I cannot believe it’s June already. How the hell did this year go by so quickly? In part it’s because it’s been mostly winterlike that it doesn’t feel as if time has advanced. or rather, we were stuck in one day for months. *Stridently ignoring world around me*
Summer Game Fest was on Friday, and there were some decent games. Nothing for me, though, as the ones I was most interested in were first-person. which I can’t play because I get nauseous. I also watched the XBox Direct yesterday. It was really good for the first half (if you care about the big games), but then it draaaaaagged in the second half. Plus, ending on COD was so ugh. Didn’t they learned from last year that the people who like that game doesn’t watch the show and vice-versa?
The big show was solid if you like Triple A games. I’m not a huge fan, but Geoff kept things moving. Hm. I’m trying to remember any game that really hit me hard. I’m looking at a list of the trailers, and there really wasn’t much for me. There was one game that intrigued me and it had the prologue on Steam. It’s called 1666 Amesterdam (Panache Digital Games), and it looked to be about witches in Amsterdam. I will admit that having black cats in it sold me on it, and I eagerly downloaded the prologue.
I will say, that the twenty minutes (slight exaggeration) of installing the sliders was not a good start. The graphics were rough, and I’m not someone who cares much about that sort of thing. When I’m looking at/playing an indie game, I’m very forgiving of flaws. I know it’s a small team of, say, under twenty people. So, yeah, it’s not going to look like a Triple A game.
The man who founded this studio was the creator of the original Assassin’s Creed. Even though I don’t vibe with those games, I have to show respect to the man who came up with the idea. Or not. But my point is that he’s a luminary in the industry. The tralier for his new game was interesting, even though the graphics were, ah, janky, at best. Plus, as I mentioned, black cats.
This game was coded for me. Witches, magic, and black cats? Hell to the fucking yes! I was interested in all those things, and once the shaders did their things, and I was finally in the game, I was eager to see what was going on. I did not love the graphics as I mentioned, but I was willing to overlook it. For now.
The controls were shonky and just did not feel good. Also, the game starts with you as the female protag walking around. Slowly. You can use your magicks to do wondrous things like light torches. I mean, really? And from what I remembered, it was very slow going. Meaning, it wasn’t just light up the torches simultaneously. You had to hold down the LT to ignite your wand or whatever and then use RT to actually light. I’m not sure those are the actual controls, but they were something similar. And it was so awkward.
The walking animation was bad. Like, is this game really for this generation bad. And when I met another character, and we were walking together, we were glued together in a way that was funny, embarrassing, and maddening. Plus, we walked at a speed that was excruciating. In 2026, there is no excuse to have someone walking at the speed of crawl.
When I met the second character and the walking was so bad and slow, plus there was clipping going on, I quietly closed the game and breathed a sigh of relief and resignation. I’m glad I got to play the demo (prologue) before buying it because now I know unless they really tighten shit up, I’m not going to be buying it. That’s a positive in and of itself.
Let’s jump to Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit (Spry Fox) (the sequel to the first Cozy Grove game). It’s now on Steam, and that’s a saga in and of itself. I’ll try to be as brief as possible, but it’s wild. Cozy Grove (the original) is one of my top five favorite non-FromSoft games of all time. Maybe third. Definitely fourth.
It’s a cute cozy game about death. You’re a spirit scout who helps bears move on to the afterlife. That’s grossly simplified, but it will do for my purposes. The twist to the first game was that it ran in real time so that you had to come back every day if you wanted to do different things. Some resources only appeared in a certain season, and each season lasts two months with a month in-between (if I remember correctly).
It was really grueling at the start because of the scaricity issue, but once you reached a certain threshhold, it was like a well-run machine. I played this every day since the day it released (the day after my birthday in 2021) to the day I ended up in the hospital (five months), and I loved every moment of it.
The characters are so memorable, and I loved helping every one of them. Well, not every one. But most every one. And there was one bear in the DLC who absolutely broke my heart because she hit a little too close to home. The DLC was released just a year over the original came out, so it was once again my comfort food as I recovered from my medical crisis.
There was a routine I had, and it helped make each day a bit brighter. I 100%ed it (the last few achievements were torturous, by the way. I hate when devs throw in a few achievements that are meant to make you hate the game, yes, I’m looking at you, FromSoft), and I was so looking forward to the sequel.
Then, Spry Fox took an offer from Netflix to work under them. They announced that the sequel was only going to be on Netflix and on mobile. And I felt my heart drop. I do have Netflix, but they didn’t know anything about gaming. Also, the sequel was going to be developed for mobile–and you would just maybe be able to play it in browser. Maybe. Who knows if it was going to work? It wasn’t as if Netflix had just thrown millions of dollars at ‘gaming’ and hoped it would work.
I was heartbroken that I would nto get to play the sequel, but I moved on. Then, Netflix informed me tha tthey had a gaming beta, and I was able to play the demo for Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit for free. Quite frankly, I was not hopeful about the sequel, especially as it was being developed for the mobile.
More on this tomorrow.