Saturday Casual Gaming

 

In Which I'm Gaming Again!!!

It's a hot and hazy summer's day, and I have not had the guts to go outside. My father has been burning our wood pile down slowly because it was starting to put off its own heat waves and we do not want it to spontaneously combust. My mother has been gardening. We entertained the idea of taking the cat to the beach for the first time, but she has been hiding in her blanket fort all day after she had a brief outing this morning.

Instead of being active (beyond my usual squats and self-soothing rocking lol), I've been starting an indoor garden!

Oh, not a real one. I have a black thumb, not a green one lol.

But as I may have mentioned on Tuesday, I have found itch.io and been able to start playing new games!

And today's title is "Plant Daddy" by Brady Soglin.

In this game, you're the eponymous Plant Daddy - a lonely college grad who has just moved into their first apartment with nothing and no one. You buy your first plant - a "garden plant" - and start caring for it. As your plant grows, it will give you Leaves, which are your first currency, and after it fully matures, it gives you Blossoms, which act as a second currency. As you gain these Leaves and Blossoms, you can spend them in the store tab for such niceties as places to sit (or set plants on), artificial lighting, and even room expansions. Mostly, though, you'll be using your currencies to buy new plants.

Sometimes, you'll get special traits on your plants like variegated leaves and fancy stem colors! You can get special pots for those plants with the Nursery item, and you can even develop seeds from them, so if you want an army of variegated Tiny Trees named David, you absolutely can. Yes, you can name your plants. I am naming all of mine.

You can also buy decorations and more places to set plants down, which the game strongly encourages you to do.

Yes, that's a plant next to a candle on top of a cardboard box, and yes its name is Dan.

Zoomed out to show that to-do list on the wall above the shelf
It's how you find your objectives!

How's Annie?

Anywho, this game is really fun! It's relaxing and quiet and cute and you can easily lose a few days just trying to work your way through your To-Do List and raise an exceptionally cool plant or three. Currently I'm about 50 blossoms away from unlocking the next room - the bathroom - where I can then proceed to grow mushrooms on the back of my purchasable toilet lol!

There doesn't seem to be any way to pay-to-win in this, either! No "pay 99 cents to speed up" or "buy x amount of currency for 3 bucks of real money" stuff that I'm used to from generator-based idle games like this. It's refreshing and pleasant and as long as you don't turn the sound effects up too much while watering, you're not going to have to go to the bathroom a bunch of times.

In short, this is a perfect game with a deceptively simple interface that leads to fabulously deep gameplay. It looks cute, the "story" is adorable and relatable even if you're a plant-killer like me, and sometimes it's nice to just look at a room full of potted plants named things like "Leroy" or "Chad" and think "yeah, this is exactly what I wanted this to look like". 

All in all, this is a game that is absolutely worth a playthrough!

So Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Saturday Casual Gaming: Leaf Blower Revolution

 

In Which I Play A Game About Leaves

If you know me, you know Fall is my favorite season. I didn't find this game until November, however, so you're getting a review of Leaf Blower Revolution - Idle Game by Humble North now. In January. Because I'm lazy and I've been playing a lot of Stardew Valley.

But yeah! Leaf Blower Revolution! Available on Steam! Free to play!

A simple, leafy game

I'm a lazy player. That's why I like idle games so much - you start it up and half pay attention to it. You don't need sound. You don't need it to be flashy. This game is a relaxing time-sink, and I've really enjoyed playing around with it.

You are a dude (or lady, or Santa...) who has a bunch of leaves on his lawn. You move your mouse/touchpad around to make the leaves go off screen and get points. You spend your points on things to move the leaves faster, including lil leaf Roombas which toodle around until they stop dead, recharge, then toodle off to move more leaves.

There are multiple menus of upgrades. There's multiple currencies. There's multiple kinds of upgrades. Do you want better skins for your tiny lil pixel person? Spend red coins (which you can earn several ways, but mostly through daily play and soft resets). Do you want a better leaf blower? Spend leaves. Do you want a change of scenery? There's a currency for that!

Basically, it's a very simple game with a lot of customization and such. I'm currently dressed as Santa and hunting down Void Leaves and Apples with my army of red-nosed Leaf Roombas and armed with a frickin Lazer. Life is pretty good.

