Indie Gaming – Hundstrasse

Top 5 Gaming Experiences: 2022 Edition

It’s good to be blogging again. Sorry, but it’s tough to write a look back over the year without reflecting a little. The best bit is not feeling guilty about not keeping a schedule; posts happen when they happen and sometimes blogging needs to step aside for other stuff to take its place. I’ve also really committed to drawing terrible webcomics about donkeys playing games. Sure nobody really asked for them, and I’m at least 90% sure that I’m the only person who laughs at them. But if something is worth blogging about then it’s also probably worth doodling a 4 panel webcomic involving goofy donkeys and a terrible ‘joke’ about too. Trust me, 2023 is the year that the Gaming Donks rise to influence and notoriety in the gaming community.

2022 was also a year that was pretty rough personally (understatement, definition: the preceding sentence). Gaming has always helped me with some of the tough stuff; given me space to regroup, and makes me smile. By extension, so does blogging about gaming… and by extension so do you. So Thank-You for reading the first two paragraphs of this meandering post.

Gaming in 2022 has been all over the place. I started the year very much on the Switch, but have since moved away because… well, I’ve kind of played everything I want to play on it. Sure, I’ve got a wishlist stuffed full of B-team offerings, but they never seem to get reduced enough for me to give them a punt. I finally carved out a small corner in the house to be my retro-gaming-nook which means I get to have retro consoles setup and connected and playable at a moment’s notice.

If I’m honest this has been a pretty big highpoint of the year.

Since then I’ve been tackling a few ‘always wanted to plays’, ‘never heard of’s, and ‘it was cheap’s off the list of retro offerings. In celebration I also picked up a GameCube which is a console that I’ve wanted to own for a long time. Nintendo make such cute consoles. Mixed in with that was a sudden lurch towards ticking a few more Jurassic Park games off the list, something that I’ve been chipping away at for some time. Special retro mention has to go to Kim & Pete from LaterLevels for their company at the London Gaming Market a few months ago. Looking forward to the next one already!

There’s also Monday evenings that have become a mainstay fixture for weekly online gaming. A small group of us have been embarking on a few different co-op experiences usually some kind of zombie/monster shooting (championed by me), or a more gentle building/crafting thing… which I’m not going to lie, I enjoy mostly for the company rather than the game.

Anyway, I came here to do a job, so here it is. The official “Hundstrasse Top 5 Gaming Experiences of 2022” … as decided by me…

5. Core Keeper (PC)

Core keeper definitely falls in to that category I mentioned earlier; I enjoyed it mostly for the company rather than the game. That’s not to say the game was bad, but it was the online hangout activity it provided that really won me over. That caveat being said, it’s a pretty cute mining/crafting/exploring type of thing that avoids some of the pitfalls of the genre that I’m less fond of. First up, the player retains the items on their toolbelt post fatal injury… to which I breathed a huge sigh of relief. One of my big annoyances with crafting games is the repetition of basic things, so at least being able to hold on to your key items softens the edges there. It also has some clear goals which mostly revolve around ‘find big monster’ and ‘attack big monster’. Then there’s a handful of neat quality of life things that just make the whole crafting thing feel less grind-like. I even leapt into the role of gardener and had some mighty underground crop fields on the go by the time we stopped playing.

Unfortunately we HAD to stop playing because we ran out of stuff to do. Turns out the developer is still making this one, so there’s a good chance that we’ll revisit at some point to mop up the rest of it.

4. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Switch)

Next up is another non-typical Hundstrasse game, KotOR. Despite being a name that I’d heard, I can’t say that I knew much about this going in, so I was disappointed to discover essentially turn-based combat. My first ten minutes with the game weren’t positive, I felt like a passenger in the combat and quickly switched the game off, but some part of the game must’ve caught my attention as I picked it up again the evening after and actually started to become absorbed in this novel take on the Star Wars Universe.

What won me over ultimately was that it felt open-world, but manageable (something that I wrote about at the time). The story was engaging, but not convoluted, and the gameplay loop quite satisfying. In some ways this became the ideal commute game; both interesting, but easy to pick up and put down .

3. Alien Isolation (Switch)

Alien Isolation is easily the best film tie-in game I can think of. A combined love letter to the Scott and Cameron films, it captures the atmosphere perfectly. Having said that, it wasn’t until my 2022 visit that I finally watched the end credits roll. Anyone who’s played this will probably agree that it could stood to have been a shorted offering; not that any of it is notably weak, but the constant tension makes it exhausting to play. Crossing the finish line felt like a real achievement.

