Game Reviews -- 2024

10/10/2024 -- NGU Idle

Price: Free (with optional ingame purchases)

Platform: Steam, Kongregate, Armor Games

NGU Idle is a game about making numbers go up. A lot of different numbers, for varying purposes. As the developer freely states, it takes inspiration from many previous idle games, a category which includes such varied entries as A Dark Room and Cookie Clicker. It synthesizes its inspirations and adds new ideas and mechanics to the genre.

The start of NGU Idle is simple. You have bars that go up over time, representing things like energy, health, attack and defense. You pit your stats against various bosses in order to progress. But soon you start unlocking new mechanics, like an RPG "Adventure" mode, a magic system, and more. And, crucially, you unlock the ability to reset your progress, with the goal of progressing past new bosses each run.

The game's look is about as barebones as possible. Icons are crudely drawn, and the interface is a series of plain bars and tables. There is no music or audio to speak of, nothing to distract you from the task of watching numbers go up. There is a story, deliberately goofy and nonsensical, and employing a lot of scatological humor. It is entirely ignorable.

With such little attention given to presentation and narrative, what is left? At its core, NGU Idle is an optimization game. If you want to leave it running for days at a time, you certainly can. But you quickly run into diminishing returns. So you start to look for the most optimal path, spending experience points gained from bosses to do things like increase the speed of your bars, to increasing their maximums, and so on.

Truth be told, there's a ton of content. I got as far as Boss 57 out of 300, which, according to the community, means I finished the tutorial. This took several days of play in which I was attending to the game at least every 10-15 minutes. My breaking point was attempting the challenge from the developer to reset the game three times in a row in runs of less than 30 minutes, while still reaching a certain level of progress each time. This proved to be incredibly frustrating, as to maximize my progress in each run I had to get as close to 30 minutes as possible. After multiple instances of looking away for a moment only to miss the 30 minute mark by seconds, I gave up.

Would I recommend this game? I think if you're looking for a pure mechanical challenge, this is an interesting pick. There's a certain joy in seeing Number Go Up, and finding yourself making incremental progress in each new attempt. However, I found the lack of narrative or aesthetic reward made progress feel less interesting. And the combination of an idle game where you nonetheless have to keep a careful watch on time made for very irritating moments.

Still, it's a free game, with only optional purchases if you want to progress faster or support the developer. If you're interested in the genre, you'll lose nothing by checking out NGU Idle.

08/05/2024 -- Pixross

Price: $3.99

In Bundle: Palestinian Aid

When you want Picross, and you want lots of it with little fuss or distractions, Pixross has it for you.

Pixross is a minimalistic collection of both precreated and randomly generated Picross puzzles. Picross, also known as Nonograms, are logic puzzles where you use logic to determine which cells in a grid are colored in.

The puzzles vary in size and difficulty level--most can be solved in a few minutes or less, though your mileage may vary. The game comes with over 170 premade puzzles, of a number of different categories, which add up to an intelligible picture. You can also randomly generate puzzles in a predetermined or random size. Solving puzzles gives you points which you can use to unlock new backgrounds and styles for the puzzles themselves. Finally, you can optionally add challenge rules for yourself, such as not being able to make mistakes or having clues disappear over time.

As I said before, the presentation and gameplay are pretty minimalistic. Just a couple ambient tracks, and most backgrounds are gradients or simple stock images. Pixross lacks a story or a lot of extra unlockables like some mobile Nonogram games I've played, but honestly, I didn't find I missed them.

The sole pain point I had with this game has to do with the unlockables themselves. You see, they function as a gatcha system, with you unlocking a random background or style with each spend of points. You're not guaranteed a new theme every time, but the game will still flash a "New!" notification every time you spin. You have to pay attention to the percentage unlocked in the upper left of the screen to know if you've actually got anything new, and back in and out of the puzzles screen to get rid of the notification.

Minor quibbles aside, Picross is a great package if you want to solve some logic puzzles. The minimalistic theme means fewer distractions, and the premade puzzles alone will keep you occupied for quite a while. For $3.99, I'd say it's definitely worth it.