Random Game of the Week

[username]

Kill the Superweapon

Kill the Superweapon is made by Renegade Sector who also made And All Would Cry Beware, one of the standout games from the initial massive charity bundle. That was a PS1 looking FPS/Metrovania with very strong layered world design that elevated the experience greatly, and their oeuvre seems to be these interesting early polygonal throwbacks. Superweapon fits in with that, although on first blush it seems to be a bit less well realized than Beware was, likely due to being one of their earlier games.

The game has a pretty tremendous concept. You break into various labs or hideouts to destroy the superweapon that is contained within, but at some point a minute or two in said weapon awakens and starts to track you down within the facility. You have a special weapon that can damage it but must find batteries in the facility to charge it up before you can use it, with your regular weapon only capable of eventually stunning it for a bit if you can hit it enough. Beyond the initial tutorial-esque location the rest appear to be a bit open, in the one I explored there was an entire set of keycard locked color doors I never managed to open before managing to drop the stalking beast.

It has fairly standard dual stick controls with jump being mapped to one of the shoulder buttons. The shooting works well enough for the most part but the jumping… is rough in a very early 3d kind of way. Movement itself in general is a hair rougher than one would hope, I started to get used to it after a bit but several rooms I came across were very platformer-esque in having to make several jumps to get to a door while having to deal with enemy gunfire/superweapons and in these moments you can feel the ambition start to outstrip their ability.

Still while this weakness is a shame there is definitely something to the concept they came up with. When you are searching around for the next battery or keycard and the superweapon randomly bursts through the door you just walked up to and you have to scramble both to deal with it and figure out how to change your route through a still mostly unknown place the concept sings. The game seems like it’d take 2-3 hours to clear which feels like a fair ask for a good idea with some rough edges, and it makes me want to see what else Renegade sector has come up with as they are 2 for 2 at showing me things that at the very least ain’t boring.

[username]

Hypnagogia 無限の夢 Boundless Dreams

When I looked at the page for this game I saw several people compare it to LSD (the PS1 game, not the drug) and while that initially caught my interest it seems rather unfair. Yes this is a game that deals with dreams, and yes it has a PS1 aesthetic, but this is much more of a 3d platformer with perhaps some walking sim inspirations sprinkled in than the sheer shortform undirected randomness of that particular game. Once one gets past that though, what it is is pretty alright.

People love describing things as being a “love letter” to something in particular… but it is very hard to not describe this as a love letter to early PS1 worlds. The game launches with an era appropriate faux Playstation logo, I can’t tell if it is just a filter but it fits in what feels very much like early polygonal FMV cutscenes, there is a different between someone referencing something and someone who understands and is committed to the bit, and this definitely feels much like that latter.

The framing story is that a dream crystal of some sort has been shattered and you have to go to various different dream locations to find the remnant that landed there. This allows for what appears to be a different variety of settings and even goals, although they mostly early on seem to be along the lines of basic 3d platforming challenges (fortunately the jumping is handled fairly well). There is also talking to various creatures that seems vaguely philosophical along with the notion that there is more going on under the surface than first seems.

This is apparently true both in terms of narrative and the game itself as I’ve already stumbled upon one fairly sizable hidden area with the game giving the distinct impression that there are numerous areas like these hidden all over the place. The one I found maintains the PS1 aesthetic but is much darker in terms of atmosphere and theme, perhaps the nightmare equivalent to the dreams.

I walked away from the first couple areas impressed with what I saw. There are a lot of random games that ape this era, yet many of them are only a step beyond asset flips in terms of the thought and effort put into them. Hypnagogia is different, there is clearly a ton of attention and care put into this, mechanically I think it intentionally is only ever so complicated but in terms of the world design, whatever various secrets are in play and the overall feel of the era it is in tribute to a lot is going on. I’m definitely going to be revisiting this game in full down the road and would not be surprised to see that it is in fact a very SB kinda game.

[username]

Lucifer Within Us

This is a pretty neat investigation game with only a couple flaws of various significance. You play as an exorcist who has to investigate murders at a futuristic abbey in order the figure out who is responsible for them, and then perform an exorcism to get rid of the daemon possessing and tempting them into these misdeeds.

The mechanical set-up is actually very well done. Each case is confined to a single fairly small area with only the few suspects still there to talk to. When you talk to them they give you a timeline of what they were doing at the time, and you get a literal timeline at the bottom broken down into activities that you can either play through or skip around to see their actual supposed actions during the murders.

In addition to walking around the crime scenes looking for evidence you can press people on contradictions between what they and others have said, which will often cause them to adjust their timelines into something more specific (i.e. breaking down a big non-specific section into 3 smaller more detailed ones). Catching them in lies also breaks down their psyche a bit and allows you to better grasp some aspect of their being as future exorcists can do that.

Eventually you get enough info to credibly accuse someone of the crime, which requires showing where on the timeline they would have the opportunity, with what bit of evidence would prove the means, and whatever psyche info you gathered to provide a motive. There is no penalty for guessing wrong so it is rather forgiving, and this is probably one of the better investigative systems in video games that I’ve come across.

…Which is what makes the flaws it does have more unfortunate. In the second case when someone changes their timeline the game accidentally gives you a peak at someone else’s actions that pretty much gives away who the murderer is. There’s only 3 cases total with the first being a tutorial, which puts the game at about 2 hours long. I am a big proponent of short games but this is a case where it feels more like a teaser than a full experience. I am only guessing this though (several complaints on the store page back this feeling up) as one transition in the final case crashes my video driver making it impossible to complete on my ancient graphics card.

Still, the good outweighs the bad. What’s actually there has generally been good, and if one likes games where you have to solve a crime or mystery then I think this is well worth giving a shot.

[username]

Upsquid

Okay time for honesty: I screwed up my schedule a good bit today so I only had a few minutes free to try a game, because of that I tried the first decent looking pick up and play game I saw.

