Excellent! Thanks for those :)

Oh yeah definitely :) Also I’ve noticed there’s kind of a new feeling of satisfaction when a game does somehow make it through this assault course and I buy it finally. It feels like an achievement in itself.

Well ok but I did say it was long. Tbh, my checklist is almost a minigame itself now 🤣

So once I’ve found a game that looks interesting, I do the following:

Google video search for the game’s title and filter to past week, then month, then year and that shows me how many people are actually talking about this game right now and who’s doing the talking.

I look at the Steam reviews and initially filter to only show negative ones. I find it’s a lot easier to see if the game’s been review bombed that way. Also, a lot of negative reviews complain about features I find positive so that’s helpful too “This game was way too easy! I finished it in 30 hours and I still had all my hair at the end, harumph!”. I also check phrases like “Abandoned by the devs” or “Yet another asset flip” or “Beware! The EULA is a privacy nightmare”.

I then switch to positive reviews and read the short ones. The dissertations are just way too much detail at this stage (or any stage really for me).

At some point early on I check the Steam update history. If the last update was years ago I factor that in. I also try to keep on top of relevant news like that time the entire staff of Annapurna Interactive quit, making a sequel to Stray unlikely.

Also, if it hasn’t had that many recent updates I’ll join the Discord and see how active that is. That’s usually so revealing. Often in a positive way like with the G-Rebels devs.

Then I go through my top YT game reviewers like Raptor, Scarlett Seeker, Splattercat Gaming, Orbital Potato and Nookrium and see if they’ve talked about the game.

I look for the title on Allkeyshop to see if there’s a cheaper EU unlockable Steam game key available.

I check for trainers in case I need an escape hatch if it turns out to be too grindy or tedious but still worth playing.

If all the searches have been positive so far I’ll wishlist it around this point. If there’s a demo I’ll play it. If it looks amazing from the start I’ll install the demo after looking at a couple of gameplay videos.

I also have a 21:9 monitor so I hop into the Steam discussion group for the game and look for confirmation that it’s compatible.

If it’s too expensive I’ll check SteamDB and look at it’s price history. My personal limit is <7 bucks for an old game and <18 for a relatively new one (unless something exceptional suddenly appears like Eriksholm).

I’ll check if there any Steam sales coming and if the theme is likely to match the game I’m looking at.

I really do actually do all this by the way. It’s the only way I’ve been able to get more sensible about the games I buy.

I used to buy Steam games without a care in the world. Now to spend even 5 bucks I make myself go through a quality control checklist so vast it would impress a space shuttle commander. There’s just been too many abandoned games, terrible sequels, fake reviews, unnecessary game launchers and disappointing Steam sales. That’s not to say there isn’t still an excellent bunch of games on there, but they’re all hidden deep in the forest and I have to go sniff em out like a basset hound.

What a brilliant question! All feature films would have a maximum run time of 30 minutes. All books would have a TL;DR at the end. If anyone takes longer than 5 minutes to explain a simple concept, they owe you a dollar. Neurotypicals would be highly incentivised to work as diary managers and time keepers for us. Forgetting what you are about to say just as you launch into a great speech would be considered good luck and there would be clapping and hugs. Commas in sentences would become optional. If a Neurotypical stops responding to your text messages half way through a conversation until a week later and then pretends they didn’t just trigger a week long RSD anxiety attack - straight to jail.

Thank God for Trello. Since I started using it about a year ago, anything I put in there gets done. Also I found out that if you put a Party Popper (🎉) emoji in the title of a list, then whenever you pick up a task and move it to the next stage it blows confetti all over the screen. Yay! pat on the head dopamine 😁 Who’s a good boy? I’m a good boy that’s who!

Been playing it for a while. It’s really good although the deliberate choice not to have a fast travel system or a minimap makes it quite the struggle at times.

There really is no need for this rudeness. I’m sure you can make your point without resorting to this kind of language. Please see rule 3 and let’s try not to turn into reddit (Clarification: I am not a mod or trying to impersonate one. This is just my opinion).

I don’t think it does either. I was referring to BenLeMan’s link Inn Keeper posted above.

