"Coming Soon..."

For no better reason than it just occurred to me it would make a quick post and because everything else I have in mind to write about would take fricken' forever  - and require a ton of research that I'm really not in the mood for right now - here's a list of the unreleased games on my Steam wishlist, along with some brief thoughts and a rough estimate of the chances I'll buy any of them, should they ever become available, something that can't be considered in any way a certainty, if previous experience is anything to go by.

I'm counting them down from the top, which means we're going backwards in time, from the most recently added to the longest-ago, although that just tells you what's been on the list the longest, not how long any of the games might have been in production. It's frightening how long these things take.

Throne and Liberty - I'm guessing everyone's heard of this one. It's "a free-to-play, multi-platform MMORPG", which obviously explains what it's doing on my list. It began development as part of the Lineage franchise but supposedly now stands alone. 

I'm fairly sure I added it because it's going to be published by Amazon, which means it will most likely be easy to access without having to create a whole new set of accounts and passwords, something I find myself increasingly unwilling to bother with these days. I also watched a promo video and it looked pretty, so that probably had something to do with it, too.

The game was in the news recently when the Producer resigned, a fairly unusual event at this stage of production, it has to be said. Whether that will affect the timeline remains to be seen but the game is supposed to arrive "sometime in 2024". Since it's free, I'll almost certainly try it but I have a feeling I won't stay long. 

Chicken Police: Into The Hive - The sequel to Chicken Police: Paint It Red, which I thoroughly enjoyed and wrote about here more than once. I played and posted about the demo to this one, too. Once again, I enjoyed  the humor, the writing and the gameplay but I did feel diminishing returns might be beginning to kick in. 

Still, it seems like a solid sequel. There's no estimated release date other than "Soon". I'll definitely buy it at some point but I'm in no hurry to play the game on release. I'll probably wait for a sale on this one.

Under A Rock - The first game on the list I have no memory of ever seeing before let alone wishlisting. I had to read the description to remind myself that it's "a procedural open-world survival craft game" and even then I couldn't remember it. 

Reading further, I see the set-up is that you play "an early-nineteenth century explorer who has just been stranded in a strange new world, a hidden world that few can travel to (and from!), with a different evolutionary path.", which gives off some definite Nightingale vibes. Graphically, however, it looks much more light-hearted and cartoony. It looks fun, in fact. I still don't remember how I found it but I'm glad I did.

No release date or price yet but it will go into Early Access first. Unless it's unreasonably expensive, I'll most likely give it a try when that happens. 

Once Human - I don't think I need to tell anyone what this is, at least not anyone who visits here regularly. I have cooled down on it a little since I figured out that gameplay will be more repetitive in the mid-high levels than I originally imagined but I don't think that will significantly impact the sheer, exhuberant fun of the whole thing. It's just a real blast to run around shooting at bizarre monsters, exploring abandoned office buildings and shopping malls, beating up animated kitchen appliances and chatting with the weird people who have to try and make some kind of life for themselves among the chaos. 

All of that should provide enough entertainment to keep me playing for a while but if not there's some great base-building to enjoy as well. The estimated release date is Q3 2024. Apple says early August. They just opened registrations for the mobile version and they're already up to 13.5m. I suspect this one is going to go big. I'll likely be there from Day One.

Dungeons of Hintenberg - A gorgeously designed action-adventure RPG that Steam tells me "doesn't look like other things you've played in the past".  It kind of does, though. It reminds me of quite a few adventure games set in mountain villages and small central European towns, where mystery abounds and puzzles must be solved. The action part is new, though.

This one has a solid release date: 18 July 2024. There was also apparently an extended play test that went on for much of May, about which no-one told me. You'd have thought I might have gotten an email, what with having the game on my wishlist. I've missed that chance to try before I buy but luckily there will also be a demo in next month's Next Fest so I'll be sure to give that a go.

If I like what I see, maybe I'll buy it on release. I kinda doubt it, though. Chances are I'll play the demo and then feel like I'm done. That seems to be my pattern.

