I’m back for another stream this weekend, Saturday 05 August. It’ll begin at a later time of 8:00PM UK, 9:00PM CET, 3:00PM EST, 5:00AM Sydney. You’ll need to hop over to the Thinky Games Twitch channel or watch with the Steam folks at the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase page, although I will only be responding to comments I see on Twitch!
I’ll be looking at six games in the Showcase, three new games and three older games you might have seen me stream before. Here they are:
- 8.00pm SokoSolitaire (Daisy Games, 2023)
- 8.20pm Kine (Chump Squad, 2020)
- 8.40pm Puzzle Pelago (Christopher Mielack, 2020)
- 9.00pm Magicube (nebu soku, 2023)
- 9.20pm Tricone Lab (Partickhill Games Limited, 2017)
- 9.40pm Golden Record Retriever (Hoochoo Game Studios, 2023)
See you there?
Update 06 Aug: The stream is now available to watch on YouTube.
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Just looking at the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase page.
I think it’s funny that Sushi for Robots and Neon Noodles released the same day given they’re both food-themed robot puzzle games. Admittedly, only Neon Noodles is automaton-based!
I see Akurra has been renamed Isles of Sea & Sky which I don’t think I like as much to be honest but the reasoning for it is fair, and it does sound fantastical and inviting. It’s got a very nice new trailer and animation too. Rare I’m excited about a sokoban game!
Good lord there are a lot of puzzle games, Joel.
I got sent the list of all the games ahead of this event, to help me work out what I wanted to stream.
Dear God.
How are the thinky streams going? I always plan to be along to one but am generally terrible at being at any specific place/time conjunction. I imagine it’s a bit like the Information Age version of doing the communal crossword in the kitchen or break room.
How are they going? It’s like an extension of Electron Dance in a way – the chat is usually a familiar crowd, some from the site, some not; you’ll see vfig, ori (salty horse), Tom “Nullpointer” and st33d (as ‘crowleyson’). Developers sometimes make an appearence!
New voices turn up now and then and I guess my mission is to make the twitch channel more successful which means, eventually, the chat might become hard to respond to. With the Cerebral Showcase Stream there were a few new names in the chat (Youtube link now added to the post!).
Unfortunately for this new stream I changed the sound setup – I depressed the game audio more than usual and allowed myself to sit back from mic by turning up the gain. Unfortunately this magnified keyboard noise and completely wiped out much of the game audio, plus I have an echo in this one. Not cool and I’ll be stepping back to how I used to do things.
I have not played The Talos Principle yet, but I own it on Epic. But on Epic there is no Road To Gehenna(?!) so… I just bought the base game and DLC on Steam while they were going cheap!
How’s Kine by the way? Is it muddly? It looks and sounds lovely (key clacks aside :P) but wow, ‘Stephen’s Sausage Roll meets Lost Vikings’ indeed! It doesn’t look as unforgiving as Snakebird but I get the impression there are a lot of tricks to learn to get each character into particular positions.
I just can’t click with Kine but playing it one more time, I’ve got a few ideas why:
* The camera sometimes gravitates to angles which are unhelpful
* There’s an awkwardness to the controls, I’m often getting confused between “do action” and “swap character” (and Euler is effectively “two characters”)
* Sometimes it’s difficult to see where a character might be able to reach; at times you just want a grid imposed top-down so you can read the entire space
It feels like an uphill struggle, because it’s not an easy game regardless of the above issues. When it comes together for me, it feels awesome, but there are many levels where I seem to be… muddling through.