-Kevin Purdy
Sixty-four
Oleg Danilov; Windows, Mac
I try not to think about or write about games in a “dollar-to-fun” way. Games often become cheaper over time, everyone enjoys them differently, and they are art as well as commerce. But folks, come on: $6 for Sixty-four? If you play it for an hour and laugh a few times at the quirks and small blocks, that was less than a big city latte or beer.
But you will almost certainly play Sixty-four for more than an hour, and maybe many more hours if you like games with systems, buildings and resources. You build and deploy machines to extract resources, use those resources to finance new and better machines, rearrange your machines, and ultimately create beautiful workflows that are largely automated. Why are you doing this? It's a fun, dark mystery.
The game looks beautiful in its own right Sim City 2000/3000-like style. It can be mentally taxing, but you can't really lose; you can even leave the game window open in the background while you convince your boss or remote work software that you're otherwise productive. It's a fever dream that I'd recommend to almost anyone, unless they're afraid of a repeat of the many days lost in games like Factor, Satisfactoryor even Universal paper clips. In that case, all you have to do is put it on your wish list; what can go wrong?
-Kevin Purdy
Tactical Breach Wizards
Suspicious developments; Windows
Credit: Suspicious Developments
What can you do to spice up turn-based tactics, a rather mature genre?
Tactical Breach Wizards for example, adds forward-looking, time-bending, hex-placing wizards. It additionally refines off-grid combat, throwing windows and closing doors into the mix, and giving enemies a much wider range of attacks than area-of-effect variations. Finally, it wraps all this up in an inventive sci-fi story, one with a compelling plot, characters who reveal themselves one gag at a time, and an overall sense of wonder at a charming, bizarre world of militarized magic.
