Happy Tuesday!

I had originally planned for this to go out the door yesterday, but I lost 2 days of work thanks to some emergency PC repairs. I don’t know exactly what happened, but Mir’s machine died on Sunday, so fixing that became my sole focus for the day. 

After testing most of the components individually, I narrowed the problem down to the board, CPU, or PSU. Admittedly, I was too lazy to test the 3 of them because the PSU was out of warranty (so it was due for a replacement anyway), and you’re saddled with replacing the board and CPU simultaneously. So we set off to the local parts store thinking we needed to pick up 3 things.

Unfortunately, I forgot that we’d need a new AIO watercooler that fits an AM5 socket CPU. Also, the new boards aren’t compatible with DDR4 memory, so we were forced to upgrade that too. And Mir’s case was too small for all the new fixtures, so we rectified that as well.

Anyway, after 9 hours of work (testing the parts, buying and delivering the new parts, deconstructing the old machine, and building the new machine) I finally had a shiny new PC built for wifey. Thankfully, it worked with very few hiccups, though it did need to have network adapters installed for a wired connection, which I thought was odd. She’s happy though, which is all that matters.

However, Mir thought it was a little unfair that she got to upgrade her machine when mine was older, so she also bought me some new parts. For context, I’ve been using a first gen Ryzen (1600X) for basically the entire lifetime of my blog. Very high-end back when I bought it in 2017, but it’s been completely obliterated by the passage of time.

So that was my Monday.

Anyway, enough of how I was playing computer surgeon for the past 2 days – here are the highlights for August:

Duck Detective 1 & 2

As is true for an ever growing number of the titles I’ve written about, I first played Duck Detective during a Steam Next Fest. The demo was short, but it showed enough of Duck Detective (for both the first, and second game) to convince me that there was something here that I’d enjoy.

As luck would have it, that demo didn’t lead me astray, and I had an excellent time playing through both Duck Detective games back-to-back.

Though, I didn’t play both games in a single sitting. I played them across 2 days, but I finished either game on the same day that I started it. That should give you a good idea of how much of a time commitment Duck Detective is. They’re the perfect sort of game for a lazy weekend afternoon, or after a mind-numbing day at the office.

As far as the games are concerned, both make a great case for blending detective work with elements of comedy. I figured Duck Detective would go more the route of Frog Detective, where the charm and humour are the focus, but both cases required a bit of deductive reasoning to work out. It wasn’t on the same level as something like The Roottrees are Dead, but I don’t think it had to be. Duck Detective felt like a Goldilocks level of deduction difficulty, and I appreciated that about it.

It wasn’t just the sleuthing that made Duck Detective so good though: the humour also worked well. There’s a few different ways that this manifests, but my favourite was the Duck Detective himself. Sean Chiplock voices the titular detective, and gives a performance akin to a Film Noir detective who smokes a pack a day. Meanwhile, the entire game is colourful, cartoonish, and bubbly. That contrast leads to a ton of smirk worthy moments, and a few laugh-out-loud jokes throughout both games.

All said, both Duck Detective games get a thumbs up from me. They’re great bite-sized Detective games, and I’m very much looking forward to the third installment that I assume is coming thanks to the cliffhanger ending of the second game.

Seriously. I need to know what happens next!

Grounded 2

Grounded 2 is the first of 2 different games that I picked up in August specifically to play with my wife. She really enjoys her Survival games, and I like doing things that make her happy. Plus, I enjoyed Grounded well enough, so diving into the sequel wasn’t something I was particularly opposed to.

In general, I think the sequel is shaping up to be better than the first, but it’s obviously fairly bare-bones at the time of writing. There’s a lot of features from the first game that are missing, but planned for the sequel. That led to a number of times where the 2 of us were wondering if we’d missed something we knew existed in the original, or if it wasn’t present in the current Early Access build.

To compensate for this, a much greater emphasis has been placed on the newly added Buggys, which are just Grounded’s version of mounts. Though if I’m being perfectly honest, mounts were a really good feature to launch with and build the second game around. We were basically inseparable from Sir Reginald the Domesticated (mine), and Mr Pinchy (Mir’s) once we obtained them. They make travelling so much more convenient, and their ability to carry large volumes of crafting materials was also a huge plus.

Though, the addition of mounts made me a lot less inclined to build satellite bases throughout the game world. When you can move that fast, you don’t really need respawn points (or emergency supplies) scattered across the map. I’m of the opinion that this somewhat undermines the survival aspects of Grounded 2, but it does strip out some of the tedium of creating and stocking satellite bases. As such, I don’t want to harp on about it too much.

I’m also of the opinion that lowering the difficulty, at least during the first few nights, was a net positive. As veteran players, we were a little surprised by the lack of hostility, but it was easy to see how it started ramping up as we explored more of the available space, and started challenging (and defeating) stronger enemies.

Other than that, I don’t have terribly strong opinions about the rest of the changes from the first game. Most of it was either a “that’s neat”, or “I preferred this in the first game”. In either case, I wasn’t moved to the point where I feel like sharing a detailed breakdown of my nitpicks here.

As far as recommendations go, I’d say wait for the game to receive some more updates. I think the few new additions show that Eidos Montreal has a good grasp on what they’re doing with Grounded 2, but I think the experience of actually playing through the game will be better after they’ve had more time to develop it. 

PEAK

This is the second of those 2 aforementioned games that I picked up to play with Mir. Though I’ll be perfectly honest here: I had no interest in playing PEAK. I know that it’s taken the whole world by storm, but I just…it didn’t look like something I’d enjoy playing.

For those not in the know, PEAK is a game where you play as plane crash survivors, and need to ascend a mountain to signal for a rescue. You go through 4 different biomes, which make no logical sense, but it does provide different gameplay challenges that make the journey fairly interesting. For example, the second area, a jungle, rains constantly which makes it significantly harder to climb up the sheer cliff faces.