Schrodinger's Catgirl - Let's be honest. I wishlisted this one for the title. It's genius, isn't it? 

It does look good, though. It's a Point & Click adventure based around a murder in an abandoned manor house, which makes me think of Scooby Doo, although Steam compares it to Disco Elysium. Yeah. I wish!

There's no release date but there is a demo available, which I assume will be in the upcoming Next Fest. I'll play it, post about it and maybe make up my mind about it then. I do have a much better record of converting Point & Click Adventures from demo to wishlist to purchase than any other genre so here's hoping.

Old Skies - Now we're starting to get to the games that have been on the list for a while. I added this one (And the last one.) in 2022. It has a demo, which I played and posted about a while back, when I called it "a great advert for the game and a lot of fun in its own right". Since then I've heard not a word.

It's a Wadjet Eye production, which means I'm fairly confident this will still be in production, not gathering virtual dust after the creators lost interest and moved on to something more lucrative. They could get a move on, though. Once again, a definite will-buy and quite likely on release.

Albert Wilde: Quantum P.I. - Another one wishlisted after I played and posted about the demo. But that seems like a looong time ago. I wasn't over-enthusiastic about it at the time and I did note that it felt like a very early build. 

The developers were still trucking around festivals promoting the game until late last year but I haven't seen anything since then. Honestly, I'd be quite surprised this one ever appears in anything like a finished form and even if it does I don't think I'll be buying it. The moment has passed.

Nighthawks - And finally, the oldest game on the list and quite possibly the one I want to play most of all. Another Wadjet Eye title, this time centered on vampires trying to build a nightclub empire. I mean, seriously, why don't all vampires do that? It seems so obvious...

Once again, Steam thinks this is similar to Disco Elysium and for once it might be right. I will certainly be buying this as soon as someone will take my money but I've been waiting almost three and a half years now and there's still no sign of a release date - or even a demo. Some people really do like to take their time, don't they?

And that's the lot. Roll on Next Fest so I can add a bunch more games I'll probably never buy!

You Say You Need It But You Don't

Over the years I've heard a lot about gaming backlogs and Buyer's Regret. The two phenomena could be seen as twisted mirror images of each other, one reflecting gluttony, the other its inevitable corollary, indigestion. Not sure how a mirror would reflect indigestion and frankly I don't want to try. Let's move on.

As I was reading Asmiroth's post on the misleading nature of sales and remembering Azuriel's analysis of the even more duplicitous pricing of expansion tiers, I couldn't help noticing both were describing problems quite different from those I have, when trying to decide whether or what to buy. I rarely get to the point of considering the comparative value of games or expansions. Mostly I get stuck on the existential question of need versus desire.

The easiest choice, by far, is whether or not to buy expansions for games I'm already playing. Why wouldn't you? Well, as it happens, Syp makes quite a good case for why you might not. You may already be so far behind the curve that expansion content won't be relevant or even accessible. You might not want to jump straight past a whole load of stuff you haven't seen, even if the expansion does come with a boost designed to let you do just that.

Mostly, though, if you've been playing an mmorpg for a while, you'll probably be ready for an infusion of new content. Ponying up for the latest expansion is a pretty straightforward decision. Which version of the expansion to get, though? That can be more of a poser.

Like Azuriel, under normal circumstances the base expansion is all I need. I don't generally play cutting-edge content. I don't raid or do Mythic/Heroic/Big Trouser dungeons. It's a safe bet that I won't need the pay-to-win bonuses some companies roll into their higher price tiers. 

As for the cosmetics, do me a favor! When I find a look I like, I stick with it for years. I'm not that target market. And anyway, like I'm going to pay real money for imaginary hats! Pshaw!

That's the "Need" part of my brain kicking in there, by the way. It talks like that, miserable bastard that it is. The "Desire" part is jumping up and down, squealing "Oooh! Shiny!" Sometimes it's hard to ignore but I manage.

