Striatum

I've been playing Striatum since the original Sega CD 32X edition, and there's a lot of new surprises added since the demo that you should check out. You can have the authentic experience of getting almost ready and being almost late, it's up to you! With so many new items and endings in this version, you may also find yourself losing track of time, breaking the fourth wall, and being late or almost late to something in real life. On another level, Striatum will allow you time to experiment and think about what's important to have with you, and how that's also up to you. Striatum contains no jumpscares or anything like that, there are so many items and endings, secret glibbus, you can have friendly(?) interactions with in-game pets, and Striatum also runs on Linux. This is everything a game needs to be.

Striatum is the kind of game that has a time limit to control how much you can learn in one run. There's no way you'll accomplish everything on your first few attempts, but you'll discover how to make the next one faster, or find a new goal for the next run. If you've played Outer Wilds, it's that type of gameplay loop. You'll spend a lot of time figuring out where important items are, but then you'll be able to repeat that task very quickly on any future runs. Some things also unlock permanently once you do figure them out, which lets you be even more efficient on future runs. The main con is that looking up and down feels very clunky. This is not your typical first person shooter with WASD controls. Instead, the mouse is used to interact and you move with tank controls, along with a pair of keys to cycle between standing, crouching, and tilting your head down. It takes some getting used to, and it does feel like some of the challenge comes from how slow your walk and turning speeds are. It feels like an earlier 3D game from before we standardized keyboard controls, and I'd recommend giving the demo a try so you know what you're getting. Overall, though, this is a great game to explore and I look forward to coming back to it for more runs. It does a great job of feeling completely overwhelming at the start and then slowly becoming more manageable with each run. And it definitely captures the chaos of waking up and realizing that you need to run out the door in ten minutes.