Nice. Most of these fixes seem fairly minor*, but I bet this is a pilot for Valve incorporating community fixes going forward. And even a bunch of small fixes are great! Can't wait to see where this goes. :smile:

*With 'seem' and 'fairly' doing some heavy lifting there, and not to disparage anyone's effort in making them.

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PlateUp! is fantastic and I can't recommend it highly enough. In much the same way that FTL introduced roguelike mechanics to the "being a spaceship captain" genre, PlateUp! introduces them to the restaurant management genre. I got it a few months after it released in August 2022 and have over 150 hours in it so far. It runs flawlessly in Proton (I've often wished it got a native Linux version just so I could submit an article here about it), and it controls excellently on the Deck – I've spent probably dozens of hours playing it on mine (and on my desktop, it works equally well with mouse & keyboard and a controller in my opinion, due to its simple control scheme of movement + four buttons).

Basically, you have a little restaurant where customers come in and you have to take their orders and serve them. As days pass more customers arrive, and every third day you get a choice of two possible options to take which increase the difficulty in some way, though often with a slight customer reduction (one will be a new food dish to serve, the other is usually some sort of customer behavior or modifier). If a single customer's patience bar ever fully depletes your run is over and your restaurant gets shut down, with you goal to survive 15 days (which lets you set up a "franchise," choosing some of the options you took to do a New Game Plus run. You can keep going into Overtime after day 15, however, and I've personally made it to Overtime day 22 using the game's other main feature: automation.

With the money you earn each day, you can buy a variety of appliances which allow you to automate food production. It starts simple, like a mixer which can automatically chop ingredients or a portioner which automatically takes portions from larger dishes like soups, but eventually you're designing complex systems which can handle multiple ingredients, chopping and heating and combining them into a finished product, all borne along by conveyor belts (perhaps all the way out of the kitchen to waiting customers!). I'm not 100% sure if every dish in the game can be automated, but it wouldn't surprise me and an astonishing number of them can be. Designing a Factorio-like layout to optimize production efficiency and extend your route just one more day is its own flavor of addicting. (I find games like Factorio and Satisfactory fun, but they quickly become too complicated for my brain to handle once they extend beyond what I can see all at once. In PlateUp!, there's a pretty high level of complexity that can be attained, but it all always fits on one screen, which keeps it manageable.)

And while it can be played solo, it truly shines in multiplayer, where you get to find out how good you and friends are under pressure when there are three customers waiting impatiently outside in the snow, table 4 still hasn't had their onion soup served yet, and will someone please clean up the customer's mess on the floor because it's slowing everyone doing front-of-house down, and also I said they needed a medium steak on table 2, not a well-done…! :grin:

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With what looks like unique characters this has XCOM: Chimera Squad vibes. Which I thought was an interesting take on the basic gameplay of XCOM and a fun time, even if I didn't end up playing it as much XCOM 2 overall. Could be good, we'll see! Though I'll wait for it to release before getting my hopes up.

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I was already somewhat thinking it with the insectile design but I saw the "Crawling Olives" in the trailer and my mind immediately went to "Kinda bug, and kinda snack…" :grin:

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This is supposed to be Valve's version of 'Fortnite: Battle Royale', isn't it?

Or is it completely different?

I'm unclear on what "this" refers to here – Mann vs. Machine? Team Fortress 2 as a whole? I've not played Fortnite, but it sounds like the closest thing to it in TF 2 would be Arena mode, where two 12-player teams compete to be the last man standing. But I get the feeling that's one of the less popular modes (I haven't played it in probably close to a decade), so there's not much overlap.

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As a Cinammon-on-Debian stable user, sounds like good news. :smile:

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Ok, that team multiplayer stuff might accelerate me and a friend getting it – team victory against the AI is how we tend to enjoy playing Civ.

Edit: the other improvements look good too, of course.

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I gave the demo a try, since my initial thought was similar to others expressed here and I wanted to give it a chance to change my mind. I like FTL (and Slay the Spire), and a turn-based FTL feels like it could potentially be interesting, but my conclusion is that adding deckbuilding doesn't really…improve the fun aspect. At least for me.

My main issue is that there's a sort of double-frustration, where to do anything you must have both a card that lets you do it and a crewmember in the right position, where they can only move (across ~⅓ of the ship) and do an action once per round. I had one situation where my crew couldn't fight a fire on my ship because I kept not drawing Extinguish cards (frustrating from an FTL perspective), and another time where I couldn't fight a fire despite having an Extinguish card because none of my crew members could reach it (frustrating from a StS perspective). Now in fairness the enemy is also bound by this system, but since I can't see their hand of cards it's hard to tell if they're also being forced into less-useful actions like I am, so the only frustration I can see is my own. It's clearly a passion project by a small team and I wish them all the best and hope they find their audience (I did leave some constructive feedback on their feedback form relating to a few things I noticed apart from the genre-mashup), but it just wasn't all that fun for me.

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Wait, didn't Team Fortress 2 Classic also do YLW and GRN teams? *checks link* Oh, yeah, they did. Guess it's a popular addition. :happy:

I wish I knew why Team Fortress 2 was so popular. I just don't get it.

Eh, fun is subjective; something either clicks for you or it doesn't. There are plenty of popular games out there that I just don't find interesting for whatever reason, even if I'm sure they're well-designed games. TF2 has nine pretty-well-balanced classes catering to a variety of playstyles (even more with all the weapons and sub-classes like Demoknight), with a high skill ceiling such that even after hundreds of hours of play you can still be growing and improving. There's everything from high-level competitive tournaments to mucking about on community 2Fort servers as a friendly, with a number of different gamemodes for different tastes, including PvE if you don't fancy fighting other people. And if none of that personally appeals to you, that's fine! No game attracts everyone equally. (I didn't think I'd find it interesting either, but as a college student when it went free-to-play in 2011 on the lookout for free games I fired it up expecting to play for a few hours, get wasted by a bunch of old-timers, and uninstall it. And here I am, 1,435 hours later… :grin:)

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There's a certain level of absurdism that video games can reach that makes me go, "Now that's a game." Games are arbitrary collections of rules, and while some games try for a ruleset that simulates reality to some degree of fidelity, other games are happy to leave reality behind in the dust while still maintaining internal consistency. Skin Deep is one of the latter; the premise is already ludicrous ("insurance-mandated commando sent along with cargo to foil space pirates"), and it only gets wackier. You (and the pirates) are human, but the crew of the spaceship is…sapient cats? And while humans have high-poly textures and mostly-realistic (if slightly caricatured) proportions, the cats look like they came straight out of Minecraft, made up of a series of cuboid shapes. The demo does not address this at all, and I kind of hope the full game doesn't either because playing it straight without addressing it gives the world that delightful je ne sais quoi of unfamiliarity, keeping the player on their (mental) toes. I guess what I'm saying is, playing that demo was quite the experience, and I look forward to seeing the final game.

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