Eventide Matter
I finished Eventide Matter to 100% in about 4 hours, and it was a great experience. It's a really tight, polished indie space shooter where you collect materials, upgrade a central hub, then defend it while it packs up to move off to the next area. In between each area you can buy upgrades, and your ship appearance changes with each upgrade. It can be played in small bursts as each map is a maximum of 5 minutes. Really enjoyed my time with it and would love to see more. Perfect Steam Deck game.
Pros
- I love the atmosphere. The music and the graphics work really well together
- Tight gameplay loop
- The upgrade tree is nice. Some of them are just incremental more materials or bigger inventory, but the ship upgrades to weapons and speed are nice
- Good length. By the time I'd worked everything out and gone through the tech tree, it was time to finish the game. I'd love to see similar gameplay and combat in another bigger game though.
- Each material tier unlocks a new tool, and a new method of acquiring the next material
Cons
As there are no explanations of your tools and the graphics are pixelated, it can be a little difficult to tell what the newly unlocked tools actually do. For example, when I unlocked the beam weapon you use to get bio controllers, it took me many attempts to work out what was actually going on. Why did I need to mine them? Did I need to fly in circles around the turret because the achievement mentioned tin openers? Did I need to fire plasma weapons at it? Turns out it just takes a really long time for it to open, and you don't have to do anything other than wait, but it took a while to realise that.