There's no heavy clicking to be done - all of the effort is put in by just moving your cursor (which is your lil avatar dude) around. You only click on menu buttons. Which is actually a problem, because if I have one complaint it's that most of the menus with scroll bars are very hard to get to cooperate. Sometimes I'll try clicking the down arrow and nothing happens. Sometimes I try to drag the scroll bar and nothing happens. Sometimes neither approach works for a few minutes.

Admittedly, this could just be a problem with my computer - my laptop is getting pretty old and I'm resisting an upgrade because I hate that new laptops don't have any dvd/cd tray :|

What can I say, I'm an internet oldie.

And yes, this game is 100% free on Steam, though you can give the developers money for DLC packs. If you really love simple games about shuffling leaves back into the forest from whence they came in all their 8-bit glory, then by all means, financially support the devs!

If you want to download this game from Steam, it's here. I'd recommend it :)

That will do it for me today!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 311: Terrarium Garden Idle

In Which I Grow Plants

I will be honest: I have a brown thumb. I do not grow things well. I want to have plants, but I've actually killed fake plants before (you pick em up the wrong way and suddenly the inside wire snaps and you have a very crummy plantlike object).

Now I can have nice, healthy plants in my pocket without having to worry about them being dead!

Because they were never alive to begin with.

They're pixels.

Green Panda Games made a game for mobile called Terrarium Garden Idle, and it's pretty darn fun!

It's also a very attractive game!

So you start out with some weird greenish orbs and buy yourself a lil plant. Then you just tap the crap out of it to get more green orbs. Eventually you level up. The more you tap and level up, the more plants you can unlock. Every 20 levels or so, you can open a new shelf to give yourself room for your obsessive plant habit.

And once you run out of space/make enough orbs, you can literally jump to a new world.

There's a lot of plants.

This is a great little time-waster app, and despite Green Panda's affiliation with Ubisoft (gag), this game is somehow not pay-to-win. Yeah, you can buy pink diamonds for special stuff, but if you're like me and you don't care how fast this goes, you can just... chill. Yeah, you can watch ads for powerups, yeah you can buy them with green orbs, but I've never needed them.

Then again, I'm not a high enough level where the wait time for a plant to grow becomes an issue.

So yeah, this is a fun game on the app store, and you should probably go play it if you need something to do at, say, the DMV or something.

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 305: Defender Idle: New Beginning

In Which I Actually Enjoy A Tower Defense Game

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a naturally high-stress person. I know, I tout myself as being chill, but the fact is, I'm an inert ball of anxiety 90% of the time - physically chill, mentally freaking out. I don't usually like games where it's possible to lose. I don't like my characters dying. I don't like losing progress. I hate screwing up and not being able to fix things. Life doesn't have an "Undo" button, but video games (newsflash) aren't real life, and I'm not looking for them to be.

So I usually hate Tower Defense games, because you go on for a bit, then it's game over because you didn't put your points into whatever arbitrary loadout the level wanted from you. And you take a penalty. Because you didn't know the first time you played what it was the game was looking for. Ugh.

Don't like that at all.

But that's where Idle Games creep in. See, in an Idle Tower Defense game? The goal is to die. You're not punished for dying. Dying is how you learn. Dying is how you progress.

And Defender Idle: New Beginning, from Barbasu, is a great example of how to make an engaging Idle Tower Defense Game.

This game has only existed since the end of December, 2019, so it's a little over a month old now, and I have to say - having started to play it over two weeks ago, I'm nowhere near even the mid-game. It's a very long game - especially if you're bad at paying attention like I am.

See, this game isn't gonna hold your hand from start to finish, but it also doesn't punish you. If you're confused, click around for a bit - you'll figure it out. That's good game design, folks. I like that.

Your goal is to beat various waves of enemies in several game modes while building up your base. Simple enough, right? Right! There's no twist. There's no surprises. You just. play. the game.

I'm still early enough in the gameplay that I have no idea what half of the currencies are used for, I've barely leveled up my base, and I only have three kinds of turrets, but I still feel like I'm having fun. I rarely ever devote this much time to a game where I make so little apparent progress. The secret, my friends, is that you're never actually stuck. Bored? Surrender. Take a lower prize than you would if you played to the inevitable outcome of your enemies overwhelming you, and go level up some random stuff in your base. I've literally only surrendered once, and that was because I'd put some turrets in the wrong place and completely missed that you can sell turrets because I have the eyesight of a very myopic newt.