Upsquid is basically an endless “how far can you get” game where you only have two buttons to control you: left or right arrow to move a bit in that direction or both at the same time to boost at a high speed if you have the necessary energy. Along the way there are lil’ squid things to pick up to keep your energy high (let’s you see more of the screen and boost) and you basically just try to keep from having the game scroll you off the bottom of the screen. The game tracks both your furthest distance and your top combo (from picking those things up without something breaking it up). The oddest bit about the game is that while it seems perfectly designed for randomization it doesn’t have it, which means you have the exact same layout to navigate each time. With it I’d say it’d be a decent little high score chaser, without it I’m not sure how long one would bother with it without some sort of external competition, so…

Here’s my top score, feel free to take a run at it! Anyways I only put several minutes into it so I can’t judge how long the appeal would last, but mechanically it is solid if simple and the basic “keep climbing (swimming?) as high as you can” goal works for this type of game.

[username]

Antecrypt

Still short on time but I did get to give Antecrypt a decent bit of time and it is a pretty good single stick twin stick shooter.

It is a single stick shooter as you use the one stick (or the keyboard) to move your character around, but you don’t actually have the ability to aim your shot. If you look at the screenshot that smaller white circle surrounded by the larger dashed line circle is where you are aiming and it slowly bounces around the screen, I saw someone compare its movement to that ancient “ball bouncing around the computer screen” screensaver and that is very apt.

This change while odd adds a lot to the experience and works surprisingly well. It shifts most of the focus to your own movement, having to keep track of both the enemies and the current location of the bouncing reticle. At least through the first ten or so stages it only gets so hectic (albeit far from calm at times) which is good as I found myself mentally ignoring the approaching bullets (most enemies so far don’t fire and only charge BTW) for a moment while trying to figure out how to best line up the next shots. I don’t consider this a flaw but more my brain having to adjust to this slightly different set of circumstances and requirements.

Oh yeah, you only have so much energy for firing your laser (indicated by the batteries at the bottom of the screen) and the only way to recharge it is to get close enough to the bouncing ball (within the dashed line around it) at which point electricity will fly towards you and fairly quickly fill it back up. You also get a bomb you can use once each stage that basically hits everything within said dashed line. Passing stages gets you some power-ups which you sometimes get to choose between (an extra bomb or battery or stronger laser) during a not-randomized 40 stage campaign.

Antecrypt based on my time with it seems legit good, I think one could probably burn through the campaign in an hour or so depending on how hard the later stages get but it’d be a good hour and I have no idea how the unlockable difficulty levels would affect things. It has some screen shaking that I think some could find bothersome but I am pretty sure it can be disabled in the options. This was one of the games that leapt out at me when I first looked through the included games and it appears it was with good reason, this is a keeper.

[username]

Spookware

Spookware initially seems like something potentially neat: a weird slightly macabre Wario Ware for PC.

You legit have 3 lives (represented by three skeleton kids sitting on a couch), the last third of the randomly ordered stages are sped up, it even has the traditional boss stage which for whatever reason is basically solitaire by Wario Ware. I like Wario Ware and am perfectly happy with something like this existing. The thing is this section ends and it gets… odd.

After this opening prologue the game starts chapter one and it is a skeleton themed adventure game with microgame digressions. You start by deciding to go to school for the first time this senior year and whenever you have to do something a microgame comes up where either passing or failing isn’t meaningful (or you have to repeat it if it is until you pass). That is a wonderfully bizarre concept for a game that my early impression is that they are struggling to pull off.

Since you are tasked with forming a band in this chapter you will have to play this particular rhythm microgame several times, pretty much each time you find someone you want to recruit to it. It is a bit too thin to lean on repeatedly, all of the microgames are but that’s fine when they are all short and getting by on novelty.

The larger problem is that there is a good amount of textual talking trying to be funny and it mostly isn’t hitting for me. I think this was developed and released episodically initially so it is possible this is just some first chapter roughness that gets sorted out as they get more experience under them, but it is a bit worrying.

I think I have to go against type and suggest maybe not rushing to try this one. Conceptually I respect what they are going for and will keep it in my random “try this sometime” list to see if it better delivers on it the deeper in it gets, but for now I’d say there are probably other better bundle games to get to first. Still though, glad to have the notion of an adventure game Wario Ware introduced to my brain.

[username]

Inmost

Last day the bundle is on sale and I had to get to Inmost in for a simple reason… well two reasons actually. One is that the game looked neat, the other is that while the two person team behind it is current based in Lithuania they started working together remotely when one was living in Ukraine and the other in Russia. Needless to say the war over there likely means much more to them, as does their decision to include the game in this bundle.

After that setting of the stage it’d be a shame if the game was awful but fortunately it seems pretty alright! I’ve seen the game described as both a cinematic platformer and a narrative puzzle platformer (genres are silly) so basically it is a platformer with more deliberate paced movement and a focus on atmosphere.

The atmosphere part is a definite strength, existing mostly in grayscale with some bits of light color shading popping up from time to time. While the character sprites can feel bit bit more… pixely the environments have a good amount of effort put into them and successfully conjures a more somber mood. There are some quick shifts that at least for me work less as jump scares but more to keep the player on their toes.

This is further reinforced by the game having multiple playable characters who you switch between with little to no warning. Already in this first hour I’ve played as four different individuals with fairly distinct movements and abilities who relationship to each other is still a mystery. The character who gets the majority of screen time mostly deals with puzzling out how to advance in an area while avoiding enemies or manipulating their behavior for his own gain, another has a giant sword to slash them with and basically a hookshot to quickly change levels, while one doesn’t seem capable of much at all but has to deal with the more clearly emotional story beats.

On their own none of the three stick out as all that remarkable but the combination of the three does give Inmost its own distinct flavor and pacing. Add in some pretty great pixelwork environments and backgrounds while trying to figure out how all these various bits will eventually fit together and I am definitely intrigued both for the rest of the journey and to see where it all goes.

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Anyways that’s for for bundle week-ish. I’d say the standouts were Pig Eat Ball, Antecrypt, Hypnagogia and Inmost although all of them at least offered something interesting.

[username]

As a bit of bookkeeping I finished Inmost, dug and recommend it but the story ends up being dark enough that it might be worthy of a trigger warning or two.

Robot Wants It All

Robot Wants It All is basically a collection of flash games put together to avoid the death of the format that decided to mess it all up by putting much too much effort into the package.

The Robot Wants games are all small scale metrovanias that take less than an hour to complete, there are the five original flash games and a new one put together for this compilation. The thing is the dev decided to add an easy map and remix (i.e. hard) map for each game, so in essence you end up with eighteen different tiny games.

