I have many, many more games from the Steam Next Fest to try, and I’ve already found some gems, and some games that, for some reason or other, I just couldn’t play.
Don’t Panic! It is Just Turbulence
Don’t Panic! It is Just Turbulence was one such. You are in a plane that is going down, and you collaborate with the control tower to land safely. What I didn’t realize when I downloaded it was that it is a two player game, similar to the bomb defusing one and a few others that depend upon sharing information in a tense situation.
In Don’t Panic, the pilot is in bad shape and must solve several puzzles. They don’t know how to solve them, they cannot solve them on their own. Instead, they must describe what they can see to the tower, who will use their references to help with the solution. Solve them all and the plane is saved. Run out of time and, well…
I didn’t have anyone to play with, so I sadly had to let this one go unplayed. I did enjoy that one of the keystroke commands for the tower player was “Pull up!”. Bound to the “Q” key.
Scriptorium: Master of Manuscripts
What I thought this game might be about: Copying and decorating texts, perhaps writing letters and decrees and things like that for those not fortunate enough to be blessed with the understanding of the letters and the Latin.
What this game is actually about: The devil is forcing you to make medieval-style pieces of art to order. People (and not-people) will come to you and ask you to make them a picture. The picture will be required to have certain elements, and optionally certain other elements, and you will be rewarded for how many of the elements you include. Aesthetics don’t really seem to be part of this, but they can have specific requests for coloring or positioning that you should take into account.
Creating an artwork is simply a matter of dragging in elements from the palette. They can be rotated, flipped, resized, and moved forward or backward within the artwork. Some can be recolored.
The store page shows that some of the artworks can get pretty complicated and take a lot of time to complete. I’m not really sure it’s for me, though?
Forbidden Solitaire
Your mind was blown when you found a copy of Forbidden Solitaire in the thrift shop. This game was so popular for awhile, and then… disappeared. You rush home, tell your sister about it, and start playing. As you play, your sister is texting you information she has found about why the game disappeared. When people play this game, bad things happen.
Unfortunately, for you, it is too late.
Forbidden Solitaire is a story game that is simultaneously discovering what happened to the people who played the game in the 90s before it was banned and taken off of store shelves, and the player working their way through a mysterious tower, solving puzzles and fighting monsters… with solitaire.
Specifically, a variant of Tri-Peaks Solitaire, invented in 1989 by Robert Hogue and included in the first edition of the Microsoft Solitaire Collection. In this, you deal the stacks, and then deal a face-up card. You can remove a card from a stack if it is one higher or one lower that the current card. In fights, the number of cards you can remove before being forced to flip another card from the waste is the damage you do to the monster. For puzzles, it is simply to win the game.
In between games of solitaire, the story continues, with monsters tracking you, the weird horror vibe growing, and your sister becoming increasingly alarmed at what she is discovering about the game.
The demo only goes to the defeat of the first boss, a terrible monster with a lot of health and a shield that ignores two points of damage. It took several tries to beat, and there’s a good amount of RNG going on. Sometimes you catch a break. Sometimes there are no breaks to be had. There doesn’t seem to be any death penalty, though.
The game is nicely creepy and would fit right in to a 90s PC game library, although the screen resolution is somewhat higher than was common back then. As with Underkeep from the other day, this looks just like how people remember 90s games looking, as opposed to how they actually looked. And that’s fine.