Is every game just a Synty low poly asset flip theses days? Somebody needs to start using something different soon, cos everything’s starting to look the same. It’s just so obvious too! One of the clips on that Steam page is literally a bunch of them just rotating in T pose 🤣

“Despite over a decade in development, take caution that Tavern Keeper is still an early access game.” lol

ADHD is falling down a rabbit hole trying to find an answer to this question and realising that there IS actually a definitive answer, which turns out to be that it’s a “half empty glass” if the last thing that happened to it was that liquid was removed, but it’s a “half full glass” if the last thing that happened to it was that liquid was added, BUT you also have to factor in evaporation which is happening constantly, so really every glass that contains an amount of liquid that corresponds to half of it’s containment ability is actually “half empty” except for the few seconds after water was added to it, in which case it is, briefly, half full, then describing your findings in a single, insanely long sentence.

Really fun demo. Do yourself a favour and ignore Hond’s review. I have no idea what they’re talking about or why they’re so filled with hate.

I’ll go negatives first - It definitely needs optimising, but I was getting a pretty smooth 55 fps on my 4060 RTX on medium settings with DLSS set to “Balanced” on my Ultrawide at 2560 x 1080. Also, why is it having to precompile shaders every time I launch it? I found at least one hilarious bug where a mountain bike would suddenly appear glued to the front of the bus sideways when I pulled into a bus stop. And that’s it… pretty much.

The rest of the game is really fun. I’ve been looking for a decent Bus driving game (not so much sim) for AGES. Also, going into this I had no love for Sabre Interactive. They absolutely ruined Dakar Desert Rally. What a horrible mess that game turned out to be! I have to admit though… they’ve redeemed themselves a little with this demo. At least I think so.

So, the good things that come to mind are…

It worked immediately with my T-248 wheel. No messing about with confusing settings like in THE BUS. It just worked and it was really easy to adjust all the settings.

I love how you have fixed side mirrors but you get a temporary mirror that appears only when you indicate and only on the side you indicate. It works really well and doesn’t clutter up the UI when it’s not needed. ETS2, for example does offer UI mirrors but they’re either on or off and not cleverly tied to the indicator like in this game.

The people in the town look good and walk around naturally. At least a LOT more naturally than the pedestrians in BUS SIMULATOR 21. There’s also a decent amount of people and a nice variety of cars as well.

I love the town itself. It feels like a city that’s buzzing with activity and looks really nice. The lighting is great and the sunshine and rain effects feel perfect to me. Compared to the weird plastic town feel of BUS SIMULATOR 21 this is a breath of fresh air. I wanted to love BS21 so much but I just couldn’t play it because the environment was so jarringly fake feeling.

I also really liked the game loop. How you unlock extras routes and buses by getting “likes” from your passengers for each bus stop by following all the good driving rules. It made me want to keep driving the routes till I’d filled up each bus stop’s “Like” meter and got that all important star. I also really like not having to fiddle about with change and tickets for passengers because bus travel is free in this game. I really didn’t enjoy BS21 where you have to get up and go check each passenger for tickets and figure out if anyone’s trying to ride the bus for free. I just wanna drive man!

I’m really excited to see how they improve this game and for an early access demo this seriously impressed me. It feels like there might FINALLY be a good bus game on the horizon 😁

G-Rebels demo is back. I just love how nimble the ship is in this one. Fully upgraded you can get up to insane speeds with it darting around the cyberpunk style city. Personally I think they should make more of that, so that you can fly through more narrow gaps and maybe even underground tunnels. Also I’ve been watching their Discord for a while and they seem to be really going full steam ahead (no pun intended) with this one. Can’t wait for the full game 🙂

Absolutely. Also, I’d love to make it a rule that you can’t start a review with:

“I really wanted to like this game but…”

Aww… Did you pumpkin? Are you SO disappointed that you don’t get to like a thing you wanted to like? That must be so rough for you. Anyone using that opener is immediately suspicious to me.

You’ve just reminded me actually, there was a game I loved playing the demo for called “Truck World: Australia - First Haul” I saw back in June that got hugely review bombed (maybe by ETS2 fans?). “Worse than a mobile game” and “It’s way too red” were two I remember 🤣

I believe how it works is people buy the game, write the negative review and then refund it. Review bombing is not only definitely a thing but Steam have gone to great lengths to combat it, which would be odd if it was imaginary.

Oh ok 🙂 It was Seafarer: The Ship Sim. A day after they launched they got a load of negative reviews that took them down to a “Mostly Negative” rating. That’s improved since then, presumably once more genuine reviews came in.

Really well explained thanks! 🙂

That’s good to know.