Every Game Releases At Once

Video game releases have always clustered around the latter months of the year, mostly so they can be out in advance of everyone’s holiday shopping. For big companies fighting over shelf space, this makes sense, but for some reason indie games continue to pile their releases into September, October, and November.

As you may intuit from this vaguely relevant preamble, I had a lot of work to do this month!

• For the most part, Fae Farm is way too monotonous, but it does have things going for it. It streamlines some annoyances of other farming games, and you get to use magic! But the magic was too weak to feel magical, and the whole game revolved around hitting a lot of rocks to get metal.

• I wrote an article about why Fae Farm fails to give meaning to its repetitive gameplay. Essentially a more detailed version of what I just said.

• Eternights is basically if Persona’s time management was melded with brawler gameplay, and it was a lot shorter. It was quite enjoyable, despite a few foibles.

• One of my issues with the game was that it’s story didn’t take itself seriously enough to make an emotional impact, so I wrote an article about that.

• Gunbrella is a game where you shoot people with an umbrella that you also use to fly like mary poppins. It’s very silly, except for the story, which takes itself too seriously sometimes, but is still okay. This was a short game, which was good, because otherwise there’s no way I would have been close to embargo on this one.

• I wrote an article about why Gunbrella’s use of a dead wife to motivate its dad protagonist is boring, and hurts what is otherwise a decent story. I’m quite proud of this one. It came out better than I expected.

• I then reviewed Moonstone Island, which was sooo looong. I did enjoy its mix of farming and monster fighting, but it wasn’t the ideal game to review in a busy month. To be fair, it was less exhausting than Fae Farm because I had more fun.

4 reviews and 3 articles isn’t bad, I think. Unfortunately I didn’t get a video out on my personal channel, and instead spent the time picking topics for my next few videos, and doing some research and early writing on them.

As expected, a lot of time this September went to looking after my health. In a lot of ways, prolific creativity is a product of good health and good routines, so that has been my focus. My routines haven’t necessarily been nailed down, but I’m testing some new strategies, and I’m hopeful they’ll see results.

I used some of my free time later in the month to learn the basics of Godot and GDscript. While it’s still early, I think it’ll do just fine for my game development plans. I was previously using Unity, but given the overall trajectory of the company, it seems wise to plan for a future where Unity either doesn’t exist or is horrible to use. I hadn’t invested much time in Unity yet, so my procrastination worked out!

I attended a game jam in the middle of the month, but the game isn’t publically available in any way and I’m not sure if I have permission to show it. The artists did a fantastic job making the game pretty, and the game was playable from start to finish, so I’d say we did fine.

This has been a truly terrible month for layoffs in the game industry. This whole year has been bad, but the hits just keep coming. I hope everyone newly looking for work finds it.

That’s it for this month! Next month, maybe things other than game reviews? Who knows?