Let's Try: Plan B: Terraform, LUNARK, Mika and the Witch's Mountain, Strain, and Pekoe
1It's the Tryday Friday roundup for Friday, February 10th, 2022.
- Intro: 00:00
- Plan B: Terraform: 00:04:10
- LUNARK: 00:58:51
- Mika and the Witch's Mountain: 01:30:32
- Strain: 01:59:01
- Pekoe: 03:01:52
Plan B: Terraform: is a little bit Factorio, a little bit Surviving Mars. You build factory chains to mine, fabricate, and construct various materials to help grow your new-found space town. Getting into brass tacks, it's a hexagonal tile-placement style game where you mine out finite resources and ship them to where they need to be. the construction chains get more complex as you go up the tech tree, and you are forced to ship materials long distances due to where minable materials can be found on the planet. It's a neat game, but the demo could have used a bit more tutorial for my taste. It's also not easy to move materials more than 1 square at a time without building chained storage platforms, which works but feels weird.
LUNARK: What if someone who really liked Another world and Prince of Persia made an extremely stylish neon-noir game? I'll tell you: it's LUNARK. You don't get a whole lot of story with the demo, but you will get a very good feel for what the gameplay is like. I get the strong feeling that this is going to be a game that people love or hate, given how easily you can screw up and, say, launch yourself off a ledge to your death. The controls feel a little swimmy (like prince of persia), but it's a very pretty game, and the music's fantastic. I personally would like to experience a bigger bite of demo.
Mika and the Witch's Mountain: First off: this demo is extremely short. Frustratingly so, honestly. You are a little witch who's been instructed by the old witch at the top of the mountain to prove yourself. She then ejects you from the top of the mountain, where you land on the beach, breaking your broom. You get it fixed in quick order, allowing you to sorta float/glide along around town. You take on the job as a delivery person, and you run jobs in order to get money to get a better broom, which lets you do more. The idea is as you upgrade, more parts of the map are opened to you, presenting new challenges and deliveries. It's a very cute game, and it's got big Studio Ghibli vibes. I really wish I could have done a bit more in the demo.
Strain: Strain is a single-person survival game (like Rust, Raft, The Forest, etc) where you have a bunch of stats that need to be managed through the consumption of various items or actions. You live in a neon dystopia (not quite cyberpunk), and you're a cop (boo) who's trying to find their friend. You're given the runaround until you finally find them, only for the story to twist on you! This game is rough around the edges at the moment, but given it's a solo dev that had very little experience prior, it's pretty impressive (and bug-free). I'll be curious to know where it ends up going.
Pekoe: Have you ever wanted to serve tea to cats? Have you ever wanted to worry about the exact temperature of the water, or how long things are steeping? Do you like beautiful and cute visuals? If so: you'll want to play Pekoe. I don't know how much more I can say. You run a tea shop, you gab with the local cats in town and make them tea. Also there's a cute little tea sprite that can help you. It's all just adorable as heck.
Game info:
Plan B: Terraform: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1894430/Plan_B_Terraform/
LUNARK: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1050370/LUNARK/
Mika and the Witch's Mountain: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1819460/Mika_and_The_Witchs_Mountain/
Strain: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1289570/Strain/
Pekoe: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1626350/Pekoe/
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