Once in a while the extras in a deluxe expansion pack will come so close to having genuine, practical applications I'll teeter on the edge. Value for money is a nebulous concept at the best of times, slipperier still when what you're thinking of buying is intangible but things like character slots, inventory space and cash shop money at least make a direct comparison between cost and uitility feasible.

And yet, to date, I have never succumbed. I have never bought anything other than the base expansion for any mmorpg and I can't say I regret it. Is there anything I could have had, the lack of which has made me unhappy? Nope. Nothing. I obviously can't even remember what any of the things I didn't buy were. Who could? Money well unspent.

So, with the glossy brochure firmly folded to the page that says "Cheapskate Edition", the baseline for the decision on whether to buy an expansion would seem to be "Am I going to play it right away?". That's a very easy question to answer. If I'm already playing the game at least a few times each week then yes, of course I am.

Around this point I probably ought to talk about pre-orders but I'm not gonna. Different topic altogether. Let's leave it at "Whether?" and "What?" and forget about "When?" For our purposes "when" means "at launch".

There is one more wrinkle to straighten out before we move on from expansions to whole games. The account issue. For a lot of people it won't be relevant but for all kinds of half-assed reasons I frequently find myself with more than one account for a game and what's worse I play them, too. 

I have seven Daybreak accounts for example, three Guild Wars 2 accounts, two Lord of the Rings Online accounts (Might be three...), three Battlenet/World of Warcraft accounts... I have, quite literally, more mmorpg accounts than I could hope to remember.

Usually I would only want to expand one of them for each game but there have been exceptions. Two of my three GW2 accounts have Heart of Thorns for the very good reason that I liked it so much I wanted a second go. Only one has Path of Fire because even once was one time too many.

Even with all that mental clutter, it's clearly not a difficult choice. In the end I buy the expansion and play it. Then I either like it or I don't but it's done and I accept it. For given values of  both "Need" and Desire" the scales are balanced. It's over. We move on.

What about those sales, then? Didn't come into the picture for expansions, did they? Expansions never go on sale until the next one's in sight, looming over the horizon, casting an ominous shadow. De facto, by that point I've either bought it long ago or I've lost all interest.

New games, though, that's different. Every one is a unique opportunity to start over. Each purchase is a discrete and separate process. God, the thinking! It hurts my head!

Here's the thing: I always want new games, just like everyone else. I'm not an android. No, really, I took the test and passed. (I failed this one, though, so who really knows? Who ever really knows? Eh? EH??)

Ahem. Yes, I read about games and think "That looks like it might be fun. I'd play that." Sometimes I go so far as to put those games on a wishlist. And then I don't buy them.

Why don't I buy them? It's simple. Games do not come with an allotment of extra hours with which to play them. If it says a game takes on average thirty hours then you have to supply all thirty of them from your own stock. And you probably already had plans.

I do, anyway. The key time for me to buy a new game is when I've run out of old ones. That sometimes happens but not really all that often because mmorpgs are stretchy. However much time you have they tend to expand to fill it. It's why they're so very good for people with more time than they have things to do, that being the genre's core demographic.

I have more time than I have things to do, being semi-retired, but it still doesn't mean I want to spend all of it playing games. For a start I have this blog to write. It doesn't write itself, you know, though I'm sure it often seems like it must. And having bloated out to a post every day means even less time for playing games.

It's awkward. I feel, sometimes, as though I might be neglecting the games I already have. Not like neglecting a puppy. That would be terrible. Games are not puppies. They don't get mopey and fractious and have dull coats if you don't play with them enough. They just sit on your hard drive or in their cases, silent, inert. Looking at you.

I can't not know they're there. (I've stopped talking in the second person, you'll notice. It wasn't fooling anyone.) There's a nagging feeling and it gets uncomfortable, which is how we end up here with posts like this one. 

Luckily, it only takes a quick hour or two and I can happily forget about a game for months. Years, sometimes. Or that's how it goes with mmorpgs. With single-player games that have a beginning, a middle and an end it's more problematic. Those, I feel more of a responsibility towards.

Let's look at those four games up at the top, the ones on my wishlist that went on sale this weekend.

