I have 442 Steam games. I’ve played about 50 of them. You’re probably in a similar situation (It’s those cursed sales.)

I realized that I was never actually going to play all of these games, even a little, unless I made a concerted effort, and so I am going to do that with this blog by creating a series called “From the Steam Vault”. These won’t be full reviews, but surveys of the titles in my library, or at least the ones which I think are worthy of bringing to your attention.

There is no better place to start than at the beginning, and so because Steam organizes your library with numbered titled games first, the two games we will start with are 20 Minutes Till Dawn and 1000xResist. I’ve never played either nor do I remember buying them or why. I didn’t even look at their store page–I’m not going to have time for that. I just turned on Steam Big Screen Mode, grabbed the controller, and started playing, right from the beginning.

It turned out that these two games couldn’t be any more dissimilar, which I think worked out great actually. They complimented each other nicely.

20 Minutes Till Dawn is a retro, pixel-art style run & gun that plays like something out of an old arcade. And in this case, that’s a good thing. It’s fun.

It takes you all of about two minutes to figure out how to play, and that’s without reading the manual.

Basically, it’s an isometric viewpoint map of a big arena type thing that scrolls with you as you move around and shoot your enemies, of which there are hoards, coming at you from all directions. You collect these little orbs they drop when they die and this allows you to level up. With each level up, which requires progressively more orbs, you are allowed to chose from a menu of power ups.

These power ups can be anything from increased rate of fire, to a larger magazine for your gun, to summoning an egg that will hatch into a fire-breathing dragon after two minutes.

Oh yeah, there’s a timer in the top right of the screen that counts down from, you guessed it, twenty minutes. All you have to do is survive.

That’s it.

But it proved to be quite challenging. I didn’t make it more than five minutes the first few times I played it. There is some strategy to it and you quickly realize you have to think about which power ups you should choose and in which order. It can be frustrating but actually satisfying at the same time. It’s a quick fix.

I like the game.

1000xResist is the total opposite in every way (although I like it too). In the 38 minutes I played it (according to Steam), I literally did not do a single thing except talk to people and explore the different areas. There was nothing that I would qualify as actual gameplay: no enemies, no jumps, no puzzles, nothing. Just exploration and talking. It was almost like Myst without the puzzles.

But it was pretty fascinating nonetheless and I was actually sorry to turn it off and go make dinner.

Basically, from what I can make of it so far, and it doesn’t hold your hand with explanations, you play as sort of a clone of a woman called Iris who is the last survivor perhaps of some cataclysmic event on Earth, which is some sort of plague or some sort of alien invasion, or both. It’s deliberately mystifying.

But what you are even doing isn’t “real”, in the sense that you begin the “game” by entering in to some sort of simulation of Iris’s memories, a ceremony which they call The First Communion, which takes place somewhere, in some place and in some time, although I got the feeling it was an alternate dimension. And then the next thing you know, you’re back on earth somewhere in Iris’s highschool or elementary school where the outbreak first occurred, after it occurred, and you’re trying to piece together what happened. And everyone thinks you’re Iris. Why? The game hasn’t said, only that you need to succeed at whatever you’re doing in order to graduate somehow to fighting what are called the Occupants, and so that you can find someone called The Fixer, if I remember correctly, another clone who left the station at the beginning of the game (there’s a train in this dimension that has an infinite loop) who seemed like she was particularly close to the protagonist, maybe even romantically so, who is called The Watcher (all the clones have cool names like that, at least the ones I’ve met so far.)

It sounds weird and it is. But it’s actually done really well. I personally would have toned down some of the mystifying elements at the beginning of the story. I remember being in a writing workshop with Eric Flint about fantasy novel openings where he said be careful not to overdue the mystifying elements at first because the reader can’t get their bearings. That’s honestly kind of how I felt when I started this game. There were a lot of mental “Huh?s”. But the story was compelling enough and the settings interesting enough that I kept pushing through in spite of some of my misgivings.

It kind of feels like a horror game. Almost like Bioshock without being a first person shooter. But very good.

The voice acting is top tier. Not just for a game, but for anything.

The game itself moves great, like the physics feel right, the camera isn’t a problem, controls are responsive.

At least with a controller, which the game actually recommends at the start. I had to use a keyboard to take a screenshot and getting the character into an interesting locale was a little awkward. Although if all you have to do is figure things out, then I doubt it matters whether you use a controller or not.

It is told from a female perspective. I guess that’s only natural considering the protagonist is female. But this is deliberate. She’s not a cipher of some sort.

Anyway, because these aren’t full reviews, I’m not going to award any Pellegrinos. But I am going to recommend them. I’ve played enough video games in my life to recognize good ones, even after only having played them once.

Take care!