This is a rare case of a collection elevating its content. On their own any of these games is fine by flash metrovania standards, but also nothing I could really recommend going out of your way to check out unless you specifically were in the mood for a half hour long game of this type. The thing is that all of the games are basically 80% the same but 20% different mechanically from the others (I made those numbers up, you get the point) and seeing how those changes affect how each game unfolds is kinda interesting. Sometimes you start with being able to jump and sometimes you must find the ability. Some games have a standard double jump, some have a double jump-esque “boost” that only moves you a tad bit higher but several of them can be found each one boosting you a bit more. One game may have regular bullets while another has you toss a companion at an enemy that causes it to fly around in a panic (during which it is very lethal to you) until aid companion finally takes it out. One game is more puzzle heavy, another has respawning enemies, another breaks the map up into distinct sections arranged in a circular pattern.

I got something out of seeing how the games changed and mutated along the way, what was kept and discarded and brought back. The easy and remix maps pushed this further as you got to see what was considered least essential on one end and exactly how far the design choices made could spiral out in the other. I am odd so I’m not sure anyone else would be into these games on this level, but it was what made the experience for me.

There are also a dozen differ characters/variables you can purchase to change how the games play further, numerous hidden achievements to try and obtain (what I saw was basically clear the map quickly, be very accurate with your shots, find or kill everything, etc.) and even a few different minigames built around the included mechanics. A lot of effort was put into this and I think it paid off for me personally, but while I found it “alright but interesting” it may very well be just alright for most others.

[username]

Good Morning Drifter

Good Morning Drifter answers the question of what would a racing game be if your car was in the shop and you just had to watch everyone else race.

This is a twenty minute long slice of life experience where you go to a local parking lot to watch as your friends in a local racing club race their cars around said parking lot. You basically can talk to people before, after and during the races (well not the actual drivers during) to learn more about each person, eat some pears or just watch the cars go around.

How things unfold seems a bit dynamic in a small scale as the race results aren’t fixed (it is basically a four person tournament) as the races seem to be determined by an algorithm that often has the cars smashing into light poles at a rate that I fear would become rather expensive quickly in real life. You are also free to wander onto the race course and walk in front of cars in order to try and fix the results (cars will always stop and honk at you), although everyone there will criticize your lack of safety and perhaps attempts to cheat. Due to this the conversations and progression can change. I don’t think there is enough to it to be worth playing through multiple times, but it is a nice touch.

Everything has a flat shaded polygonal look which is rather basic but very clean looking. The mostly cool colors work to reinforce the chilly morning it is and for a work that is mainly built on vibes said vibes are pretty chill. There’s no great character tales or dialogue but everyone seems very nice and supportive of each other and racing, they seem like a crew one would like to hang out with for a bit.

That’s pretty much it, there’s not a lot to it but it seems to be what it wants to be fairly successfully. In terms of virtual places or situations to dip ones toe into for a bit of time I’ve certainly seen worse or less pleasant ones.

[username]

LiveScream

LiveScream is basically a tiny point & click adventure game made to look like a twitch stream of a streamer checking out a haunted house, which is a pretty swell concept.

(Replacing the generic gender select with “your boy!” or “your girl!” is chef’s kiss)

You enter the house and have to decide what to and what not to examine, with some offering additional options when you do so. For example in the above picture if you click on the broken staircase you are given the choice of trying to jump it or not. The clever element in this is that you have two different elements you have to keep track of: how scared you our and how many viewers you are gaining/losing.

The meter above your facecam increases whenever anything startles you, be it supernatural or otherwise. If it fills all the way up you have a full freak out and go running from the house in tears live on stream. The meter above the chat fills up whenever you do something the chat finds interesting, like examine a creepy book possibly tied to the stories about this place, or drops when you do something boring like take a nap on the couch.

These don’t end up being mutually exclusive systems but end up pushing you towards an optimal playthrough. The game is very small, 3-4 screens and maybe 15 minutes long tops with the focus being on playing through multiple times to figure out that best path/what’s going on. The game has multiple endings it basically points you towards as soon as you complete it once and allows you to fast forward all repeated dialogue so tracking these down isn’t too hard; I still looked up a walkthrough after my second attempt to figure out how to reach the hidden extra room.

LiveScream ultimately feels more like a test of concept for a more expanded version, but even though the writing isn’t much the presentation and atypical progression goals made it an enjoyable thing to mess around with for a bit. Having the fake chat react to your choices is an inspired decision and seeing how it all fit together was interesting enough. I approve of it. Anyways this is your boy username signing off 'til next random week!

[username]

Wurroom

Whenever I see a Rfdshir game (no, I never remember that name) I instantly know who made it as their aesthetic is just that distinct. When I think about it, how many game creators are out there where you can tell a game can only be theirs based on a single screenshot? It is a gift, and I finally noticed that one of their games is free to play so I decided it was time to try one out and see if there is anything to them beyond their distinct look.

The answer is it is hard to tell from a not particularly interactive 10 minute experience. Basically you click on parts of what are shown, something transforms or happens and you move on to the next scene. In motion the claymation base becomes much more evident with things transforming or pulsating, although even then it often feels like things only transform halfway in a way that feels grotesque.

That isn’t to say that it is without any game ideas. While most of what would qualify as gameplay is very basic point & click-esque puzzles, it often treats the hand icon you do the said pointing and clicking with as part of the scene itself. Watching the roles reversed and having a click transforming the pointer, or the game seizing said pointer for a bit regardless of what you try to do is something not often done and gives things here a breath of unexpectedness.

I have no idea what story it was trying to get across which may be a negative, and again as a game there really is next to nothing here, but as a 10 minute experience it lives or dies by the world and aesthetic is creates and this definitely lives for those 10 minutes. I walk away without knowing whether they can produce anything more than this, but if this is the limit of what they can produce it is still worthwhile. We can always use more distinct voices in gaming, but I’ll take some distinct eyes as well.

Moonleap

Bonus extra game this week since both are short and there wasn’t a lot of mechanics in that last one.

Moonleap is a brief 16 stage puzzle platformer where every time you jump the world shifts from day to night, which in mechanical terms means that various objects switch from safe to dangerous to touch. The time of day also affects whether certain vines are climbable and the behaviors of creatures as you get to the later set of stages.

