A mix between Setters-style missions and a rogue-lite, this game is a great take on the genre. It's possible for missions to take short amounts of time, but like most "RTS" style games these days, you can pause and look around, which allows me to play at my own pace.

The lore is doled out a little at a time, like most rogue-lites, but unlike the ones I've played before it happens most when "visiting home", where you can talk to your aunt to learn the world's backstory. I'm just getting to the point where rerolls and managing your options is important, having unlocked enough content that things aren't as predictable, and so having "many draws" is important.

Efficiency plays a role when it comes to how many settlements you can make during a campaign, and the game gives you quite a few options as to how to roll with that. Lower difficulties allow you to make rapid progress, but earn fewer of the game's unlock resources. On higher difficulties, there's more variables and effort required to make progress, which slows you down but also highlights the game's more intricate systems.

Like most rogue-lites, the game is about pushing a little more and going a little further than the last time you played. While this can produce a repetitive experience, that's one of the things I rather enjoy. I don't know precisely what will happen, but the general "shape" of the game allows me to treat the first half of any settlement as a pastime, making it a fun game to pick up, play for a while, then drop off. If I want to push myself, I can always accelerate time and really work at the efficiency... but most of the time I just want to relax. I love that it gives me that choice, and lets me play hard when I want and carebear through the rest.

The one thing I'm hoping for in future development is more variety in the art and music. While I wouldn't mind more variety in the mechanics, I feel like Against the Storm is largely about supply chains and trade, and venturing too far from that core could make it overwhelming. I'm excited to see what the devs do as the game evolves past its 1.0 milestone!

Satisfactory is the kind of game that I really want to like, but just can't. It looks like it'll be really fun, with lots of factory pieces and tons of automation and neat building pieces to construct into large factory buildings. And, for 90 hours, it was pretty interesting. After 90 hours, though, it's just not.

I find that to build anything of good size I either need to make it sprawl out over a huge amount of space or spend a lot of time walking up and down floors trying to line up conveyor belts and floor holes and all of that. The 3D parts allow for a really incredible world that can be fun to navigate and neat routing puzzles, but at the end of the day it just isn't very fun to do that.

What's more, a lot of the building components and automation logic require optimizing your startup time so that you can unlock them before building a factory that does things like load balance. Just trying to get to that point has been a chore--and, yes. I was automating my production chains from the beginning. But, like, I need to go and do 11 different things and produce a ton of components just to be able to get a component that can sort its inputs. I have to do lots of math and set up wild belt loops just to get things to balance out, or my machines get starved of resources.

Some folks find this fun. I find it maddeningly tedious.