DI:NB is not a graphics-intensive game. It has a comfortably nostalgic Atari-vibe to it (some of the enemies vaguely resemble the spaceship from the OG Galaga, for instance), but it has its own flavor. I like that the colors, while bright, aren't obnoxious, they mostly make sense - green buttons can be clicked, red ones are locked, and yellow ones are close to being unlocked (except in the Masonry building - why are the purchasable upgrades red, but the maxed-out ones yellow? That makes no sense...)

Yes, keeping track of no less than 11 different currencies/substances can be confusing, but thankfully, there's not any real crossover. You'll always use gold for tower-defense upgrades, you'll always use RP (Rebirth Points) for percentage-based upgrades (like what % of a chance you have to find a specific substance/currency when killing enemies, boost your health by x%, etc), and you'll always use "Esoteric Substance" (lol nice name) to boost your Masonry projects.

Music and gun sounds are fun, with some chiptune aspects as well as some more modern effects. It's fairly repetitive, but it's also exactly what you want from a game like DI:NB. The gun sounds are fairly standard crunchy lasergun sounds not a pewpew, but also not a bangbang, more like small, satisfying explosions.

Overall, I'd have to say that Barbasu has a real winner on their hands with DI:NB, and if you want to check it out on Kongregate, you should. The developer has indicated that the game is now in its final form, barring any unforseen bugs. My only suggestion is that you keep it opened in a separate window, rather than a separate tag, as it doesn't always run very well when you aren't actively watching it, and it doesn't seem to do much while your computer is in standby or sleep mode. If that's not the purpose of the design, then it's a bit annoying. If it is the purpose, then well played - you're demanding attention for your game.

So yeah, go play this game!

And Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 303: Idle Pins on Kongregate

In Which I Am Very Sleepy

I'm typing this up at midnight because I'm 99% sure I'm going to either sleep in like a fool or wake up early to get things done, but either way, I am a sleepy birb.

When I'm tired but cannot sleep, I do one of two things: I watch videos on YouTube or I play idle games.

I have elected to play idle games, since for some reason (which I can't figure out) my computer has decided that a fairly good internet connection be damned, it's going to refuse to load YouTube videos. At all. It's horrifying. We're talking 144p.

Thankfully, you don't need a whole lot of crazy internet speeds or whatever to play a sweet little idle game like Idle Pins.

Idle Pins is a fairly new idle game on Kongregate. Made by publisher Arkshija and published on December 17, 2019, this game is a fun combination of RPG, idle game, sci-fi, and blatant copyright flummery. Seriously. There are a lot of references to other video games which the publisher is unlikely to have had a hand in. I'm not gonna complain about having my pins in the "Charmander" formation... or the one that looks like Sonic... or the one that looks like a Koopatroopa...

What I'm saying is that this game is very tongue-in-cheek. The story is pretty upfront about the fact that it doesn't really matter, but that's one of my big problems with it. When I logged on at the start of January, I had no idea what any of the mechanics were. You're given walls of text that make little to no sense and are left to do just... wait around and hope that something good happens. I'm still not 100% sure what pins go where in a formation!

You have pins, which are little buttons, and you're sending them to kill bad guys. You do this by loading them in formations (you start with "Noob", and it's trash, but you'll need it anyway) and hoping they don't die. Pins are... basically idle Pokemon. Except instead of kidnapping them and forcing them into combat, you either find or create them. This is also a little confusing at first, but here is my advice for if you're going to start playing this game:

1. If you have two pins that are the same (such as, a pair of "Alpha" pins), drag one on top of the other in your inventory. This will fuse them and make them stronger (two "Alpha" make one "Beta" for instance).
2. If it seems like you should be able to do something (crafting, tuning, etc) but you can't figure out how, just chill. You haven't found that ability yet.
3. Don't freak out about Tuning or the SynthLab. Tuning is a way to improve your pins with extra stats. SynthLab adds batteries to your pins and levels them up. You'll find batteries eventually, or you can deconstruct the higher tier pins you have (Gamma and up) for energy. Again, don't worry about this.
4. Bosses will kill you a lot early on.
5. You're not gonna keep the cool pins when you soft reset after Area 4 on the game map, so don't invest too heavily in them.

