What I Played Today: January 7

Game Dev Story, Trainyard

This is less about what I played today but what I’ve been playing all week and keep forgetting to mention because I played them during off minutes, when I’m not really thinking. The first is a game that people continue to not shut up about, Game Dev Story, which is a cute little simulation game that really does a lot of weird things. It’s competent, but there’s a lot going on that I don’t think works. The fact that you have very little control over how well something does unless you happen to min-max your staff (and in turn ramping up your payroll, which hits you all at once in March, that’s weird). After playing a couple of cycles, I got frustrated about the lack of real immersion. A few people have stated that it’s far from even close to showing what it’s like to develop games, which I guess is fair, but when you wait until the beta phase to actually assign a sound guy, and people inject a numerical value for things like “fun” and “creativity,” I think it’s mostly the art style and minmax friendly gameplay that attract people to it.

I’ve also been playing a lot of Trainyard, a puzzle game that’s not bad, which involves getting the right colored train into the colored station. It starts slow, in which you think to yourself that there’s no way this will get difficult, until you end up with colorswap stations and cut stations and have to turn one yellow train into 7 orange trains and it starts to get out of control. I “passed” the game yesterday, but once I got the “you win!” screen, the game said, “enjoy these one hundred bonus puzzles,” each harder than the last. It’s vicious.