Game 16 of 2023 - Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor

Developer: Sundae Month
Publisher: Sundae Month
Platform: PC
Genre: Adventure (Anti-Adventure)

Difficulty: Easy
Hours: ~7

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 7.5/10

This game is so delightfully weird.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor bills itself as an "anti-adventure" game, and it's not messing around. You mostly spend your days incinerating as much trash as you can before your incinerator runs out of batteries and finding the cheapest and safest (and sometimes not so safe) food you can sustain yourself on.

You also get cursed by some asshole skull that just follows you around and yells at you.

This dude is such a dick.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is rendered in an old-school combination of pixel art and 3D, think the early Doom games or Daggerfall. The world is filled with all sorts of creative little details that give the feeling of depth; items have interested descriptions, the spaceport is filled with a variety of weird little guys, and spaceships land and take off.

It's kind of a shame you don't have the luxury of taking it all in, as you've got trash to burn. I guess that's kind of the point, though. You're barely scraping by in a dead end job, and then you get this dumb curse. Your dream of leaving the spaceport just got that much more difficult.

The game often feels like work, since you have a bunch of busy work to do in addition to your normal job. You need to find the fetishes of all nine goddesses (Sprense took FOREVER), save up enough money to buy some blob his weird porn, and run away from this creepy specter in a sewer of green goo.

Actually kind of terrifying.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor feels like a labor of love from a small team, and while it overstays its' welcome by a couple hours, I feel like it made it's point. Great buy.

Game 15 of 2023 - Dave the Diver

 Dave the Diver

Developer: Mintrocket
Publisher: Mintrocket
Platform: PC
Genre: RPG, Sim, Casual

Difficulty: Easy, mostly
Hours: ~22

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 9/10

Picture this:

You're exploring the glacial depths of the Blue Hole where no man has gone, when you come across an ancient geothermal vent. 

That's when you see Dunkleosteus!

This ancient, armored fish lived during the Devonian period, thought to be extinct for like 300 million years, but here it is, right in front of you!

What do you do?

I'll tell you what you do; you bring your trusty rifle to bear, shoot the shit out of this living fossil, and make sushi from the corpse.

Bancho makes goddamn incredible sushi from anything you put in front of him.

Dave the Diver is awesome. It's a mostly lighthearted adventure where you dive into the depths of the Blue Hole during the day, and help your bud Bancho run his sushi restaurant at night. Bancho relies on you to bring him fresh ingredients from the Blue Hole, including, Vampire Squid, sharks, octopus, and sea urchin. You can also find stuff like mayonnaise and sesame oil during your dives.

Bancho often hosts cooking contests and VIP customers. Gather rare ingredients to impress!

The environment is beautiful and the aquatic denizens are colorful and varied. Dave always has his trusty harpoon while exploring, so he can gather tasty looking fish and defend himself from the Blue Hole's more aggressive denizens. You also get a rifle early in the game, and while it's powerful, ammo is limited. Don't worry, you can find more while diving.

No killing this guy, I'm afraid.

There's a few other distractions, like farming, phone minigames, and raising fish, but you'll spend most of your time diving for cool stuff and serving customers at Bancho's. You run yourself ragged waiting on the patrons, but luckily you can hire help as Bancho's makes more money.

I considered giving Dave the Diver a perfect score, but I had to dock for a particularly frustrating boss fight: the Helicoprion. You control two characters during the battle, but the camera doesn't seem to want to focus on either of them and Helicoprion hits like a friggin' Mac truck. Argh.

Otherwise, it's great and highly recommended!

Book 6 of 2023 - Children of Time

 

Children of Time

Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Genre: Science Fiction

Pages: ~600

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 10/10

I fuckin' loved this book.

Set many thousands of years in the future, Children of Time follows the last remnants of humanity aboard an ark ship and a population of intelligent jumping spiders that are rapidly evolving thanks to a biologically engineered nanovirus.

See, the humans have rendered Earth pretty much inhospitable, and they all boarded huge ark ships and went to sleep for a long time, to be woken up if and when needed. They find the perfect planet, only to discover that it's protected by a very ornery satellite and inhabited by a rather enlightened and fascinating spider civilization. The story aboard the ship, Gilgamesh, is mostly told from a classicist specializing in the Old Empire. The spiders' story follows Portia and her many, many descendants, as they make scientific discoveries and learn how to mold and shape the world around them. The author has really put a lot of thought into how a spider society might develop, and watching the nascent spider civilization grow was the best part of an already stellar story (holy shit the ants).

Children of Time has one of the most satisfying endings of anything I've read recently. Turns out empathy is powerful and beautiful, and if spiders actually evolve human intelligence god I sure hope they have empathy.

