Try it Tuesday: January 4, 2023
New year, new games! Technically these are all games that came out at the end of last year, or close enough to the end – they’re basically 2022 games. But they’re still fairly new, and definitely new to me, and that’s all that matters!
The loose theme of the night was definitely “cozy vibes” which I think somewhat holds true for the menu I chose. I had originally planned to do this stream last week, but Valheim came creeping back into my life and absorbed the entirety of last week, so I went ahead and decided to take a little break from the binge tonight to get in some nice VARIETY. Presented in order, here’s what was showcased on last night’s stream.
Cafe Owner Simulator
I play a lot of goofy simulator games on the stream, as most of you know. Hell, I even dedicated a month to it in October called The Horror of Reality, and this year had a twist to it with The Wheel of Pain! Cafe Owner Simulator definitely fits in with those kinds of games, to an egregious degree, so I can’t really take a review of it too seriously, if you catch my drift. These games always feel a bit slapped together, and sometimes you can’t tell if they’re trying to take themselves seriously, or if it’s more of a gaff on the entire genre of simulator games. In this case I believe it to be the latter, though it does have some satisfying moments encased within. At times, it mimics one of the more successful titles of the genre, House Flipper, while at other times it definitely has the same kind of off-the-wall joke content that something like Gas Station Simulator or one of the Weed Shop games – all three of those titles are great, by the way, and super accessible to start playing. Cafe Owner Simulator is somewhat within the same pool of simulator games as these titles, but it doesn’t pull off some of the parts that could genuinely be more satisfying, which I think is the mark of a truly successful simulator game of this type: mundane task that you end up actually enjoying the hell out of. Renovations to the building were somewhat satisfying, as was the pickup of debris. Hiring employees and serving customers was a little obtuse, and the UI needs a lot of work to help players figure out more of what is going on. I had a lot of customers coming in and immediately leaving because I didn’t have the ingredients for certain dishes, which is something I found hard to figure out. There were dots next to what I needed to order, but it wouldn’t indicate that I was out of these to begin with, or what I needed to order in the first place to make sure I had those ingredients from the offset… at least, plainly. Some more tweaking to those early game tutorial elements would be helpful. I also wasn’t a big fan of the homeless guy walking around, but not because of the mere fact that he was homeless – moreso because there didn’t seem to be any way to temper his mood. If you upset him, it was forever a nuisance to deal with. Oh well. I’ll probably come back to Cafe Owner Simulator during one of my future simulator marathons, but it was more or less what I expected from the game… if not slightly disappointing.
?? out of 5 slabs
Links to the game:
Cygnus Enterprises
* This game was part of a paid promotion. My thoughts and opinions were not a part of the promotion, merely my time spent on the game
Upon initial viewing of trailers and screenshots for Cygnus Enterprises, I wasn’t actually sure what to expect. RTS? Building and colony management? Isometric combat? Well, all of the above is sort of available in the game, which was surprising to say the least. Furthermore, it felt like the bones of what could someday be a really well put together game. Cygnus Enterprises puts you in the role of a space explorer who is tasked with restoring a derelict colony on a world called Mytilus, which is lush and full of hostile creatures and abundant resources. The game has a unique approach to cross-genre mechanics, because it starts you off with the combat, which sort of feels like V Rising in space. This I really liked. Once you get through the initial tutorial, you’re thrown into the colony area, and asked to restore key parts of the facility to really get the ball rolling on what the core of the game is, which is making this colony live and breathe again. From here I could see what the hook would be, and I did find myself wanting to complete certain items before moving on entirely. There’s resource processing, construction, base building, and eventually you unlock a cloning facility that allows you to have colonists that – yes – you have to manage. Jobs, housing, all of that is a part of the management process. Another interesting twist is thrown in, however, because you have a stamina bar that only allows you to gather resources within your colony a certain number of times within a day cycle. Here’s where the game started to lose me a bit, but only because it feels like an incomplete idea. You have three types of missions that you can embark upon as well within a central computer hub – combat, gathering, and another one that presented you with three choices based on a text scenario that was spat out at you. Gathering missions weren’t fleshed out, nor do I know if they will be (this game is early access), so really the only missions you could truly embark upon in the game were the combat missions. All of these yielded resources for the base management, and I’m hoping there’s space in the developer roadmap for some variation in the missions. Combat was kind of fun, different types of gear and the skill tree made things interesting enough to keep going out, but the monsters were all relatively the same, and all of the maps looked identical to one another. I can forgive it because again, early access, but it definitely got a bit stale and I would hope that even within the content currently available, there are some changes to the look of the environments. I think the combat should be truly engaging and challenging, because you want to go on those missions, but have the difficulty scale with the resulting reward at the end, which feeds into the base building even more. Progression! I could see the intent here, but it’s not quite there yet. Therefore, Cygnus Enterprises is something I’d keep an eye on, because while not entirely a one-to-one copy of V Rising, it definitely shared similar elements with that game, which I found to be enjoyable.
??? out of 5 slabs
Links to the game:
Len’s Island
I tried out a demo for Len’s Island during one of my Demo Daze shows last year, and thought that it was pretty fun – at least, enough to commit it to memory and revisit later down the road. This particular Try it Tuesday was the night for that revisit, and I wasn’t expecting to enjoy what Len’s Island has to offer quite as much as I did! For all intents and purposes, Len’s Island is another survival crafting base builder, with a few little interesting differences. For starters, it also has an isometric perspective. There seems to be an element of narrative to the game, because you have a town you quickly find, and have to help bring back to life. There’s base building, which is deeply satisfying from right out of the gate. And, there is dungeon diving! The core loop of Len’s Island appears to be based around these dungeons, which are deep, dark caves that have a lot of resources and even more monsters within them. Enemies can vary in difficulty, and I ended up going so far into the first cave that I found an actual boss fight! Locked behind that was an NPC, which appears to feed into the narrative of saving this town, and potentially indicates that there are more out there in the world to discover. The map updates with different objectives with this kind of progression, and I found myself tasked with exploring somewhere further out that looks like it’s going to require a boat to reach. I didn’t even get this far last night! I didn’t even know boats existed in this game!! This seems, conceptually, like a bit of a departure from what the idea for Len’s Island originally was, but I’m not mad at all – I could have easily played this title all night, and intend on returning to it pretty soon. Were I to make a comparison, I would say that it, too, has V Rising qualities to some of its elements – specifically combat and base building – but it also has something cozy to it like My Time at Portia or Dinkum mixed in… mostly because of the town, so I have to imagine some inspiration was drawn there. Again, Len’s Island captivated me well beyond expectation, and I’m excited to go back to it as soon as I possibly can. Probably next week? Probably next week.
OH… Did I mention there was a Seinfeld reference in the game!? Festivus! Len’s Island just gets me.
????? out of 5 slabs
Links to the game:
