Steam Room #1

This game is basically Dwarf Fortress but you’re one person, and the world it generates around you as you embark on your adventure feels so lived in you might wonder if you found it in a vintage store bin. I only started this recently, and it’s a roguelike which means when you die it’s all over and you have to start from scratch. I’ve died like 20 times before making it out of the first little area, but from what I’ve read the very high learning curve is rewarded pretty heavily on the other side and I’m excited to dig into this when I have a bit more time. Get into this if you’re looking for something to lease the next month or two of your life, and don’t if you’re not.

It’s a minor dream of mine to have to start a new life in an interplanetary commerce colony while piecing together the fragments of my troubled past, so Citizen Sleeper so far has felt like the Steam marketplace started looking back at me through my screen sometime in the last year or two. This game is something closer to an interactive novel than anything else, with the gameplay mechanics hovering just above something my grandmother could figure out on her own and the reading level rises to something around Ready Player 1, which is to say lengthy-ish and not particularly dense. I love everything about this so far, and it’s been incredibly fun to get lost in the minutiae of galactic malaise. This is a great option if you’ve been wanting to read sci-fi lately but want to feel a bit more a part of the action.

There are, like, 50 Yes Chef jokes lurking around here that I’m going to leave alone so we can focus on the task at hand. Throne simulators have become a bit more of a thing I think since Game of Thrones, and from my experience so far it’s actually pretty fun to be in charge of a rudimentary kingdom. What separates a game like this from, say, Crusader Kings III is scope. You spend most of your time in your own castle, and more specifically your throne room and various parlors talking with family members and administrative homies about the matters at hand. There is a basic storyline here that your decisions shape considerably, so it isn’t just approving budgets for repairing collapsed wall sections and expanding the town market. But there is enough of that to scratch the itch, and after investing in a local tavern and negotiating for a larger cut of the weekly revenue I’m hooked on this forever. We’ll see once I get to the end of my first run what the replayability is like, but so far it’s been well worth the coin it costs.