Replaying A Hat in Time after about eight years. I decided to get some cheap DLC in place of more games during Steam’s summer sale, and that includes A Hat in Time’s Nyakuza Metro. With that, I thought it was worth a full replay of the game.

Still really liking the game. With more hindsight, I’ve realized the game’s plot makes barely any sense. And it has an oddly dark sense of humour that contrasts with the game’s otherwise kiddy presentation, even outside the spooky forest.

Don’t you need special training for that? And also a special suit that squeezes your body to keep your blood in the right place?

Can’t believe Rick Mercer personally hosted the thousands of Americans stranded in Nfld

Certified YouTube classic

!youtubeclassics@sh.itjust.works

They’re like trains but vertical!

ok i pull up

!photomode@feddit.uk needs this as well

A certified Sony moment

They didn’t win an award for capturing lots of pixels

• Tunic — You need to figure out the game’s manual to know how to play. Souls-style exploration and combat.
• Papers, Please — If you liked Rocket Shop, you’ll like this. You are a border guard, checking people’s documents and choosing if they can enter. The rules change every day as international tensions grow. Great plot with multiple endings, expressed with just your green and red stamps.
• Hypnospace Outlaw (kind of) — You are a moderator in a fictional version of GeoCities in the last months of 1999. Your training is web pages and crusty point and click CD-ROM slideshows. It’s heartfelt story about the impact of technology on society and a loving funeral for that era of the world wide web.

As even further stretches, there is TIS-100 and Shenzhen I/O, both Zachtronics games that have you do programming. The tutorial for TIS-100 just opens a PDF that looks like a crusty scan of an ancient computer manual, like you were learning to program on a C64 or something.

WRONG those are provincial trade barriers that will be gone by Canada Day

Monday Night Combat, and especially its successor, SMNC, had such good potential. It was a damn shame the developers bet on a different project of theirs instead. And now over a decade later, Valve picks up the formula to make Deadlock.

I’ve tried a related game, BallisticNG, in VR. It was worth doing… once.

If you like that kind of game, also check out SEUM and Neon White.

ODDCORE (939 Steam reviews, Early Access)

Roguish boomer FPS where you travel to liminal spaces to shoot all the monsters. They’re not scary if they’re dead! Instead of having a map of encounters, you get 5 minutes to do as much as possible. Once you’ve cleaned out a space, you jump to the next world… unless your teleport gun glitches out and takes you someplace very weird. At any time, even during combat, you can jump to your home base to buy upgrades or extra time credit.

WORMHOLE (51 Steam reviews)

WORMHOLE is next-level Snake. I’ve written about it before! There are powerups, wormholes (obviously), and increasingly complex and cramped levels. The game’s graphics and music get more intense over time and it becomes an oddly hypnotic action game.

I’m glad to see these threads again! They’re fun.

Ash & Adam’s GOBSMACKED (37 Steam reviews)

This is a single-player arcade FPS. You battle robots in a series of arenas with a set of wacky weapons, with shops in between. At the start of each run, you have to buy yourself a starting loadout using the money you got from previous runs, but you can’t choose the same items as your last run. Buying an item for the first time at a shop unlocks it so you can choose it as a starter in a future run.

The balls must glow

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. Robust kart racer with advanced mechanics that reward good driving and still-working online multiplayer!

There’s the fan theory from the Pokémon Black/White series that N, the half-rival/half-enemy, is secretly a Zoroark. He has a similar hairstyle and it would explain his backstory as a wild child and why he somehow has the ability to understand Pokémon. There’s also a chase sequence where you follow a Zoroark around, but you reach the dead end of a cave and it’s just him there.