Age of Umbra
1x08 The Tomb of the Heretic Saint [season finale; 1st hour]
[Watch it (again) on YouTube or Beacon.]
Tuesday, 16 September 2025
Games
Aperture Desk Job
This free game is basically a half-hour "how to use your Steam Deck" demo. I'm sure it'll run just fine on other systems and work with other controllers, but it's literally laid out to teach you about the functionality of your Deck. It's almost crazy that it's not preinstalled and/or promoted at you when you get one, to be honest.
Anyway, because of its positioning as a "how to" guide, I was certain it was going to be the first thing I played on my Deck. Well, it was the first thing I played intentionally... if we just ignore all those various other games I played bits of to test if they worked. And all that time I spent fiddling and installing other stuff. And that "what I'll do Day One" ended up being "what I did Day 17". And that "Day 17" is actually "Day 21" because that "Day One" came almost a week after it arrived (as noted in the footnote at the time).
All of which said... for me, this still marks the end of "setting up my Steam Deck" and the beginning of "playing stuff on my Steam Deck", so it's The Start in that sense.
Samorost 1
Talking of short games... Longer is better in most gamers’ eyes, it seems. In fairness, when you’ve paid £50–£100 for a AAA title, of course you want your money’s worth. This partly depends on genre, but I’ve seen people complain about a game being short when it takes at least 8 hours to complete. Imagine complaining a movie was only 8 hours long…
Those people might have some kind of fit if they ever encountered Samorost, which has a HowLongToBeat time of 15 minutes. Yes, minutes. It is free, though (whether you get it on Steam, GOG, Epic, or the publisher's website), so how can you complain? I guess nowadays it serves as a kind of demo for the hour-long Samorost 2 (which is free on the Epic Games Store from Thursday, hence how I discovered this) and five-hour Samorost 3 (maybe that'll be free the week after?) It's a quirky little point-and-click puzzler, with no proper dialogue and none of the modern helpers like highlighting clickable items. Indeed, working out what's clickable, and when it needs to be clicked (and, in some cases, how many times), is the whole challenge. I enjoyed it, and am quite looking forward to picking up at least the next one.
This free game is basically a half-hour "how to use your Steam Deck" demo. I'm sure it'll run just fine on other systems and work with other controllers, but it's literally laid out to teach you about the functionality of your Deck. It's almost crazy that it's not preinstalled and/or promoted at you when you get one, to be honest.
Anyway, because of its positioning as a "how to" guide, I was certain it was going to be the first thing I played on my Deck. Well, it was the first thing I played intentionally... if we just ignore all those various other games I played bits of to test if they worked. And all that time I spent fiddling and installing other stuff. And that "what I'll do Day One" ended up being "what I did Day 17". And that "Day 17" is actually "Day 21" because that "Day One" came almost a week after it arrived (as noted in the footnote at the time).
All of which said... for me, this still marks the end of "setting up my Steam Deck" and the beginning of "playing stuff on my Steam Deck", so it's The Start in that sense.
Samorost 1
Talking of short games... Longer is better in most gamers’ eyes, it seems. In fairness, when you’ve paid £50–£100 for a AAA title, of course you want your money’s worth. This partly depends on genre, but I’ve seen people complain about a game being short when it takes at least 8 hours to complete. Imagine complaining a movie was only 8 hours long…
Those people might have some kind of fit if they ever encountered Samorost, which has a HowLongToBeat time of 15 minutes. Yes, minutes. It is free, though (whether you get it on Steam, GOG, Epic, or the publisher's website), so how can you complain? I guess nowadays it serves as a kind of demo for the hour-long Samorost 2 (which is free on the Epic Games Store from Thursday, hence how I discovered this) and five-hour Samorost 3 (maybe that'll be free the week after?) It's a quirky little point-and-click puzzler, with no proper dialogue and none of the modern helpers like highlighting clickable items. Indeed, working out what's clickable, and when it needs to be clicked (and, in some cases, how many times), is the whole challenge. I enjoyed it, and am quite looking forward to picking up at least the next one.
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