Four short mini-articles for four short experiences. After bouncing hard off The Outer Worlds 2, I decided to poke at my backlog a bit instead of chasing my next great obsession.
After Inc: Revival (demo)
First on the list is the new post-apocalyptic city-builder from Ndemic Creations. I’ve played a ton of Plague Inc and the premise sounded interesting, so I downloaded the demo as soon as it was available… and then let it sit for months as I put all my gaming time into finishing Baldur’s Gate 3.
Manage resources, explore, kill the zombies in your way. I do wish there was better visibility into what you’ve already built, but other than that it was a smooth, polished experience. It definitely feels influenced by the Rebuild series, though it’s not a direct clone the way Plague Inc was of Pandemic 2. At the same time it doesn’t fall far from the Plague Inc tree, with the exact same time compression controls, similar resource bubbles to pop, and an overall flow that feels a lot like its predecessor.
I enjoyed the demo, but that didn’t translate into a strong desire to buy the full game. It’s executed competently, but it didn’t really have anything unique or exceptional enough to draw me in, at least not as someone who rarely plays this type of game. I think it might be worth picking up if you are into the subgenre, especially if you also enjoyed Plague Inc.
Soda Story – Brewing Tycoon (demo)
I have no idea how I ran across this one.
It’s a tycoon game, and a specific subtype at that. I’m not sure what this type of game is called, but I’ve played similar ones before. You control a character, moving resources from one station to another to produce and/or sell something, along with some upgrade mechanics.
I didn’t love the art style, and the framing device seemed overly convoluted, but other than that it’s a perfectly cromulent game. I do feel it would work better as a web or mobile game than a full Steam release.
Hammer and Sickle (demo)
I had vague memories of playing the demo of this game, and I’ve been looking for it for a long time. I remembered the title correctly, but the synopsis didn’t line up with what I remembered from the demo (possibly a combination of my poor memory and the demo starting in medias res), so I didn’t realize it was the right game until I finally downloaded and tried it.
It’s a thriller set in the early Cold War, and I think the plot is a standard “stop the bad guys from making the Cold War go hot”. It’s described as a tactical RPG, I’ve heard it referred to as turn-based tactics, it seems more like a CRPG to me very similar to the original Fallout.
There’s eurojank, and then there’s eurojank.
The UI is clunky and confusing. The mechanics are opaque and completely unexplained, with initiative and turn order being seemingly arbitrary, movement happens when it feels like (if it works at all), weapons either hit like sledgehammers or completely miss. The dialogue is so stilted and unnatural that I would have sworn it was generated by an LLM had this game not predated ChatGPT by fifteen years. Maybe it was written in Russian and then translated very late in the process. Every voice also sounds like it’s someone trying to put on an accent.
This is a game that’s aged like milk, yet I already want to take a second crack at it.
Consortium (remastered)
There’s a bit of a story on how I learned about Consortium. Years ago, before the pandemic, I was demoing Ascension III at Full Indie Summit- back then there was no application process, you just grabbed a table and set up- when this guy comes along and mentions this game he worked on. We talked a bit, but all I remember was that he was quite enthusiastic, and that they managed to get “Jeremy fucking Soule” to do the soundtrack more or less because a guy knew a guy who knew a guy.
So, how’s the game, now that I’ve (finally) played it?
Well, it has some really, really cool ideas, but the execution is all over the place. The setting on a futuristic airplane (part DC-10, part A380) is super cool, but there’s disappointingly little you can interact with. It has complex (if unpolished) combat mechanics for two short battles you may or may not get. There’s a ton of lore to the world, but it’s never really laid out organically, with an underlying assumption that it somehow will sell itself and you’ll spend hours reading the codex on your own. I can tell the characters have a lot of depth, even though some get much more interaction than others, but the game is so short your interactions with them don’t really lead anywhere.
I completely failed to solve the mystery, but I’m not putting that on the game- I’m consistently bad at whodunits. It’s clearly a game that’s meant to be replayed and explored, but in one more contradiction, it has zero quality of life features for a replay- not even the ability to skip or fast-forward dialogue! I’m still not sure how I feel about the fourth-wall-breaking advertisement sequel hook at the end- I think it’s conceptually interesting but severely undermined by the sequel having been stuck in development hell for nearly a decade.
And you know, maybe that describes Consortium as a whole. A lot of interesting ideas put together by a team that was deeply invested in them, that unfortunately had to be chopped up into awkward chapters, with a result that didn’t quite resonate the way they’d hoped. I certainly appreciate the passion, but I’m conflicted on the result.