June 2023 Random Game Thoughts Thread

[ZedClampet]

June Sale Dates:​

Steam: Next Fest: June 19 - 26, Summer Sale: June 29 - July 13
Epic: Mega Sale: Through June 15
GoG: Neon Dreams: There are several small scale sales going on right now. No idea when the summer sale is.

Coming to Game Pass in June:​

Car Mechanic Simulator 2021, June 1
Slayers X, June 1
The Big Con, June 1
Hypnospace Outlaw, June 6
Amnesia, The Bunker, June 6
Rune Factory 4 Special, June 8
Stacking, June 8
Dordogne, June 13

Top Game Launches for June (From PC Gamer):​

• June 1 — Killer Frequency - First-person '80s slasher adventure (Steam)
• June 2 — Street Fighter 6 - Ryu Ryu Ryu Ryu Ryu Ryu (Steam)
• June 2 — We Love Katamari Reroll+ - Rollemup remaster (Steam)
• June 6 — Amnesia: The Bunker - WWI sequel to hallmark horror (Steam)
• June 6 — Diablo 4 - The long-awaited action RPG sequel (Battle.net)
• June 8 — Harmony: The Fall of Reverie - Choice-driven visual novel (Steam)
• June 8 — Mask of the Rose - Fallen London's 'sort-of' dating sim (Steam)
• June 8 — Riders Republic - Ubisoft's downhill sports wildlife reserve (Steam)
• June 9 — Greyhill Incident - LGM-shootin' horror FPS (Steam)
• June 13 — Dordogne - Gorgeous watercolor childhood adventure (Steam)
• June 14 — Oblivion Override - Cyborg Dead Cells (Steam)
• June 15 — Layers of Fear - More horror from Bloober Team (Steam)
• June 16 — Park Beyond - Tycoon simulator of the rollercoaster type (Steam)
• June 20 — Aliens: Dark Descent - Xenomorph-slaying squad RTS (Steam)
• June 27 — Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life - Harvest Moon redux (Steam)
• June 30 — Crime O'Clock - Hidden object crime-busting (Steam)
• June 30 — Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective - Poltergeist puzzler port (Steam)

Notable DLC Releasing in June:​

The Elder Scrolls Online: Necrom on Steam

Traverse the Telvanni Peninsula in Morrowind and preserve secrets ascribed to the unfathomable realms of Apocrypha. Unlock the runic power of a brand-new class - the Arcanist - and fight to uphold reality itself.

store.steampowered.com

Tank Mechanic Simulator - Shermans DLC on Steam

Renovate & build vehicles from Shermans DLC. Experience highly detailed exterior and interiors. Take tanks fully apart by using different tools. Transform them from rusty and ruined to fully working machines. Check them on the proving ground, sell or put into your own museum.

store.steampowered.com

Farming Simulator 22 - Hay & Forage Pack on Steam

Get 17 specialized machines to maximize hay and forage resources! Included are authentic tractors, mowers, mergers & more by seven new and returning agricultural brands.

store.steampowered.com

Deep Rock Galactic - Decontaminator Pack on Steam

The Decontaminator Pack will give you a full suite of properly insulated weapon frameworks for dealing with a ghastly planetary plague! No more gunk in your clips!

store.steampowered.com

Save 25% on LEGO® 2K Drive Premium Drive Pass Season 1 on Steam

Purchase the Premium Drive Pass for Season 1 to unlock the ability to earn a total of 101 Premium Rewards at your own pace, including 10 Vehicles, 10 Drivers, 26 Brick Packs, and more!

store.steampowered.com

Coming to Early Access in June:​

Driftwood on Steam

A game about high-speed downhill longboarding and a sloth named Eddy. Carve up the mountainside as you drift through the beautiful landscape, and find the perfect balance of speed and control.

store.steampowered.com

Space Reign on Steam

An indie space-sim and strategy game featuring ship and fleet combat mixed with RTS elements. Complete contracts and Claim sectors for your faction in the near-future, where resource exploiting corporations are in a state of constant conflict over territory control.