For this successful attempt I decided to take a more ‘fortune favors the brave’ approach to moving and taking the chances where they came. This definitely paid off and I quickly developed a no-lockers-policy of play as getting in to a locker tends to mean getting stuck there for several minutes until you finally decide that it might be safe to leave. If you’re a horror fan, or a fan of the original films and haven’t checked this out then you really should take a look. Plus the Switch port is excellent!

2. Silent Hill 3 (PS2)

I’ve been having a real Silent Hill few months; revisiting the original, finally acquiring a copy and playing 3, and recently playing through Shattered Memories. I’ve got designs on trying to get hold of 4 too, a game that I did once own, but never completed.

Silent Hill 3 was my star purchase at the London Gaming Market, and I’m pleased to say that it was well worth it. I’d always heard that it was well regarded in the original games, and whilst I would still rate it third in that trilogy, it is still a standout game that delivers a solid Silent Hill experience. Rounding out some plot elements along with revisiting some familiar locations, 3 is really one for fans. It also packs a good whallop of that late 90’s/early00’s survival horror vibe that I crave so much…

1. Tormented Souls (Switch)

… which brings me neatly on to my number 1 gaming experience of the year. The unassuming ‘Tormented Souls’ which I had pre-ordered a physical Switch copy for waaaay back in 2021. Yes, it surprised me too, but looking back on the games I’ve played over the year I couldn’t pick out a better experience that the one I had with this love letter to early survival horror. Taking inspiration from both Resident Evil and Silent Hill, Tormented Souls really delivers on capturing that era of survival horror. There’s a balance between building tension, but also unraveling mystery with combat being functional, but not prohibitive.

.. and without spoilering, there is at least one puzzle that I loved because of how much only people who lived through the 90’s will get.

If you like early survival horror then I thoroughly recommend giving it a go.

Trüberbrook: Pointing, but not Clicking

Spoiler Warning: This article contains major plot spoilers for Trüberbrook

Point-n-clicks are one of those genres that has found a home in the arms of small and indie developers. Whilst mainstream triple-A releases focus on increasing levels of action and frame-rate, the humble PnC offers gamers something at a more sedate pace which I almost completely ignored growing up only to uncover their charms when I was a little older; and there’s a lot for me to like about PnC’s give my gaming tastes. One of the reasons I enjoy classic survival horror is that feeling of exploring, unravelling and gradually unlocking an area which a good PnC encapsulates. I also enjoy a good story and that certain brand of gaming where you don’t need to have twitch reflexes to play.

It was with this thirst for a story and world to explore that I picked up Trüberbrook, a PnC adventure that drops the player in to the scuffed shoes of a Quantum Physicist, Hans Tannhauser. Arriving in the small remote German village of Trüberbrook in the 1960’s, under the unquestioned circumstance of having won a competition that he didn’t enter, Tannhauser is drawn in to the mysterious local activities of the Millennium Corporation and ends up saving our reality. The visuals, made up of hand crafted model shots, are probably the most immediate draw with its intricate diorama-like presentation and an almost claymation quality to the onscreen cast of quirky characters. Regular readers will know that ‘small town mysterious events‘ and ‘diorama-like‘ are two of my triggers to an almost instant purchase, so it seemed like I was on to a winning formula already.

Gaming of the Dead: What Would George A. Romero Think?

A few weeks ago I had a hankering to revisit the films of the late, great, George A. Romero; specifically his two Zombie masterpieces: ‘Night of the Living Dead’ (1968) and ‘Dawn of the Dead’ (1978). I have very few film buff credentials (being more of a casual absorber of the silver screen), but even I know that these two films arguably defined the zombie genre cementing Romero in history as the undisputed zombie master. They created lore, established tropes, and even their production carried some legendary stories such as Romero himself grabbing the reels as soon as editing on NotLD finished and scouting movie theatres for somewhere that would agree to screen it.

Sadly Romero passed away in 2017. It wasn’t only a loss for the world of cinema, but for the gaming world too. At the time I reflected that every zombie themed game could trace its roots to the work of Romero, either directly or indirectly. My own teenage interest in Resident Evil 2 led me to his films and, whilst to the outside observer his work could be dismissed as decadent gore for the sake of it, the themes he set up are what makes the zombie genre (and zombie apocalypse) so grotesquely captivating. Having revisited the films, it seems like a good moment to stack up how the gentle torrent of zombie themed games that erupted in the 90’s stacks up against Romero’s original work; in short, are we playing the zombie apocalypse in the way George A. Romero imagined it?

Editorial: September – An Announcement

No Blog Posts, No Tweets, No Random Sonic the Hedgehog Doodles… I bet you’re all wondering what’s going on over here at Hundstrasse.com??

