Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It was called Dyson at the Independent Games Festival, and now it’s called Eufloria. That should have been Euphloria, I reckon, but no matter: it’s a minimalistic “ambient” space strategy game, and it’s out already on Steam or, better still, from the creator’s site. I’ve been playing it for the past couple of days, and my flowery words follow beneath the click.
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It’s been an astonishingly busy few weeks and I’ve neglected to mention a few bits and pieces of work that fell outside the RPS net. One such was this mini-history of the Total War games, which ends with a little clue from developer Mike Brunton as to where the Creative Assembly team might go after Empire. Oh, and my review of Empire: Total War will be in the next PC Gamer UK. A world first, and all that.

Elsewhere, I’ve played through all the IGF Grand Prize finalist games, and written some impressions over here. Blueberry Garden is wonderful, but my favourite by far is Dyson, which we posted about last summer, but which has progressed somewhat since then and will hopefully go even further. The new v1.08 build is definitely worth a look. So, so relaxing. Mmm.

Also: I’ll have more Planetside War news tomorrow. It looks like there’s some kind of special event in the works, and a big push from this weekend. 8pm GMT Saturday Join us!

Dyson, by Alex May, Rudolf Kremers, and Brian Grainger, seems to have rounded off an oddly vacuum-cleaner themed evening that I’ve had, here at RPS Country Retreat (as my new abode will henceforth be known). It’s nothing to do with vacuum cleaners, of course, it just happens to share its name with a popular brand of sucking appliance.

In fact Dyson is a wonderful ambient strategy in which you conquer an abstract asteroid belt with the seed-ships which emerge from the trees that you grow on the surface of the asteroids you conquer… still with me? Okay then. It’s beautiful: soft yet strategic, fierce yet calm. Sending out swarms of seeds to battle with AI-controlled asteroid populations is weird enough to stimulate the tired old skull-glands, and simplistic enough be completely engrossing. It seems like a bit of a work in progress, but if you don’t play anything else in the next week, you should probably play this.

I found Dyson, of course, via the incomparably excellent Indiegames.com.