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Race The Sun, Hyper Light Drifter, 30 More Greenlit

Eldritch too!

This week, on a very special episode of As The Greenlight Turns, social intrigue rules the spotlight. Remember Race The Sun? It's an excellent blink-and-you're-wall-pizza racer in its own right, but it also recently catapulted its way into prominence due to its trouble getting on Steam, abysmal initial sales, and a subsequent, er, sale its developers organized for others suffering from their same plight. Well, all that stuff worked! Kind of hilariously quickly, given that the sale only started yesterday. Race The Sun has been greenlit. Other standouts this time around include Thief/Dishonored-inspired roguelike wonder Eldritch, Kickstarter darling Hyper Light Drifter, and PULSAR: Lost Colony.

The full list is a biggie at 32-strong. Remember, no sudden movements or loud noises. Otherwise... oh no. GAAAAME AVALAAAAANCHE.

Phew. Is everyone OK? Look, if you lost an arm or a leg, you should be fine. Just put it in milk and have a dentist reattach it within a few hours or a couple days or a month or four. That's how people work, right?

Anyway, this is quite a list, and a decent many of the games on it show great promise. I'm especially enamored with Death Road to Canada, Eldritch, Hyper Light Drifter, PULSAR, Claire, Dysis, and Race The Sun, myself. A few others, however, do seem fairly early and a bit worrisomely janky. Hmmmm. Is this the price of greenlighting games like a Papers, Please player whose family is cold and sick and hungry and haunting dreams with their disappointment? Hopefully not, but I suppose we'll find out in time.

As for Race The Sun, it seems to be the latest beneficiary of a rather bizarre recurring theme. Not on Greenlight? Far off from making the top-30-or-so and in desperate need of sales? Then talk about it. Loudly. Don't get me wrong: your game still needs to be good, but yeah. Incredipede also rocketed upward due to a similar situation, as did a smattering of others. It's tough to say how exactly Valve should fix Greenlight, but you know your system has a problem when one of the most effective methods of cutting its line is lamenting its flaws.

For now, though, Valve finds itself at a weird impasse. Greenlight more games and maybe end up with lower quality on the whole, greenlight less and drown in dissatisfied grumbles. Many like claim that Greenlight's bulb was burnt-out from the get-go, that the idea was noble but fatally flawed. In light of the fact that Valve has substantially increased Greenlight's output in recent months, how are you feeling about the system these days? Should it stay or should it go?

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