Game Reviews – PAX Aus 2024

I didn’t record my game reviews at PAX Australia last year and, later, regretted it. I think I’ll try to make it regular practice, if only as a memory aide. My reviews this year include:

Video games: Aussie Bogan Hero, Dolven, Ecliptik, Fox and Shadow, Game Over: A Musical RPG, Hello World, HexaQuest, Hissy Fit, Kriegsfront Tactics, Memory’s Reach, Neon Squad Tactics, Overhours, Pixel Starships, Reign Absolute, Rita, Untethered, 420 Blaze It 2

Board games: Blasphemy, Cultivaria, Deep Rock Galactic: The board game, Dirty Laundry, Hunted by a God, Nimbus, The Score, Thwarts, 4D tic tac toe (Tic Tac Joe)

And some bonus content.

Video games

Aussie Bogan Hero

2D platformer featuring a pot-bellied white bloke in a blue singlet with a mullet, wielding a cricket bat in one hand and a beer in the other, puffing on a ciggie and accompanied by a sheepdog. I am not getting close enough to see whether the irony outweighs the cringe.

(Yes, at one point you fight a boxing kangaroo.)

Dolven

This was pitched to me as “a tactical RPG – think XCOM – with a deck-building element  – think Slay the Spire”. This sounds like it should be my crack, but somehow I wasn’t compelled to stay and play it. Not sure why; maybe the artwork is a bit too dark for me. (There are a lot of dark games here, they’re blending into one.) I should revisit this later. Available on Steam to wish list.

Ecliptik

Ecliptik is kind of a graphic novel about horoscopes where, over the course of the story, your gameplay changes with the horoscope. Eg Gemini (the Twins) has you control two characters at once in split screen. (I haven’t seen the others.) 

Not my thing but I respect the idea.

Fox and Shadow

Dual deck-building roguelike: a cross between “Transistor” and “Slay the Spire”

Fox and Shadow is worth a look on PC. Described as a roguelike cross between “Transistor” and “Slay the Spire”, you build your deck of ability cards (for your battling robot) and modify them with traits from the human controller. It goes live on Kickstarter on the 23rd of October.

Game Over: A Musical RPG

Rhythm game experience on a PC

Hello World

Hello World is a mobile game in early play test, described as a strategy roguelike. (You may see a theme in the games I’m testing, but also there a lots of these around.) I… didn’t get it. There’s no tutorial and you’re just kind of left to your own devices in a game that appears to have some depth to the mechanics; it just wasn’t obvious to me. 

Here was my feedback on their survey:
“I had NFI what I was doing, or why. Pretty much every element of the game other than movement was a mystery. Should I pick up junk? Why? What’s valuable and what isn’t? What am I trying to achieve? Entirely baffled”

I will try to keep an eye out for this next year to see how it’s progressed.

HexaQuest

Dice-builder RPG?

You play as a die who rolls through the 8-bit fantasy universe to, IDK, find/avenge your brother or something, I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe you’re banished from dice heaven? Who cares: you have six sides, and you can upgrade those sides with attacks or other abilities to help get through the levels. Break down crates and shit.

Inventive, but I struggle to see how deep it could get.

Developed by a Melbourne studio, live on Kickstarter.

Hissy Fit

Isometric ‘Snake’-like for console, but you’re… a pigeon? Or other animals. Simple and cute. Banging beats.

Kriegsfront Tactics

What if Mechwarrior, but in 1970s South East Asia?

Yes, please.

Demo will be out soon on Steam, for free. For that reason I didn’t play here, but it looks like fun.

One more picture because I dig this game.

Memory’s Reach

Myst, but make it space-y.

Disappointingly, not by James S. A. Corey.

Neon Squad Tactics

What if XCOM were a board game and you played it in VR? Pop on your MetaQuest headset then pick up and move your units around the game board (rather than mouse and keyboard). Designed for VR first, a mouse & keyboard version is under development.

Overhours

Overhours is fun! It’s a tower defense game, but you control a little character who runs around placing the towers/traps/barriers etc and who can shoot the enemies directly. Keeps you involved the whole time.

