I wrote about my experiences with Sunset; that I found it thought provoking and moving. Since then, the creators Tale of Tales have announced that they are giving up on creating games (at least commercial ones), after Sunset only sold a bit over 4000 copies as of about a week ago. Their full post is worth reading in my opinion. I'd summarize it as saying that they tried to make 'a game for gamers', along the lines of the more successful Gone Home (which I also thoroughly enjoyed), hired various advisors and PR people, and it all failed to produce sales. So they're unlikely to bother anymore, especially as funding for artistic games dries up in their home country of Belgium.

Lots of people have had opinions about this, and it ties into some interesting discussions about whether governments should subsidize art, whether their games were good, whether they were games at all (that endless debate), and so on. Since I am apparently one of fairly few people who have tried the game, and my opinion of it is so different to many other people, I thought I'd try and respond specifically to some of the criticisms I've seen of the game - not necessarily trying to counter them, but at least explaining why they didn't occur to me, or if they did, why I didn't think they mattered all that much. You could loosely consider some things below as spoilers.

Seeing both the Eastern Europe and Scandinavian DLC on sale, I couldn't resist grabbing it and spending a few hours trundling around hauling cargo. I've played a little bit of Euro Truck Simulator before, and it doesn't take long to get into the swing of things in any case. Taking these screenshots caused a slight pause each time, and since I've been driving with a keyboard and mouse combo (which can make it a bit easy to oversteer at times) there was a certain amount of risk involved every time I took a photo.

In my spare time lately I've been working on a game inspired (in a sense) by the rather addictive Compact Conflict. I love the simplicity of the game, the satisfaction in switching chunks of the map to your colour, the replayability of the random maps and the limited actions mechanic - here used to restrict army movement, but it's something I like in board games as well when used to make every action interesting and keep the game moving at the same time. But what really keeps me coming back is the interaction of the AI players.

I recently completed the adventure game Technobabylon, and thought it was  well worth a post. I've enjoyed everything from Wadjet Eye Games, in particular the excellent Blackwell series, with the last game (the Blackwell Epiphany) being an absolute gem that I would probably nominate for best ending to a game & series ever. Based on this, I'd pre-ordered Technobabylon (actually I tried to pre-order it a second time, having forgotten that I'd already done so!) and wasn't disappointed.

Since I last wrote about Chroma Squad, I've played more and I'm pretty sure that I've reached the last battle - though I haven't finished the game for a couple of reasons I'll go into more detail about below. I've spent 12 hours in the game and had a lot of fun with it - but I don't have quite the same enthusiasm as when I made my last post.