While the game did frontload a lot of conflicting or confusing info early on, I found that after I started to accumulate Formations and Unlockables (and even Event Items!), the game was better able to explain itself.

If you're looking for an idle game that asks you to practice some basic logic and reading comprehension, then definitely give Idle Pins a try. Now that I kind of understand what I'm doing, it's a lot of fun!!! Arkshija has done a great job here, and the fact that they're continually updating and tweaking the game tells me that they care about the game itself and how much fun you'll have playing it.

I'm going to bed now :)

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 249: Soda Dungeon

In Which I Play A Fun Free Steam Game

I love me some Roguelike Dungeon Crawlers, guys, and Soda Dungeon has been suggested to me pretty much ever since it came out. Since it was free on Steam, I couldn't resist and downloaded it.

It's addicting as heck.

Which is funny, because addiction is kinda a big theme in this game.

Addiction, money, fame, and big scary monsters

You are a hapless, impoverished person with big dreams of bigger wealth, but the best way to get money where you are is to venture into a dungeon of certain death... which you're super not into. Fortunately, while hanging out at the local soda bar, you end up with a grand scheme: con a bunch of soda-addicted crazies into going into the dungeon of death for you.

And thus, your journey as a very messed up kind of adventure pimp begins.

But... money!

Ethical complications aside, this game is fantastic. From the peppy, bullet-hell-style music to the awesome arcade-like graphics to the hilarious story (so far), this game has had me hooked from my first run with a mostly naked Soda Junkie.

You have different choices you can make while your party ventures through the dungeon. Do you choose each move yourself, or do you let the game automatically run your guys through? Which of the three boss chests do you open? Do you take one of the alternate paths that occasionally appear, or do you ignore all possible distractions?

Speaking of bosses...

They can be pretty epic...

Look how tiny you are compared to that behemoth! Your party, which can contain up to five adventurers of varying skills and abilities, is always dwarfed by the bosses (and minibosses) of each section. So far, I've only made it to the fourth zone, the ice levels. I'm sure I'll eventually get further, but I'm having a good time, regardless, and earning tons of money.

But what can you spend that money on?

One of the main features of Soda Dungeon is the Soda Bar, where you hire your adventurers to go make you money. You spend that sweet gold on upgrades to the Soda Bar, which let you buy and sell gear, earn money while offline, invite more and stronger adventurers who get buffs depending on the decor and food qualities, and you even end up with a wizard who can warp you to later levels you've beaten so you don't always have to run the dungeon from level 1! At one point, a faintly creepy gladiator guy shows up to let you know you can send a trio of adventurers to die for you in the arena for money. If you want to see how far your loot can take you, that's a fun challenge!

All in all, Soda Dungeon, from AN Productions and Pox Power via Armor Games is a great game, both on Steam and on Mobile, so if you're looking for a free game fix, this is definitely a fun one to play.

And I'm serious about that music being awesome. It really gets you pumped!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

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 420: Area 51 Raid Simulator

Area 51 Raid Simulator by PinkPsychic on Kongregate

Once upon a time, some crazy folks got together and agreed that it was time to "See Them Aliens" which are clearly, obviously, absolutely being held on a secure base in the Nevada desert called "Area 51". These people, these heroes, had a very simple plan: Get a bunch of people together and storm the base - after all, the heavily armed guards couldn't possibly shoot everyone, could they? And if they ran like prepubescent ninjas believing it, they could possibly even dodge the bullets! Genius. Foolproof.

Now, you, too, can join in on the fun if you missed out with Area 51 Raid Simulator by PinkPsychic. This idle simulation game has multiple endings, branching paths to greatness (or abject failure, that's an option too), and a shocking amount of depth. Especially since the game is essentially a bunch of buttons and menus.

It is.... incredibly simple.

Depending on how you spend your time leading up to the Raid, you might end up being the leader of a cult, being the coolest guy your friends know, being a memelord, or something else! I don't know if there's a millionaire ending, but I'd love to get it at some point!

This game is downright addictive, too, so if you're looking for a ridiculous time-waster, there you go: Area 51 Raid Simulator has you covered.

That'll about do ti for me, today, guys.

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 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