Game Reviews – PAX Aus 2022

I went to this year’s PAX Australia gaming convention and briefly reviewed of a lot of independently developed video games, as well as several board games, for friends who weren’t there. Now you, too, may read my reviews.

Video games reviewed: Before We Leave ; Darkweb Streamer ; Dredge ; Every Hue of You ; The Godfeather: a Mafia Pigeon Saga ; Gubbins ; Mars First Logistics ; Repella Fella ; Sigil of the Magi ; Spies and Soldiers
Board games reviewed: The Crew: Mission Deep Sea ; Magic Maze ; Nataterra
Bonus content: Aethermon: Tower of Darkness ; Chess Plus

Video games

Before We Leave

A “mostly non-violent” city builder [Before We Leave on Steam]

You progress through different levels of civilisation, occasionally defending your planet against space whales, until you can depart your planet. No specific goal other than the experience. Pleasant artwork and relaxed theme.

Darkweb Streamer

Roguelike RPG with psycho-social horror themes, 8-bit art, text interface. [Darkweb Streamer site]

You are a streamer on the dark web competing for viewers to become #1. Your viewers want occult shit, so you go out and collect haunted dolls, magic bones, voodoo headdresses, etc. Unfortunately, some of these things actually ARE occult and your apartment gradually becomes haunted; you have to balance the growth of your viewerbase against your loss of sanity… and life.

Lots of black white and red. I’m impressed by the idea and watched gameplay with interest; not sure whether I’d want multiple plays through. Worth a look.

Dredge

Lovecraftian fishing RPG. [Dredge site]

This is fun. Sleepy seaside town with a dark mystery. You are hired as the local fisherman in a rusty boat. (Maybe you’re fleeing some troubles at home? I missed it.) You catch fish, sell for upgrades. BUT! The town is not what it seems. There are suspicious activities and shady characters. What mysteries can you dredge from the deep during the course of your fishes?

I enjoyed this, and would happily spent more time exploring the story. The style is similar to Penny Aracde: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness; animated text dialogue and 3D movement. But no combat, AFAICT. I recommend.

Every Hue of You

A visual novel, I think. Maybe emotional therapy through conversations? Terrible mini-games. [Every Hue of You on Steam]

You live in a world of anime characters whose emotions, when too strong & not well controlled, can manifest in the physical environment. There is a stigma against showing emotion.

You run a jewellery store and are sad because it’s been raining for weeks. Hot dude shows up but he’s from the government and – oh no! – it’s been raining BECAUSE YOU’RE SAD.

But hot guy doesn’t want to lock you up: here’s here to talk about your feelings and help you process them. You discover you can channel people’s feelings into jewellery; a rare and special skill.

People come into your store and ask for jewellery. You have interesting, open conversations about their emotions (‘for the purpose of your work’), and it’s lovely.

Then, because the designers want to break up minutes after the minutes of text dialogue, you make the jewellery via mini-games. It fucking sucks.

Describing them as mini-games is charitable: they’re tedious hoops to jump through with no elements of choice and mechanics that would bore a primary-schooler.

“Click the ‘metal select’ dial and select ‘silver’.”
“Click the fire, then click the bellows rapidly until the fire bar is at max.”
“Click and drag the pan of silver to the mould, then the mould to the water. If your mouse does not stay within specific but invisible boundaries you will drop the item. You will have no visual or auditory indication you have succeeded at either step.”
“Press W, then A, then S, then D. The conveyor belt has moved forward 2 cm. Do this 20 more times.”
“Now you need to use the arrow keys, for some reason? In combination with WASD. Match this shape/colour combination.”

5 minutes later, you return to the story. I probably complained about the mini-games to the developer at least that long.

‘We wanted it to be like the Coffee Talk minigame,” they told me. Later that day I played Coffee Talk 2 (not reviewed) and the minigame, making coffee, is much quicker, simpler, and actually provides choice with (minor) influence on the story. These EHOY minigames are just a chore.

Wait a year to check this out so they can fix that shit.