store.steampowered.com

DUBIUM on Steam

DUBIUM is a survival deception game set in a near future sci-fi environment. Five Frontiers must work together to complete different missions to escape before it’s too late. But beware, one of the Frontiers is a Traitor whose goal is to escape and leave the others to fall into the abyss.

store.steampowered.com

Six Days in Fallujah on Steam

Six Days in Fallujah is a realistic first-person tactical shooter based on true stories of Marines, Soldiers, and Iraqi civilians during the toughest urban battle since 1968.

store.steampowered.com

Forever Skies on Steam

Forever Skies is a first-person post-apocalyptic survival game. Return to Earth, ravaged by an ecological disaster. Fly, upgrade and customize your mobile high-tech airship base. Scavenge resources to survive, face dangers on the surface and hunt for viral pathogens to cure a mysterious illness.

store.steampowered.com

Life Not Supported on Steam

You are the lone survivor orbiting a potential new home planet, tethered to what’s left of your ship. Gather nearby debris and assemble a make-shift vessel in an attempt to survive the harsh realities of space. Maybe you'll live long enough to uncover the truth behind the ship's malfunction...

store.steampowered.com

Revival: Recolonization on Steam

Set in a post-apoc version of Earth, Revival is a 4x strategy game where the world and its rules can change at key moments, creating a deep and highly replayable experience.

store.steampowered.com

Additional June Releases Perhaps of Interest:​

Save 50% on Myriads: Renaissance on Steam

Myriads: Renaissance is a turn-based strategy game with city-building and 4X mechanics. Set in a fantasy world made up of thousands of floating islands, you must grow your capital and expand your kingdom. Resist waves of powerful corsairs and construct defence towers to survive their incursions.

store.steampowered.com

Pile Up! on Steam

"Pile Up!" is a strategic building game which you need to build houses, fulfill your people’s requests and manage your risky buildings in different ways on a small land. But don’t let your guard down in this chill environment, we only get you relaxed so you destroy everything you did.

store.steampowered.com

Super Mega Baseball™ 4 on Steam

Super Mega Baseball™ 4 is where the Legends play. The signature combo of arcade-inspired style and immersive gameplay returns with over 200 baseball Legends and a grand slam of presentation upgrades.

store.steampowered.com

Tiny Thor on Steam

Jump into this challenging retro platformer! Play as Thor, use his mighty hammer and unique items to explore the Northern Realms. Beware of mythical creatures blocking your path to become a god!

store.steampowered.com

Espresso Tycoon on Steam

Espresso Tycoon - a coffee shop simulator. Create your brand, decorate the coffee shop, manage your employees, and take care of your customers. Use the 3D coffee editor to create coffee recipes, order supplies, and collect rating points. Build the whole coffee business and complete all the missions!

store.steampowered.com

MotoGP™23 on Steam

Open the throttle, pass your opponents and cross the finish line: live the dream of being the next champion with the new MotoGP™23, more amazing and challenging than ever!

store.steampowered.com

Brewpub Simulator on Steam

Quit your day job, open a bar! Decorate the place, create your own beer and design your labels. Keep your kegs full and your customers happy, and never stop growing!

store.steampowered.com

Daydream: Forgotten Sorrow on Steam

Experience the altered memories of a dying man, reliving his entire life as a little boy while lying on his deathbed. Explore the profound depths of his subconscious as you assist Griffin to shed the remains of his miserable life before his impending demise.

store.steampowered.com

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six® Extraction on Steam

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six® Extraction is a tactical, co-op, PvE first-person shooter where you and your squad face an evolving alien threat. Teamwork, tactics, and flawless execution are key to your survival.

store.steampowered.com

F1® 23 on Steam

Be the last to brake in EA SPORTS™ F1® 23, the official video game of the 2023 FIA Formula One World Championship™. A new chapter in the thrilling "Braking Point" story mode delivers high-speed drama and heated rivalries.

store.steampowered.com

The Leviathan's Fantasy on Steam

This is a Simulation game. You will manage your cloud city, recruit adventurers all over the world, take them for exploration, obtain resources and blueprints. Construct buildings, make equipment, produce items, so to develop your city into greatness together with your adventurers.

