All posts tagged in strategy
Aug 1, 2024
Step into the gorgeous world of Flotsam, developed by Pajama Llama Games, and experience life on a floating garbage town! Much like Raft and Havendock, this game depends on you catching trash as it floats by. Then, you can use this trash to grow your city. Of course, you need to gather fresh water and search for food in order to survive. If you manage your resources well, though, you and your growing town will thrive!
You aren’t alone on your floating island of garbage. Join forces with your crew as you sail across the world. As you float around Flotsam gathering resources, you’ll come across remnants of the old world. From those remnants you’ll re-discover long lost technology that will serve your town well. Just be careful. The old world is polluted and can make your crew sick. While this game is a post-apocalyptic survival, it’s a cheerful one full of bright colors, beautiful sunshine, and quirky characters!
Release Date
You can find Flotsam on Steam now!
- Aug 1, 2024
For those who enjoy games like Overcooked and PlateUp!, Hellspresso should be next on your radar! Developed by Eliary Games, this fast-paced cooking game will have you managing your restaurant while also planning and developing it. You play as a ghost chef who’s just trying to make a living in the afterlife. Each day you’ll craft your own menu and race against the clock to serve an ever growing customer base full of hungry guests. Start with a small, cozy restaurant and build it into something great as you increase your reputation to become the best chef in hell!
Run around taking orders, chopping up ingredients, cooking tasty meals, and serving dishes to customers before their patience runs out. There’s a lot to do to make sure things go smoothly, but you’ll have to balance duties with the personalities of your customers. Some are super impatient and unwilling to tip, while others will be the opposite. Serving them quickly is key to succeeding. Sometimes you even need to switch to your secret kitchen in Hellspresso to fulfill orders containing venomous mushrooms and magic plants. Or transform steak into rotten meat, sprinkle glowing eyes on donuts, or brew magic potions. And when you’re ready to make some upgrades, steal the souls of unsuspecting customers as they nap. Then, improve your skills and your restaurant!
Release Date
Hellspresso is set to release on Steam in November of this year. Add it to your Wishlist to be notified of its release, and check out the demo in the meantime!
I’d also suggest Bone’s Cafe if you enjoy a darker, but still cozy game.
- Jul 31, 2024
Thank you to Broccoli Games for a copy of this lovely game!
Coffee Caravan by developer Broccoli Games is a wholesome and cozy cafe management game. Think PlateUp!, but with a pastel color palette, you only serve variations of coffee, and there are difficulty levels that affect the whole game. Start your coffee-making adventure with the smallest trailer and basic equipment. Serve a variety of different customers in order to earn money. And experience an enjoyable, but sometimes challenging cozy game with a roguelite element!
This charming game puts you in charge of running your very own, albeit tiny, coffee shop. You start your journey with the smallest trailer possible and with the basic necessities like coffee beans, a grinder, coffee pot, sink, and cups. As you complete levels in Coffee Caravan and earn money, you’ll be able to access the shop to buy upgrades to your equipment, new equipment and helpful items like counters, and add more coffee recipes to your list. If you successfully complete a whole run from start to end, you’ll receive a larger trailer, too! Plus, there are decorations you can buy that offer useful buffs and you have control over how your kitchen, seating area, and decor is set up. So, organize the kitchen to best suit you, and serve some coffee!
The Coziest of Coffee Management Games
I love everything about Coffee Caravan. No, seriously. The start menu is relaxing and easy to navigate. The background music is chill, but upbeat. I enjoy the pastel aesthetic and the faceless character design adds a charm to the game. Being able to select recipes, organize my space, and decorate is a lot of fun too. The choice of easy, normal, and hard difficulties is perfect for different days. Some days I want the easy game, some days I prefer the challenge of hard difficulty. So, I have a save slot for each one!
What I’d never thought I needed was a roguelite element to my cozy games, but I love how it plays out in this one. No game will play the same as your roadmap will be different each time. And how you choose to play one map may differ from how you play others. The unique way Coffee Caravan lays out level choices adds freshness, too. You can choose from a laid-back level, or maybe visit the shop. Unless you prefer the challenge of a more hectic day, then choose that one and then hop on over to a bonus stage that might reward you with a new item, extra money, or even be a chance at another shopping spree at the shop. Or you’ll earn new customers or conditions to play through.
Final Thoughts
Overall, it’s a great little single player game. Play on whichever setting you prefer, and experience an ever-changing game with fascinating roguelite features. There’s also tea service you can unlock, and coming with the free summer update is ice cream! It’s a perfectly cozy game, or make it as challenging as you want, if you prefer that. Coffee Caravan really aims to provide a varied gameplay experience and they achieve that! I can’t recommend this game enough to the casual gamers out there.
I give it:
You can find Coffee Caravan on Steam now!
If you’re looking for more reviews, check out the one on Rusty’s Retirement, Minami Lane, and Times & Galaxy for a few different game ideas!
