Having thus violently detonated my prized Persian translator, we headed south again until the Scottish soldier on our expedition reached a critical level of despair and shot himself, after which I butchered the dog that still remained, staggered around a little longer without water, found the golden pyramid… but before I could get inside, Darwin succumbed to his wounds. Later on we encountered a pack of hyenas, and since I had acquired some dynamite I thought it a brilliant idea to use the dynamite to dispatch these enemies… without quite realising that when it said group damage, it meant everyone in combat. Our donkey bit one of our other team members and so I had to shoot the donkey and use the food to reduce my party’s stress but then another party member fell into a spike trap, got an infected wound, and later died, not before asking us to convey a last message to his wife. Playing as Charles Darwin we first began to run out of water, since I had not fully appreciated that water was (almost) required for traversing desert regions then my team’s sanity was reduced to nothing and bad things began to happen. My third expedition was the one that really sealed the deal for me, mainly because my entire party died. At first I wasn’t clear about some of the aspects beyond the expeditions themselves such as how fame worked in the game, or larger “campaigns” of expeditions – but once I got a good handle on all of this I absolutely loved it. I’m pleased to say I was not disappointed.ĭespite the wonderful premise and some obvious thematic overlaps with bits of URR, I confess that it took me a little bit to really “get into it”. I met the guys from Maschinen-Mensch in Germany during the International Roguelike Developers Conference / IRDC all the way back in 2014 (!) and Riad and Johannes are a fabulous pair with a very clear vision and a great sense of humour – but I’m not one for playing early access games myself, and so I wanted to wait until the entire thing was finished. The idea of a roguelike-y game set in the age of exploration sounded absolutely gripping to me (and not just because I’ve been reading Patrick O’Brian’s genuinely fabulous Aubrey-Maturin series in the past year so, which I’ve had to carefully space it out in order to not exhaust its wonders too quickly). We start, of course, with a roguelike, and one I have been looking forward to playing for a long while. As before I’ve written up a little review of each one, so without further ado: Last year’s “winner” was quite clear-cut ( Rain World) but this year we have more candidates competing for this top title – The Curious Expedition, The Outer Wilds, Hellpoint, and Streets of Rage 4, to name just a few. this one, and this one) and esports ( this one) gambling-style mechanics in gaming ( this one), started preparation for finally teaching game studies as I’ve been doing now in 2022, and was generously funded by the Japanese Hoso Bunka Foundation to study Japanese and Australian live streamers in a project I’m conducting at the moment, and will be publishing findings from in the next few years.Īs for games, by my count I played 17 titles this year. I published a ton of research articles on live streaming (e.g. Much to my surprise (and I’m sure the surprise of everyone else) I released Ultima Ratio Regum 0.9 and I’m now actually beginning work on URR 0.10 (!) with hopefully a yearly model for major releases, barring further health disasters and so forth. Welcome all to 2021’s (six months delayed) edition of “Some Games I Played in and What I Thought Of Them”! What a year it was.
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