On top of this the game has screen wrapping where if you go off any side of the screen you appear on the opposite one (walk off the left side and appear on the right, fall off the bottom and drop in from above). This works both to give you a chance at times to get around or take extra advantage of having to jump and change the world state if not break a bit outside of what would initially seem to be the borders of the puzzle.

Ultimately it feels more like a test of concept than anything else, but the combination of ideas work well together and produce something that seems worth further exploration. I’m not sure there is much here that would take anyone more than fifteen or so minutes to work their way through, but it’s a fine fresh-feeling fifteen minutes.

[username]

Walking sim battle: Old vs. New!

Dear Esther

Okay yes this does sorta defeat the purpose of the thread, but an explanation. The randomizer I use selects from every unfinished PC game I have listed so I often have to go with the second or third pick as the first is some well known or massive game that wouldn’t fit here. This week it happened with Dear Esther… but someone happened to mention the game to me and how I hadn’t played it a few days before the randomizer selected it and it felt like the universe saying to finally give it a shot. Add in that the next game selected was a recent walking sim and here we are.

Won’t go much into Dear Esther as it is rather known beyond that a decade ago it emerged as the first breakthrough modern walking sim that more or less established the genre moving forward (citation needed). Instead for the sake of this we’ll ask how well it holds up after a decade of successors and I’d say pretty okay. The island it takes place on still looks rather lovely and does a solid job establishing a sense of place. I’d say most games now would have the island be an open free-roaming location while here you are set on a rather rigid set path (with some detours or separate paths that shortly rejoin), but this seems to be a strength as it works to take you on a fairly well crafted tour around the island with a pacing of its own. It benefits from having the tower with the blinking red light often visible in the distance, a set landmark that you can measure your progress against and intuitively feels like the goal you are working your way towards.

The caves are also truly lovely.

The writing is a kind that I do not care for. I lack the proper vocabulary to describe it but it strikes me as haughty or overly striving for profundity, it is much more personal preference than a flaw but if I started reading a book written like this I’d put it down early. I had to put on subtitles as I couldn’t keep track of it otherwise. The underlying story underneath is to be pieced together and seems fine enough assuming I grasped enough of it. This sort of put a ceiling as to how much I was gonna get from the experience but I still found it to be a decent way to spend an hour and it is clear that the craft behind it is solid.

Sunlight

Sunlight is the modern walking sim representative and the true random game of the week and it is… less good than its decade’s old ancestor.

It is basically a half hour stroll through a procedurally generated expressionistic forest painting, which is at a minimum a solid aesthetic choice. As you make your way through voices pops up every so often to tell you a story seemingly on a timer so it doesn’t really matter where you wander which is good/bad as it never feels like it matters.

(I had to share that line.)

It is the rare half hour long game that is markedly too long as every bit of the forest looks so similar to the rest that it collectively becomes indistinct and sadly boring (Proteus it is not), which is a shame as it is initially lovely. Given that you basically hold up and occasionally pick up a glowing flower there’s even less to the walking than usual and the story… sadly two for two this week in terms of not being my cup of tea. It is very focused on nature which is fine but in a very new age “we are the trees and the grass and everything else all at once” to such a degree that I was close to rolling my eyes, again consider it more of a personal preference than a hard flaw.

I do have to give credit to the voice work which I felt was a strength. It is all delivered as a number of voices swirling around you (headphones are very strongly recommended) which does give it a feeling of the forest itself telling the tale which is both nice and slightly inconsistent with the details of the story. It also ends very strongly, saying how would be a spoiler but it is always good when a game ends on a peak.

I would go with Dear Esther as the clearly better put together experience and still worth a recommendation. Sunlight is trickier as even with the good things it does it is simultaneously both too much and not enough, although if reading my description you go “that sounds swell” then it may be worth risking a half hour on.

[falsedan]

@username

The writing is a kind that I do not care for. I lack the proper vocabulary to describe it but it strikes me as haughty or overly striving for profundity,

huh now that you mention it, I took the overwrought writing and symbolism to be a sign of the narrator’s failing mental health as they process their grief, but the same overwrought writing was in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. I guess that BBC radio play writing is just Dan’s personal style.

Proteus is the best modern walking simulator I’ve played. it would be Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor if there was no skull

[username]

You are better than me as I gave Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor a shot and wanted to dig it but for whatever reason just found it to be overwhelming.

[username]

Mimic

The random game that got picked for this week is seemingly several hours long, so since I got to it late I ended up going with a tiny random game I saw mentioned elsewhere. That hand me down random game is Mimic.

Mimic is a twenty-ish minute long Pico-8 puzzle game where you simply have to make your way to the yellow goal point. The issue is that there are woods, mountains, rivers or other bits of terrain which you generally cannot cross but that other on-screen animals can do with ease.

Naturally this means you must transform into said animal in order to proceed, but how you do so is in a rather original way that I’m not sure I’ve seen before. The various creatures are moving in a certain repeating pattern, and if you mimic this pattern you will then transform into them. The main limitation to this is that there are certain spots you must start or end this movement on for it to work (on regular ground at least, once you move onto another terrain you can transform from any point on them), and working around this is where the puzzling comes in.

As it is a very brief game I don’t want to go too deep into how puzzles unfold from this, I will just say that there are sometimes bits of terrain you can move around. While this can be done to free up more space for you yourself to move it can also be done to interfere with the movements the animal would like to make. Consequences spin of from this and eventually fold in upon themselves, and over the twelve puzzles you see some very clever ways this can unfold.

Ultimately any twenty minute long puzzle game can only dig so far down into a concept so it isn’t going to compare to what say a Baba Is You will eventually throw one’s way, instead it is more in line with what its first world asks you to do. There is a question if this concept could be built upon to create that bigger, deeper, more fleshed out game or if this is about as far as it could go, but it is always good to see a legitimately new idea in this space and if this isn’t the first time it’s been done it is uncommon enough that I’ve never come across something quite like it before.

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Pig Eat Ball follow-up

This was the first game I checked out from the big Ukraine charity bundle, and I stuck with and eventually finished it up this week. I am revisiting it as I ended up enjoying it a good deal and if it was in the first giant itch.io bundle I played all those games from it would have had a good shot of sneaking into my top 10 games list from it.