Well, the good news is that I’m writing this now so there’s no need to keep fiddling with the rabbit ears on top of your set; not that analogue TV has been a ‘thing’ for years now, nor do I have a TV show. The reason things have been so quiet on here is that my wife and I have recently welcomed player 3 to the game! Yes, that’s right, I’ve entered the world of ‘being a dad’ full of fun packed activities such as deciphering the foreign language that is baby products, ensuring that my offspring survives, and sitting awake at 4 am wondering what exactly could be so terrible that it necessitates such unrelenting screaming. Of course we’re absolutely delighted, but it transpires that those first few weeks after having a baby are pretty non-stop without much shape or structure or time for really anything else. There’s also the additional problem that even the Nintendo Switch mini-controllers are still a bit too big for the critter’s tiny hands … oh, and they can only focus 20 – 40 cm away from their face at the moment which has scuppered plans for immediate parent/child gaming time!

The upshot for you all is that my blogging schedule is likely to be even more erratic than it has been over the past few months with the plan being to essentially fit it in whenever I have a moment. The upshot for me is that I’m in the process of modifying how & what I play. Obviously fill-tilt-headphones-on PC gaming sessions aren’t really on the cards at the moment (not least of which because it looks like our lounge is scattergunned with an array of baby products and I can barely make it to the PC) as nap-time can end rather suddenly and often takes place with a parent pinned in place barely daring to move. the upside is that I’m getting much more use of of the Nintendo Switch than I had been in recent months. The ability to pick it up either on the big screen or in handheld form and quickly pop it back to sleep at a moment’s notice makes it almost ideally suited to new parents grabbing a quick game. I’m currently finally getting around to playing ‘Golf Story’ that 16-bit styled half golf simulation, half RPG is an ideal pick up and play option full of short challenges and longer rounds suitable for all occasions…. and I have to admit having had a bit of a sort spot for golf games since I first played Greg Norman’s Ultimate Golf (“SHARK ATTACK”) on Atari ST many many years ago.

We’ve also managed to resurrect the PS3 (yeah, I bet you didn’t even know that I had a PS3… not that it was every used for much more than Little Big Planet) so that my wife can finally get around to playing Last of Us and maybe… just maybe I’ll finally play MGS4… possibly…

In short we’ve defaulted to couch gaming.

Of course this also fits in nicely with my ongoing Resident Evil 2 challenge, especially as I’ve already managed to push through the more time-critical unlocks so I’ll hopefully be able to continue with that a bit more once we start to find a rhythm to the days.

August Wrap Up

Despite all the excitement, I did manage to write a few articles during August. The first of which relates to a decidedly queasy visit to the world of Quake in VR. Dashing around those murky dungeons at 90’s FPS speed turned out to be something of a motion-sickness inducing winning combo for the ol’ VR headset and despite wanting to soak up more of it I had to shelve it after only a small handful of levels and lengthy periods of lying down afterwards.

Next up I gave my impressions of the intriguing Bendy and the Ink Machine; a stylish survival horror game of sorts that I sampled on the Switch. Sadly, even having let simmer in my mind for a few weeks, the controls marred the whole experience somewhat…

Looking Ahead to September

As I’ve already said, September is likely to be pretty patchy, but I am hoping to be able to jot down my Golf Story thoughts and maybe even make it through the odd RE2 scenario depending on how parenting goes…

I’m also open to recommendations for good baby compatible games if anyone has any particular experience in that field?? HAPPY SEPTEMBER ALL!!

Editorial: November 2018 – I Know of No Reason

… And another great big “Haloooo” to everyone out there, it’s time for the Hundstrasse monthly editorial…

*Plays Theme Music*

I hope everyone had a great Halloween whatever you got up to? As I mentioned last month, Halloween hasn’t ever really been a big deal for me growing up, but one tradition has manifested itself over the years and that is the Halloween evening family trip to the Birmingham Town Hall to see their annual spooky silent movie with live improvised organ accompaniment. I can’t say that I could watch silent movies every day of the year, but once a year it is a novelty and if nothing else it’s normally a great showcase of silent actors’ silly, wide-eyed, horrified expressions. Wednesday evening saw that landmark in prosthetic fingers “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1920) starring John Barrymore.

Early November however is when the UK attempts to deplete its firework stockpile through arson in an act of remembrance for the poor souls who failed to blow up the houses of parliament, or in condemnation of them, or in celebration of them, or as tribute to them, or as a celebration of the triumph of parliament. To be honest the actual message is a little confused; we burn effigies of Guy Fawkes, but then we also set off explosives. I guess it’s just a way of keeping everyone happy whilst also getting to make things go bang with sparkles and colourful flashes.

