Underneath my yellow skin

Indie games vs. Triple A games, part three

More about indie games and AAA games.

Side note: And, yes, this is probably the earliest I have done this. Sony is talking about buying FromSoft’s parent company. Not because of FromSoft, per se, but that’s just a cherry on top of the deal. And it made me immediately worried because Sony looooooves themselves an exclusive, and I have no intention of buying a PS5. Plus, my PS4 is busted, I think. Totally my own fault. I hate the PS4, anyway, and the DualShock 4. I HATE that controller so much, and I can’t even tell you why. Anyway, if From games suddenly become exclusives for the PS for the first year or so, well, that is going to make me very unhappy. But I doubt I would actually buy a console, anyway.

Just finished up a cute little game called Supurr Cat Cafe: Sandwich Rush by 2 Nerdy Nerds. At first I thought it was initially a mobile game, but now, I’m not so sure. It doesn’t really matter; I played it on the PC. The basic gist of it is that you (Olive. That’s your name, not just a fruit/vegetable/ingredient in your sandwiches) re-open (I think?) of a cat cafe. You and your cat, Maka.

It has a simple premise. Olive races around the cafe with a big platter over her head. She catches ingredients as they fall to make sandwiches. Gotta start with bread (with or without butter) and then add to it. You can slap a piece of second piece of bread whenever you want as long as there is one other ingredient between the two pieces of bread. If you put three different ingredients on the piece fo bread, then another piece of bread, it’s a stack (I think?). That’s the whole point of the game–making as many stacks as you can.

As the game goes on, you get different items you can buy to make your sandwiches better. You also can buy some things to decorate your cafe with. Oh, and of course you can adopt cats and put them in cute costumes. If you level them up, they will help out with the sandwiches. Unfortunately, they aren’t discriminatory about what ingredients they put on the sandwiches, which is a problem. You can’t put three of the same ingredients on the sandwich in a row, and you can’t serve a sandwich without bread on top of it. The cats will throw the ingredients on the sandwich so fast, I can’t always avoid the ones I don’t want.


You lose money for catching the wrong ingredients (cat toys rather than ingredients), for not putting a piece of bread on top, and for not giving the customer the ingredients they asked for–to name a few things you can do wrong. The problem with the last is that you have no control over what is dropping, where, when, and at what spee.d Also, there is one symbol that for the life of me I think isn’t coded properly. To be honesty, I’m not sure how to do the symbols properly. I mean, you might get a heart symbol then the chicken symbol and then a mayo symbol. There are no heart items, so you have to look for something with the heart symbols emanating out of it. I assumed it would be the next symbol the customer was requesting. In my example, the chicken. So I wait for a chicken with hearts coming out of it. And wait. And wait some more. I am not getting any chicken at all. When I do, I can’t get to it and if I do get it, I still get the garished wages for giving something ‘disliked’ to a customer. I have tried to do it so I gave a sandwich with only those ingredients and have still gotten this response. There is a beach ball that if you catch it on your sandwich, it forgives all your mistakes.  I think.

That’s one of the issues I have with the game, but it’s such a small one. In addition, it doesn’t really matter if I lose money because I’ll just make more the next day. It’s the perfect game for just spending a couple hours doing not much of anything. I finished the campaign with no effort, and I’m pretty much done with it. It’s exactly what I needed at the moment. Even if I never play it again, I am very satisfied with my experience.

It helps that it’s only six dollars. Anything under ten bucks is something I can take a gamble on. If it’s over ten bucks, then I start deliberating as to whether I want to get it or not. Over twenty, and I’ll usually pause for a minute–unless it’s a known developer that has made something else I’m interested in.

Here’s a weird thing. One of my favorite games in the world is Spiritfarer by Thunder Lotus Games. I’ve gushed about it over and over again because it took me completely by surprise. They had two previous games. Jotun and Sundered. I have both, and I’ve apparently played both for half an hour each. I don’t remember either except that I did not like the former. I don’t remember the latter at all. I may have to go back to them because I loved Spiritfarer so much, but I know that their thing is to make a completely different game each time. Sundered is a metroidvania, and Jotun is an action-exploration game (according to the Steam page). Spiritfarer is a resource management/casual platformer (which I did not realize until a few weeks ago when I looked it up). Their next game is a  multi-player game in which you can have up to 33 players. 33! That’s mind-boggling! It’s called 33 Immortals. I’m assuming that means that the players are the immortals or are trying to become the immortals. I’m not interested at all, but I’ll at least give it a look-see when it comes out because it’s Thunder Lotus Games.

I feel like they captured lightning in a bottle with Spiritfarer, though. I played it mostly because I loved the gorgeous hand-drawn environments/characters and the main character had a cat who accompanied her everywhere (and helped out from time to time). I knew it was about death, and I was fine with that. I did not expect how hard it was going to hit me, and I was an emotional wreck by the time I was finished with the game.

That is whatt indie games can to do me, and that’s why I love them so much.

 

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