Update Sixteen: 29 June 2017
Let me start first off with…. why am I this way?
A friend gave me thirty dollars as a late birthday present, and I figured tossing another thirty at some games wouldn’t be too awful…. which is how I ended up spending another 60 dollars on the sale -_- This time, though, I went for quantity over quality and just sorted my wishlist by price and bought the cheapest games. It’ll be a random selection in quality, but I can’t say no to a game that’s 60 cents or two dollars that seems interesting, and there are a few gems in here I’ve had my eye on for a while. My backlog cries out in pain once more…
But now, to return to our scheduled programming:
Corinne Cross's Dead & Breakfast
2.4 hours, 11 of 16 achievements
tsuper review: 8/10
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
Corinne Cross’s Dead & Breakfast is a delightful little sidescrolling game. Initially developed for Indie Game Maker 2015, a month-long contest for which it won first prize, it was updated and revamped for official release with everything polished to a shine. So, overall, it’s short but sweet.
Corinne Cross is, like me, a twenty-something year old who doesn’t quite know what to do with herself after college. A friend of hers from high school had just died, and his mother is in the hospital. Corinne Cross steps in to look after her house - which used to be a Bed & Breakfast - for a week as the mother recovers. The Bed & Breakfast butts up next to a cemetery, and the old lady who runs it seems to know something you don’t… that the B&B is still in business, except the guests never go home!
The art is absolutely adorable and the colors are rich, the writing is cute, and the gameplay is simple. The vast majority of the game is just talking to people all the time, which I love. There are simple mechanics like a flower-growing mechanic, a cooking mechanic, and an energy meter, but these are simple, sweet, and don’t feel unfair. There’s a New Game+ mode that makes things harder, presumably by increasing how much energy each action takes, Even though it’s a short game, with how inflated my backlog is I figured it’d be better to put it aside for now to revisit later.
If you’re thinking of picking it up, please do!
Next up: Going down?
See you soon!
And therein lies the real power of the steam sales. Yes this one may have been bad for big name games, thanks to AAA publishers now deciding their 3 year old games are still worth $30 (looking at you ubisoft especially), but if you’ve got a little bit to spend, there are so many good games just sitting there asking you to drop a few dollars on them. And so you add a few to your cart, then a few more, and suddenly you’ve got 10+ games that you’re keen to play, and somehow you’ve only spent $30. That’s why despite a lot of complaints from gamers that the ‘sale sucked and they were boycotting steam forever’, I was still pretty excited about it. If your appetite is only for games that come from big publishers you were always going to be disappointed in these days of increasing production costs and longer release schedules, but for indie games? More bargains than you can shake a stick at.
YES!!! you are absolutely right!!!!
I’ve pretty much given up on the AAA industry (I’ve played Persona 5 and Overwatch in the past year and that is it) so when people were complaining and I looked across steam as a whole and saw the plethora of what could be had here….
I mean, again, different strokes for different folks, and I like a lot of niche genres (vns, hogs, point and clicks, walking sims, relaxing puzzle games, teeny tiny rpgs) that tend to skew indie, but there is so much to be had that people just don’t care to look. They’re talking like ‘oh I won’t buy on steam anymore, only off of indiegala or humble or whatever’ and literally half of my wishlist only exists on steam, because it was made by one person or three people and that’s the biggest platform they could get it on.
There’s a lot of complaints about steam that I just don’t get, and yeah, absolutely, that is one of them.
Yeah people seem to be increasingly negative towards steam and I don’t really understand it either. It’s like some people would be happier to see steam just die, and I really don’t get that attitude. If it wasn’t for the convenience of Steam a lot of people would just go back to pirating all their games, and developers would benefit from that how exactly? I have played so many games I would never have even thought to try thanks to seeing them on steam, and enjoy gaming now even more than I used to in the rose-tinted days of childhood. It’s just so easy for developers to make games and sell them. Does that mean a lot of crap? Of course. But I also don’t think half of the creative and clever indie games I’ve played over the years would have had a chance without a big publisher behind them, if it wasn’t for being able to sell them on steam. So yeah, I’m happy with the games I got this sale, and there’s a strong possibility another tenner or two might be dropped to mop up a few more of those wishlisted cheapies.
Corinne Cross’s Dead & Breakfast looks interesting! I hadn’t heard of it but I’ll give it a look thanks to your positive review :) I played first chapter of The Journey Down last month, it’s also a short game to finish, personally I’d give it a mixed recommendation as there wasn’t really much in this one, I expect the future chapters to have a more interesting story as you’re teased about the interesting “journey down” right from the start but you spend almost of the game repairing an aircraft in order to make that journey in future chapters…
Hey, Joe!
I’m all right with one installment being a little light - if this is a ‘first act’ of sorts for a full trilogy, it’s a little hard for it to stand on its own legs. Mostly I just want to test out if I like the writing, the art, etc. But thanks for letting me know what to expect. I heard the third one’s going to be out in august!
Fair enough :) The art was a strong point. I’ll be interested to hear how you get on!