store.steampowered.com

Swelter on Steam

Swelter is a story-driven mod set several years before the events of Half-Life 2. It explores the internal tensions within the Resistance during their rebellion against the Combine in a post-Soviet Central Asian city, encircled by the scorching steppe.

store.steampowered.com

Revival: Recolonization on Steam

Set in a post-apoc version of Earth, Revival is a 4x strategy game where the world and its rules can change at key moments, creating a deep and highly replayable experience.

store.steampowered.com

Save 40% on Trepang2 on Steam

Become the ultimate badass in Trepang2: A gory, action-packed FPS set in the near future. Unleash all hell on your enemies, dodge bullets and leave a trail of destruction in this hardcore and frenetic shooter.

store.steampowered.com

 

[ZedClampet]

@Colif does Pile Up look like your sort of game?

Also, Swelter is a Half-Life 2 mod that looks pretty cool.

Forever Skies (early access) is what I'm really looking forward to. I played the demo some time back and it was pretty good.

 

[Colif]

@Colif does Pile Up look like your sort of game?

it looks a little more complicated than the games I was playing

It depends what Diablo 4 is like as to if I come back and look at it again.

 

[Brian Boru]

Grabbed this from a Gameranx video, saved it as 'EA Graveyard'.

 

[Colif]

that image drew one line at a time... looks at imgur, oh its down... that explains it. I felt like internet had gone back 20 odd years to when it did draw images one line at a time.

 

[ZedClampet]

Actually, I'm MOST excited by Super Mega Baseball 4. I keep forgetting about it because it's sort of a surprise launch.

 

[Colif]

Super Mega Baseball 4

I read that as Super Mario Baseball 4 a few times...

 

[ZedClampet]

I read that as Super Mario Baseball 4 a few times...

That would sell better for sure.

 

[Brian Boru]

@ZedClampet thanks again for this great job! I don't see anything there to tempt me, backlog breathes sigh of relief.

 

[mainer]

@ZedClampet - I love these monthly random game thoughts threads, as opposed to our old weekly version, as it's much easier to follow what individuals are playing. It's also, as I think I said previously, a great way to see what's scheduled for release. How long does it take you to compile all those upcoming release links? Seems like it would take hours. Maybe you do it over the course of several days instead of all at once? It's much appreciated anyway, I think by everyone.

Nothing on that list really interests me, but one game that I'm keeping an eye on that's not on that list and currently scheduled for a 6/21/2023 release is Trepang2. Weird name, but it looks like an old-school shooter, very similar to the first Fear game. I'm not big on most of the new release shooters for various reasons, but this looks like a lot of fun to me.

Save 40% on Trepang2 on Steam

Become the ultimate badass in Trepang2: A gory, action-packed FPS set in the near future. Unleash all hell on your enemies, dodge bullets and leave a trail of destruction in this hardcore and frenetic shooter.

store.steampowered.com

As far as my current gaming goes, I finished up Prey earlier this week (I actually finished a non-RPG from start to finish, which is rare for me). I had my doubts at first, mainly because of the combat, which at first felt difficult armed only with a wrench and very few skills.

But it opened up dramatically once I found the GLOO Gun which opens up so many more options in how to handle not only combat, but exploration (plus realizing that I couldn't just waltz into any unlocked room or area). The story, exploration, mechanics (not including the hacking minigame), and brief character interactions were great. And the combat became more fluid later in the game. Very RPG-like, and a very underappreciated game overall.

I don't know how many different ending there were, but I was happy with my ending.

While I intend to play the new System Shock Remake, I thought I'd wait until the end of June for the Steam Summer Sale to see if there was a bit of a discount. So I've started another run through the Solasta main campaign so that I could play through my newly purchased Palace of Ice DLC (which is a continuation of the main campaign). You don't have to do it that way, but it seemed appropriate to me, plus I love rolling the dice in character creation.

 

[ZedClampet]

@ZedClampet - I love these monthly random game thoughts threads, as opposed to our old weekly version, as it's much easier to follow what individuals are playing. It's also, as I think I said previously, a great way to see what's scheduled for release. How long does it take you to compile all those upcoming release links? Seems like it would take hours. Maybe you do it over the course of several days instead of all at once? It's much appreciated anyway, I think by everyone.

