Lots of Life Happened and a Rant about Roots of Pacha

 It's been over a year and a half since I last posted. I've played a few games in that time. I'll get around to reviewing them eventually. All I can say is that lots of life happened and it was overwhelming. But I really hope I'm on the upside of all that and the light at the end of the tunnel is actually the end of the tunnel, not another train headed my way.

On to the rant! (because I know that's really why you're reading this.)

I picked up Roots of Pacha recently. It's pretty much Stardew Valley with a prehistoric flavor. The mechanics are almost the same - you farm, fish, explore, talk to villagers, etc. You tame your animals with the power of your magic flute then invite them to live with you, if you have enough space in your sheds or home. Every day in the game is a round of chores. But if you ignore them, it's okay. There really aren't consequences. Overall, it's a very chill game and very playable.

But...

I wasn't happy with it. I left it for over a week and didn't really want to pick it up again. In trying to figure out why, I realized it's because I'm basically an NPC in the game. Nothing I do matters to anyone except me and even then it isn't important. I'm a passive observer of the village growth. I don't get to experiment with the food I grow and collect to find new recipes. I have to interact with the right person at the right time for them to hand me a recipe. Or expand my kitchen and suddenly, I know how to cook new things. I'm not the one who experiments with new materials or tools to see what I can build. The villagers do that. All of the upgrades and expansions to the village? I get to decide which pre-determined build spot they use but otherwise I have no input whatsoever. My character could die and not a single one of the villagers would notice or care.

I made it through one year of the game and I'm not sure I care about going back for another. I felt like my character mattered more in Animal Crossing, which is a pretty passive game. The endless chores are okay, if that's your vibe, but I want to feel like what I do affects the game in some way. Even the story, what there is of one, in Roots of Pacha doesn't depend on my character's choices or actions, except as a trigger when I've collected so many rocks or some such hidden checkpoint. How am I supposed to have a goal in the game when I have no idea what it takes to meet it because nowhere is it specified?

So I wander around randomly doing random things until suddenly, I've accomplished a goal! Whoopee. There is no sense of accomplishment, no dopamine rush for me. Because I'm not invested in the game because the game gives me no reason to be invested. I'm not a part of the village, I'm a disconnected observer. I don't even matter as much as the other villagers. I'm an outsider with no real influence. If I decide not to grow any food, it doesn't matter to anyone. If I spend the entire day sitting in my hut staring at the wall, no one cares. They have no reason to care about me and I have no reason to care about them.

And no reason to keep playing.

Out of Space

 Rating: 7/10 😸😸😸😸😸😸😸
Ages: Mainly 8+ but younger kids can have fun with it, too. I'll explain below...

The basic premise of this game is that you and up to three of your friends are a cleaning/moving crew for a spaceship habitat company. Your job is to clean out alien infestations, furnish, and power up a space station habitat. It's harder than it sounds. The controls are simple. The game play, especially on zen mode, is pretty easy but still can cause some challenges.

Hint - it's much easier to be successful if you talk to each other as you're playing so you can coordinate what you're doing.

Younger kids can join in the fun as long as you have two more competent players handling the aliens and cleanup portion of the game. My 3yo grandson enjoys just making his character run around the spaceship with the dog.

It's bright, colorful, fairly laid-back fun for the family. It only got 7 cat faces because it can be pretty repetitive if you try to play a lot of it at a time. A couple of rounds once or twice a month seem to be plenty for us. That said, it has a lot of staying power as a fun group game.

BroForce Forever

 Rating: 7/10 😸😸😸😹😾🙀😸
Ages: 8+

One of my sons exposed me to the chaos that is BroForce. Chaos is the right description. This game is a parody of all the early video games where you had to slaughter lots of enemies, save your friends, then escape on a helicopter. So in this game, you and up to three of your buddies have to slaughter a lot of bad guys, aliens, and a bunch of other things, blow up the landscape but not too much or you end up with bottomless pits you can jump over, die a lot but save each other, then escape on a helicopter. At least on the early levels. The later levels have different win conditions. My son's advice, when I asked what the objective was, was simple, "Go to the right and try not to die."

The characters are hilarious. All of them are puns on 'Bro' and various action heroes. RamBro shoots a machine gun and has a red bandana. McGyBro hurls explosives and has a mullet. Brophy the Vampire Slayer throws wooden stakes and holy water. You get the picture.

Game play with four players is an absolutely chaotic mess of explosions and various weapons firing. You die. A LOT. But it's all okay and fun. We laughed a lot, blew up everything a lot, and generally had a very cathartic time blitzing levels.

*Lots and lots of cartoon violence
*Lots of silliness and bad puns
*Occasional hard levels that caused some outraged cries of "WHY did you just BLOW UP EVERYTHING?"

Bonus - this one is available on a lot of platforms, not just Nintendo Switch.

DragonQuest Treasures

 Rating: 6/10 😸😸😸😸😸😸
Ages: 5+

I've been a fan of the DragonQuest series from the beginning. Big caveat: I've really only played I, II, and III (which are excellent games!). DragonQuest Treasures is okay, but nothing as good as those three. Still, it was fun while it lasted.

The basic storyline is pretty simple. You play as two children, you can swap which one you are playing but you can't play both at the same time, who befriend two glowing winged things, a pink cat and a green pig. They provide infodumps but not much else. They open a wormhole to their world and of course you jump through, as characters do in RPG adventures.

