What I played on my summer vacation

Careful Ars readers may have noticed that my byline was absent from the site for a large portion of July and August (if you missed me, please leave a comment so my editors will know how much. If you didn’t notice… do not leave a comment). That’s because I was using a large hunk of saved-up vacation time to tour around Europe from a “home base” in beautiful Switzerland, where I’ve been living and working for the summer.

The timing of that trip meant I didn’t have access to my usual PC gaming rig, consoles, or reliable Internet for the anticipated launch of Baldur’s Gate III, on which I’m now playing catch up. It also means I needed some more bite-sized games that could be played during stolen moments on trains and in hotels during vacation travel downtime.

Luckily, a few recent indie releases on the Steam Deck were happy to fill in those bits of time. Here are a few of the games I found most interesting on my European travels.

Viewfinder

Gamers may take it for granted, but navigating complex 3D environments through the flat, 2D “magic window” of a TV or monitor is kind of strange, if you think about it too hard. And Viewfinder, if nothing else, is a game that directly forces you to think about it too hard, messing with your sense of 2D and 3D perspective in a truly brain-warping way.

Viewfinder‘s main puzzle-platform conceit is the ability to hold a flat 2D picture in front of your avatar’s first-person perspective and then “snap” a 3D version of that picture into the world based on that perspective. So a picture of a vertical column, for example, can be rotated and “snapped” to make a 3D column that acts as a horizontal bridge over an otherwise uncrossable gap.

It’s a hard concept to explain, but the first time you experience it in the game is a lot like the first time you used a portal gun to warp from one end of a room to the other in Portal. And while the concept might seem gimmicky and simple, Viewfinder takes pains to constantly take the basic idea in interesting new directions. Polaroid cameras, photocopiers, and even selfies all factor heavily into complex puzzles that require a great deal of lateral thinking to solve. An easy-to-use rewind system encourages experimentation, and a generous hint system makes it hard to get stuck for too long.

The only real problem with Viewfinder is that there isn’t more of it. After about five hours of constantly inventive and interesting puzzle platforming gameplay, the game comes to an abrupt end with a timed skills test that integrates pretty much everything you’ve learned over the game’s short running time. The game’s brevity gives it the feeling of an extended skills tutorial that never develops into its full potential.

Viewfinder forced my brain to see things from a literal new perspective, then threw me too quickly back into a real world that is missing that perspective. Here’s hoping a sequel can expand on the game’s strong ideas with even more mind-bending puzzles.

Venba

Video game storylines have gotten a lot more diverse and complex over the years. Still, even the best modern big-budget video game narratives tend to focus on power fantasies of one type or another. That’s why it was so refreshing to play through Venba, which focuses instead on the small, everyday struggles of an immigrant Indian family living in Canada.

Venba‘s generational story is told through a series of small vignettes, each centered around a traditional Indian food recipe from a matriarchal cookbook passed down through the years. As the player, you’re tasked with putting those recipes together despite a stunning variety of important gaps in that cookbook (smudges, torn pages, language barriers, etc.). Through a mix of story-integrated hints and trial and error, even someone who has never cooked before will be putting together idlis and biryani like a pro.

Following these recipes won’t prove too taxing to anyone who’s familiar with video game puzzles and their tropes. But what makes Venba special is the way it personalizes these interactive acts of loving home cooking, integrating them into a subtle and well-written story that comes to life through colorful, lively animation. When a family member is outwardly embarrassed by the idea of taking a fragrant Indian feast with him on a road trip with native Canadians, for instance, the rude refusal hits even harder thanks to all the time you, as a player, spent putting all that food together.

Venba can be completed in just a couple of hours, making it one of those lovely ultra-short games that is perfect for a slow evening when you don’t want to dive fully into something more complex. Here’s hoping we continue to get more lovingly crafted video game “short stories” like Venba to balance out the sprawling epics and endless time sinks the medium is known for.

Brotato

After nearly 100 hours spent on Vampire Survivors across multiple different gaming devices, I feel like I’ve finally reached my saturation point on the game’s addictive loop. After picking up Brotato, though, I found that I’m still not tired of the rogue-like auto-shooter genre that Vampire Survivors has now inspired.

Just like in Vampire Survivors, a Brotato-player’s only direct control involves moving on a 2D plane, avoiding enemies while the game automatically attacks whoever is nearby. But unlike Vampire Survivors, those attacks come from a variety of guns and melee weapons rather than arcane magical spells and sword-and-sorcery pyrotechnics.

The first few rounds of a run pretty much go on autopilot, but after a few minutes you’ll find yourself desperately looking for the rare open path as dozens of enemies and their bullet-hell-style attack patterns converge on your position. The game’s unblemished, four-walled environment can seem claustrophobic in the best way here; you can’t simply dash through the map to escape enemy hordes as in some Vampire Survivor builds. Brotato‘s heavy-lined, cartoon-inspired art style also makes it relatively easy to keep track of what’s going on even as the screen fills with threats being quickly blown up by explosive weapons.

Brotato runs are divided into rounds that tend to last less than a minute, for the most part, giving plenty of between-round opportunities to purchase new handheld weapons, stat boosts, and area-of-effect assistance like turrets and explosive mines. Managing these upgrades can become a surprisingly complex game of balancing pros and cons—is it worth getting a faster attack speed if it also means having slower health regeneration? Do I want close quarters melee weapons or a keep-my-distance ranged strategy?

I’ve barely started to unlock the roughly 1 billion different characters, weapons, and ephemera that can be unlocked through repeated Brotato runs. Those should help give the game’s simple concept some much-needed longevity, which will be useful as I gleefully dodge enemies while catching up on podcasts.

Let’s! Revolution!

As the guy who literally wrote the book on Minesweeper, I’m always on the hunt for games that take the simple hidden-objects-in-a-grid format in a new direction. So when I first heard Let’s! Revolution! pitched as a mix of Minesweeper‘s logical tile-flipping puzzles with roguelite turn-based tactics, I knew I had to check it out.

Each board in Let’s! Revolution! hides a twisty road underneath its grid of tiles and a variety of threatening enemies that can reside on that road. Non-road tiles feature a Minesweeper-style number indicating how many road tiles are adjacent, which helps you figure out where those enemies may be hiding (though not all road tiles contain danger).

Simple enough so far. But Let’s! Revolution! adds a complex energy-based system of directional attacks that you must use to find and destroy those enemies before they can attack you. Doing so earns coins that can be used to buy items and offensive upgrades at the shops that dot the dead ends on each road.

Even for a Minesweeper expert, the new intricacies of this system provide plenty of new avenues for learning and experimentation. As later boards fill with enemies that can attack from afar, you’ll find yourself planning four or five moves ahead in a desperate attempt to survive, balancing your position, energy, health, and limited items to maximize your chances.

The game’s six unlockable classes are all unique enough to practically count as their own distinct games, too. I’ve had great success with the Trooper class, with a powerful Roundhouse that reveals all nearby tiles. But I’m still struggling to find winning strategies with other unlockable character types, like the stealth-focused Oracle or the loud Berserker who awakens nearby enemies with every attack.

The procedurally generated nature of each run means it’s easy to convince yourself that the next run is the one where all the items and enemy placements will come together for success. Just like Minesweeper, you’ll be captured in this grid for a long time.