Pixel Starships

Pixel Starships is described as a mix of FTL and Fallout Shelter. Curious mix of 8-bit, manga, and regular artwork. Unlike FTL there’s a narrative and tasks/missions, eg collect resources and upgrade your ship. (IDK what Fallout Shelter is so I can’t compare.)

Reign Absolute

Reign Absolute is interesting. It’s PC turn-based tactics in a fantasy setting (humans/orcs/elves), based on the 2017 board/card game of the same name. The board game was described to me as “Warhammer Fantasy meets Exploding Kittens”; the PC game is pitched as a fantasy strategy game for (older) gamers who don’t have 40 hours to devote to the game; campaigns are instead 1.5 hours long. (But I guess there’ll be several of them?) 

Your army is cards of different units that you place on a grid opposite your opponent’s. You can move a unit or attack an adjacent unit, then boost a unit with other cards for later turns. The PC build is pretty limited ATM to hard to judge, but it’s quick, reasonably straightforward and I enjoyed it. Due for release 2026.

Rita

Cute. Guide a chicken around an 8-bit world, collecting letters that go into a crossword puzzle to unlock game features or abilities.

Untethered

A space survival sandbox. Gently paced (initially?) exploration and tinkering game, gathering resources and fixing/pgrading your space station.

On PC, demo out on Steam. Slightly clunky controls, but intriguing.

420 Blaze It 2

Dumb and knows it. Do a cool kill and your screen goes meme. I’m only slightly surprised there was a first one successful enough to warrant a second.

Board games

Blasphemy

I’m not quite sure how to describe this one. Betting with deck building? 

You are blood mages who collect monsters via betting (selecting a ‘spell value’ card from your hand). The second-closest to the monster’s target value enthralls it, which is a fun mechanic. The monsters in your area give you active or passive abilities, usually involving the ‘blood rune’ currency.

After several rounds of monster collection, the game shifts and there are three rounds of collecting “the old ones”, with similar mechanics but usually a kicker (e.g. some players gain monsters, others lose them). The randomness of the betting makes it hard to really develop deep strategy and the monster abilities seem situational, but it’s alright. Cool theme.

Cultivaria

Wingspan but lighter

Designed by two archaeologists and… some other guy (sorry, other guy), this is a worker placement game about cultivating and harvesting diferent foods in different areas (islands, grasslands, etc) and different seasons (stable, wet, dry, etc). You are trying to grow above susbistence level to develop cultural advances and, ultimately, get VP.

Is it good? NFI, but the pitch sounded really interesting. Friends described it as, “Wingspan but lighter. Lovely artwork. Maybe a bit simple? Better for younger players.”

Deep Rock Galactic: the board game

It was fine. There are a few mechanics to learn intially, but they basically mirror the PC game and, once you grasp them, it’s pretty quick. It goes player/game/player/game/etc, gradually scaling up the frequency of enemy games spawns the longer you’re in there. It replicates the theme of the PC game reasonably well, I think; as a standalone game it’s just okay. Decent quality components and minis, though.

Dirty Laundry

Didn’t play this but it looked cool and the booth was very popular.

Hunted by a God

Tactical sci-fi board game

I also did not get to play this, but it similarly looked very cool. Asymmetic empires with area control, resource collection with a ‘push your luck’ mechanic, tactical actions that you can upgrade, and you can play it solo! It has a lot going for it. The creator said he was working toward releasing a Kickstarter in the next year or two.

Nimbus

Nimbus is fun. It’s sort of chess-like? Triangular grid, pieces with different movement patterns, BUT up to one piece changes type after each move. (Imagine e.g. a bishop moving then turning into a knight.) Rather than having distinct pieces – a tower, a horsie – Nimbus uses pyramids with different elements on each of the four corners. The element that is facing upward denotes the state the piece is in: Fire, Earth, Lightning, or Water.

It was definitely activating the chess centres of my brain, and I’m sure the new movement patterns would be come natural over time, but it’s also fully handmade so it costs $450.

The Score

Heist Movie RPG in a box

Deal out cards to give players their skills (e.g. hacking, fast talking, break & enter). Deal more cards to generate a random target (e.g. jewels from a hotel; animals from an island.) Then shuffle those (and other) cards in between the Act 1–5 cards to set up your ‘plot’.

