April 14, 2023
Good morning! Welcome to our regular column where we write a bit about some of the games we’ve found ourselves playing over the past few days. This time: gardens, TikTok recommendations, and that Doom, Mario Maker mashup you’ve always wanted.
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We Been Playing, here’s our archive.
Galaxy Garden, PC
Garden Galaxy is a game where you create small 3D gardens. He has a beautiful sense of interconnectedness. Strange teardrop-shaped visitors show up in your garden and you click on them to get a coin. You put the coin in a magic pot and you get a garden decoration – a plant, a pot, something else – and any decorations you don’t want go back into the pot and you get more coins.
GOOD. What this fails to convey is the strategy involved – and to me, Garden Galaxy is definitely a strategy game. At first I was just in love with everything that came out of the pot, so I filled my little garden with clutter. Then I realized what I really wanted was more space, so I put all the decorations back in the jar and focused on just keeping the extra land tiles that were sticking out. from the jar. Now my garden is growing but it’s a bit empty. Cor, it’s all a balance.
There is more. Garden Galaxy is a game of regular surprises, I think. One minute it’s something entirely new coming out of the pot, the next – I just found out – it’s the fact that you can select multiple coins and put them in the pot all at once. It’s one of those deceptive games that looks simple but contains multitudes of them. I’m going to play it for a while, I think.
bertie
Doomlings, card game
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I found Doomlings on TikTok, where I started finding lots of games. I was scrolling happily, then I saw colorful cards and cute little creatures and…
Doomlings is actually a game about the end of the world. It’s a card game where you play cards to grow your evolving trait bank as the apocalypse draws closer and closer. I love games with a clock on them, and I also love games with hundreds of different maps – Doomlings has so many traits, and a lot of them have cool qualities that either put you ahead of the pack or spoil it a rival’s deck.
What I really like, however, is the sense of time that unfolds as the game progresses, with each round seeing you turn over a new Age card. There’s always a chance here that you’ll get a global disaster that brings you closer to the end of the game, but even before that these Age cards change the rules in some ways, banning certain cards, changing your hand size, or whatever. just fucking with people.
I’ve had a few games with my daughter so far and they’ve all been great fun. So Doomlings is up there with my touch sleeping duck lamp as one of my top TikTok buys.
Chris Donlan
Meet Your Creator, PS5
When I first read the blurb for Meet Your Maker, this month’s Playstation Plus giveaway, I imagined it was something like Rust. The phrase “Players are tasked with building and looting user-generated outposts filled with traps and guards” made me imagine an open-world style persistent survival game, something you could fill with diabolical bases filled with traps that other players could then randomly stumble upon and attempt to raid.
However, after downloading and uploading it, I quickly began to realize that it was none of that. Instead, what I was playing seemed like a twisted mix of Super Mario Maker and DOOM and at first I wasn’t really enamored. The gameplay loop is pretty straightforward, though hidden behind a complicated and confusing loot and resource system, and it basically boils down to doing one of two things. You can either indulge your creative side and build a big base full of insta-kill death traps by placing large square blocks around a procedurally generated construction site, or you can jump into outposts created by user and attempt to attack them for their precious ‘GenMat’ resource before trying to make it out alive.
Obviously, you can indulge in both activities if you want, and it’s worth doing because you’ll earn resources for upgrades by doing both things. If you’re a builder, all player kills in your base will earn you resources, and if you’re a Raider, any resources you remove from a player base will be yours.
But here’s the thing. It’s brutally difficult to be a Raider and with most traps killing you in an instant, you’ll have to replay each outpost multiple times before you can access the GenMat core and return in one piece. It’s a gameplay loop that’s sure to put off a lot of people, but for me, it really appealed to my stubborn side. Once I found an outpost that seemed impossible to beat, I had to beat it. And so I reappeared again and again, each time getting an inch closer to success until I finally managed to escape.
Meet Your Maker certainly isn’t for everyone, and in fact, it feels more like an experimental game that developers Behavior Interactive made for fun, rather than something that will be played by the general public like Dead. By Daylight. That said, if you like taking on challenges (or making other people suffer), I highly recommend giving it a try, as I’m currently completely addicted to raiding player-made bases to see what new tortures await me. .
Ian Hington
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#played