It doesn't take all that long, but I couldn't take a guess right now. Next month I'll time it.

When I was doing the "other" releases and came across Trepang2, I thought it was in the PC Gamer list, so I didn't add it. I have to go back and forth so much I just got confused. Went back and added it now. Thanks for the heads up.

Obviously, there are a ton of games I don't add, but that one should have been in there.

 

[ZedClampet]

We finished our now annual V Rising game today. We're thinking about starting a new game now with some mods, including the modern camera mod that lets you play in first person. Will be hard to set the options up correctly for first person since the game is going to be much, much harder that way.

 

[Brian Boru]

there are a ton of games I don't add

Slacker! There are only slightly over 1,000 monthly releases on Steam, so what's yer problem?

 

[ZedClampet]

There is currently a "Cozy, Family Friendly" game sale going on on Steam. They seem to have something going on all the time now. I can't find a list of anything but the major sales/fests, so we'll just have to keep an eye on it

 

[Zloth]

Grabbed this from a Gameranx video, saved it as 'EA Graveyard'.

Eeesh, imagine being "Pandemic Studios" in 2020. They would have had to make a FAST name change.

that image drew one line at a time... looks at imgur, oh its down... that explains it. I felt like internet had gone back 20 odd years to when it did draw images one line at a time.

With interleaving, so we could guess what the picture looks like before it was even half loaded!

 

[DXCHASE]

I (and i never get like this) did something neat on facebook! I made a post that got over 1.2k likes! (so far).

It was my anticipation for Diablo 4 and i wanted to be funny so heres the post (i think its SFW)...

I got all sorts of fun comments from "press any button, press the belly button" which made me laugh to "your mouse is s**t". Not a lot of fat shaming comments, mostly supportive ones! So it kinda made my day.

Diablo 4 has taken over my life, got a small group of clan members from Destiny 2 to join me, and were having a blast so far, also no connecting issues.

 

[Sarafan]

Diablo 4 has taken over my life, got a small group of clan members from Destiny 2 to join me, and were having a blast so far, also no connecting issues.

We'll see how it goes when most of the players join on 6th June... :> I wonder what are the sale percentages of each version of Diablo 4, but I presume most of the people grabbed the standard edition like usual.

 

[Alm]

I get to play in less than an hour. Hopefully no major performance issues.

 

[Pifanjr]

An example of the typical process of a Minecraft project:

1. I discover I need a bunch of diamonds.
2. I check the in-game search function to see if there are any ways to get diamonds easier than simply digging for them.
3. I find a recipe where I can turn 8 coal/charcoal and 1 flint into a ball, put that in a compressor, then combine 8 compressed balls with an obsidian to create graphene, which can go back into the compressor again to make diamonds.
4. I look up sources for all the ingredients. Charcoal can easily be made by burning logs. Flint can be made by washing gravel. Obsidian can be made by washing magma blocks. Doesn't seem too bad.
5. I built a nether portal and immediately find a large source of magma blocks, enough for all the diamonds I could ever want for.
6. I find flint chickens, which lay flint instead of eggs and can easily be bred to the point that I get more flint than I know what to do with. Everything is going really well so far.
7. I summon a lumberjack spirit, using materials I had already gathered when summoning an ore processing spirit. However, its pathfinding is broken. Luckily it somehow fixes itself when I start the game again later, so I built it a large forest. However, when I move him into the forest, his pathfinding breaks again and doesn't come back.
8. I find a machine that can harvest trees and replant the saplings. However, it doesn't collect the resources automatically. So now I need a way to power this machine and a way to gather and sort all of the resources. Also, it needs a piece of amber, a resource specific to this mod.
9. The amber can be created with lava, a fire charge, a redstone block and gold. However, redstone and gold are needed for a lot of things and the only source I have for them is to mine, which is a lot of effort. Luckily there's an alternative recipe that uses honey instead of lava, a single redstone powder instead of a redstone block and a magma block instead of a gold.
10. Honey comes only from bee hives (or the bee dimension). However, there don't seem to be any bee hives near my base (or portals to the bee dimension). Luckily, some research shows that bee hives have a 5% chance to spawn when an oak tree grows near a flower. Good thing I had cleared an area already to set up a forest. It only takes a little while to get 5 hives, which start producing honey pretty quickly.
11. By now it's been at least two weeks since I first set out to make an automated process to create diamonds. I could not have foreseen that becoming a beekeeper would somehow be a part of this process, but here we are.
12. I realize I still haven't automated any of the steps in the process since I begon.