- Jul 4, 2024
Happy Sheepies by developer Berker Games is an adorable and cozy sheep farming sim. Kick back and relax with its simple drag and drop gameplay as you take care of your herd of sheepies. They’re your most valuable asset, so caring for them and keeping them happy is important! Feed them crops you’ve harvested, offer them water to keep them hydrated, and they’ll reward you with wool and milk.
Use what your sheepies produce to craft different items at worktables. Make things like cheeseburgers and leather jackets, or one of the other 150+ items to make from recipes. Use the different workbenches and some fun automation tools in Happy Sheepies to increase production, which will increase profits. And every 3 days, sheepies will want to breed. More sheepies means more profit, too! Plus, there’s no enemies to fight off, so you can simply take care of sheepies and make money in a relaxing environment!
Release Date
Happy Sheepies is releasing on Steam July 8th. That’s just four days away! Add it to your Wishlist now to get notified of its release.
Prefer llamas? Check out Wish Upon a Llama!
- Jul 3, 2024
If your favorite part of life sim games is filling in the different collections for places in town like the library, aquarium, or museum, then Museum Keeper by developer Red Thorn Interactive might be perfect for you! In this cozy exploration game, you get to build your dream museum from almost the ground up. Located in a small town, the museum is the town’s shining hope for an economic revival. So your job is to get that museum up and running to attract tourists and revive the town!
You have total control of how the museum turns out as you get to decorate the place to your heart’s content. You also get to staff it, choose the exhibits, and go hunting for the artifacts you’ll display! Go exploring the underground where you’ll find artifacts based on real life historic artifacts found around the world. Engage in battles against monsters who want to stop you from your research. Don’t forget to keep an eye out for museum thieves, too! You’ll encounter them in Museum Keeper and they’re determined to make money off the valuable artifacts you display. And get to know the quirky cast of townspeople as they come visit you or you visit them. Each one has their own unique interests that draw them to the museum.
Release Date
Museum Keeper is currently listed on Steam where you can add it to your Wishlist. There is no release date available, however.
- Jul 1, 2024
Rusty’s Retirement is a cute farming idle game that sits at the bottom, or vertically on the side, of your computer screen. It’s a farming sim, so you plant crops, raise animals, and decorate. But instead of requiring your full attention at all times, it chugs away at whatever tasks it needs to while you do other things. You start out with just Rusty running the show, but as you progress, you can automate by building robots who will plant, water, and harvest crops for you. It’s perfect for the busy person looking to take short breaks playing a little something cozy!
It’s The Perfect Idle Game
I really don’t generally enjoy idle games, honestly. They don’t hold my attention and the progression never feels good. Nevermind that most idle games I come across are combat-based and require repetition of levels to get good enough to advance. I’ve found myself trying different ones before, but always forgetting they exist after a while. I just can’t get into them.
Rusty’s Retirement, though? It’s perfect in my eyes. Perhaps it’s because I already enjoy farming sims, but I think it really is more than just that. The game uses some lovely pixel art that I’ve grown to love over the years as it represents a sense of nostalgia for me. Plus, the color palette used for everything works well. The grass, farm plots, and buildings aren’t overwhelmingly bright. They’re actually a fairly subdued color, which helps things like the different decorative flowers pop when they’re placed. It makes for a really pleasant look overall.
Which brings me to the different options. You initially start with just Rusty’s house, a biofuel converter, and water well. The rest is an empty plot of grass, much of which you need to unlock to expand. Place down farm plots where you want them to begin growing crops. There are 42 different crops to grow in Rusty’s Retirement, and 7 different houses to build. Each house serves a different purpose in unlocking new options for you. Decorative flowers and other natural decor, berry bushes and bees, bot upgrades, farm animals, and farm statistics all come in handy at some point. The bees provide honey and the animals produce fertilizer that help crops grow. Everything has its place and works together with everything else to create a balanced game. Of course, the decorations are just for fun and to make your farm a creative outlet.
Easy to Play and Perfectly Cozy
I really appreciate that Rusty’s Retirement is easy and casual. There’s no huge learning curve. There isn’t some big, hidden challenge. What you see is what you get, which is exactly what I want from it. It’s easy to come back to. And your little helpers are fairly intelligent when moving buildings and plots. The ones performing the move will grab a box, move it to the new area, then head back. They focus on finishing that one task before moving on to something else. No one is performing tasks like I do when I’ve had too much coffee: a little bit of everything here and there so nothing really gets done well or in a timely manner. Plus, the unlock progression feels appropriate. It doesn’t feel like an overwhelming grind. It also doesn’t feel too quickly achieved. There is a balance that’s been struck that feels just right.
