Was feeling pretty down today, but I had some energy after napping so I spent some time playing games in my backlog tonight. I played Space Haven, Lorn's Lure: Prologue, and Venba. I figured I should take some time to reflect on some of those games.

Space Haven is a base building colony sim that a friend had gifted to me quite a few years ago. Despite it having been a few years, the game appears to still be in early access. The game felt a bit empty to me... I skipped the tutorial and chose the basic scenario which claims to teach you the game on medium difficulty. For the better part of an hour, I simply followed the game's instructions to build different crafting benches that are needed to sustain the spaceship, before jumping to nearby systems to progress the story. In general, I found the game to be a bit boring despite liking other games in this genre like Dwarf Fortress, Banished, and RimWorld. At some point, it gave me the decision to follow the campaign or to explore on my own in a sandbox, but by that point I had lost most of my motivation to continue playing. For some reason, this game did not hook me. Maybe it was the lack of difficulty? It didn't really feel like there was a "puzzle" to solve. I liked how snappy the UI was and I enjoyed the music, but I think the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired for me. I might try this game again later, if and when it exits early access.

Lorn's Lure: Prologue is a climbing game that I've been interested in for a while, but had never gotten around to playing. I noticed that the last announcement mentioned that this version of the game would be removed from the Steam store, and it is in fact no longer available on the Steam Store. Instead, there's a new page for the full game Lorn's Lure along with a new version of the demo. However, I can still download it, so I decided to play this version anyway. At the beginning, you don't have the picks that allow you to climb up walls, so you can only jump and fall. The momentum of the movement and the solid landings on small platforms ended up feeling quite enjoyable -- which was surprising since I was initially bummed that I couldn't climb right away and thought I might be bored until I could. Another surprise was that climbing wasn't as interesting as I thought it would be. Climbing is, in general, maybe a little too straightforward. The way it works is you click on a climbable wall, and then you move around on that wall until you run out of stamina. In many ways, the climbing is just as boring as it would be in the game Peak, but without any of the variations to make climbing more interesting like pitons, helping hands, and changes to how well you can climb due to the weather. Overall, I felt a bit disappointed in this demo, but I really liked the ambience and mood.

Venba is a short casual narrative cooking game about Tamil cuisine. The story reminds me a bit of Everything Everywhere All at Once in that it feels a little bit like a millennial parental apology fantasy, but not really. This is because the story shows the stress caused by the differences in culture that arise between the child and parent, and some elements of reconciliation as they grow older. The story doesn't develop much or go as deep as I would have liked, but it is also quite a short game -- only at an hour long. The game is beautiful and I was surprisingly familiar with a few of the recipes covered in the game, though I certainly want to try making all of them now. Also, the game is $15. If they can get away with it, I guess I didn't need to stress that much over the pricing of no signal.