Swords of Legend Online is a an mmorpg I don't particularly want to play and it's quite expensive even at 40% off, considering it's not all that different to any number of Free to Play titles. I certainly don't need it and I don't even want it all that much, either. I'd kind of like to have it installed on my hard drive so I'd know I could play it if I felt like it but I know I wouldn't feel like it so what would be the point?

Wildermyth is the one everyone goes on about how great it is. Terrible syntax there, which I'd have to say is what runs through my mind every time I read a post about Wildermyth and imagine the character dialogue being read out loud. People say how immersive and convincing it is but the screenshots tell another story. 

All of which, ironically, makes me even keener to try it for myself to see what it is that I'm not getting. I really wanted to buy Wildermyth yesterday and the reason I didn't is because if i did I knew I'd start playing it immediately. I'd then either find it was as good as everyone says, in which case I'd be playing nothing else for days, or I'd find it wasn't and I'd feel I'd wasted my money.

Since I neither want to derail my current activities right now nor feel like I've tossed £14.61 down a FOMO drain I've decided to leave Wildermyth where it is, on my wishlist. We'll see what combination of circumstances and price cuts it takes to shunt it onto my hard drive. Pretty sure half price would do it.

Lake I liked when I played the demo but it's quite slow and quite.. I don't know, I want to say "difficult" but that's wrong. It's not easy to play, I think that's what I mean. I found I had to pay attention. If I found it a little draining in a demo, would I want a whole game of it? Not sure. And that discount is pitiful. Why even bother? So, definitely don't need, not even sure I want. Easy skip.

Lastly, Sable. I liked the demo a lot. I liked the look of it, I liked the music, I liked the setting and the characters and the writing. The gameplay was acceptable. Not exactly riveting but didn't need to be. Of the four, this is definitely the the one I want most.

A third off is a substantial discount, too. Substantial but not sufficient. I can tell you from decades in retail that at a third off you're pushing people who were definitely going to buy to buy now but you aren't pushing people who were maybe going to buy to buy at all. I was maybe going to buy. I still am. At 50% off I might be nudged. At 33% I'll stick, thanks.

On the last paragraph, I think we may as well define "people who were definitely going to buy" as people who've decided they need. Obviously they don't. No-one needs a video game. (Although maybe we should avoid absolutes. You might not think anyone needs Walkers oven-baked sea salt flavor crisps but you would be mistaken.)

My problem is that I'm perhaps too good at knowing what I need. Or maybe I'm too precise. Too specific. Too hardline. Or maybe I'm just too weird about it.

I mean, apparently I needed to spend two hours writing this when I could have been playing New World or even Wildermyth, had I bought it, because look, here's some time I could have borrowed that would never have been missed. Clearly I have my priorities entirely straight, no doubt about that, none at all.

Anyway, I'm glad we could have this talk. It's cleared a lot of things up for me. (It hasn't.) Let's do it again sometime soon. (Let's not. Really, let's not.)

Roll on the Boxing Day sales!

Speed Dating : Steam Next Fest

Thanks to the hard cutoff at the end of the Swords of Legends Online demo, I found time last night to do what I'd meant to do all along: download some single-player demos to try. I didn't have either the time or the energy to comb through the plethora of short sales pitches in Steam's Next Fest, particularly given the delight the platform seems to to take in stuffing most the entries into all of the categories, but I gave it a few minutes and pulled out a handful of choice-looking plums. Then I played through all of them.

Well, kind of. Let's say I pressed Play on all of them. That's true enough. Of the six demos I downloaded, so far I've only finished one but I've seen enough for a bullet point or two. That's about all you can expect from a demo anyway. Here they are in order of time played.

• The Secret of Retropolis - Minutes Played: Zero (0). Uninstalled.
  

This looked right up my street: "A blend of classic point-and-click adventure with immersive cinematography. Embody the witty protagonist of a film noir plot. Meet unforgettable characters. Solve puzzles. Lose yourself in the retro-futuristic atmosphere". The screenshots looked stylish. I was itching to get started.

