These are games where the number goes up, but the mechanism by which that happens might make it a completely different kind of thing from game to game. And that's weird right? I don't have any conclusion, I just thought it's interesting that this genre now exists which doesn't act like a genre.

It's not like a platformer where you might have wildly different move sets or even 2D and 3D versions but it's essentially about navigating environments by running and jumping around.

And I can't help but think that the main thing all these examples have in common is number goes up, but that doesn't say much about what you're actually DOING in them. It's not like a FPS where the details may vary but you'll be shooting guns at things in a first person perspective.

Then you got the game that got me thinking about all this, Q-UP which also has very intricate build-crafting which is a very long way from the fairly predictable journey of Universal Paperclips, but isn't run based like Clover Pit and has multiplayer elements.

But then you've got stuff like 10,000,000 which definitely has the make number go big stuff but is also a Match 3 game. Then you have more recent examples like Clover Pit which do all the number embiggening things but there's elements of build-crafting in there, and also run-based stuff.

So you got your basic version of this, your Universal Paperclips style thing which is a clicker and I guess an idle game, the idea is that you click to make the number go up, you upgrade to make it go up better then eventually you automate to make it go up massively.

I picked this up as it seemed like a silly thing I could casually play, and it is that, but also just instantly one of my favourite things this year. Games are okay

You cannot convince me they weren't flirting in that bathroom

Ok but hear me out

Royd

Update: finished dispatch and Robert, the most bisexual man who ever lived did not in fact get to be bisexual... as suspected. It was good, otherwise, though!

I never have! Or at least I don't think so. Looks cool, though!

I think the reason other ones haven't worked for me is that they all feel like they're trying to do tetris but you end up thinking 'I wish this was just tetris'. But Lumines has enough of its own feel that I never think during it that I'd rather be playing tetris.

And that last part is a lot too. Every day I get people mailing in and saying stuff like 'hey, by the way I absolutely LOVE this game but I've got this one problem I was hoping you can help me with' and why would they write that if they wanted an automated response?

...or even in cases where the player's query got successfully answered by the bot I'd -still- be wondering if they, as a fan of the studio, would not have prefered an actual answer by someone who worked in the studio and cared enough about their problem to muster up a response.

Even if I could get a robot to answer the most mundane support queries so that I could just take the interesting stuff I would be absolutely driven to distraction wondering what I was missing, and whether I could have said it better, or if it gave good advice, or if I should have taken the ticket...

The scene where they brofist at a urinal and then the big guy demonstrates his urinal shaking off technique? That was just a normal good old straight time those two were having, are you sure??

Sorry, you're tryna tell me these two are NOT flirting in this scene?

It's early days but this cast of characters has such obvious queer potential that it frankly seems bizarre that the two potential romances it seems to be setting up with the main dude are the two most conventionally attractive women in the cast, especially when the MC has such bisexual energy