Recent reviews by Lapison

When this popped up on my feed the other day, I was pretty intrigued. It's not every day that a game comes out with a fairly interesting question. After playing through it and (somehow) eking out a synchronized galaxy...I'd recommend it with a heaping pile of asterisks and caveats.

The premise of the game is, as the blurb says, "galactic gardening"; civilizations will rise, and your job is to guide them on the path towards eventual alien contact and (hopefully) intergalactic hope and peace. Woo!

The gameplay is really reminiscent of Plague Inc, Redemption Inc, or other "management sims" of that nature. You click on small little blooms called "synthesis points" to progress the timeline as your civs develop. Every once in a while, some event will pop up, whether that be a new civilization, some discovery, an impending war, or an extinction event. These events can have varying consequences on the various parameters of your civilizations. You can spend synthesis points to either increase the potency of a "good" event, or to negate the consequences of a bad one. At the same time, it's not a bad idea to take the worst choice sometimes, as they'll usually pay out a nice little bounty of synth points themselves to use on some other event.

And you'll definitely want to have a synth point buffer to take advantage of certain events in the game (especially the potentially game changing ones like radio waves or spaceships). You should also have a synth point buffer for the inevitable extinction event that threatens to kill off one of your civilizations that you've babied up to this point. (Or, y'know. Let them die, because ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ they're eating so many resources and they're not gonna survive, might as well use their synth points on someone with better luck!)

The gameplay is also a very noticeable gripe with the game, in that clicking on blooms is...really all the game allows you to do. You'll see the bars representing the civilizations moving back and forth, as you wait for "stat up" blooms so the civilizations don't inevitably burn themselves out on strip mining their system, blow themselves up with a nuclear bomb, or devolve into some sort of dystopian society with no hope of continued survival.

The balancing act is fairly engaging and intuitive, but at the same time also isn't particularly clear with the numbers behind it, which can prove to be a bit of a pain as well. I can see this really becoming a slog later, however; the sheer monotony of just waiting around for the next big thing is thematic, but doesn't really keep you all that engaged. It's also not that helpful when certain parameters for getting endings are wrapped up in a stat you didn't realize would be important; I was a bit blindsided by the need for "utopia" for one of the endings, even though I'd already been building it and it wasn't too much of a problem.

The writing here has a lot of potential; between the small blurbs and sentences that the game gives you as you click on synth points, there's a nice amount to chew on in this game. The consequences of your choices actually do follow you: the game even makes a point of showing you the results of all your previous choices, and those choices factors into the blurbs you see as you continue to click away at synth points. As an example, early in my game I had a civilization called the Maru; an extinction event happened, I had them escape by the skin of their teeth, and suddenly they were renamed the Prey. That was a pleasant surprise!

However, I'll note that in this early access version of the game, it's exceedingly obvious that there aren't a ton of blurbs, and seeing the same variant of "X civilization laid down their weapons and chose peace" over the eras is remarkably easy to spot, as well as the sort of Mad Libs-esque civilization characteristics. This also extends to the events that we see; you're not going to be seeing the "depopulation on X" blurb only once, although the wording may change based on scenario.

That being said, the writing is certainly solid in its execution: you'll get to see a fascinating blend of historical and sci-fi blurbs as your civs make it from the Stone Age to the Lightspeed Age, and I rarely came across a quote or scenario that didn't make me think at least a bit about "what if this happened to me?" (Of course, it does get somewhat ruined once you see the stat gains or losses and make a decision based on that, but y'know...tradeoffs.)

The art is quite stylized, reminding me of other cartoon-ish narrative selection games of this nature (the one I most think of is Out There, which also happens to be a space faring narrative sim). The music is...adequate? I found it pretty blaring at times, but during typical gameplay it felt fairly reasonable.

Would I buy this for the current price? Nah, wait a couple more months to see what they do with it and/or get it on sale when it's < $10. Is it worth keeping your eyes on? If you're into a narrative god game, absolutely. I had a lot of interesting thought provoking moments even in the 2.5 hours I spent on a single run, and I certainly hope it fleshes out what it has.

Final score: 7/10, with a lot of potential.

Halcyon 6: Lightspeed Edition is a fine addition to the "time killers" section of the Steam Library, and it's been a nice and easy game to sink a couple of hours into when I don't feel like turning my brain cells on.

The premise of the story is typical and well trodden. Evil eldritch horror from beyond the stars invades, kills off almost all of humanity, and you as the lone remnant must get powerful enough to kick their ugly multieyed butts back where they came from. There's...some semblance of urgency, but it's really kinda whatever. One thing that did surprise me was that the game isn't really "over" once you fight the big bad boss (for there is always a big bad boss) and finish the main mission. In this edition, beating the big bad boss means you'll really get to the meat of the game, as the game gives you access to all the shiny toys and throws increasingly harder challenges at you.

Combat operates on a turn-based combat system where the name of the game is stacking debuffs and then chaining them like a technical from Persona to inflict massive damage on whatever poor sucker is on the receiving end. On lower difficulties (like the one I'm on) this is pretty rote, but has potential to become a nice little trade-off: keep the debuff on them, or consume it for extra damage? There's some decent variety on how you choose to execute combos and exploit them (although once you see something like Ramming Speed or Suicide Run you'll wonder why you don't choose this combo every single time it's feasible).

When you're not blowing some aliens to kingdom come, you'll be playing the resource game: building up your nodes, leveling your officers, blah blah blah. This portion of the game starts insanely slow, but quickly snowballs once you get auto-collection and resource gains, and your expansion is set. I won't say too much, because this is really straightforward if you've done something like XCOM.

The game boasts a lot of different systems (like diplomacy with other factions, skill/tech trees, interesting small questlines), but to me they really feel kind of samey and underdeveloped. Most of these really just boil down to "what do you kill" and "how do I kill it faster/safer". That wouldn't be a problem if any of this were fleshed out, but there tends to be very few options for building or exploration. At some point, you'll realize that you've snowballed, and the game really loses a lot of its shine after playing the same battle for the umpteenth time with the same ships and builds. Heck, the game really only has two choices for ships, two choices for "class", a few factions....it just isn't fleshed out enough to provide the endless variety that something like FTL or XCOM does.

Is it worth full price? Definitely not. Is it worth it on sale? I'd say so; even with all its repetitive roteness and general ease once you hit the snowball point, I'm pretty satisfied with it and it's a nice little romp.

Just, uh, don't feed the Voraash.