It wouldn't play. At all. Clicked the buttons, nothing happened. I tried restarting a few times but no joy. Turns out in my excitement to play I'd missed one key factor: "The Secret of Retropolis is a VR narrative game."Ah! That explains it. My bad. Next! 

• Catie in Meowmeowland - Minutes Played: Four (4). Uninstalled.

 

Okay, this was a gamble. "Catie in MeowmeowLand is a classical humorous point-and-click adventure game. Help little Catie get back home from the bizarre cat world of MeowmeowLand!" Could go either way. The screenshots looked inviting and unusual, like stills from a child's picture-book. I had high hopes although the word "humorous" in the description of any video game always rings alarm bells.

Within seconds of logging in I was fairly sure it wasn't for me. The same art that looks good in screenshots looks awkward and uncomfortable in game. Nothing wrong with it, just not my thing. The visuals would have been manageable if the gameplay had been to my taste but "point-and-click adventure" clearly means something very different to whoever wrote the blurb than it does to me.

• The Lost Legends of Redwall: The Scout Act III - Minutes Played: Twenty-Four (24). Uninstalled.

Much more of a known quantity, this one. "A whimsical puzzle-adventure game set in the world of the bestselling Redwall books. In this third and final episode, seeking escape from Cheesfthief you find yourself beholden to a family of mysterious Stoats who may or may not be carnivores..." Based on a much-loved series of children's' books and the third installment of an established spin-off series of video games. Should be fine, right?

Maybe. Maybe not. The Redwall series looks like the kind of thing I like but in fact I have never been fond of it. I don't much like Brian Jacques' prose style and when I did try and read one of the books I didn't much like some of the concepts and philosophy either. Still, it's talking animals having adventures and solving puzzles. How bad could it be?

Not very bad. Just rough around the edges and uncomfortable to play. It opens with a lengthy cut scene in which the characters watch a stage play and catch each other up on the plot. I counted four typos in the captions. There may have been more but some of the text was on and off the screen far too fast for me to read it. 

 

After that it was into the game proper. Movement was floaty. I changed the settings several times but it never felt right. The developers have gone for full immersion with almost no instructions and no visible UI at all. Most of the twenty-four minutes I spent with the demo went on trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing and which keys I needed to press to do it. By the time I'd worked that out I'd also decided I didn't care. 

About the only thing I liked were the character portraits and associated text. Those were nicely done. The "Scent" system, whereby the mice identify and find things by smell is original in concept but in execution doesn't seem all that much different to any other "Press key to see things light up" mechanic. To be fair, I didn't play long enough to be able to tell if there was more to it than that. And I'm not going to. Pass.

• The Season of the Warlock - Minutes Played: Fifty-five (55). Completed.
  

Okay, this is more like it. "The Season of the Warlock is a weird adventure game inspired by the gothic tale tradition, with two storylines to choose from. The soul of a warlock of yore, trapped in a portrait, will present Lord Alistair Ainsworth with an offer he will not be able to resist. Or will he? It’s your call..." Looks good, sounds solid. "Weird" is a tad worrying but let's give it a go...

I liked this one. It's a straightforward point-and-click adventure in the way I understand the term. You walk around inspecting things, pocketing things, talking to people and solving puzzles. The descriptions you get when you inspect things are amusing, the things you pick up are logical, the people you talk to are characterful and the puzzles you have to solve are manageable. 

 

And it's funny. Not laugh out loud funny but wry smile funny. The jokes land, most of the time, and there aren't too many of them. Nothing feels desperate or forced which is more than I can say of "funny fantasy" games in general. I was a bit doubtful of some of the historical research (Did they have toy poodles with pompom cuts in the 1840s?) but it seems a bit pointless to quibble over historical accuracy when the basic premise involves a five-hundred year old warlock who can only communicate by way of an oil painting.

The visuals were very impressive throughout, rich and detailed with a tactile depth to them. The UI and the controls, always crucial to the success of a point-and-click adventure, felt well-designed and natural. I'd have gone on playing this one for a lot longer if I hadn't come to an actual "Game Over" screen. I haven't wishlisted it yet but I might. 

