. Scrapping items earns you Scrap (among other things), which can then be used on upgrades.

But you need to be sure you want to destroy something. There are no take-backsies once it's in the chute.

More upgrades mean less difficulty challenging the different zones in the Battle tab. Here, your adventurers wander about, whacking baddies and, eventually, dropping dead, all while sending you their spoils. How nice of them! Now, obviously you're going to lose a lot of guys here. Don't feel guilty about that. I'm pretty sure they all know what they're signing up for.

And it's a fun little warzone, too.
Very simple. Very streamlined.
Wow.

So that's Scrap Quest in a nutshell - you kill tons of adventurers for fun and profit. Everyone wins.

Definitely give this little Kongregate game a go - and encourage Localhero to make more games, because this one's pretty darn fun!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 231: The Dark One

The Dark One from Tenfor on Kongregate

If you know me, you'll know that I love me some RPGs. You'll also know that I've played all kinds of very blocky, pixelly RPGs and loved them just as much as any hyper-realistic super 3D 1080p ultra-high-end RPG from a major AAA company and boy was that some word-salad right there... deep breaths.

Anywho, this is a game from Tenfor on Kongregate called The Dark One.

First things first: this game is a prequel to Tenfor's Landor Quest series, which are all also RPGs, and I found this one at random on the Kongregate landing page. Published back in March of 2019, this is a really new game, too, but so far, I haven't encountered any bugs (which is kind of novel, when you consider how buggy console games tend to be even a year out from the first sales). Score one for the little guys!

We enter with a story:

I love me some stories!

The gist of the tale is this: a very bad demon tried to take over the world and was stopped by a tough wizard who wound up stuck as the demon's prison guard and opened a wizard school right on top of his prisoner. If that seems like poor planning, you'd be right. You play as Varthen, a wizard-in-training who ends up having to help stop a necromancer from taking over because, as you might guess, sometimes wizards aren't the good guys.

You start out, however, taking your final exam - killing a big bad demon in the school's dungeon.

look at this lovely pixel art!

As you play, Varthen will level up, gain artifacts, and learn new spells. All of this is shown in adorable pixel art on a nifty weathered-parchment background that I dig.

As you can see, I took these screenshots way early in the game to avoid spoilers.

You'll travel to various locations, all with a very cute pixely vibe to them. The game isn't afraid to use humor to defuse the tension of literally being thrown into the fires of a necromantic invasion five seconds after you graduate.

I cackled when I saw that bird's name!

You move around using the A and D keys on your keyboard, interact with E, and cast spells or use potions during battle with Q, W, E, A, S, and D. The music is an adorable and super simple chiptune that loops around and kind of blends into the gameplay, augmenting the world around you without being too obtrusive, and the sound effects make me feel like I'm playing video games in the early 1990s. I love it!

Combat isn't turn based, by the way.

When you cast spells, they have a cooldown period, which means that you sometimes have to just absorb some hits in between blasts, and you also have to manage your magic carefully, because you can run out of MP during battle. While your Q attack uses no mana, it also has a pretty significant cooldown period compared to your W attack (a fireball), so you have to choose between hurling the powerful stuff quickly and running out of magic or waiting for your Q attack to recharge while you're pummeled by faster enemies.

All in all, I like this RPG. It's simple without being dumbed-down, it's fun without being addictive, and it's heckin pretty to look at and listen to. For being a game about fighting demons and undead, it had me smiling my whole playtime!

If you're looking for an RPG to fiddle around with, definitely give The Dark One a go, and while you're at it, follow the links on Kongregate to the other games in the Landor series!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC