The summer is winding down, the days are starting to grow shorter, and there’s a new chill in the air at night. It’s the perfect time to catch up on some older games ahead of the September onslaught that kicks off with Star Wars Outlaws’ launch next week.
It’s also a good time to make room for lesser-known releases that deserve more looks but aren’t always getting them in the glut of high-quality releases that are the monthly norm now. One of those is Dustborn, a gorgeous road-trip game about bandmates. Another is Arco, a pixel-art tactics RPG that’s easy to overlook but unlike anything else out there.
“This game is a masterpiece,” wrote Reddit user QubitsAndCheezits. “More important and impressive is that I’ve never played anything like it in ~40 years of gaming.” But even as a bunch of indie devs hit on the importance of venturing outside the same three genres that hit big on Steam, Arco co-creator Franek shared a brutal discovery.
“‘Make. New. Stuff.’ is fun advice until you have to sell your game without a target audience and you got rent to pay,” the developer tweeted. “We made something new. Our game has been well rated by critics and players but it sold badly.” There’s no magic formula for making a god game sell anymore, if ever there was, outside of maybe calling it Pokémon.
Day of the Devs lead curator Greg Rice made this point recently during July’s Brighton Develop keynote address. “Back in the day…If you had a really good art style, or maybe a really good game mechanic, maybe that was enough,” he said. “Now there are so many games out there, you have to excel across the board in most cases. [You need to have] a really beautiful art style that stands out from the crowd and is instantly recognizable, try to have mechanical gameplay hooks that are unique and different, and have a personality behind it that feels like it’s something coming from a place of creativity and passion.”
Surviving the modern gauntlet of Metacritic scores, Steam visibility, and ignorant online mobs also takes a lot of luck. So maybe take some time this weekend and play something that’s fun, fresh, and different. Here are six games we’re excited to play this weekend that chart a different path.
The Order: 1886
Play it on: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5
Current goal: Dig into the lore
When steampunk cover shooter The Order: 1886 was first revealed with a flashy trailer at E3 2013, I was sold. Of course I wouldn’t actually get a PlayStation 4 until a year after the game finally released in 2015 and by that point I had read enough reviews deriding it that I never bought it. But thanks to a strong recommendation from my colleague Kenneth Shepard and a perfectly timed sale on the PlayStation store, I decided to finally see what all the fuss was about. About two hours in I can confidently say the game is… fine? It’s just fine, guys.
Combat itself is a mediocre attempt at recreating the slick cover shooting mechanics of Gears of War and is nothing to write home about. The spark of brilliance The Order does bring to the table is a collection of wacky steampunk weaponry provided to your protagonist by the game’s version of eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla. Shooting an old-timey rail gun at enemies is undeniably a joy that brightens up the mostly average combat loop.
The real star of the show, however, is the world. Steampunk Victorian London is a marvel to behold thanks to excellent graphics that still hold up nearly a decade later, but the worldbuilding is equally fascinating. By adding some magic and occult elements to the game’s alternate-history London, developer Ready at Dawn carefully weaves a fleshed out-timeline that makes the game’s setting feel rooted in reality. This detail is present in everything from the architecture of buildings to the dialogue of random NPCs walking around between gunfights. Even when I’m tired of repetitive shootouts, I always look forward to gathering bits and pieces of lore along the way. I’m curious to see if the rest of the game can somehow make the actual gameplay experience as interesting as the world itself, but considering the game’s reputation, I doubt it. If anything, my time with The Order: 1886 just makes me wish the game had the chance to get a sequel. -– Willa Rowe
See The Order: 1886 on Amazon – G/O Media may get a commission
Tactical Breach Wizards
Play it on: PC
Current goal: Finish the game
Tactical Breach Wizards continues to be an absolute delight since I wrote up my impressions of it earlier this week. Since then, we’ve jumped a train from both ends and enmeshed ourselves in a resistance movement in an entirely different country that seems to be fighting off a religious sect. We’ve also added some new units, including a bruiser who can essentially toss people around the map and swap places with virtually any unit to get around quickly and soak up some damage. It is both growing more familiar and also constantly throwing curve balls into the kits of these tried-and-true tactical units to keep things constantly refreshing. Also, I didn’t mention it in my previous piece, but this game has got exceptional pacing, knowing exactly when you might be starting to get comfortable with things as they are and picking just the right moment to throw a cool new wrench into the works.
I think what I’m relishing most, atop the fun of throwing people out of windows with magical powers, is how boldly political Tactical Breach Wizards is. At a time where so many AAA developers are cowering from even implying that their obviously politicized games bear anything even resembling an ideology, I am taking on armed members of a church gaslighting a country so that they may remain in control. — Moises Taveras
See Tactical Breach Wizards on Steam – G/O Media may get a commission
RoboCop: Rogue City
Play it on: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S
Current goal: Serve the public trust. Protect the innocent. Uphold the law.