10/10.

Game 14 of 2023 - Starfield

 Starfield

Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Publisher: Bethesda Software
Platform: PC
Genre: RPG

Difficulty: Easy/Moderate
Hours: ~40

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 7/10

It's fine. End of review.

Starfield

Okay, fine.

Starfield does a lot of things, it just doesn't do anything particularly well. It does them all, fine, I guess.

Meet Blast Hardcheese.

There's a zillion quests, but the overwhelming majority of them are boring. Get coffee for that lady. Pick up the coffee order for the executives. Take this message to this guy on this planet and bring what he gives you back. Find a charred planet for some reason. Wash, rinse, repeat.

There was one quest, Entangled, that I felt was kinda cool. I couldn't help but think that the quest would have made a great game on it's own if fleshed out. 

There's one other quest chain that sticks out in my mind. Blast Hardcheese and Sarah Morgan ended up embroiled in a turf war in Neon between The Strikers and The Disciples. As we do quests for the leader of The Strikers, the less worse gang, the turf war escalates and Sarah and I end up in a shootout in Ebbside. The bullets and lasers are flying fast and furious, but The Strikers prevailed!

That's when I notice him.

A Chunks employee, lying in the gutter, cut down in the crossfire. Was he killed by the Strikers? By the Disciples? By Sarah? By... me?

That was like the one quest I actually felt connected to, partly because I chose the Neon Street Rat for my character. 

Space travel is pretty much pointless, I mostly skipped space combat, and I never really gelled with any of the characters. I found base and ship building too fiddly to get into, and I didn't want to spend points in those skills, anyway. I wanted to shoot things. With lasers.

Yeah, I guess there are a lot of planets to explore, but why? There's mostly nothing except copy/paste structures there. 

I'm sure some kickass DLC and mods will come down the pipeline in the near future, but I mostly pushed through this game out of obligation, being a fan of the Bethesda RPG since the days of Daggerfall.

So, yeah, it's fine. Nothing memorable, but fine.

Book 5 of 2023 - Solaris

 

Solaris

Author: Stanislaw Lem
Genre: Science Fiction

Pages: ~210

Date Started: ?????
Date Ended: September 16, 2023

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 8.5/10

Poor Kris Kelvin. Guy studies the planet Solaris all his adult life, spends 18 months in space travelling to the station that hovers over Solaris, and when he gets there the surviving scientists are acting all weird and shit. And then he gets haunted by the phantom of an ex that committed suicide after he treated her like shit. No wonder this guy spends the entire book in an awful mood.

I love going back to classic science fiction. Great ideas, great characters, a great setting; Solaris has them. While Solaris' story is about humanity's continued attempts to communicate with what might be an extraterrestrial intelligence, its also about how even the most rational among us are capable of behaving irrational, and that maybe this penchant for irrationality is human. We find it so difficult to communicate with one another and there's so much about ourselves we don't understand; how the heck do we talk to a plasma ocean thingy?

great book recommend!

Book 4 of 2023: Red Team Blues

Red Team Blues 

Author: Cory Doctorow
Genre: Mystery/Thriller

Pages: ~210

Date Started: ?????
Date Ended: August 12, 2023

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 7/10

Red Team Blues is an entertaining enough tech thriller. I enjoyed it quite a bit. 

Martin Hench is an accountant. But he's no ordinary accountant, you see. He's hip to what all the cool kids are up to nowadays. He's almost seventy, but still does all the cool drugs, knows all the dope lingo, pulls all kinds of babes, and is super tech-savvy.

There you go. That's my review. Breezy beach read.

Game 13 of 2023 - Immortality (2022)

Immortality

Developer: Sam Barlow
Publisher: Half Mermaid
Platform: PC
Genre: Interactive Film

Difficulty: Easy
Date Started: May 2 2023
Date Ended: May 4 2023
Hours: ~8

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 9/10

Immortality is awesome. I almost gave up about 10 minutes in because I was just confused, I guess, but holy crap am I glad I stuck with it. 

Immortality is a sort of supernatural mystery thriller told in a non-linear manner. It involves three films starring Marissa Marcel, a promising young actress that made three movies that were never released and then disappeared.

Here, have some screenshots:

That's what they called me in college... ladies.

Carl: Kind of a dick.

I'm not sure what else to say about it. The gameplay is pretty basic, you just click on stuff in the scenes that you watch that take you to related scenes. You can watch clips in reverse, which you have to do in some cases to see hidden clips and advance the story.

The actors do a great job, particularly Manon Gage (Marissa) and Charlotta Mohlin (The One).

Heads up, a good bit of nudity, foul language, and drug use. Immortality is nice enough to give you a content warning in the beginning.

Go play Immortality.