Draw cards! If you are the player whose card was drawn (e.g. hacking), you talk about how the skills applies to the scenario. (“I hack into the hotel CCTV and loop the footage.”) If no one has that card, you explain why this wasn’t possible (I think). In some Acts, everything goes plan; in others, things go slightly wrong.

Basically, everything is a prompt for storytelling. It’s light, quick, and if you like the theme it’s a bit of procedurally generated fun.

Thwarts

Curious little game designed by a Mum and her young teenage son; the pieces include things like “Swancrabs” (his choice) and Paladins (hers). It looks like a chess variant but isn’t; the designer doesn’t play chess and knows bugger all about it.

While it has similarities like a playing grid and pieces with different movement patterns and attack patterns (separate from the movement), the biggest difference is that you roll dice to determine which class of pieces you’re allowed to play and how many actions they take. Initially that is fun; after a little while it was irritating have pieces you couldn’t do anything with because their numbers never came up. Definitely a work in progress. Perhaps having played chess might be helpful.

The designed told me she wante dsomething where a new player could complete on reasonably even ground with an experience player and, well, yeah: randomness will give you that.

Tic Tac Joe (aka 4D tic tac toe)

Quaterni, but play you pieces out of sequence (in random order) then ‘confirm’ the position of piece X once all preceding pieces in the sequence have been confirmed (starting with piece 1, though that’s probably not the first piece played)

This game is only a prototype, but it’s great and I love it.

Picture tic tac toe / noughts and crosses: 3x3 grid, each player takes turns placing a nought or a cross. Now, expand that to a 4x4 grid. Now make it 3D, i.e. four levels, so you need to connect a row of four but can do it across levels, including diagonally. So far, I’ve just described Quaterni or ‘3D mill’. Now: imagine playing the pieces out of sequence.

That’s a bit confusing, so come back to a 3x3 tic tac toe grid. Usually, on your first turn you will place your first piece (a nought or a cross). Imagine you instead placed your third piece on move 1. Or, to think of it another way, what if you, on your first turn, wrote down the intention to place down your third piece in, say, the top left corner.

Why would you do such a thing? Well – in 4D tic tac toe, each player has 32 pieces, and they have to place them in a random sequence. (You draw them blind, essentially.) So, on turn 1, you might draw your third piece, and your ‘move’ is effectively to say, “I will place my third piece here”. Physically, you put down your piece in the intended location with the white (unconfirmed/provisional) side up.

Why is it provisional? Well, in regular tic tac toe, you can’t placed your third piece (write your third nought or cross) where your opponent (or you!) has placed their first or second pieces. If the first and second pieces have been played, well, the third piece is not provisional: it’s a final move. But – and this is the fun part – a piece earlier in the sequence (a 1st piece, a 2nd piece) can displace a later piece in the sequence (e.g. a 3rd piece), even if the later-sequence piece was physically placed on the board first. The later piece simply comes off the board and back into the owner’s hand – which might be you, the active player – for placement on the next round.

Only once all preceding pieces in the sequence have been placed does a piece become confirmed, rather than provisional. In the image above, you can see the “1” piece (top level, front middle corner) is red = it’s the earliest possible piece, so it’s always placed as confirmed. The “2” piece (second level, mostly hidden by the cyclinder) is also red – confirmed – because the 1-piece is on the board. The “3” piece is not on the board, so the “4” piece (top level, right corner) is provisional; the 3-piece could displace it.

This is a slightly brain-melting game and I dig it. Players can be placing all sort of mid-sequence pieces, in the 10s and 20s, when an early-sequence piece comes out and shit just starts cascading, i.e. pieces are displaced and replaced. Once a cascade happens, displaced pieces are place and confirmed (in sequence order) before a player has their next ‘turn’ for new pieces.

Simple concept – despite being difficult to explain – but a great challenge. Not for everyone 😄 I do hope they come up with a better name.

Bonus content

eSports-ed Dodgeball.

The court gets power-ups and changes in size over the course of the match. It’s… still just dogeball. Fun to play, lame to watch.

Single (bed) for life

Yes, those are RGBs.

Stormtroopers

These guys had a blast, just walking around all weekend pumping music and showboating.

Word salad

Yes, it’s PAX, but this is still almost impenetrable