As noted previously it is a game where you have to try and eat all the balls in various small stages in order to complete them with most of the focus on doing so as quickly as possible, although in many cases that isn’t actually required as a time limit isn’t always present. To try and explain why I think the game sticks out as an actual hidden gem I’m gonna break down a single stage.

At the start this stage resembles a classic Pac-Man-esque set-up (fun fact: despite the obvious influence most don’t), with you having to make your way through a maze in order to eat every ball. What stands out is that the maze itself is made up of blocks that are breakable when you reach a certain size (most are breakable when you eat 5 balls, some when you eat 10), which initially appears to be a problem as none of the balls are actually initially reachable.

What you can reach are some soda cans which when sucked up make you gassy, which fortunately swells you up an additional 5 ball sized when you do so. This allows you to dash into these 5 blocks and break them one at a time but one must be quick as if unoccupied you will burp every so often which reduces your size by 1, so you must be constantly dashing and breaking to get to the balls in order to eat them quickly enough to offset this deflation.

Unfortunately there is a 60 second time limit and going about things this way will never get you even close to a gold medal time. Lucky for us this stage has a number of spikey balls which you can’t eat but can hurt you. This is counter-intuitively a blessing as if you are in a “just damaged” state while dashing into breakable blocks you will plow through them at such a markedly faster rate that it becomes difficult to control but does let you crash across this stage in a fraction of the normal time.

The issue is that if you have already eaten some balls damage causes a timer to start (represented by a green circular gauge over your head) that once emptied causes you to spit up a number of them. However that timer resets whenever you eat a ball, smash a block or take damage again. This results in a stage where you get to the soda as quickly as possible, intentionally take damage and then start a mad dash through all the 5 blocks towards the balls they were blocking access to both keep ahead of your burping/deflation and spitting up risks, intentionally damaging oneself again or even grabbing a second soda in order to more quickly be able to get at the balls behind the 10 blocks.

On top of this you have to deal with your movement likely being so fast that if you don’t hit the balls right you might accidentally send them bouncing away from you a good distance (the player character is constantly sucking thing up like an out of control kirby but their mouth closes when starting a dash), that if you aren’t careful you will end up spitting multiple balls out in randomish directions, and that if you do so said balls remain… barfy for a bit and if you re-eat them too rapidly you’ll want to upchuck again.

What Pig Eat Ball asks of you is basically imprecise precision. You often have to madly dash about and rather than asking for perfection it instead asks that you prevent things from falling into utter chaos. There are several mechanics and systems in place that are fairly unusual but work well in an arcade game setting and they play off of each other rather well. There’s a couple hundred stages in this game, most of them well under a minute in length and while the ultimate goal is fairly constant (pig eat ball) they mix it up with a large number of different twists and gimmicks to keep you on your toes, be it the aforementioned sodas that make you swell up (which can be bad in a stage full of smaller gaps), bubble gum that blocks your mouth from sucking up balls as the bubble blows but also can gum up any spikes in your way, giant straws you must suck things through, frying pans that heat up at variable rates, and heat seeking pies among other bits of madness.

It is… exuberant. I would only feel the need to play through so much at any given time but over many sessions split over 16 total hours (and one modified save game thanks to a stupid bug) I managed to make my way through its campaign and get many of its gold medals and I do not regret a single minute of it. I worry it might lose a bit of something if one wasn’t going for the gold medals and instead took it safe and slow, but said golds are relatively reasonable to get (I’d say 90% of them are less looking for mastery of a stage than a solid understanding of the right way to go about it). I’d say its my favorite game I’ve played for this topic so far and by a decent margin, very solidly recommended

[username]

Alone With You

Alone With You is a visual novel/adventure game hybrid that is apparently a love letter to the Sega CD, with which I naturally have zero personal experience. Does this prove to be a problem? Fortunately no not really.

You play as the last living inhabitant of a space colony that went very wrong some number of years back. It has become clear to yourself and the AI tasked with caring for everyone there (I know, but all those deaths were likely well beyond its control… right?) that the situation here is untenable and that you have to get the one remaining escape ship up and running, the only issue being that neither of you have the expertise necessary to do so. Since the four people who had said expertise on the colony are long dead the AI has gathered up all the data and logs available on these four in order to bring them back as holographic analogues to assist with this.

Ignoring the hard science issues with doing such a thing (the amount of data the AI would have to have access to to produce an accurate complete lifelong record of an individual would put google to shame) it ended up being a solid sci-fi set-up as the vague “rift event” that went wrong here some years back is also when the records ceased, so the digital versions of these people beyond getting used to being “alive again but not really” also have no idea what went on near the end of their lives. This means as you explore around gathering info and supplies to try and escape this doomed planet not only are you seeing the hows and whys of the colony failing you also gain insight as to how these four in particular were dealing with it; the initial signs are that they weren’t doing well. How the four of them respond to this info is a solid portion of the story.

The game itself is broken down into over a dozen days, each one spent going to a single location to achieve a specific goal. You sometimes are given a choice of where to visit but eventually you must do them all. This part is the most adventure game-esque with you wandering around these locations examining stuff, generally via holding down a button to have the AI scan things in your immediate environment. There is also some figuring out how to open doors and solving some generally basic puzzles less to stump or challenge you and more to pace the telling of the story, but it is fairly brisk (thank god for a very high walking speed) so it generally works out.

This part is also helped by the aesthetics which I assume is the part of the game most heavily leaning towards its Sega CD inspirations. Everything is sort of 16-bit-plus with a good dose of dithering (I think) but is detailed enough to get across the state of disrepair and how things were falling apart in each location, with good amounts of animated touches to bring it a bit more to life (the environments, the bodies are quite dead and decaying). The game is also crammed full of interstitial animations, micro-sized cutscenes whenever you have to open a door, drive your vehicle to a different location and the like. Rarely they are a bit much (mainly the door ones) but they are always brief and do a solid job of making everything feel a bit more fleshed out than it’d be otherwise. I wish I knew how to make a gif of the getting into the vehicle one, it’s pretty great.

