7/14/2023 0 Comments Spellcaster university soundtrackWe need more sport games with this kind of humour and accessibility. I didn't know what would happen if I turned down the shady feller's offer to hire escorts for my team, but I suspected, and that was enough to make it an interesting decision. ![]() I was proud of my lads, whoever they were. It's a simple system that really pares everything down to the point where I punched the air with every goal, even though none of my players even have names. ![]() But most of the match is a case of playing it safe and waiting for an opportunity, or taking a risk at the cost of (temporary) exhaustion. "Keep possession" is a dull but useful one, but there are more outlandish ones like offside traps, aggressive formations, or riling up the crowd just to see what happens. Card haters need not fear - they're really just a shorthand for instructions you shout from the sidelines, hoping the team will listen. Before it starts, you pick one training option, and up to five one-off cards to play during the match. And woven into all that is a surreal, minimalist language and a mysticism that replaces the acres of boring stats you normally get with degrees of Karma and "Kaos". This odd blend detaches it from anything too real, even as it introduces wealthy Russian gangsters, shady match fixers, and the faintly menacing presence of THIEFA. It's all over the place chronologically, with a lightly jazzy, 1940s fashioned soundtrack, mega-corrupt characters in dramatic outfits encouraging players to slack it in the pub, evoking the 60s or 70s, and the big press conferences and references to social media you'd expect today. You're the new manager of an unremarkable team, Calchester, in what I took to be the 1960s but that's just its styling. It's a management game crossed with interactive fiction, with the fat of both genres ruthlessly trimmed off. This is an odd game that does very little to explain itself, and yet makes a lot of sense. Installing malware on every PC I find left on overnight this week: island escapes, imperial collapses, and forbidden studies. It is time, my friends, for Unknown Pleasures, our regular delivery of the best lesser-known games on Steam, direct to your eyeballs, or possibly your earcubes. There is only me, Candide the rainbow llama, and the endless invisible stream of code I must consume to sustain my terrible power.
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