This may sound goofy, but Baldi’s Basics PLUS is on the level as pizza tower for me.
If you like real-time strategy mixed with the chaos of seed based generation along with the atmospheric art-style of 90s educatment games, then man, this is an absolute gold-mine of a game.
And when you get hang of this game’s mechanics, it becomes one of the most fun experiences you will have with strategy games as a casual player.
The items are simple and you can easily remember what they do just by how diverse they are. For example, try to compare a door lock to a banana peel... In other words, you won’t have to remember 50 variants of the same item just to have any chance of getting good. But mastering the items and the rewards of using them is the key to a great time!
And this game also has a bit of characters... But it’s the same deal like with items. Every character is so unique, that once you meet and understand they work, you will never mix up or forget what a specific character does. And the only thing that I will say about character design is that when all character are put together, they basically look like background characters in TAWOG. So the art direction is all over the place in the best meaning of that phrase.
And due to this game having a seed generation (like in Minecraft for example) it’s infinitely replayable, and in my opinion this game shines with replay value, every run takes around 10 minutes if you’re good, and even if you’re not, a single run is perfectly balanced so it won’t be too short nor too long. And it’s engaging all around.
And the best part of this game is that it’s not even done yet. And when a game is already good in early access, then that’s your sign that you probably should give it a try. Or not... but still, if you’re into strategy then this is your sign to finally try this goofy semi-horror game. (And yeah, this game is a horror game, but the whole horror for this time in the development is just a quick jumpscare when Baldi catches you and some spooky game corruption shanenigans.)
And I’m not really sure if BB’s could be considered as a hidden gem, but I feel like it tightly fits into this category. Yes, the game did explode in 2018, but afterwards this game just disapeared from public image for a bit, and now people just tend to see BB’s as that silly mascot horror game from 2018, not knowing how much that game grew since that 2018 game jam version. But it seems like people are starting to remember BB’s, mainly due to the rapid updates of PLUS. So now I can pretty much say that... It’s something in between, it’s a hidden gem, but it’s still quite popular. :P
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