The Godfeather: A Mafia Pigeon Saga

What if Goose Game but with a pigeon? [The Godfeather on Steam]

(Maybe unfair: I haven’t played Goose Game; just going on vibes.)

You play a pigeon, flying around and either shitting on people or swooping them. You get missions from “Da Roost” – ‘a wise guy is trying to escape south west; get him!’ – and carry them out.

Very funny concept, easy to play. Free demo out now.

Gubbins

Cutesy word making game for mobile. [Gubbins on Kotaku]

Put scrabble tiles on a board and swipe to ‘pop’ them. Some letters must go on as grouped tile (eg you might get an “ing” tile), and you get “Gubbin” tiles that are wildcards or explode to provide unwanted letters or whatever. Nice artwork, easy time-passer.

Mars First Logistics

Puzzle game, I guess? Physics simulator? Cute and simple but with novel elements. [Mars First Logistics on Steam]

You’re on Mars trying to build a colony. You a control a little rover that’s got a Lego vibe, and you can (must) modify the rover by adding hooks, winches, clamps, hydraulics, etc to perform various tasks: carry a box from A to B, carry a crate of oranges, etc. Do it wrong and your oranges go flying out all over Mars. Sucks to suck!

Repella Fella

Post-apocalyptic Australiana. Animated, slow paced, story driven. [Repella Fella site]

Australian soldier in the 1960s faces the apocalypse and seals himself into a survival pod. A few years pass for him, 150 years outside. He emerges to a very different (but still recognisable) Australia.

I enjoyed this and would be interested playing it through. It’s got a very Australian voice (in the case of the voice acting, literally so), and it’s only 6–8 hours long. Worth checking out.

Sigil of the Magi

Rogue-like deckbuilding RPG with turnbased combat. [Sigil of the Magi site]

You control a party with a Fighter, Wizard, and Rogue. They fight on a tiled map against enemies. Combat is turn-based and each turn your possible actions are determined by the cards you draw from your action deck. “Add armour”, maybe, “Long shot”, or just “Staff attack”. Add more cards to your deck as you play.

It’s fun, it’s straightforward, the 8-bit art is fine, I could kill some time with it on the Switch, but in the end it just made me wish I were playing Gloomhaven.

Spies and Soldiers

Turn based strategy. Sort of like Diplomacy, but with more stuff yet also not as intense. [Spies and Soldiers site]

There’s a map with regions (procedurally generated). Some regions have castles, some have cities, some have farmland. Castles give you VP and let you recruit soldiers. Soldiers capture regions and castles, and fight other soldiers (most soldiers wins).

Cities provide action points and let you recruit and upgrade spies. Spies can capture cities, kill other spies (if higher ranked), and act as a tie-break for army battles.  Regions with farmlands give ‘supply’ determining your maximum soldiers per region.

Turns are simultaneous: you use your action points to select soldier/spy movements, builds, upgrades, attacks, etc. So do all opponents. Then you resolve simultaneously.

I enjoyed the mechanics and would play this again, but the interface could do with little polish. Positive recommendation.

Board games

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea

Co-op trick-taking card game. [The Crew: Mission Deep Sea on Time to Play Games]

Instant hit with the group I played it with. We played it on several nights for many hours.

You have a deck of cards with four suits and some trump cards. Like Bridge or 500 you want to win tricks, but the game sets you conditions: e.g. one player must end the game with all the #7 cards (ie the #7 card from every suit); or one player may not end up with any cards from two of four suits. You are not allowed to talk or gesture, but some limited communication abilities by displaying a single card to the table give it a bit of a Hanabi vibe.

Higher difficulty levels mean more difficult conditions, or multiple conditions, or more limited communication, etc. It’s quick, lots of fun, very replayable, and – while nominally an expansion – functions as a standalone game for cheap. Excellent value; I went out and bought a copy the day I played it.

Magic Maze

Real time co-op maze game. [Magic Maze on Time to Play Games]

Okay, bear with me: a mage, a warrior, an elf, and dwarf need to steal weapons from a shopping centre. The shopping centre is a maze, and the four meeples characters need to be guided through the maze by the players – jointly.