Their world is a series of sky islands that have been overrun with monsters and bad guys. And treasure, which for some reason keeps re-spawning. The treasures are fun nostalgic nods to previous games but have nothing to do with this game other than being a way to keep score. The game is a series of side quests to collect certain types of treasure, beat up certain monsters, collect enough of the right resources, and restore the islands to some kind of order. The monsters never go away, though.

It's fun enough, for a while, but it gets very repetitive. If you are a 100%-er who has to get EVERYTHING, don't play this. The treasure drops are pretty much random and there are hundreds of different items to collect.

Once you finish the main storyline, there are still a few side quests that open up. Most of them are okay, mostly beat up the gangs of rival pirates that are trying to steal all the treasures. I gave up on the one where I had to beat the ghost king pirate. The battle was just too hard, especially compared to the simple fighting that all the other fights had been. You get shut in an arena with the pirate king. You fight really hard and think you've beaten him, but wait! He's not really dead. He comes back bigger and stronger and full of more health. Rinse and repeat a few times. After dying several times in a row, I just gave up. When you aren't having fun, the game needs to end.

So overall, it was fun but not something I'd come back to. It's one to hand to my grandkids and let them have fun with it.

Graveyard Keeper Update

 I kind of gave up on Graveyard Keeper not too long after I wrote that review. The story was fun, BUT...

There are WAY too many ingredients for potions and things and the chain to make some of the stuff you need is VERY long without clear instructions or hints on how to get there. You have to mix two or three things together to get a new ingredient that you then have to mix with two or three other things to get a new different ingredient which you then mix with more, and keep repeating until you finally manage to figure out how to make the stuff you really wanted in the first place. Oh and did I mention that all of these mixing and grinding and whatever steps can take place at any one of six different stations? Yeah, it got way more complicated than I wanted to deal with.

The reason you want these things is to eventually make zombies for yourself so you can automate all the fiddly little things like wood chopping, stone mining, grape growing, etc. I managed to get two or three zombies but then ran out of the bonus potions I'd found. See the paragraph above for why I gave up on trying to make more. The potions to make the zombies do what I wanted just took way to long to figure out and were too hard to make.

Did I mention that all of this potion making is trial and error until you accidentally stumble on a set of ingredients that make what you want? It's not always the same ones, either. Multiple ingredients can end up making the same thing. What they make also depends on if you grind them, smash them, blend them, cook them, or decompose them.

Another pet peeve were some of the quests. Why hand a player a quest right at the beginning of the game that they have no hope of finishing until they are more than halfway through your long, involved story? It's frustrating to me.

So, overall it was a fun game, but unless you're willing to spend a lot of time fiddling in the alchemy lab trying to figure things out, it drags horribly. And if you're like me and like to see progress by checking off quests, even if they're dumb fetch quests, this game will only make you frustrated. Half of the quests they hand you near the start aren't even possible until you've unlocked most of the items in the game which doesn't happen for a looooooong time.

I'm dropping my rating to 5/10.

Graveyard Keeper

 Rating: 8/10 😼😼😽🙀😿😺😹😸

Ages: 10+ (mostly for theme)

My son bought Graveyard Keeper with all the DLC. I've been thinking about it for a while but haven't grabbed it yet, but I played my son's copy. I'm maybe 1/3 of the way through the game. It's going to be a long haul. There is a lot of resources needed to gather and create.

I'm enjoying the quirkiness of the game. The bits of story I've found so far are amusing. But, and it's a big one, there is so much you have to gather and figure out. This game will not hold your hand. You pretty much have to experiment with everything and keep trying it again and again until you figure out what you need to do to get to that next step so you can figure out how to do the next fifteen steps to finally get that one thing that a character wants. Thank goodness for Google. I'll try it for a while until I get frustrated, then I ask my son to look up a hint or two for me. The alchemy lab in this game is way too complicated. At least it remembers recipes once you figure out the correct combination so you can easily make more.

You also get to make zombies, once you figure out all the steps to make your zombie juice potion. The zombies will do some tasks for you. I'm still trying to figure out which ones. The one that I really really really wish I could hand off to a zombie or three is the stupid fishing minigame. Yes, you need fish and yes, you have to fish for them, and yes, the fishing minigame is horrid. At least the game gives you the option of buying your fish and fish fillets from the fisherman character at the lighthouse. I'm just really hoping I don't need to catch the super-rare fish for a potion somewhere down the line because, frankly, if that becomes necessary to playing the game, I'll quit. I managed to catch one fish and I detest the minigame. It's a deal-breaker for me. Which is sad, because the game is such a fun mix of quirky, dark humor and happy beekeeping and everything in between. Plus it has friendly zombies.

For the first third of the game, I'll give it a solid 8 stars and a thumbs up recommendation, BUT, that might shift as I finish playing through the game.

No New Games

 I tend to buy games in spurts as I find them. I haven't found any recently that I enjoyed playing, so no new reviews for a while. The games I like tend to be very niche. There aren't that many out there, at least not good ones that I enjoyed. If I don't like the game or don't enjoy playing it, I won't review it.

If you come across a fun game that you think I might like, please leave a link in the comments!