What we've been playing
A few of the games that have us hooked at the moment.
3rd February 2023
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: Hockey, Wonderland and colouring books.
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.
Tape to Tape, PC
I wasn't expecting an actual hockey game! As in, one you can full-on real-time play. I haven't played one of those since the 90s, back when playing them felt like sliding around on Marmite - like playing the early FIFA games, actually.
I didn't expect it because Tape to Tape is a Rogue-lite and, in many ways, it's exactly the kind of thing we've seen copied many times from Slay the Spire. You select a character and upgrade them by making a series of stops on a map, taking in normal encounters, elite encounters, and a variety of events. You even collect relics to alter your 'build'. And you only get one life, so to speak, to see how far you get.
The difference here, though, is that the encounters are hockey - playing hockey. You skate around on the ice, passing and shooting and shoving people into barriers, and control a team rather than only one character - although you have clear star players the team revolves around. And then you bulk them out with new abilities as you go.
And it's fun! It's all quite cartoony in tone and appearance - a bit like Mario Strikers in how you can unlock special moves that knock-out opposing players and so on. It's not the most detailed game of hockey so don't go into it expecting that, but as a way to mix up a familiar formula like this, it really works.
You can check out a demo of Tape to Tape in the Steam Next Fest event right now, sneakily.
-Bertie
Wonderland Nights: White Rabbit's Diary, Switch
Has any book had a greater impact on videogames than Alice in Wonderland? Aside from the specific lifts in things like Mario and the Alice games, there's just the anti-logic of Wonderland, its colourful landscapes and terrifying tweeness.
All of this makes it into White Rabbit's Diary, a game which is clearly a work of passion. What a gloriously odd thing it is too. You play the harried White Rabbit and must organise the schedule for an annual Wonderland summit, planning the diaries of the various attendees and, in doing so, creating alliances, and possibly shifting policy.
It sounds weird, and it is weird, but I love it for its weirdness. The point here, I think, is that you replay the game again and again searching for new synergies and, perhaps, new disasters. It's lovely to see such brilliant source material still powering games, and still making them strange, personal, frightening and vivid.
Christian Donlan
Chicory, PC
Bertie's thoughts on Halftone this week sent me back to Chicory, where paper is everything and the worlds you travel through are nothing but lines, with a mimeo-ink ruggedness and spread to them, printed on top.
It's a wonderful game, filled with surprises and secrets and ingenuity, and built around proper emotional stuff. All great. But what I love more than anything is its commitment to paper, to flatness and blankness and the way that colour - any colour - transforms everything.
So it's great to come back and be reminded of one puzzle or another, this revelation or that. Really, though, I'm just excited to see each new colouring book page laid out before me, while I wait, for a few seconds, before raising the brush.
Chris Donlan