Other Blogs Blog Blogging of Note: October

This is a new feature and I promise I’ll try and get better at it, but I thought it might be be nice to point everyone in the direction of some work from other great games bloggers just in case you’ve reached this point in my editorial and gotten so bored that you want to leave already. So here are a handful of the great offerings from other bloggers that specifically caught my eye this month:

PC Users Plaguing P.U.B.G Mobile, Reaper Interactive: Insight into some bizarre practice where PC gamers feel the need to prove superiority by hijacking rounds of mobile PU:BG. I didn’t even know such a thing existed!

End Of An Era: Reflecting On The Sudden Shutdown Of Telltale Games, Simpleek: A nice, if slightly mournful, look back at Telltale Games in light of their sudden and dramatic closure. I know I’ll miss them being in the market.

Non-Horror Games for Halloween, A Geek Girl’s Guide: Do you like horror? do you like Halloween? If the answers there are No and Yes… in that order… then check out this great list of non-horror spooky games!

5 FREAKY FAVES: HORROR GAMES, A Geeky Gal: How could I not include this list of great horror games considering the month. A couple of my own favourites on the list!

Now Playing: Bulb Boy (Switch), Virtuanaut: A great review of Bulb Boy put together by Virtuanaut. Sounds like an intriguing puzzle platformer that I’ll have to look out for.

World Mental Health Day 2018, The Gaming Diaries: An insightful article from The Gaming Diaries with some personal insights about their mental health truths. Thanks for sharing.

The Evil Within!, The Maximum Utmost: The Evil Within is a game that kind of passed me by, but this well put together review from The Maximum Utmost makes me think that there was something there that I missed out on.

Video game items that need to exist in real life, Later Levels: Ok, so I did contribute on this one, so it’s not a full escape route for you, but this list of the ‘what and why’ of various people’s chosen gaming item is a good read and great fun to be a part of!

October Wrap-Up

October was a slightly disjointed month of gaming for me. I spent a chunk of time playing the original Unreal Tournament (which still has quite a few populated servers if anyone is interested). UT was one of the first games that I ever played online, I guess it must have been released around the time that our home migrated from dialup to broadband which meant it was possible to just about hold a coherent game. Like a fine wine… with the cork left out… my skills in this arena have not aged well, but that fast paced 90’s FPS action has been fun to revisit if only to be reminded of the blistering pace of FPS titles in that era.

I kicked the blogging month off with an informal look at a piece of often included architecture in games: The Lighthouse. Along with things like windmills, crates, barrels, and villagers looking for specific numbers of specific items, lighthouses occupy that space of ‘things seen in games much more often than real life’ (queue a string of comments from people living next to/in lighthouses). Turns out quite a few commentors also have favourite ingame lighthouses and I’m still toying with the idea of this becoming a breakout page on the blog.

Next up it all went a bit retro after a spontaneous weekend streaming session of everyone’ favourite slow motion diving enthusiast, Max Payne, so I took a look back at that first game in the cold light of now. Sadly it fell in to the pile of revolutionary games at the time that just haven’t aged well; best left to the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia-vision.

October also saw me return to the great arena of “Question of the Month” battle. After my first choice answer was nabbed by the ultimate, and much deserved, winner ‘That Green Dude‘, I decided to go way … waaaaay … back to recount for you a story about fear and rising panic that took place in the caverns beneath the surface of an alien world. Vector graphics can be scary, it all depends on your imagination.

The final post this month saw me take a shot at unpicking the Rockstar crunch controversy of recent weeks. Unable to add any meaningful or informed insight I hopefully managed to get people to think a little about what, as gamers and consumers, we can do to support the hard working creators that pour so much talent and time into the games we love… also there were stock photos of fist bumping…

Looking Ahead at November

I guess the big blogging event of November is a huge collaboration that’s being released over at Normal Happenings. Thirty-something different bloggers have each written about a personally defining game and that hard working blogsmith, Matt, has been putting them all together in to one huge month long event with a different piece being posted each day. It’s a huge collaboration that I’m already proud to be a part of (look out for my own entry on the 13th) so make sure you head over there to check it out.

On a gaming side of things I have deviated from Jurassic Park to the super-cute Parkasaurus. It’s a colourful, and surprisingly indepth, dinosaur park creator that I’ve been having some fun with so hopefully I’ll get around to writing my thoughts on that. I’ve also picked up ‘The Invisible Hours’ in the latest Steam sale as the combination of VR, an Agatha Christie style plot, and Tesla all seem exactly the kinds of things I’d enjoy.

Happy November Everyone!

