Try it Tuesday: May 10th, 2022
I keep doing this thing to myself whereby I choose too many games for the Try it Tuesday lineup and shortchange them all with the amount of time the show actually has to run every week. It’s sort of unfair of me. But it does allow me to come back someday – return, if you will – to some of these games, to actually dive much deeper into them. I’m going to have to do that with most of the games that were on the lineup for this week, because they were all simply too good. I will waste no further time discussing, and just get straight into the first impressions.
I‘ve included affiliate links to purchase each game and support the channel where applicable.
The Gunk
The Gunk is a game I recall seeing the trailer for last year during one of the summer game announcements. I clearly tucked both that memory away, as well as a predisposed notion that it might be a roguelike? I don’t know why – perhaps it’s just that I play so many of them that I just assumed it would be another one. Maybe a shooter. I was pleasantly surprised with both how beautiful The Gunk turned out to be, but also how casual and fun it was. The story follows your main playable character Rani and companions, a small group of space haulers, who stumble upon a mystery planet that seems to be jam-packed with resources for them to harvest for some extra funds. You’re more or less traversing the landscape from here on out: figuring out delightful puzzles, sucking up gunk with your upgradable power glove, and exploring ever deeper into the mysterious alien ruins that you keep stumbling upon. I was utterly captivated by what The Gunk had to offer, and I think it probably set the tone for the rest of the night. Not only was it an unexpected high bar for the Try it Tuesday show, but it was just a delightful and refreshing RPG that I needed to offset whatever is clunking around in my brain this week. Gameplay mixes a third person perspective with light puzzle solving, deep exploration, mild combat, and some platforming. Fans of Journey To The Savage Planet will love The Gunk; I know I did, and I can’t wait to get back to it as soon as possible.
Links to the game:
Below
Below was another surprise, albeit less of one. I picked up Below during a recent sale on Steam, fully expecting the minimalist, zoomed out perspective. I wasn’t sure of what the gameplay would have in store for me, and I guess that was where the surprise still lied. Below has two modes: survival and exploration, which invokes games like The Long Dark for me – not just in difficulty selection, but in overall sound design. Very well done, comfortable, ear-pleasing soundscapes mixed with a very minimal presentation are what made Below so cozy to sink into. I only played the survival mode, but I imagine exploration is less stringent on eating, drinking, and staying warm, and puts the focus more on the journey over the challenge. I still don’t fully know the story, or if there is one – but that doesn’t bother me. As the game suggests in its description: explore. Survive. Discover. As I stated at the beginning of this week’s write-up, I didn’t have as much time as I’d have liked to dig into this game, at least not enough to me to say that enemy variance needs some work. An hour and a half in, and I felt that way – but that could change the further in I get, or the more that I find. The elements presented to me gave me the same feeling of wonderment that I got when I first gave Book of Travels a try, which is a very minimalist and mysterious Tiny Multiplayer Online RPG – a genre they’re trying to define – so if Below is something you’ve already played, I can recommend that game. and vice versa. If you’ve played neither, and love a really mysterious, yet cozy, somewhat solitary experience, then I can’t recommend Below enough. The pace of it is exactly my speed, and I look forward to returning to it sometime soon.
Links to the game:
Tunic
There was a lot of hype going into Tunic in the chat. A lot of people stated it was their Game Of The Year, which is setting the bar pretty high. And while that is completely fair, and valid, it almost set the bar too high for me going into the experience. I also found myself running into my show’s time constraints issues, so Tunic got a little bit of a rough go for me. What I played, I did enjoy. But I think the measured comparisons to other genres and titles conflicted with my base desire to experience the game in an organic fashion, and therefore sort of colored my overall opinion of the game. I definitely played Death’s Door last year, which is a game that Tunic definitely invoked memories of. I struggled with some of the difficulty early on, but less so because of the difficulty itself, and moreso because of my full disregard of the rules the game was so clearly laying out before me. Tunic‘s cute art style is a great juxtaposition to its challenge – the game feeds you breadcrumbs of knowledge and very clearly tells you exactly where to go, but these details are obscured behind the game’s unspoken base rule of knowledge. Respect the little details, and pay close attention to what you’re given, and you’ll succeed. Disregard everything and plow through, as I did, and you will be met with frustrations early on. As the player, you’ll trek across the landscape and battle other equally cute enemies to contrast your cute fox character, while also reconstructing the manual for the game. That manual will, hopefully, give you breadcrumbs of information on where to go, what to do, and how to handle the things you encounter. It’s definitely a cute love letter to The Legend of Zelda that I can appreciate, and I do intend to go back to Tunic to give it another chance, because I think this game speaks to its merits and achievements much better than anyone else ever could on its behalf. I’m not even doing a great job of explaining the game, or my opinions of it, right now! Needless to say, I think that Tunic is great, but the audience for it will be divided in whether or not it enjoys the type of game it is. While I think most people can recognize that it’s clearly a good game, it may not be for everyone at the end of the day.
Links to the game:
Trek to Yomi
Trek to Yomi has a clear inspiration rooted in Kurosawa films, and even if you’re not familiar with those, there’s a deep appreciation for the aesthetic presentation for the game that anyone will have. I would even venture to say that those who aren’t familiar with the classic films may soon become if they played Trek to Yomi at all – the game is basically an interactive film, and I mean that in the most complementary way possible. The story follows a lone samurai named Hiroki who is bound by duty to protect everything he loves until the very end. I didn’t get too far into the story for the game, but I also wouldn’t want to spoil it because I believe it’s the big draw for Trek to Yomi – gameplay, at least for the hour and a half that I played it, seemed like it could get deep, but wasn’t at the stage I’d progressed to. I could see the potential for deep, impressive combo attacks, but found little necessity to use the ones presented to me up to that point. Clearly you would encounter different enemies that you had to change your strategy for in order to dispatch, but I was mostly crushing the same button or two to run forward. Another thing that I know the game has that I didn’t give myself enough time to explore on Tuesday was the lore spread across the world. Rooted in real Japanese history, what I did find really added to the immersion factor. The perspective of Trek to Yomi was somewhat fixed, but each scene offered a different camera frame, and that definitely mixed up the 2D combat scenes. I always think of Shadow Complex when I see a game that has this kind of creative use of environments, and I love that. A lot of games have taken that formula and done something fairly innovative with it, and Trek to Yomi is such a visual feast that it sets the bar pretty high for other games of this type going forward, at least from a visual standpoint. I’ll definitely be coming back to Trek to Yomi as soon as I can – the game clocks in at around 6 hours, and is worth the price of admission.
Links to the game:
