You gotta play Death at Fleming Manor, Steam approval delays, and more (bonus newsletter)

Hey folks, happy Wednesday!

This week's bonus newsletter is a mini review of my time with Death at Fleming Manor, a detective game I've been totally enamored with over the last week. I've also got some thoughts on the latest rumblings from a number of Steam developers who are noticing the time it takes to get their builds approved is growing... wouldn't have anything to do with the influx of AI games, could it? I've also been playing Phantom Blade Zero (I'm firmly Team It Rocks), and I've been spending some time with the Xbox Nano Controller.

Thanks for supporting my work! Remember that I'm running a TANUKI: Pon's Summer giveaway, so make sure to head over to Discord to check that out. Winners will be picked on November 9.

Death at Fleming Manor thoughts

I finished up with Death at Fleming Manor on Monday night, a detective game where you play as a coroner in 150s post-war Britain, and it's your job to over grisly crime scenes with a fine-toothed comb, run tests, and fill out the paperwork. It's naturally one I graduated towards as a lover of the The Golden Idol Saga, and it had a lot of neat tweaks to the deduction formula that I greatly enjoyed experiencing over its roughly seven hour runtime.

If you've played Golden Idol, you know the drill: you're dropped into a crime scene, you click on anything that looks relevant to the case (it helps that they twinkle), and add underlined words like names and nouns to your notebook. Fill in the death certificate using these words, but make careful deductions by running tests, consulting with your fellow coroner Avery, and cross referencing your medical textbook. It's enormously interesting to match fingerprints, analyze blood samples, and carefully cross reference handwriting samples: setting the game in the late 1950s is a clever ploy from developer SUPERTHUMb because you have to analyze the results yourself, no relying on a PC to do it all for you here!