Lets Try: Curious Expedition, DROPSHIP, Mixolumia, Insufficient Adjectives, and From Orbit
1It's the Indie Game Wednesday roundup for Wednesday, June 08th, 2022.
- Intro: 00:00
- Curious Expedition: 0:01:29
- DROPSHIP: 0:47:48
- Mixolumia: 0:59:16
- Insufficient Adjectives: 1:36:45
- From Orbit: 2:04:59
Curious Expedition is an interesting game with a lot of mechanics I did not stop to actually learn via tutorial. You are an adventurer looking for glory! You set off on a boat to a variety of locations, and traverse a randomly seeded hexagon map full of things to explore, fight, and plunder. It's got a dice-based combat system, it's got food requirements, it's got a sanity meter, it's got a local populous to exploit! It's a lot of things, and very interesting.
DROPSHIP is what happens if you took lunar lander, gave it gravity, and then gave you the ability to move the map around the lander, except it feels backwards and you hate it. Or maybe I'm just projecting. It's a neat-looking game with a good soundtrack, but wowzers did I hate this game.
Mixolumia is a sort of tetris... maybe more like Dr Mario, where you have cubes of smaller cubes, and you arrange them on a grid to try and get 3 or more of some colours in a row. The twists are that the grid is at a 45 degree angle, and that blocks will try and slide to the left and right, adding an added wrinkle to every placement. It's a neat game! I wasn't good at it, but I appreciate what it's doing.
Insufficient Adjectives is a really fun idea for a game that my brain just could not handle. You have to direct trucks to their destination by adjusting the roads a la Pipe Dreams-style tile placement. The big twist is that you have to guess where the trucks are supposed to go based on the descriptors of their cargo. I found the game a bit too fast and too big for my idiot brain to keep up with. I think starting on a smaller map and working the user up would help a whole bunch.
From Orbit is a light survival game where your crew operate a space ship on it's way to a wormhole. You land on planets, collect resources, kill the locals, take off, upgrade stuff, and repeat. Your crew is limited, as are the jobs they can have, but it's still got a lot of difficulty baked in. I ended up wiping because I rush the ending, but I think there's a lot of fun to be had with this one. The game could do with some overall QoL improvements: better ui, better key-bindings, a tutorial. But the bones are decent!
Game info:
Curious Expedition: https://maschinen-mensch.itch.io/curious-expedition
DROPSHIP: https://minigoliath.itch.io/dropship
Mixolumia: https://davemakes.itch.io/mixolumia
Insufficient Adjectives: https://razburygames.itch.io/insufficient-adjectives
From Orbit: https://tentaclehead.itch.io/from-orbit
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