I’d love to pretend that I’ve spent the past week making lots of progress in a number of different games, but that’s not even remotely close to the truth. Instead, I spent a week binging every episode of Parks and Recreation before it left Netflix. Now I’m obsessed with it/Aubrey Plaza and don’t want to play anything. That’ll pass! Probably! It usually does. But man, what a great show. I had no idea and started watching it on a whim, thinking that I’d get through two seasons before tomorrow when it disappears and becomes a Peacock exclusive. Somehow, I managed seven seasons in something like five days. I’m not entirely sure how. Anyway, the point is that I haven’t accomplished anything site-related in a week and I’m going to start requiring all PR emails to work in a Parks and Recreation reference to avoid deletion. Probably.

Brief side note: I just bought all seven seasons on DVD for the price of a single new AAA game. It’s kind of ridiculous how little value gaming offers for your money. I seriously got into the wrong industry.

There are two things worth noticing right off the bat: more Kalypso rejection, for one thing, but also the absence of that Fallen Angel key that I was planning on using closer to release. Turns out that some keys expire and this particular key was set to expire more than three weeks before release. I can’t even.

I looked into a game called Death Tales and kind of dug the art style, but the movement looked iffy. Then Biomass caught my eye. It looked familiar, and I had actually requested this one a while back before its release date was pushed back. It doesn’t look like there’s much player anticipation for it, though, and it doesn’t appear when searching for “Biomass” for obvious reasons. If a game can’t be found on the first page of a search for its title, then any coverage is destined to become similarly buried because search engines are terrible about context. That’s why titling your game a single existing word is a bad idea compared to something like Undertale that’s simple and had no existing search competition to deal with.

After wading through an unbelievable amount of other stuff, I finally came across 9 Monkeys of Shaolin, a beat-em-up developed by the studio that made the positively-received Redeemer. It looks like the type of game that could either end up being great or terrible, so that pedigree makes it easier to buy in.

Remember how I tend to avoid games with a single, frequently used word as its title? And also those with no discussions on their Steam page? Thing is, I’m insane and there’s no one around here to stop me from disregarding all of that. Prodigal is a puzzle game with a focus on characters and a Game Boy Color-inspired look. That’s a lot of things that I like. Prodigal should probably be getting more attention.

Carto is a cute-looking adventure game where you cut up the world map and rearrange it to find things and progress. It’s also published by Humble Games, which has historically published only high-quality stuff. Their seal of approval—and tendency to ignore my requests—kept me from looking into Carto much.

Finally (for now), there’s Ghostrunner, which is the only game on this entire page that I’d be willing to drop everything to play right now. I don’t know why the warm glow of a feel-good television show combines so well in my head with a first-person face-slashing game. I suspect that my hesitation to play anything right now revolves around not wanting to wash out that show’s emotion with the lesser emotional cues found in many games, which is something the seemingly mindless violence of Ghostrunner would likely sidestep.

Finding Games Etcetera Etcetera 09/30/20 first appeared on Killa Penguin