@lemm.ee
I follow lots of early access devs, and it's not uncommon for some devs to blatantly post updates only strategically, fixing some minor thing as the next seasonal Steam sale approaches. Some continue even after leaving early access: serious issues in bug report threads, but some minor fix gets posted as the sale approaches, clearly to make the game look alive, even though none of the big stuff is getting fixed.
Plenty of devs are their own business side, anymore.
If this added itch.io it'd be a fantastic filler for managing all the non-DRM off-Steam stuff.
Twin-stick shooter against various bugs and robots with some ARPG gearing, and the action here is fantastically tight with probably three key factors:
I play a lot of twin-stick and top-down shooters, and this does a great job mixing the arcade twin-stick feel of high intensity fending off a swarm with tactical top-down dungeon crawling elements, and it's just really special feeling to play. The core action feels not just well designed but like it was made just for me, and I'm genuinely glad someone made it (or is making it, since it's early access). Plus, it's extraction style instead of being a roguelite, so you're always right at the best action while still getting procedural levels, to keep runs a little different.
It does have a price in a sense, but that price also gets you that exact value in premium currency, so you don't actually pay anything extra for early access, you're just required to buy that much currency to open the doors.
No, at least six months is the plan.
Probably Ouija: Origin of Evil. Others we'd note in particular:
It's not really pointless, just because you can easily remap them to replace the abomination that is stick clicking.
Gameplay has been so on the decline nowadays, that just having an actual reactive counterplay element like a parry is a major positive, even if it's a huge simplification of defense. So, more engaging defense mechanics would be nice, sure, and there's certainly huge underexplored territory on "offensive" actions with non-universal parry type defensive properties to make fighting more interesting, but that doesn't mean what little we do have becomes a negative or less engaging.
It was tragic that the current Soul Calibur dumbed their deflect down to a single simple action instead of the series standard of at least needing to match low/high height zones (mids could be deflected with either, which was a nicely subtle drawback), but it's still better than not having it at all.
Parrying is good. More interesting parrying/defense is better, but that's a level of player and dev effort/investment that's rarely on the table.
I think they're sad, creatively bankrupt exercises that generally shouldn't get made, but on the other hand, it's good when they at least do different things or bring real ideas to the table. Tons of horror movies really aren't very good, so you'd expect doing a good thing better to be a slam-dunk, but it's rare for a remake to actually take that and execute. Even a frame-by-frame remake has the potential to do better and bring out the best in a proven idea, or even fix something that wasn't appreciated from the many limitations a lot of old horror worked under. That's one aspect more specific to horror that makes remakes potentially a lot more useful to do, but it's still an issue that people making remakes happen are usually doing it because they don't have something better.
Friday the 13th (2009) did a great job mixing polish, old ideas, and tongue-in-cheek series self awareness that all make it a fun way to enjoy what was good as well as what was bad about the early F13 movies. Then you have things like Shutter, where the remake is basically the same but still manages to be worse at every opportunity on top of the weird and pathetic jingoism. That was just ugly all around, and pollutes the movie space, so now we have to be forever careful to clarify Shutter (2004) instead of Shutter (2008), because the only thing seeing the remake does is reduce the impact of seeing the better movie.
We start our horrorfest movie plowing in mid August, so the September list is quite long already. Way too many for a post per movie :(
Like I’ve seen games that are in “early access” for years.
Games take years to build, especially when you are changing your design from feedback and improving the game. Some games come to early access intending to change little and just finish the game, while others come to get ideas and reshape the project as it moves along. Many EA projects are also indies with small teams, or even just one dev plugging along on their own, not even full time.
Of course there are bad actors, and devs who made mistakes (like thinking early access would fund development--even Valve tells devs not to do that, but there are always optimists thinking EA is for sales, and then they run out of money), but there are many ways to do every early access, and you have to look at each project to see what it looks like it's doing, how much and how often it posts updates, etc.
Also, if he's a bit of a tinkerer, he might be interested in trying shooters using gyro+flick-stick, which he probably didn't have access to before. Witchfire, Deep Rock Galactic, and Deadlink can readily play that way once set up in Steam Input. Some games you only need to set up the gyro-to-mouse and flick-stick, whereas others (eg Vermintide 2) you have to map the entire controller manually.
Jeez, the laziness of reviewing it based just on the store page. It's been in early access for like five years, getting better every update, and not one person there can even bother to actually play the game they recommend to others?
My partner and I found Beezel better than we were expecting based on reviews, so that was nice.
It's What's Inside was a lot of fun.
Aberrance says 2022 or 2024, so maybe it's new somewhere. It was a decent twisty horror attempt from Mongolia, so if you like the off the beaten path, check it out.
Week 1
Week 2
Thoughts
You'll Never Find Me, A Wounded Fawn, Post Mortem, and Beezel were unexpected finds. It's What's Inside was expected to be good, and was still quite fun. Luz... was notably weird but probably workable. We'll keep that around.
Strange Darling was awful. Big disappointment there, based on talk. We didn't expect much from VHS Beyond, especially with the alien theme, but one always hopes for anthologies to pull some surprises. Like most of VHS 2 and on, at least it wasn't worse.
Yeah, but I mean, we're over 40 now, plus some shows. Such a long and random list is not really useful to anyone. Here's some season-so-far notables instead:
The Demon Disorder has some fun bits, though it requires When Evil Lurks levels of tolerance for nonsensical authorial hand puppeteering. Once you get past that characters just can't do anything that makes sense, it's a trip.
Note: Haven't seen Nosferatu or Smile 2 yet. Also, I've seen some call You'll Never Find Me as a 2024 movie. If one includes that, it goes very high on our list.
It's funny to talk about "keeping control" because you can put a disk in a device that completely locks down every aspect of the game environment. PC offers generally way more control over games, allows more games, etc.
And there's GOG to buy from if one doesn't want Steam's potential ability to delicense a purchase, but I'd be playing games through Steam either way because of it's ability to tweak and rebuild controller handling for each game. I'm picky and a lot of game devs are sloppy about how they handle controllers, so having that extra control over the experience is a major plus to me.
It's more that many keep Origin because the EA App is so much more of a problem.
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