• Lake - Minutes Played: Seventy-Eight (78) so far. Incomplete. Still playing.
  

I didn't know what this was going to be but it looked intriguing. "It's 1986 - Meredith Weiss takes a break from her career in the big city to deliver mail in her hometown. How will she experience two weeks in beautiful Providence Oaks, with its iconic lake and quirky community? And what will she do next? It's up to you." After nearly an hour and half I still don't know what this game is and I'm still intrigued.

It's a walking sim, I know that much. I mean it literally, too. Most of the gameplay consists of driving around the small, lakeside town of Providence Oaks, the town where you grew up and which you left over twenty years ago. You're in your dad's postal delivery van. You have letters and parcels for houses and businesses marked on your map. You get out the van, walk up to the mailbox, drop in the letter, get back in the van and drive on. If there's a parcel you walk around to the rear of the van, open the doors, take out the parcel, walk to the door of the house and ring the bell. 

 

When you've delivered everything you take the van back to the post office and go back to your parental home for the evening. Your folks are vacationing in Florida and you've agreed to cover your dad's mail route while he's away. At least I think that's the deal. He could be retired. He's definitely not dead. The phone might ring. It could be your mom. It could be your boss. You talk on the phone then watch TV or read a book. In the morning you wake up, go to the post office, get back in the van and do it all again.

All of this you're doing in your vacation time. You have a real job. You're a coder. You just finished a product. Some business program. It hasn't shipped yet. Your boss doesn't seem to understand vacation time so he's calling you at home and sending you promotional copy to work on. There's some sense of tension there. It is a program, not an app, too. This is all happening in 1986.

 

I didn't read anything on the Steam page before I played this. I was completely at sea for the first half hour. I kept waiting for a plot to develop. It never did. The visuals were so beautiful and the gameplay so relaxing, so immersive, after a while I stopped caring what it was "supposed" to be and just fell into what it was. 

Driving the van is easy and fun. The radio plays, intermittently, and the songs are perfectly suited to the setting. As you deliver mail you meet people from your past and chat with them. Sometimes they ask you to do something for them. I took a lady's cat to a guy on the shore who runs a bait store because she thought the cat was sick and the guy is the nearest thing in the town to a vet. I had a conversation in the video store that felt like it might have been flirting but might just as well not. I had an awkward conversation with my best friend from school, who I'd not seen for twenty years.

 

I really like Lake. It's one of those games that indie devs seem so keen on making that feel to me like living inside a graphic novel from the eighties or nineties, something by Harvey Pekar or Daniel Clowes. Only with even less plot. The more games like this I play, the more I want to play. 

I'll finish the demo for sure. I'm curious to see how long it is, for one thing. I've already done three days' delivery and I'm only supposed to be there for two weeks. Seems like I've seen a substantial chunk of the game already. Lake is on my wishlist now and I highly recommend the demo. It's almost a game in itself.

•  Sable - Minutes Played: Eighty (80). Incomplete. Restart needed.
  

This had the most striking screenshots of all the demos and a description to match. "Embark on a unique and unforgettable journey and guide Sable through her Gliding; a rite of passage that will take her across vast deserts and mesmerizing landscapes, capped by the remains of spaceships and ancient wonders." Sounds great but what about the gameplay? I was nervous.

I needn't have been. This was probably my favorite although it's a close call between Sable and Lake. The graphics are exceptional and they work even better in game than they do in stills. The color palette drives the heat in the day and brings a chill at night. The style has a luxuriant minimalism that evokes sixties and seventies bandes dessinées. I could sense the aesthetic of movies like Barbarella and Dune somewhere in the background.

 

Great graphics in a video game mean nothing if I can't control my character. I was a little worried this was going to be some kind of platformer or jumping game. I don't get on with those as a rule. Sable begins with your character in a desert ruin. With only the most minimal of instruction you're left to figure out what to do next and yes, it does involve climbing, jumping, crawling and all those things.