Editorial: October 2018 – Spooky

Wow, it’s really not been that long since I last wrote an editorial thanks to my poor “time-management” in September and weirder still is that we’re already in October… or as the internet calls it “The Month of Halloween!”

Yes, Twitter and the various fantastic blogs I read are already firing up their pumpkins and kicking the spookfest into overdrive in anticipation of that chilling spectacular that occurs on or around the 31st of the month. Here in the UK of course we’re always a little behind the latest trends so it’s no surprise that when I was growing up Halloween wasn’t the event that it is now. As an adult I’m bemused slightly by the spectacle that this monstrous month seems to have on my friends across the Atlantic… especially as I’m usually more excited by the prospect of Guy Fawkes night that occurs a few days later.

Duck Season: With Paprika

Spoiler Warning: This article contains spoilers for “Duck Season”… also whilst I’m warning, so does the trailer for “Duck Season”.

I’d lay a guinea to the fact that most of you reading this are of that very specific age to have grown up knowing the simple time pressure of renting a videogame from Blockbuster. Three-day rental, five-day rental, it made little difference, there was always a race against time. How far could you get before the return day approached? I can’t say that I had that many of the pre-requisite entirely free weekends which coincided with a Friday night adventure through the fabled door below the ripped ticket stub in to the land of blue, yellow, overpriced snacks, and disappoint of realising that although they had about a hundred of the empty cover boxes of the latest movie you needed to find one of the generic boxes to actually rent that movie. Game rental for me was indeed a rare treat, so much so that I can remember almost every instance of it during the 16-bit era… and they were all mediocre titles at best.

Editorial: July 2018 – Toasty…

Hello and a happy July to you all; doesn’t seem like so long ago that I was wrapped up warm in the middle of a blizzard writing March’s Editorial and now the UK is in the sweaty grip of a heatwave with people standing on street corners tutting disapprovingly at hose users and making statements about liking it hot, but not this hot.

… of course from a gaming point of view the past month has held the joy of E3, seemingly endless logos and carefully scripted trailers being paraded out to the cheers of a crowd somewhere in the press conference at an unsocial time for anyone in the UK to watch; not that I’m bitter. I don’t generally get caught up too caught up in the E3 hype, but this year I think I enjoyed that collective sense of anticipation in the community more than in the past and there were a few things that caught my attention even at this early stage. I’m was very excited to finally see some of the Resident Evil 2 remake and thrilled that it looks really… really… good. Within the list of other announcements I’m quietly intrigued by Wolfenstein: The Young Blood; TNO was excellent, but neither Old Blood or New Colossus quite captured that same feeling. At this stage there are very few details other than it being a co-op experience so I’ve quietly been trying to convince my wife that she should play TNO in preparation for Young Blood’s release.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter: Love & Hate

I’ve tried to avoid major plot spoilers, but there’s a chance that there are some minor spoilers lurking in the text below. Also, for completeness, I played the Redux version of the game which has a few gameplay tweaks, slightly enhanced graphics, and loading optimisation.

I’m not sure if subliminally I was inspired by Steam’s latest “event” which is bizarrely focused on getting gamers to acknowledge their growing backlog of… well, whatever has been picked up for a bargain in the past 200 Steam sales yet never played… but I finally decided to fire up “The Vanishing of Ethan Carter”… then some hours later I finished it. The affectionately acronym-ed TVoEC (Pronounced too-voh-eck) jumped out at me x steam sales ago for being a first-person exploration game with some puzzle elements, a supernatural vibe, and seemingly coupled with some healthy reviews & recommendations. The cynical might call it a “walking simulator” leaning heavily on the negative implications of the phrase whilst the more pro-exploration crowd might also refer to it as a “walking simulator” but in a positive light of a group trying to own what was initially a derogatory term. I guess I prefer the more neutral “first-person exploration” as a genre, but given how widely recognised it is as a phrase I don’t flinch at the aforementioned divisive terminology which is a microcosm of the divide that this style of game causes. As I ambled through TVoEC I couldn’t help but begin to see it as a prime example of how and why this genre manages to split gamers.

Rezzed 2018 Wrap-Up: I’m Still Not Great at Expos

Despite disruption on the District Line I managed to navigate the sprawling metropolis of London to make it to the Tobacco Dock for this year’s EGX Rezzed. Ok, so I really just dropped that “District line” in there to make it sound like I know how London works where the truth is that I was pretty lucky not to end up on the confusing “Overground” (that seemed to be mostly underground) in the wrong direction. In my summation of the last EGX I mentioned how I’m not great at expos and I once again failed to take any meaningful pictures, but I did play a few more games this time so maybe I’m improving.