Of course I have done about a dozen different projects in between working on this one. Pretty much all of them have involved setting up yet another set of machines or gathering some obscure resource, or both. None of them have been automated so far.

 

[Brian Boru]

The Signal From Tölva | GOG 74% | Steam 70% | Metacritic 69%

Far Cry with robots, someone said, so I put a few hours into this. Robots yes, Far Cry no—but it's an indie, so temper expectations.

Open World FPS where you're a robot in one of 3 factions battling on an alien planet—the other 2 factions fight each other too, which can be useful tactically. No bugs, Alt-Tab works fine, manual Save available, Medium load time, quick quit to desktop.

Open World… not really. If you wander off in a random direction, there isn't much variety, and no verticality that I met. The world is empty is the main problem, so there's no reward for wandering far afield—wander across the wide corridor to the next objective and collect some debris/currency is all I could see.

You get a pistol and 2 main weapons, seem to be strong damage for short-medium and ~½ damage for medium-long. They're energy weapons, which I'm not used to from other games—not sure if it's infinite ammo, but I never ran out. There are reload and cooldown periods tho, 3-4 seconds each.

There's a mechanic where you can 'deputize' some of your faction's robots to become combat buddies—but… and it's a BIG BUT—you have to give up one of your 2 weapon slots for the controller. If the buddies were badass it might be worth it, but they die easily—so scratch that mechanic and keep your 2 weapons.

There's nothing else as far as I could see—no vehicles, no climbing, no explosives, no places worth exploring for themselves. Just a repetitive long walk between repetitive gunfights, with no discernible tactical options I could see.

It's a decent indie effort, but I've been spoiled by Far Cry, so ultimately too boring.

 

[ZedClampet]

I played today's update to Big Ambitions then had this conversation:

Me: Are you specifically trying to get rid of all your players? (was a rhetorical question)

Dev: I can assure you we aren't. We are only trying to make the game better.

Me: By completely changing the focus to mind-numbing busy-work as opposed to setting up successful businesses?

Dev: Would you mind sending in a bug report with your name in it so I can see what's happening?

Me: I just spent 30 minutes copying in-game statistics for you, but sure...

This takes the prize for the worst early access update for me. It's even worse than Osiris New Dawn, which I've detailed here at least once. This game was so much fun just a few days ago.

 

[Colif]

Digital Foundry have to realise that games aren't just about graphics

Graphics won't save this game. Testing its performance is an utter waste of time

 

[ZedClampet]

I need a new game to play. Or I may take a break from gaming for awhile except for co-op games with my son.

 

[Sarafan]

I need a new game to play.

Well then... There's some particular title almost no one heard about. Maybe it's worth checking. It's called Diablo 4 or something like that...

 

[DXCHASE]

Digital Foundry have to realise that games aren't just about graphics

Graphics won't save this game. Testing its performance is an utter waste of time

Nothing will save this game. First off Gollum from the Shadow of Mordor series from what? 9 years ago? Looks so much better than this games. Second, its a story about gollum (i like the name smeagol more) probably one of the least appealling adventures in the LoTR for a lot of people and Third, its B-O-R-I-N-G. I mean i like the effort for making elves speak elvish, but cool stuff like that is wasted on boring gameplay, even the story which, from what i had played so far, didnt seem all that bad.

Like, i can defend Amazons LoTR series and new stuff like that that gets a lot of ridicule, but this game..its just bad all around and its sad to see the universe be used like this. Really should have been beta tested.

Imo you'd have to redesign the game.