The VN bits are basically you speaking with a specific hologram person at the end of the day, going over any progress made on their aspect of the escape ship design and what you may have learned about the colony or what happened to the real life thems. It seems mostly straightforward with your interactions being limited to picking one of three responses at certain points in the conversation, with those mainly being different in tone that content. The writing is alright videogame writing, I think it mainly gets by based on the strength of the concept and seeing how their eventual fates are revealed but that’s fine enough. The game is broken up into days and most days are between 20-30 minutes tops, like I said before it seems definite effort was spent on keeping the pacing quick and I appreciated it.

Worth noting is that the literal title screen references romance and I seemed to have successfully avoid any bit of it? Perhaps if my choices were different something could have popped up, and you very clearly get to pick between two endings right at the last moment, but I appreciate that the game was totally fine with me going “yeah they aren’t actually real people, I enjoy interacting with them but that’s about it”.

Game probably took me a bit over five hours to complete and I think it managed to keep up its momentum for that long. The structure is fairly repetitive and mechanically it never asks much of you but I enjoyed the narrative set-up and the visuals, and all the interstitial animated segments charmed me a good deal. It feels odd to describe a game on a doomed colony surrounded by dead bodies as pleasant but the characters generally all had a decent energy to them which combined with the snappy pacing made it a fairly easy playthrough. Maybe I would have liked the Sega CD as well if this game is an accurate tribute to it, perhaps I was too harsh in my prejudgment of that C + C Music Factory game.

[username]

Teenage Blob

One concept I’ve seen attempted a few times in the indie space is the combination game/album, with each track having its own corresponding game chapter or minigame to go along with it. None of the ones I’ve come across before were really worth noting, but Teenage Blob at the very least crosses that particular hurdle.

Teenage Blob is a split release from The Superweaks (handling music) and Team Lazerbeam (handling the game). The game takes place over a single day where you are trying to make enough money to buy a new set of boots before seeing your favorite band live in concert that evening; the band is of course the Superweaks. In order to do so you work a few odd jobs via a set of mini-games that fortunately each last the length of a single song.

I am at a bit of a disadvantage here as I don’t think I have the vocabulary or really the ability to break down a music album. The best I can say is that it is very pop punk and rather catchy. I enjoyed it musically, but I’m prone to like guitar rock that sounds like it would have fit in with what I was listening to 20 years back so big YMMV warning here. It is pretty high energy which definitely helps the game part, and the punk leanings help with the presentation/game half a great deal.

Aesthetically it is very typically punk, at times a bit sloppy or intentionally “ugly” but rather colorful and matching the energy of the music rather well. The mini-games for the most part are derivative of known games, most blatantly Paperboy and Guitar Hero. Mechanically I don’t know that any of the games are particularly worthwhile but counter-intuitively I think that is to the project’s overall benefit? Since they are sharing the stage with the music anything with too much depth, unfamiliarity, demands or stakes (you can do better or worse at these games but I don’t think you can actually fail) would possibly risk throwing off that balance, so viewed through the lens of instead just having to hold your intention and provide a mood/aesthetic they deliver fairly well.

The game and music is never directly synced a la a Rez, but you do have the games shifting into a different mode (sometimes dramatically so) when there is a musical interlude or a slow part so they do play off of each other to a degree. This probably peaks with the second to last track when you get to the actual concert, with the game basically trying to best simulate a mosh pit experience while the band turns up their intensity to its relative max.

Like I said before I’ve seen a few of these “game as an album/album as a game” projects before but this was the first one that made me go “there might be something to this” beyond just an experiment. The music being more to my tastes might account for some of that but I think it is mainly due to the big DIY/punk energy this is suffused with. If one has a low tolerance for this type of music it is likely a pass but otherwise I found it to be a very enjoyable 25 or so minutes long experience.

[Mikey]

@username

2022-05-11 20_48_06-Greenshot1600×900 144 KB

Good homage

[username]

So some weeks the random game that came up to play isn’t particularly good or interesting and from a dev whose country is currently war torn leaving one struggling with how to approach it… and then a random Steam puzzle game festival pops up and offers a way out. I played a bunch of random puzzle game demos, let’s talk about them instead! All of them, strap in or get out, we’re going long~

Putty Putter

Is it Sokoban?: Yes

Putty Putter is a golf puzzle game where you have to push one or more balls into one or more holes, but some genius made most of the balls too heavy to easily move. You have to weigh as much as the ball to move it, fortunately you can hold down a button to increase your size and hence weight by expanding in a given direction. The problem is that if you expand say three back then once up you will try to grow up from every available surface, so if you are three long horizontally expanding up or down will make you a 3x2 block unless something prevents that; that’s where the puzzling comes in. Use the environment to shape your growth, be careful as moving rather heavy balls requires transforming the player character into some massive, difficult to maneuver shapes in order to get the balls to their homes.

Did I wishlist it?: No. I had a real tricky time wrapping my head around the central mechanic. Either they put a rather tricky puzzle way too early in the game or my brain just wasn’t processing this well so I hit a bit of a wall. Clever concept but looks like it wasn’t for me.

Meet me at Noon

Is it Sokoban?: No

Meet me at Noon is a control two different characters time loop game “inspired by the movie Tenet” according to its store page; I never saw it. What that means in practice is that the “day” character goes first, and then when the “night” character goes next the day character repeats their moves from the day. The thing is the two character repeat their moves differently, the day character during the following night basically rewinds and does their moves in reverse while in the multi-day puzzles the night character just repeats their motions exactly as performed the prior night. Generally the characters have to perform some actions in concert, such as one acting as a platform for another, so that they can both be on their goal spots at the same time and advance to the next puzzle.

This isn’t an entirely new concept, but the touch that helps here is that there is a move counter at the bottom of the screen that lets you know how many button presses you get during a day/night which both lets you plan ahead much easier and makes it much more manageable to sync up both characters and make sure they are at the right place at the right time. It takes away any reaction timing-esque player responsibility and just makes it so much easier to deal with than these games often are.

Did I wishlist it? Yes! It doesn’t feel like something I’ll definitely have to play someday but the smart choices it made makes it something that I want to check back on down the road once it is finished to see how it turned out.

Jelly is Sticky

Is it Sokoban?: Yes

On one hand this is at times the most straightforward sokoban game, with you having to get certain jelly squares onto certain marked tiles in order to solve the puzzle. On the other it isn’t because not only do you often play as the jelly square itself, said square is made of jelly and can change its shape by bumping into stuff, sliding part of its mass off against a wall or bumping into other sloughed off bits to grow larger. Let me grab that gif again.

