Two little indie games since I'm traveling.
Nantucket is a game similar to Sid Meier's Pirates! and Sunless Sea in which you play as Ishmael from Moby Dick whaling. It's a really narrow premise for a game, and that reflects in it being light on content. Whaling is portrayed like a card-and-dice game, basically you have up to three boats with up to three whalers in each boat, you roll actions for the boats and have to choose one, the whales/sharks roll actions. Strategic map of the Atlatnic and east Pacific, whole world (but there's only one port per continent, basically, you have Massachusetts, England, Hawaii, New Zealand, Japan, India, South Africa, and Brazilian ports) in an overpriced expansion. Light crew/ship management stuff, events. I walked in on two of my cabin boys buggering each other and had the option to flog them or join in. It's okay if you have a passing interest in whaling and like Pirates!, otherwise the thing doesn't have enough to recommend it really. The whaling concepts (like discovering mating grounds/migration routes that are only in use at certain times of year, and trade winds) are what drives it, but could be easily layered into a mod with a whaling minigame. It's just okay. You have sea shanties, but not as good of covers as Black Flag.
The other is Public Land Hunter, a very cheap ($4 full price) hunting game that's basically a bundle of minigames based both on real hunting sims and arcade/old garbage like Oregon Trail (its mode is even included as a computer with "Dysentery Trail") and Duck Hunt. Your choices are deer, rabbit, boar, quail, duck, fishing. Duck hunting has a rhythm game to choose how many ducks spawn (doing the duck call) then just shooting them down in 2D. Boar are like a horde mode, defend a cornfield. Quail and rabbits are the same, you are wandering a full-scale map in a competition, first to a certain number. Fishing is weird, totally different from other fishing minigames (they tend to all be the same), it involves playing Flappy Bird with your hook as your boat trawls along, then trying to reel in the fish without it getting snagged on anything or breaking the line. Lastly, deer is an enigma. The deer are extremely skittish, have routines involving migration patterns and feeding/drinking/sleeping cycles, there's wind, there's binoculars, there's blinds, the whole thing is basically a challenge of figuring out from exploring the map (without scaring the deer off) where the deer's route is and laying a successful ambush, except this shit is near impossible in a way Call of the Wild isn't.
The graphics are pixelshit, colored but pretty terrible, intentionally ugly Oregon Trail/Duck Hunt looking ass.
