I suppose it’s the game design pattern of “Impose arbitrary restrictions, then grant the player special powers to overcome them”, but it’s a well-done example of it. This lets you leapfrog past creeper-infested areas and build in areas disconnected from your base, enabling tactics otherwise impossible. I particularly like the “guppy”, a flying non-combat unit that carries a cargo of packets to a designated landing spot.
There’s a “forge” that lets you mine “aether” to research upgrades, terraforming machines that slowly reshape the land per your instructions, and so forth. It then adds some new mechanisms of its own, steadily increasing the complexity by introducing new things you can build and the conditions that make them necessary, as is customary in RTS campaign modes. Destroying emitters makes for a much more satisfactory and conclusive-feeling victory. The third game is back to the top-down view of the first, but brings along some of the mechanical improvements of the second game: that you can harvest ore (if it’s available) to produce your own “anti-creeper” that physically acts like creeper but is on your side, and that you can actually destroy the emitters instead of just parking cannons around them to destroy any creeper the moment it gets emitted. Creeper emerges from “emitters” and just kind of pools and spreads out until it starts damaging your structures. All three games are basically novel real-time strategy games, in which you expand a network of nodes that carries the “packets” you need to build and power weapons to fight an enemy called “creeper”, which is a fluid. I’ve posted briefly about Creeper World and its first sequel before. Probably more than it deserved, but I found it a tremendously easy pastime to default to. Instead, I have to confess that I spent an enormous amount of time on Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal. I pretty much skipped the IF Comp this year - I tried, but it was an especially big year, and I just wasn’t in the mood for it, and wound up playing less then 10 games total. Now that I’ve broken silence, I should probably say something about what I’ve been playing for the past few months.
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