Of waving away even the most absurdly overpowered attackers. Gemcraft offers a fantasy of mastery, of not having to put in the effort you once did. If I’ve found myself playing Train Valley 2 a lot lately, it’s because it offers a fantasy of control, of making plans and executing them. But it’s also part of the appeal when you’re in a certain state of mind. This is part of how the game tempts you to turn up the difficulty. They’re really meant to be played a bit at a time over a long period, but even then, you’re going to level up to the point where the challenge is gone long before you reach the end. Far longer than is comfortable for my normal binge play-style. The other chief thing of note about these games is that they’re long. It looks like it may be the setting for Chapter 3. A conspicuous gap in the overworld map made me think that I had some way to go yet, but that gap only fills in on victory. Right now, literally between starting this post and finishing it, I’ve played to the ending of Chasing Shadows. Once you’ve leveled up a little from the beginning, the only reason you ever fail is overconfidence. To recap, it’s a series of wizard-themed tower defense games based around two innovations: the ability to move your weapons around from tower to tower, and press-your-luck gameplay where you can make levels more difficult for greater reward, both before starting the level and while playing it. The fact that the fourth game is labeled “2” is a little peculiar, but not unprecedented. I’ve written a few posts before about the fourth Gemcraft game, Gemcraft Chapter 2: Chasing Shadows. This experience has played the same role in my life this year that Creeper World 3 did a couple years back. The near-simultaneous releases of a new Gemcraft sequel and a couple of standalone Flash players with bundled games in response to the long-awaited Death of Flash on the web spurred me to try to actually play every game in the series to the end for the first time. And when I say Gemcraft, I mean all of it. Besides, I called it “Gemcraft” in all my previous posts, so why stop now?. But the main thing I’ve played, the biggest constant throughout the pandemic, has been Gemcraft 1 Officially, the title is capitalized as “GemCraft”, but I find that less pleasing, ambiguous in how to pronounce it properly. And I’ve played a whole lot of Train Valley 2. So, I’ve played a bunch of hidden object games this season.
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