Joyously, Sable also has some of the most natural movement controls I've run across since I first played Genshin Impact. Jumping, gliding, climbing, riding your sand-bike... everything just feels easy and intuitive. The only real problem I had was a slight tendency towards motion sickness as I careened around the landscape, hurling myself off  high places, spinning the camera with abandon. My fault, not the game's.

 

The demo consists of the opening sequence of what looks like it's going to turn into a young girl's rite  of passage: a walkabout in the desert to come to know herself except the desert is on another planet and the walking is actually riding a hoverbike. Unfortunately, the guy who was supposed to source and build the bike had other things on his mind and forgot so you're going to have to build it yourself. But before you can do that you need to go scavenge the parts from some crashed spaceships...

I mean, come on! Aren't you sold already? I am! It's a melding of very traditional rpg gameplay with parkour-lite movement in service of a classic bildungsroman narrative. The writing is good, too, and there's just the right amount of dialog. It's so nice to play a game that says just as much as it needs to say and no more.

 

I had just one problem with the Sable demo and it's a very unusual one: I couldn't find any way to save my progress. I was so immersed I played my eighty minutes without even thinking about saving and then Mrs. Bhagpuss called lunch. I searched for a save function and couldn't find one so I took the only logout option I could find, assuming the game would autosave and it didn't. There's no save function of any kind as far as I can tell. Start a new game is the only choice.

I think I was probably very close to the end. I'm guessing the demo finishes when you build your bike and I had two of the three parts. I just needed to figure out how to get some beetles to bribe the horrible child who'd hidden the last part and I'm guessing that would have been that. Even so, it was annoying not to be able to come back after lunch and finish what I'd started. 

I certainly don't mind going through the whole thing again but I'll have to be sure of not being interrupted for a couple of hours when I do. Not as easy you'd think. I've wishlisted Sable so I might just leave it until it comes out to start over.

Both Sable and Lake are due to arrive in finished form in September. With Bless Unleashed and New World due in August and quite possibly End of Dragons around the same time it's more than likely my wishlist won't be seeing much use for a while but both of these games are going to get bought and played... eventually.

I guess that's a win for the Steam Demo Fest. Now if they'd just make it easier to sort the demos meaningfully...

Wishlist

So, Black Friday. What's that all about? As usual, I got a whole lot of links to things I wouldn't buy at any price, plus a whole lot more for stuff I might consider if it was cheap enough. Certainly not at these miserable discounts, though. Seriously, if it's not half price or less, who even looks?

And of course there was something from Steam telling me there were offers on five things from my wishlist. Like that's news. Something on my Steam wishlist is always on offer and still I never buy anything. 

I was thinking only the other day how I ought to go in and clear the whole thing out. I'm not sure I'd download most of the things on there if they were giving them away. And it's not as though I've wishlisted a lot of games. Seven, to be precise, and one of those I swear I had nothing to do with. I think it added itself when I downloaded an alpha build.

 

I'll tell you what the titles I have on there are. Why not? I'm not ashamed of any of them. They're all perfectly respectable titles. I'd be in a bit of trouble if you asked me why I'd picked them instead of any of a thousand others but I'm sure I had my reasons at the time.

The not-so-magnificent seven are

• Kenshi
• Legend of Grimrock II
• Totally Accurate Battle Simulator
• Past Fate
• Flowscape
• Kind Words
• Fuser

Let's see if I can figure out why I put those on the list.

Kenshi's the kind of game that I dreamed of playing in the '80s and '90s. I read about it a couple of years ago and got a big nostalgia hit for the person I was back then. So I put it on the list. It's been up for sale several times since and every time I imagine actually playing it it's not nostalgic longing that sweeps over me - it's a wave of boredom. Imagine actually playing something like that in 2020. The world has moved on since games like this seemed like an amazing idea and I hope I have, too. If not, I don't want to know.

