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.
MTG Arena's Dragonstorm set has arrived alongside a barrage of flying lizards
- By Ash
- in News
After a couple of sets that borrowed heavily from our modern day, real world, I'm pleased to say that Magic has now returned to a more fantastical and grounded setting - the plane of Tarkir. As you would expect from a set...uhhhh, set on Tarkir, the freshly launched Dragonstorm is full of all sorts of dragons, a plethora of cards representing each of the five tri-color clans, as well as a surprisingly large chunk of individually powerful cards that will likely remain relevant for a very long time.
With all of that in mind, I'm sure it'll come as a massive shock to hear that Dragonstorm has been a raging success so far! Hopefully this means we'll get more traditional Magic sets in the future rather than ones where popular characters do random cosplay, because after MKM, OTJ and DFT, I must admit I missed some good ol' fashioned fantasy.
Metro 2033 is celebrating its 15th anniversary with a free giveaway
- By Ash
- in News
If you've somehow managed to avoid playing Metro 2033 or its Redux variant all these years, I'm happy to say I bring some good news. The original Metro 2033 is currently celebrating its 15th anniversary, and in order to get everyone in on the action 4A Games are now giving away Metro 2033 Redux on Steam.
The giveaway will end at 5pm on April 16th, so while you do have a little bit of leeway, I'd highly recommend grabbing it sooner rather than later, lest you forget. And once you have added it to your account, it'll be yours to keep for good. Don't worry, you won't have to finish the whole game in a single day!
The Stone of Madness is a highly stylized stealth/tactics game from the Blasphemous team
- By Ash
- in Indie Games
I have to give it to The Game Kitchen, they are not an easy studio to predict! They went from making point & click adventures to grim yet stylish Metroidvanias, and now they're working on what looks like a Commandos inspired real-time, stealth focused tactics game!
Set in an 18th-century Spanish monastery, The Stone of Madness will put you in control of five prisoners, each with their own unique skills and resources. However, unlike games like Commandos where you play with a team of hardened veterans, your characters in The Stone of Madness aren't exactly the most... stable bunch. So not only will you have to navigate obstacles and deal with all sorts of enemies with them, but you'll also have to manage their phobias and their dwindling mental health.
Dredge is a remarkably charming combination of Lovecraftian horror and commercial fishing
- By Ash
- in Indie Games
[Update #2]: Dredge's Patch 1.1 has now made navigation smoother and added quality-of-life improvements,
[Update]: Good news! Dredge is getting an expansion alongside a couple of quality-of-life focused updates!
Whether we're talking about real life or video games, I must admit I don't like fishing. It's a slow, boring activity that mostly seems like an excuse to crack open a few beers and kick up your feet. Yet despite this, I found myself really enamored with Dredge - a Lovecraftian exploration game that's almost entirely about roaming the isles looking for strange new fish to annoy.
The main reason Dredge got its hooks into me is the simple yet compelling gameplay loop. You need to catch fish and collect various materials in order to upgrade your ship, which then allows you to explore further and catch even bigger fish, which then lets you upgrade your ship with even more fancy toys, and so it goes. Most things take a bit of effort to unlock which makes acquiring new items feel satisfying, yet the process is never too grindy so you get to constantly enjoy a stream of new abilities and enhancements.