@games Today I even have a theme: strategy games

Crab God

I wasn't expecting much from this, and yet I came out positively impressed,
it can be defined as a more refined Kingdom Two Crowns-type of tower defense. Instead of using coins, the player uses faith, crabs can specialize in 5 roles, it's level based, instead of having a singular map, progressing once gathered enough food. I suspect that this game was made by a marine biologist, no other way to explain the detailed in-game encyclopedia.

I'm loving your recaps. Please keep them coming!

I don't have much time for gaming and trying every single demo out there is too difficult for me, but I also like discovering new indie titles.

I've been maintaining a log in my own Mastodon thread. I'll summarize from yesterday:

• Push The Cat with WASD is reverse sokoban with interesting story/gameplay integration, but I find the puzzles unsatisfying.
• Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is a stylish callback to colourful GBA adventures. It zooms out to show the GBA when you're idle! Wishlisted.
• Stardust Demon triggers my Cave Story neurons and the 3D FMVs are a very cool aesthetic choice. It needs a little more polish to be great.
• NanoApostle is a very hard boss rush with deadly but well-telegraphed attacks. The range of visual intensity in the art is impressively huge.
• The Rise is a precision platformer about jumping, dashing, and going up. It's competently produced, but I don't see anything novel about it.
• Waltz & Jam is a very cute top-down adventure with interesting characters. It's a lot more forgiving than Tunic. Wishlisted.
• What the Car? Extremely silly. Wishlisted.

Not a lot compared to before, but I did play:

Thalassa: Edge of the Abyss
It's a creepy underwater walking sim. It's... actually pretty damn good in atmosphere, despite not playing into thalassophobia remotely as much as the name would suggest. I really like its style and design. OTOH, technically it's rough, with only a single very slow pick-up / interact animation that has the character awkwardly center in front of the object first.
If they polish it a bit, I'm interested. Kept on my follow list.

Creatures of Ava
A game somewhere between a more peaceful Zelda, a Pokemon-like and a lot of Pokemon Snap? Not reasy to describe. Very beautifuly, and I really liked the world as designed. The tutorial is overly simplistic and long for what it teaches you, but eh, minor issue. Definitely keeping an eye on this, quite interested in how it is at release. Kept on my follow list.

The Alters
The most impressive game I've tried this Next Fest. A survival game on another planet where you need to recruit the only reliable person you know: Yourself. You got access to a cloning bay and a quantum computer and the computer can create you, but if you had decided differently at certain points in your life, e.g. not moving out early from home would have led to a life where you are an engineer, which gives that clone +50% technical skill. These "alters" have their own stories and you get to talk to them about it, which is really cool.
Quite impressed, wishlisted.

I've been playing Enotria: The Last Song. So far seems like a solid souls like but it has wicked performance issues right now. I'm really digging the vibe of the main demo city but I'm barely hitting 40fps on low settings with an RTX 3070ti

I've been playing Heart of the Machine, and really enjoying it. It's a fascinating 4x ish in a future city, in a bit of an inversion of AI Wars (same developer). Before playing, I was merely intrigued, but now I'm excitedly awaiting where it goes. It was, however, initially difficult to figure out what to do. Perhaps more UX is going to be useful here.