Zero Play Time

What is the first thing you think of when you look at this game? Let me guess. Does it feature little guys with green hair? As soon as I laid eyes on the trailer for this game I knew I was going to enjoy it. Nothing I have seen in years of browsing game sites like Steam, Itch.io and Indie Gala has hit me so directly in the Amigas that I actually had to stop what I was doing and fire up the SteamDeck to download the demo. Sure enough, as soon as it was installed and I was into the tutorial level I felt the wave of warm fuzzy Commodore-powered goodness. The obvious instant thought is, of course, Lemmings. Heck, the developer even uses a Lemmings tag on the Steam Store page! As you start playing there are also some nods to The Settlers and I felt a tip of the hat to Benefactor in there too. Obviously this isn't an Amiga game, it's a modern title built in Unity (the horror!) but it is so well executed that you could almost believe you were  playing on an Amiga. The art style is gre...

Pacific Drive has been front and center in a lot of videos I've seen about Steam's Next Fest event so I naturally had to give it a shot. The idea of an apocalyptic survival setting, blending games like Organ Trail and Snowrunner really sounded appealing!  Playing on SteamDeck I had to dial back the settings that, for some reason, had all been set to ultra. I get that the devs want the game to look it's best from the start to "wow" the player but some configuration detection routines to set initial video settings would have been useful.  Right from the off, I found the controls to be difficult. Sadly because it's a demo, and very new, there were no published community control schemes available. I pushed on with the defaults.... I struggled with picking up the wheel to fix the car, as it wasn't obvious I had to hold the RB button down instead of tapping it to pick up the wheel. Eventually I realised this and some other controls started making sense.  Getting...