Now while some jellies act like this, others will try and hold their shape, some are very sticky and some aren’t sticky at all. Often times these different types of jellies are in the same puzzle and you have to manage their differences to get by, while sometimes you get to do stuff such as having the manipulate a giant set of jelly lock tumblers to move a single square over one row. You know, the usual.

Did I wishlist it? Yes! It is hard to convey in writing but some puzzle games have this spark in them, either being just that clever or that well crafted that they shine. I can’t say for sure this game has that as it could easily be frontloaded or run out of ideas but as a demo it definitely made my ears perk up, real strong first impression here.

Inbox Unbox

Is it Sokoban?: Yes.

Is it Patrick’s Parabox?: Well… it is complicated. On first blush it certainly looks like it is straight ripping off Patrick’s game, but it turns out that beyond both being long gestating puzzle games (this one is already 2 1/2 years into development) they actually are both inspired by the same gamejam game from 2018 named sokosoko and seemingly got said creator’s blessing to build off their idea (BTW, said person coming up with and executing this concept in about 24 hours is absurd).

I haven’t played Parabox yet but apparently both games take the same central recursive sokoban concept in distinct directions. This game doesn’t appear to have the polished presentation of the other but its puzzles are definitely sharp and impressive. How certain blocks you can enter can appear as multiples or in different places, which means you can push a different block into one of them before removing it from another, already in these early demo stages offers a ton of mind expanding possibilities.

Did I wishlist it?: Yes! I mean, I did the same for Patrick’s game, so it only seemed fair.

Sokobond Express

Is it Sokoban?: Somehow no!

This is a mash-up of two previous Draknek games, Sokobond (where you push elements together to form chemical bonds and molecules) and Cosmic Express (where you lay out train routes), where you have to craft a route that takes an element by other ones in order to form a molecule. The thing is as it forms chemical bonds with other elements it drags the whole in-progress molecule along with it which is much bulkier and can bump into other things, which means you have to keep track of the orientation of the molecule you are crafting along with everything else.

Did I wishlist it? It was already on my wishlist. Even though it is made by someone else with the blessing (and publishing) of the original dev it looks like a neat idea. I got stuck hard near the end of the demo and had to quit for now, but it still seems likely to be a keeper.

Box to the Box

Is it Sokoban?: No.

This is a time loop puzzle platformer (unsure if the dev was also inspired by Tenet) where you play through with one character before hitting a button and playing through with a second while the first goes through a recorded loop of your previous actions (30 seconds max) from the first go around. Here the goal is to have at least one character reach the path out of the room. Unlike in the conceptually similar Meet me at Noon this plays much more like a straight puzzle platformer where you aren’t tied to a grid or move limit, which allows things to grow much more complicated (and not nearly as easy to sync up) before the demo even gets around to introducing a third character to control.

Did I wishlist it? No. By the end of the demo it had already grown very complicated and the implementation is a bit too harsh for what it asks. If you want to tweak what the first character does (and you will likely have to several times) you have to erase every character routine and start over, and by stage nine (the demo has ten, the full game fifty) it had already hit a point where I felt it was just too much work.

Kine

Is it Sokoban?: No.

Kine is a navigational puzzle game where you have to maneuver one of three anthropomorphized musical instruments (on their own, although I assume in the full game they will later have to work together) to an exit point. What sets the game apart, beyond the heavier than usual emphasis on presentation, is that all three instruments have unusual shapes that you can switch between different forms of at the press of a button. This makes figuring out how to position and rearrange them in order to get through a particular gap or space much trickier as as opposed to a normal cube these shapes all “roll” rather differently over these grid-esque layouts.

Did I wishlist it? No. It feels like something I should like and it is pretty clever but it didn’t really grab me. Also the nicer 3d presentation here requires maneuvering the camera and often obscures part of the puzzle, which is a downer. Still I can see others loving what this does.

Paquerette Down the Bunburrows

Is it Sokoban?: No.

This is a game where you chase after bunnies and try to grab them, as you really love bunnies. Unfortunately the bunnies would rather not be caught so they run away from you and try to avoid any obvious dead ends. This means you need to exploit some of their behaviors (their AI ain’t bad but it has some intentionally predictable “quirks”) in order to trick them into spots where you’ll be able to grab them, and if that doesn’t work you can always lay a trap on the ground as well to help.

Did I wishlist it?: No. It’s not a bad little test of learning AI behavior and exploiting its pathfinding but by the end of the demo I felt like I had already gotten enough of what it was going for that I didn’t need to see more. As a stand alone demo it isn’t bad though.

Lab Rat

Is it Sokoban?: Yes.

Man I can sense the eye rolling coming before I even start. Okay you play as a person chosen to run through a set of block pushing puzzles by an artificial intelligence that feels like it should owe GLaDOS royalties, who chimes in between puzzles to evaluate you or offer other clever metrics-based comments. This part is well done but also very… this so I could see it being a deal breaker for some.

The block pushing is a bit different than usual as you can drag a block side to side beyond just forward and backwards and even jump atop of it to get to the other side if blocked off, which means you don’t have to worry about things like getting stuck in a corner or other common worries in games like this. There are lasers that can charge up whatever surface of the block they hit which you can then no longer grab unless you get zapped yourself (which means you then can’t grab the non-zapped surfaces) with certain puzzles requiring certain sides of the block to be charged before it hits the goal space.

Did I wishlist it? Yes. I wasn’t going to, but as a reward for completing the last set of puzzles in the demo I got rewarded with some “multiplayer” ones, which was just not-GLaDOS putting some robots in the stage that grabbed the block while saying “I’m helping”; they just made things much trickier than they’d otherwise be and had to be worked around (I think I was then called antisocial afterwards when I said I didn’t care for their help). The thing is that was a very clever variant to toss in there which resulted in what was clearly the best set of puzzles in the demo. I’m now at least interested enough to see how the full thing ends up.

Rytmos

Is it Sokoban?: No.

Rytmos is a musical puzzle game where you select a surface on a cube and solve the puzzle on it, which is done by drawing a path that touches all the instruments before returning to the start point (once you start in a direction it only stops when you hit a wall). This creates a musical loop which plays constantly before you pick another surface and do the same, ending when you complete all six sides and the full song starts playing. A later set of puzzles had parts of the ground raising and lowering to the beat, which created some extra places where the path could be stopped and hence made figuring it out more puzzling.