I didn’t make time for RoboCop: Rogue City when it came out last year, but I’ve started delving into it now after picking it up on sale recently, and I’m finding it to be a pretty great example of a kind of game that rarely gets made anymore, the kind that exists between the tight focus of low-budget indie games and the colossal expanse of big-budget blockbusters. It’s a mainstream, mid-budget game that doesn’t try to pass itself off as something else. It wears its looping, canned animations openly, the evidence of its being a production that couldn’t take the “spare no expense” approach, so as you walk around its environments, you may at times feel like you’re playing a PS3 game, though in a way I found endearing rather than off-putting. Instead, the folks making it put their time and money into the things that mattered most, things like making sure playing as RoboCop feels right, hefty and powerful, that the violence is spectacularly over the top, and that the world exudes the feeling of grimy urban decay that pervades the Detroit of Paul Verhoeven’s original film.
I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by just how much time you spend doing things other than gunning down punks. There are mini-open-world sections that see you doing actual police work—searching for clues, questioning people, tracking down suspects—and, at least in the early going, it seems that the ongoing theme of Murphy’s lingering humanity (and how, to the corporate jerkwads at OCP, that humanity is nothing but a problem to be solved) could be handled in some interesting ways. I hope I get to take out some of those corporate jerkwads, too, before all is said and done. It wouldn’t feel like a proper RoboCop story without that.—Carolyn Petit
See RoboCop: Rogue City on Humble Bundle – G/O Media may get a commission
Dustborn
Play it on: PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
Current goal: Talk to good characters, avoid bad combat
I’m still early into Dustborn and I’m genuinely enthralled by its alt-future take on a dystopian America and how it affects a group of marginalized, superpowered people just trying to get by. From the opening scene of protagonist Pax trying to quietly process a heist she and her friends undertook just before the game started while they all yelled over each other in the car, I was hooked. Red Thread Games’ adventure juggles a lot of different mechanics in between the dialogue choices, from its rhythm game interludes to the occasional offbeat minigame that doesn’t get repeated. However, I don’t love the combat, which is a bit flimsy for my liking. But luckily, I just chose an option that shortens combat encounters so I can get back to the stuff the game does exceptionally well. If you’re looking for a really solid Telltale-like adventure game, Dustborn definitely feels like a good one of those so far. I’m intrigued to see where Pax’s story goes from here. — Kenneth Shepard
See Dustborn on Humble Bundle – G/O Media may get a commission
Arco
Play it on: PC, Switch
Current goal: Get red on the Red Company gang
Arco looks like an unassuming pixel art adventure but it doesn’t take much time playing to discover how much really cool stuff it has going on. Aside from the neat aesthetic and good music, there’s a meaty tactical-RPG here powered by a moving and morally charged tale of pain, identity, and revenge. I’m only a couple of hours into the roughly 10-hour-long game and already find myself satisfyingly under its spell.
There are two sides to Arco. In the first you explore small 2D zones, talk to people, choose how to respond, and occasionally suffer pangs of guilt when doing something you know you shouldn’t. In the other, you engage in what are essentially turn-based battles with a neat twist. You move around a battlefield and select when to wait, dodge, or attack with the vector of consequence for each action telegraphed via blue and red trajectories. Enemies signal when they’re about to attack and you try to respond accordingly by getting out of the way, killing them first, or setting up a special combo that saves the day.
You use items to heal and spend XP on learning new abilities and upgrading old ones. It has all the familiar trappings of an action-RPG with a layer of XCOM-lite strategy on top, but done in a way that feels fresh and befitting the broader story and how it’s being presented. It’s a perfect fit so far for handheld. — Ethan Gach
See Arco on Steam – G/O Media may get a commission
Dress To Impress
Play it on: Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, PC, iOS, Android
Current goal: Get on the podium more than once
Yes, I’m hooked on a game built by teenagers running on a platform made for children. Dress to Impress is a Roblox game that tasks you with dressing up a Bratz-like figure in an outfit befitting a specific theme (which changes every round) from a selection of clothing scattered around a simplistic boutique. You only have a few minutes to pick out your clothes and accessories and style your hair, nails, and makeup before walking the runway, striking a pose, and waiting for other players to dole out their votes. The top three players will get a coveted podium position and some in-game currency, which you can use to buy nicer outfits and accessories.
Frustratingly, Dress to Impress is often populated by children who either make alliances before their runway walks to ensure their mutual success or who are wooed only by outfits that reference pop stars and Disney princesses. As such, I’m rarely on the podium, even when I conjure up the perfect representation of a “movie night” fit these grade schoolers have ever seen. But despite my frequent losses, I have a blast every single round, because Dress to Impress mixes the perfect amount of quality gameplay with jank to ensure your experience is always a little bit frantic. I’ll be playing this damn kid’s game all weekend. — Alyssa Mercante
Leave a Reply