Either way, one night at dinner, Mir was lamenting how she was frustrated that she could never reach the eponymous peak with her regular cluster of friends. Luckily, PEAK was on sale that very same day, so I bought it, and said I’d help her to reach the top of the mountain.

I am happy to report that I have a 50% winrate at PEAK, and I made my wife very happy when we reached the top of the mountain during our second run playing together. I then promptly uninstalled the game because I was 100% right in my original assessment: PEAK is not for me. Though it was nice to help my wife, especially as I got to hear her bragging about it (over a Discord call) the next day with her friends.

Is This Seat Taken?

Hooooo boy.

So, Is This Seat Taken was another title I covered from Next Fest, and it was one of my favourites from the particular event that it debuted at. I was really impressed with the variety of ways that developer Poti Poti Games managed to utilize the core mechanic of placing shapes around a level based on their seating preferences. Doubly so because of how some of your decisions would have cascading effects on future problems within the level.

For example, there is a level in a film festival where certain movie-goers have popcorn. They’ll leave a bit of a mess behind in their seats though, which will interfere with your ability to place shapes who don’t like messy seats leading to some interesting cross-puzzle problem solving.

Unfortunately, the full game doesn’t evolve much beyond the confines of what’s shown off within the demo. This was a fairly large disappointment if I’m being perfectly honest. There is so much variety in those first few levels, but you end up revisiting a lot of the same locations over, and over throughout Is This Seat Taken with the only real differences being that a few additional seating preferences have been added to the mix. This gives the whole game a rather flat difficulty curve, and makes it feel quite repetitive by the time credits roll.

I have similar opinions about the game’s story. Conceptually, I like it. Having a story about finding your place in the world gels really nicely with a game that’s literally about finding the best place for everyone to sit.

However, the story moves at a really languid pace, and feels far too stretched out to be satisfying. I appreciated what was there, but I think the delivery would benefit from a tighter script, and delivery.

As such, and it pains me to say this, I don’t know that I’d recommend Is This Seat Taken? If it was a little tighter than I probably would, but it’s a little too drawn out for my taste.

Sudoku

I wasn’t originally going to include this, but I spent more time playing Sudoku this past month than I spent playing…anything.

I already wrote a whole article about it, but I’ve since progressed well beyond the point where I was while writing. I’ve completed the Hard puzzle on NYT for the past 2 weeks, and have done the past 14 Expert, and Impossible difficulty Sudokus over on LA Times.

For my money, the coolest part of this whole thing has been learning different solving proofs. What I mean by that is that there are certain patterns that you can apply to reduce the number of potential candidates for a specific space on the board beyond the standard Sudoku rules. I already touched on that a bit in my article, but I’ve had to learn several additional proofs while solving these harder puzzles. 

The most satisfying part of this whole journey has been actually applying those proofs on future puzzles though. It’s almost like learning a new combo in a fighting game, or a new card combo in a deck-builder that improves your odds of success. Though, I’ll fully admit that I don’t always understand the internal logic for all of the proofs that I use, but I know that they work, and I can visually identify them.

Either way, I’m glad that I started doing Sudoku puzzles daily because they’re really satisfying to solve in a way that very few other things in my day-to-day life are. It kind of reminds me of programming if I’m being honest. Though without all the bullshit that regularly made my old office job brain-rotting instead of fulfilling.

Öoo

Coming from the developer of Elechead, Nama Takahashi, Öoo is another great puzzle game where Takahashi takes a single idea, and runs with it to the ends of the Earth. In this case, you play as a caterpillar adjacent creature, and you place bombs that you can explode at will. The result is an incredibly satisfying puzzle-platformer that’s filled to the brim with excellent puzzles.

I think the moment where Öoo went from good to great, for me, was when I hit my first dead-end. The game’s structured like a Metroidvania, so reaching that final empty room felt really anticlimactic. Everything about the game’s design language was saying that there should have been a reward here – like a new power-up – for all my effort in reaching this room.

That’s when it hit me: I already got the power-up. In order to even reach the room in question, I had to first learn a new way to use my bombs. Then there were several consecutive rooms with puzzles built around reaffirming my understanding of this new technique. That was the reward: new knowledge that I didn’t previously possess.

That dead-end after a series of puzzles wasn’t a 1 off occurrence either: it happened another 7 times. There’s a term that I’ve heard used to describe games like this – Metroid-brainias – and Öoo fits squarely within that niche. All of your different “power-ups” are knowledge based, which makes them really satisfying to discover, and apply throughout the game’s world. I’m a sucker for this sort of thing, so I had a really great time working my way through each level of Öoo, while learning everything.

Plus, I love how Takahashi wordlessly teaches all of these concepts to the player. I feel like teaching through level design has become a bit of a lost art, so seeing that on full display throughout Öoo was really nice.

Obviously, Öoo comes highly recommended. It’s about 2 hours for a standard playthrough, and it’ll make you feel very satisfied as you work through its various quandaries. Though, I think it is limited to a Steam release at the moment, but I’d hazard a guess that it’ll make its way to Switch at some point like Elechead did.

And with that, I think I’ll call it for August. I was going to write a section about Guilty Gear Strive as well, but I think the article I wrote last week gushing about the newly added Ranked Match mode says it all. It’s great. It’s the best Strive I’ve played in a very long time. I’m happy.

Otherwise, I don’t know exactly what I’ll be covering throughout September. There’s a few revisions I’m making to my May guide in tandem with the newly dropped seasonal updates for Strive, but that’ll be imperceptible to most of my readers.

I guess just keep checking back here periodically, or consider subscribing for email notifications. That’ll let you know whenever a new post goes live.

Thank you as always for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one.

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