I played through Cairn this week and have lots more thoughts to come on this endlessly scenic, challenging and interesting game.
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Real players are identifiable because their movements are a little more unpredictable. The loop often goes, “great, I have a partner, are they real or — oop, they just ran away, they’re real. ↩︎
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Each player only gets a single revival between rests at monuments, so this put us each in a vulnerable position going forward, ratcheting up the tension. ↩︎
I played through Herdling this weekend and exuberantly recommend it. It’s a short, beautiful journey with a growing group of rescued furry beasts, and it’s long enough to make you feel connected to each and every one of them without wearing out its welcome. The mechanics are just right, and it’s punctuated with exhilarating moments and peaceful campfire rests.
At campfires, some of the Calicorns wait away from the fire, providing gentle signals that they need something from the player — one would wait near firewood to make sure I found it, another always wanted a few rounds of fetch with a toy it found, and others need cleaning, a pet, or a bite of fruit before they’re ready for bed. I got invested in making sure they were all taken care of.
The game is mostly about pathfinding, with increasing danger from the environment as you progress. The intensity is really satisfying, with risks and reveals that contribute to the sense of being part of something grand and mysterious. It’s a lovingly crafted adventure.
Playing a lot of Lonely Mountains Snow Riders this weekend. I really enjoyed its mountain-biking predecessor, and this version – on skis – is a treat. It adds a chaotic, fun multiplayer racing mode that gave me a surprisingly great co-op game last night, in which an opponent would zip ahead of me, then pause and turn to watch me descend to their location, emoting cheerful hearts and thumbs-ups.
When I yard-saled myself off a rock or into the river, which happened a lot on one of the maps we raced, they patiently waited, cheering me on, occasionally falling off their own skis so that we respawned together at the same checkpoint starting line to try the pitch again. When I finally found the right line, we glided together down the rest of the route, angling around long curves and dipping through a field of bumps before crossing the finish line to our camp. It was like skiing with a coach, or, sometimes, like skiing with my dad; and it reminded me of the surprise co-op session of Ashen that I played last fall, and was, 100%, the most wholesome and warm and encouraging game experience I’ve had in a long time.
Sometimes games are really good, gang.
I am so looking forward to this game: Cairn is a realistic-ish climbing game with a layer of survival and resource management mechanics, and it feels really good to play, right down to the calming breath from a bomber hold to the Elvis-leg twitching you get from holding too long on a sketchy, fatigued toe edge.
After a hard pitch, you can roll out your little bivvy sack, cook some instant noodles with your ultralight stove, and sleep with a view of the stars. It’s delightful and a perfect depiction of dirtbag climber downtime.
You have to manage food, water, and consumables like climbing chalk that give you a temporary boost, and at one point in the demo I had to rappel all the way down several crags to fill my water bottles and spend my meager few coins on a packet of fruit chews – I just hoped it would fill my energy meter enough to get back to, and then finish, the final long pitch of the climb. I had barely enough food energy to make it to the top, and when I finally topped out, doubled over from the effort, exhaustion and hunger, it felt like an amazing triumph.
I knew this game sounded familiar, and I found Riley MacLeod’s great writeup of the demo from a couple months back, which I’m sure I read at the time. The demo now has a mode that lets the player somewhat-gracefully select the limb to move, which I found I needed when I got myself into tricky, awkward positions on the wall. This game looks like something special and I can’t wait for its full release to see how it handles things like expedition-length trips – route finding for resupply drops, heck yes! – and what it does with the hints of story found in the demo.
I started playing Caves of Qud this weekend. It feels like a retro-throwback Rogue combined with an amazing amount of procedurally generated complexity and narrative depth. I keep dying. I’ll make another run.
I picked up Arco for myself to play this long winter’s holiday, and, wow is it good! Highly recommended.
I started playing Balatro and, alas, it’s such a good game! I don’t care much either way about poker, and Balatro adds a fun, challenging layer of modifiers and risk that makes it awfully hard to to put down.
I had such a good experience playing Ashen last night that I want to share. (I mentioned playing Ashen in my week notes.) It has an inventive multiplayer mechanic that pairs the player with another player at approximately the same place, if one is available. If one isn’t available, you get an NPC companion, who is often quite competent but sometimes prone to disappearing or falling off ledges.
Last night in a new area – a dark, winding, flooded canyon – I was matched with another player1. Even with fast travel, the game does such a good job with art and environments to create a sense of being somewhere new, dangerous, and far from home. My new companion appeared at just the right time, as I approached a small camp of several strong marauders by myself. Together we handily took them out, and then we carefully moved along gangways from platform to platform high over the water, fighting enemies and finding quest items and treasures nearly in unison. They went down once and I revived them; later they returned the aid when I was surprised and overwhelmed, appearing with a flurry of heavy blows to finish off the enemies swarming me.2
We progressed for a long time, maybe 30 minutes, silent companions leapfrogging from small patches of light and safety back into skirmishes. At a chokepoint in the route, far into the uphill journey, I was long out of health renewal items and getting nervous. We faced one final cluster of tough enemies and then pressed up a very long corridor, to emerge finally into bright daylight, in a brand new environment, in sight of a fast travel monument. We were safe! This was a really cool semi-social adventure that perfectly showed off the game’s theme of finding hope – and help – in a dark place.