Did I wishlist it?: No. It started to pick up in complexity a bit near the end but it starts off so easy that it was just kinda boring to me and I’m not convinced it’d ever ramp up enough to get past that.

Alephant

Is it Sokoban?: Kinda.

This is a hebrew language-based puzzle game. You see “Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and it is generally silent”, however it can be combined with vowels to make a sound. This is why you push hebrew vowel-shaped blocks around a grid towards alephs, and also why the playable character is a silent elephant. Hebrew is underrated when it comes to puns.

The game itself doesn’t look impressive but that unique background convinced me to give it a shot, and I’m glad I did. While you do push stuff around a grid because the game is wordless you have to “Discover and understand apparently arbitrary rules” (creator’s words) in order to proceed (much like language itself?) and this proves to be an interesting enough challenge to keep pressing ahead. I got stuck near the end of the demo, and seemingly a bunch of players got stuck at a few different places, which isn’t unexpected given this approach, but I still appreciate what it is going for.

Did I wishlist it?: Yes. The demo goes from stage A to stage P (I got stuck on N) so I’m curious if they really gave away 60+% of the game in the free pre-release demo. This will remind me to check back on that. Also if the price isn’t that high I’d be interested to see what other arbitrary rules it has up its sleeve.

The Last Cube

Is it Sokoban?: Not in the demo at least.

First off, even thought it is different that’s one Gamecube ass looking logo.

This is a puzzle game where you roll a cube around, with one side generally being marked with a symbol that you must then roll said side down onto a grid square marked with the same symbol. If you get close to it the game prompts you to press a key to show what moves to take to do so, and I literally stopped for a second to ponder exactly what the point of this puzzle game is if it decides it is best to just tell you how to perform a part of the solution.

The game is out and has rather glowing reviews, yet after playing through about 2/3 of the demo I’m still not sure I have an answer to this question. You get some different marks that give you different abilities (dashing, being able to rotate your side around while staying on the same spot), and a similar mechanic has been used in games such as English Country Tune to great effect, so I can see how puzzles can be built around what is here. It also takes place in like over the top brutalist environments or mountains where solving a puzzle causes a platform to rise up and place you on an elevated one for the next one, and you can find hidden bonus stuff that gives you access to lore entries that I guess explain why you are the last cube and… it feels like such a parodic set-up yet so far it is nothing but straight faced and serious. It honestly confuses me.

Did I wishlist it? No. The regular asking price is $20 so even if it hits an eventual 75% off discount that’s still $5. I admit to curiosity, to wanting to better understand it, but not for $5+ and the 20+ hours the campaign asks for. Maybe if it pops up in a bundle someday.

Recursive Ruin

Is it Sokoban?: No.

A first person puzzle game built around a recursive world you can shift with the press of a button, it initially feels a bit more walking sim and talky but after ten or so minutes shows its real cards. You begin to play the game Recursive Ruin inside the game Recursive Ruin (yes, it has the same title screen) and end up in a kaleidoscopic world (stole that from the store page) that repeats infinitely as you try to make your way either towards the inner- or outermost sections… until you end up indoors and it is less hard to parse. Once you get past the initial trickiness of grasping the world your goal seems to be to find a block and take it to a receptacle to open the door to the next space, although this often involves having to shift the world state or leaving the block at one side of the recursion to retrieve it at the other.

Did I wishlist it?: No. Not as much a fan of first person puzzlers as I am other kinds and this feels like it has the potential to become more bothersome than intriguing. That’s how I felt about Antichamber as well FWIW.

Altered

Is it Sokoban?: Yes.

Much like Kine, here you control one of a few various characters (the demo focuses on one but gives brief tastes of two others) that can adjust their shape in various ways in order to make their way to the goal spot. This game is much more traditionally laid out with a top down view and has some block pushing elements, usually in order to lay them upon a switch that lowers a door blocking your route to the goal.

Did I wishlist it?: It was already on it. After I tried Kine it struck me that I should try the demo for this one to make sure I actually liked it. This game feels less ambitious, at least in terms of presentation, but more like a regular puzzle game and that seems to be a better fit for me personally. One of the characters had a truly “oh this could be a lot to deal with” feel to them, so that both intrigues and scares me a bit.

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That’s it! I think Jelly is Sticky and Inbox Unbox were my favorites, but there were a bunch of fun ones in there.

[username]

Meta Form

Sorry this is a day or two late, other random responsibilities tied me up. Fortunately this should be a quick one.

Meta Form describes itself as a point & click adventure, I’d lean more towards visual novel but in-between the two is probably close enough. Most of the screen shows you an image of the current location while the right side has some text describing what is going on and any details of note. This is a fairly standard set-up but it has one very clever twist up its sleeve.

Certain key words are written in blue and hence become usable to you. You combine two of these words to perform every action available to you. The common ones like “eyeball object” allow you to look at something in particular but the real game is twisting what you have available to you to perform something different. To use an early game example you can see a CLOCK that is stopped, and if you examine the open window you notice the WIND, which gives you the option of selecting WIND CLOCK in order to get it running once more.

Once you internalize this the game becomes one of trying to figure out what “other” phrases and such one can come up with in order to figure out how to advance through a few short scenes. You generally have more than a few words available to you (some general ones like “eyeball” are always available while many others are tied to specific places) so it generally isn’t blindingly obvious if also not particularly difficult. The game wraps up in maybe twenty or so minutes so it is hard to tell if this system could carry a more fleshed out experience, but for something of this scope it varied things up enough to avoid being repetitive.

While the settings are often rather surreal the narrative seems to very much be an internal battle with depression or social anxiety. It feels very honest, but also fairly trope-y. By the writing standard of random itch releases it is fine but it is worth knowing not to expect too much from it in this regard.

Personally I found it a decent experience solely because this particular spin on a text parser is one I hadn’t even considered before and seeing what the dev came up with to put it through its paces kept my attention throughout. If one removes novelty from the equation there probably isn’t enough remaining to be worth mentioning, but I am very pro-novelty and being introduced to new gaming ideas so I considered this to be a successful use of twentyish minutes.