Gritty Retro Survival-Horror Inspired by Silent Hill – You Should Try: Labyrinth of the Demon King
- By Ash
- in You Should Try
Labyrinth of the Demon King is a grim and dreary survival horror RPG inspired by oldschool classics like Silent Hill, Resident Evil and King's Field. You play as a lowly footsoldier on a foolhardy quest avenge your fallen master – and it sure as hell feels like it. Your weapons are rusty and half-broken, horrific monsters inhabit nearly every corner of the world, and even the non-hostile characters are about as helpful as a punch to the gut. And yet, despite how awful everything is, actually playing Labyrinth of the Demon King is a lot of fun!
But before we begin, I just want to say that Labyrinth of the Demon King is so retro that it exclusively runs in a 4:3 aspect ratio! In order to spare those of you on smaller screens I'll be stretching out my screenshots and footage to a more comfortable HD resolution. Now usually this would be a big no-no given how much it would ruin the image, but considering how grainy and blurry Labyrinth of the Demon King is on its own, it's thankfully almost unnoticeable.
You Should Try Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days – A Tense and Highly Atmospheric Zombie Survival Game
- By Ash
- in You Should Try
Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days, besides being a needlessly long title, is a curious case of what happens when you mix This War of Mine with zombies. But even as someone that loves both of those things, I must admit I was genuinely surprised by how much Our Darkest Days ended up gripping me.
A lot of it comes down to the perfectly executed atmosphere of stress and hopelessness - where every single excursion outside your safe zone feels like you're a hair's width away from death as you sneak through hordes of gurgling, twitching, and utterly disgusting zombies. It's all incredibly stressful - but the good kind of stressful!
You Should Try: Guardians of the Galaxy – A Surprisingly Heartfelt and Clever Action-Adventure Game
- By Ash
- in You Should Try
Historically, tie-in games have been a flaming pile of garbage, so when I saw that Guardians of the Galaxy is getting its own tie-in game around the same time the Guardians of the Galaxy 3 movie was starting production, I immediately wrote it off as yet another cash grab.
But then the strangest thing happened. I was browsing through my collection and I just found it sitting in my account. Usually I'd just go "huh, that's odd" and move on with my life, but this time around I actually decided to listen to that little gremlin rampaging inside my head and give it a try. At worst, I could just have a few laughs at its expense and that would be it.
And you know what? I did laugh, and quite often at that! But not because Guardians of the Galaxy was something to mock, but rather because it was an actually well written, creative and unique adventure that did justice to the larger-than-life characters and the bizarre world they inhabit.
You Should Try: White Knuckle – A Ruthlessly Addictive Speed-Climbing Roguelite
- By Ash
- in You Should Try
Desperately climbing away from an all-consuming ooze doesn’t sound like a jolly good time, yet somehow, White Knuckle makes it ruthlessly addictive. Thanks to extremely tight controls, a slew of challenging-but-fair obstacle courses, and a dystopian world so bizarre that I need to know more about it, White Knuckle has completely devoured my past few days. And now, like an estranged uncle in a cheesy horror movie, I'd like to rope you in as well!
Easy to learn, hard to master
At its core, White Knuckle is an astonishingly simple game. You can jump, you can sprint, and you can grab onto things with either hand in order to climb. If you're feeling particularly spicy, you can even latch onto ledges with both hands to hoist yourself up faster. What you can't do is hold on forever as your titular white knuckles will quickly start turning bright red, thus warning you that your stamina is running out and that your grip is about to fail. To avoid a grizzly fall you'll need to either find a perch to rest up on, or if safe haven is nowhere to be found, alternate between each hand to buy yourself just enough time to crawl to safety.
You Should Try: Deck of Haunts – A Roguelite Deckbuilder Where You Are the Haunted House
- By Ash
- in You Should Try
Tell me, have you ever wanted to be a house? No? Strange... How about a haunted house? Perhaps one with a mean streak a mile wide? If the answer is still no, I think I have a game that can make a pretty good attempt to convince you otherwise. Greetings and welcome friend, I'm Ash and today I'd like to introduce you to Deck of Haunts - a roguelite deckbuilder that's all about expanding your house of horrors by tormenting and consuming scores of hapless investigators and exorcists.
Building the house of your nightmares
It all starts off very innocently during the daytime. This is where you get to purchase various room fragments and upgrades in order to construct the house of your dreams... or, well, nightmares! The goal is to create as many distractions as possible between your house's entrance and the very vulnerable heart that is the source of your power.
However, this is not as simple as building one long corridor and calling it a day. The further away from the heart you build the more essence it'll cost you each day to keep those rooms under your grasp. To succeed you'll need to compromise and utilize the entire length of your house to create something that is as maze-like as possible, while still sticking to a somewhat humble budget in order to be able to afford future enhancements. As it turns out, even eldritch abominates are not except from the horrors of the housing market!
Lost Skies Beginner's Guide - Eight simple things I wish I knew before I first started
- By Ash
- in Tips and Guides
Greetings and welcome friend, I'm Ash and I'd like to share with you eight tips and tricks that I wish I knew before starting Lost Skies - an exploration focused crafting/survival game. Without further ado, let us begin!
1) Don't be a hoarder
At the time of writing the items in Lost Skies take up a fair bit of space, yet storage for them is extremely limited and very clunky. So unless you want to painstakingly sort everything into dozens upon dozens of low capacity chests, my advice would be to not hoard random knickknacks like some sort of dragon.
If you have dozens of something and you don't see yourself using it any time soon, just chuck a portion of it off your ship. Have a bit of extra lumber after upgrading your ship? It's huge and it literally grows on trees, so toss it all away. Got any leftover ore after smelting? You betcha - right down the toilet! Those items are huge and there's no guarantee you'll find the exact same ore any time soon, so best not have it clog up your chests for the next two dozen hours.
Stick to this sort of mindset and you'll find the crafting system a lot more pleasant as you won't have to slowly rummage through scores of random chests looking for a specific gray item in a sea of other miscellaneous gray items.
Lost Skies Review - A magnificent ship lost in a sea of bugs | Early Access
- By Ash
- in Reviews
Lost Skies, much like its predecessor Worlds Adrift, is all about fulfilling that primal urge of thrusting yourself into the unknown in search of riches, long lost civilizations, and most importantly, a chance to shoot a cannonball straight into a would-be god's face! While Lost Skies already shows a lot of promise in this regard, the unfortunate truth is that it has cut so many corners in order to launch into Early Access that it now resembles a well-polished sphere.
Without a shred of exaggeration, I don't think I've had a single 10-minute chunk of gameplay where I didn't encounter at least one major annoyance, and at the time of writing I've been playing for 28 hours! Saying this genuinely hurts me because when Lost Skies behaves itself and you get to sail across the skies in a ship of your own design it's incredibly compelling. If it wasn't I wouldn't have been playing it non-stop for the past few days, after all. But when my character randomly glitches through my ship and becomes a Lovecraftian monstrosity twisting and contorting itself through the cold vacuum of space, all I can really do is sigh.