If Kenshi invokes nostalgia, Legend of Grimrock II is Marty McFly pulling up in your driveway in a deLorean and inviting you back to 1985. It's Eye of the Beholder II with slightly better graphics. I just think there are better ways to spend my time. And my money.
 

Steam, always parental, warns me Totally Accurate Battle Simulator (TABS for short) isn't like anything I've played before. That's the appeal, really. It looks like something you'd fire up for a few minutes for a laugh. I generally feel annoyed with myself if I spend much time on stuff like that, though, so it's a temptation I should probably resist.

Past Fate is an mmorpg in very rough alpha state. I played it a couple of times and wrote about it. I don't like it much, I'm not interested in playing it and I have no memory of putting it on this list. I'm guessing playing the alpha added it automatically.

Flowscape I had to look at again to remind myself what it was. It's not a game at all. Occupy White Walls looks like a theme park in comparison. I'm not sure how it ended up on Steam, much less on my wishlist. I think I must have seen it as some kind of replacement for Landmark, which, now I think about it, does make it sound quite appealing. Hmm. It's 35% off. and it wasn't expensive to begin with. I might buy this one. 

There's no real excuse for not already having bought Kind Words except that plainly I don't want to. It's almost always on some kind of offer and it's only £3.99 full price. Thing is, I just know I'd never "play" it, if playing is even what you do there. I think I drained all the value out of this one already when I read all the blog posts about it a year or two ago.

Fuser, though, now there's a different story. I really want to play this. Or mess about with it, more like. I got an email announcing it a few weeks ago because somehow it's an NCSoft (sorry, NC) game and apparently that means if you play Guild Wars 2 you have to be told about it. 

I was interested enough that I watched one of the tutorial videos and it did look like it might be fun. I was less than impressed with the list of licensed songs that come with it but in a way the weirdly disparate nature of the tracks - I mean, who hasn't dreamed of a Glen Campbell/Pixies/Fetty Wap joint? - just makes it more intriguing.

 

The price tag, though. £54.99. Yeah, right. I wouldn't pay half that. Maybe a quarter. Maybe. Which is a moot point because it's the only title on my wishlist that hasn't received any kind of discount yet.

There's one title missing from that list of seven because yesterday it was a list of eight. I cracked! Our corporate overlords got me. I bought something on a Black Friday discount. First time ever, I think.

As I'm sure anyone who's played it has already realized from the pictures, the game that switched from my Steam wishlist to my Steam library yesterday was Unavowed. I'd had it on there for quite a while, since I looked at it after someone in the blogosphere was raving about it. I ought to be able to remember who that was but I'm afraid I've forgotten. Sorry about that. It's my age (plays all-situation get-out card). If you'd care to out yourself in the comments I'll backfit a link. 

(And thanks to Jeromai, who points out in the comments that he was singing Unavowed's praises a couple of years ago (and I commented to say I was adding it to my wishlist, where it was then the only item) but that we both most likely first heard about it from xyzzysqrl, who called it "one of the best games I played in 2018". It's a good thing someone's paying attention!).

Unavowed is a really obvious, unadventurous purchase. Of all the games on the list it was always the one most likely to make it to "owned" status. It's a point&click adventure game, my second-favorite genre after mmorpgs. It's urban fantasy, a subgenre I think is just made for this kind of game. It has stellar reviews. It also looks to be more than averagely replayable, making it potentially good value for money.

 

And I was missing a good adventure game. As has been apparent from numerous posts here over the last couple of years, I get quite into them and also I get quite a lot out of them, not least material for the blog. There's only so many posts I can write about levelling in World of Warcraft, after all (although that particular well is nowhere near dry yet, trust me...).

So I bought it, installed it and played through the introduction and the first case. And I was planning to write a first impressions piece on it, only, last night, right after I finished playing Unavowed, I watched the fourth episode of the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which gave me an idea for a post that would combine both experiences plus a bunch of others... and then this morning I sat down and wrote this instead.

So now I have two more posts to write. Three, when you count this month's song title round-up. I guess my mini-drought is over. Suppose I'd better get on with it.

I think I might just play some more Unavowed first...