While any player can move any meeple, each player can only move meeple in a narrow way. Eg one player can only move meeples left; another right; another up; etc. You start with one map grid explored, and add further grids when get to edges – but ‘adding grids’ is done by only one player. Ditto using escalators between corridors.

So there’s a whole table trying coordinate movement of multiple meeples – but you’re under time pressure from a sand timer! And – you can’t talk!!

Highly recommended; I will be requesting a copy for Christmas.

Nataterra

Asymmetric territory control and combat board game. Still under development; I did an hour-long play test. [Nataterra on BoardGameGeek]

The board is comprised of big hexes of a particular biome (forest, desert, grassland, etc.) Each hex has six slices; some slices offer meat, or wood, or metal; you start out with workers that you send to the relevant slices to collect resources (by occupying the slice at the end of your turn). You also start with more worker tokens and some unit tokens representing your basic unit types (e.g. archers and zealots).

There is a tech upgrade path that’s represented by a deck of cards. You start with the basic upgrade options in your hand. If you play e.g. Card #2 “Farms”, your meat resource collection gets better and you draw card #7, “Advanced Farms” into your hand. Or if you play card #4, “Advanced archers”, your archers become better, you get more archer tokens, and you unlock cards #8, #9, and #10 (different unit types).

So you collect resources, build units, upgrade, expand out of your hex. You can win by occupying the opponent’s home slice or fulfilling a particular victory condition, maybe territory control or winning X battles.

Combat is deep: it uses unit initiative, strength, armour, wounds, and ‘melee’ vs ‘ranged’ types – melee attack only melee, ranged attack anyone. Plus there’s tactics cards for eg bonus initiative or damage.

Nataterra board (PAX Aus 2022 playtest version) with annotationsNataterra has a lot of moving parts but they are mostly contained; think Twilight Imperium, but only moderately complex. The designers have tried hard to make the complexity easy to deal with, e.g. by having the unit stats listed in multiple places: once on your race reference board, and then again on little reference cards to place on the battle sheet. AFAIK each unit can be upgraded once, so the reference cards have the basic unit stats on one side and the upgraded stats on the other.

Races are asymmetric e.g. cheap weak orcs Beasts, expensive powerful Not-Dark-Elves. My opponent and I had a cagey stand-off for several turns at our defacto border, his X Beasts to my X-1 not-elves, both gradually adding units each turn. However, I had a few cave golems lurking several slices away, and, in the final turn when I upgraded them to fly, I was able to ignore intervening terrain, achieve numerical dominance, and crush his army. That wasn’t enough to win in that turn, but my glorious victory would have been assured with more time to play. I really enjoyed Nataterra, and look forward to the next iteration.

The designers of Nataterra are aiming for a Kickstarter next year; mailing list is here https://linktr.ee/gametribe

Bonus content

Aethermon: Tower of Darkness

Tabletop co-operative rogue-like monster tamer. Still under development.

Aethermon board

Aethermon rules. Link opens in correct orientation.I didn’t get a chance to play-test this because every single slot for the whole weekend was booked out!

Chess Plus

It’s not chess, it’s better.

Chess Plus boardChess Plus rules. Link opens in correct orientation.I disagree.

Magic Maze
Real time Co-op maze game

Okay, bear with me: a mage, a warrior, an elf, and dwarf need to steal weapons from a shopping centre. The shopping centre is a maze, and the four meeples need to be guided through the maze by the players – jointly.

While any player can move any meeple, each player can only move meeple in a narrow way. Eg one player can only move meeples left; another right; another up; etc. You start with one map grid explored, and add further grids when get to edges – but ‘adding grids’ is done by only one player. Ditto using escalators between corridors.

So there’s a whole table trying coordinate movement of multiple meeples – but you’re under time pressure from a sand timer! And – you can’t talk!!

Highly recommended; will be requesting a copy for Christmas.