Final Thoughts
If you haven’t tried Rusty’s Retirement, please do. It’s so relaxing and chill. You can play while completing important homework tasks or answering work emails. Or you could even let it run while you play other games. Your options really are nearly endless. It’s a great bite-sized game that deserves every bit of love and attention it gets from the gaming community.
I give it:
You can find Rusty’s Retirement on Steam now!
- Jun 14, 2024
Thank you to Prideful Sloth and CULT Games for this early access copy!
Go-Go Town is an adorable city builder and management game where you’re the mayor. Your job is to plan, build, and prosper! Rise through the ranks as you surpass other towns as a prime tourist spot. Turn the rundown town from not to hot by cleaning it up and building things people want to see. Food stalls, knick knack shops, and beautiful parks all make for a fun experience for visitors. There’s a little more to it than just building things people want to see, though. Being mayor isn’t easy!
What’s New
The first time I was given the chance to play Go-Go Town, it was a simple and limited playtest that barely scratched the surface of the game. This time, there’s so many new features and cool additions to the game that it’s like playing a whole new thing! There are new areas to explore, upgrades and progression that didn’t exist, plus fun cosmetics.
You now start the game with a humorous and easy tutorial that walks you through how to play while setting up a simple story behind why you’re suddenly a mayor. You can access the information via your in-game phone at any time, too. Then, you’re set off on your own to explore town and do almost anything you want. You are limited in what you can build until you unlock more things. However, you can build something and move it any number of times you want with ease. So it’s easy to redesign if you change your mind!
As the mayor in Go-Go Town, your prime objective is to restore the town. To do that, you’ll build interesting attractions to lure in visitors. To do that, you’ll need construction materials! Go mine some stone to turn into bricks, and cut down trees to turn into planks. Eventually, you can automate those jobs by hiring some of your new inhabitants. As you progress further through the game, you’ll be able to automate just about everything from farming and fishing, to courier services and trash pick up. In order to progress, you earn EGO points you can use to unlock more options. You’ll get the chance to have town decorations, upgrades to farming, fishing, mining, and forestry, as well as new home types, shops, and more! Progression is easy, but still satisfying.
What Else Is New
Your handy in-game phone now has several apps to help you manage your town, too. The tourist tracker lets you know if any of the visitors are unhappy so you can fix the problem. The calendar shows you what time trains arrive, but also lets you schedule your leaderboard challenges. These challenges can be scheduled once you’ve bought every EGOTech currently available, and completing a challenge increases your town rank, unlocking more EGOTech to buy. Challenges are pretty easy to complete, and can be rescheduled with no negative outcomes should you fail. My first challenge needed me to earn 100 coins (which will happen through your shops), build some shops, and build a few lamp posts. The leaderboard app shows you how your town ranks amongst other towns. Keeping an eye on your apps will help you learn how to progress, but also lets you see how far you’ve come!
The potential new residents that show up in Go-Go Town now require you to meet some demands before they’ll accept an invite to move in. That means you’ll need to pay a fee, build something specific, or even just give them a high five! You can then assign them to a specific home and give them a job. Hiring residents will help you automate the town and take some tasks off your plate. If you’re getting overwhelmed, though, you can close the train station to visitors. This lets you restock shops, redesign and redecorate, build, clean up the trash and spills left behind, or even explore the new areas and biomes in peace! Of course, you won’t earn any money, but that’s an easy trade-off for momentary peace.
While you’re designing the town, don’t forget to give yourself a redesign! Visit the little kiosk next to the train station to change your hair, facial features, and clothes. As you find loot throughout the world, they’ll be sent to this kiosk. So, you can change clothes and add fun accessories like heart-shaped glasses. There are even a variety of hats to choose from, plus different baskets to carry your stuff in.
Overall
Go-Go Town is such a great game. It’s exactly as chill as you need it to be since you can close the train station, but even then, it’s not an overly demanding or hectic game. The art is lovely. The music is perfect and not overwhelming. Being able to decorate and manage a town makes for a cool concept, but with the addition of the progression tiers, it’s a super engaging game. There are an almost endless list of possibilities for your little town, too!
There is a new demo available for the current Steam Next Fest, too. Even more exciting is Early Access drops on Steam June 18th! That’s just next week. So, if you haven’t already, add the game to your Steam Wishlist to be notified when it’s live.
- May 23, 2024
Pixel Colony by Studio Gimbap is a game where you’re the governor of a new island, and it’s yours to build up and manage. To keep your citizens happy, you need to ensure their access to resources and services. Collect and gather the necessary items, like food and building supplies, for building your new society. Also provide services, luxuries, and medical supplies to keep your citizens healthy and happy. What will really make your new town successful is establishing production chains to make operations run smoothly. Resource processes will start simple, but as your city grows, you’ll need to upgrade to more complex production chains in order to produce new buildings, medicines, and foods on your tiny island.
Release Date
You can find Pixel Colony on Steam now! There’s even a demo available.
This game is similar in feel to dotAGe!
