everyone online hates me when I write about stuff, so you’re leagues ahead of me!
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A Bird’s Tale
Well the rando gave me another ten minute game, this one a brief platformer about a momma bird who has to find food to feed her babies.
…Okay, gotta string that out a bit longer. A Bird’s Tale is a platformer built around a single action button that has you flap your wings to function as a jump. What complicates it is that you only have the strength to flap your wings three times before you need to land and rest (i.e. touch the ground and you get another three flaps) with most of the obstacles built around managing this limitation. Most of them are of your standard “hey, don’t fly into spikes” variety, but there are a few moving obstacles that introduce a timing element. This initially seems balanced fairly well if a bit tightly until one realizes that holding down the action button causes the bird to glide for a bit (a screen about halfway through requires this), at which point things gets pretty easy as that gives you enough leeway to get past most everything with an extra flap to spare. Then to spoil the end of this ten minute game you bring the food back to your babies to find the tree the nest was in cut down, along with every other tree.
See this game takes place in Palestine and beyond being a fairly simple platformer it has a message behind it. Turns out Israel has a habit of cutting down the trees and other plants of Palestinian farmers, which plays hell with both their ability to make a living and feed themselves. It’s definitely something worth raising awareness about, and the game itself is unobjectionable if not the tightest mini-sized platformer I’ve come across.
9 Likes
Running Askew
So I believe I said this before but I generally write-up my thoughts on these games late in the week, sit on them for a couple days then clean them up and post them. I did not do that this week as I’ve got like a total of two thoughts about this game?
The main thought is about the aesthetics, which is basically a visual novel that has gone full ASCII art. It generally makes things much harder to make out but I find it to be rather striking to look at. I think there is a decent chance it is just run through a filter of some sort (there are video clips that are done in ASCII which seems like it’d be difficult to do otherwise) but I don’t care, even if it is just an odd trick I was enthused by it.
The other thought I had is that this is another ten minute long comedy VN built around “wow ain’t that so nutty” randomness. I’ve played a bunch of them in the past few years and while I don’t hate them on principal alone I am tired of them. At this point it’d have to be either among the better written or funnier of the bunch to catch my attention and this is neither, it is stuck right around the middle of the pack.
My overall thought is that it was neat enough to look at for ten minutes, and I was fine looking at it for those ten minutes. If it just looked like any other VN I would struggle to have written even this much and likely would have looked for another ten minute long game in hopes it was more interesting. Basically… go ASCII filter!
4 Likes
it’s ascii but … the text boxes use modern graphics. i guess that’s an effective way to split the visuals from the interface (?)
i wonder if any of those ascii filters include subliminal messages
1 Like
Welp, now I have a headache. I don’t think I could play this game for a minute, just those screenshots made my eyes feel like they were bleeding.
Now imagine full video clips rendered like that!
Butterflies Episode 2: Getting Up
The random game of the week is the second episode in a random game I mentioned during my big bundle deep dive, and it is very similar but hey that was at least a year and a half ago so I say it is still fair game. That and it was enjoyable enough and I wanted to play it, that’s a bit more important than how fresh it is for all of you…
Oddly confrontational intro aside, Butterflies ep 2 much like ep 1 is a very Jet Set Radio inspired game, so much so that one could probably get away with calling it a fan game. Now I haven’t played that original game in quite a while now and it didn’t make a huge impression on me (I recall thinking it was just kinda alright if rather stylish) so I’m not really in a position to make a full comparison. I recall that game having fail states or time limits (maybe if you ran out of momentum or health?) while Butterflies is more in the open world vein, even if failing challenges and running out of health are still possible.
You start with the default “all arounder” skater plopped down in the middle of this chunk of city, a chunk that is fairly sizable without becoming unmanageably vast, where you can wander around until you come across one of the legion of graffiti spots (which is handled like a very basic rhythm game) or flashing icons that if ridden through while hitting accept will start a particular challenge. These challenges are mostly of the “pull of a combo while hitting all these marked locations”, “follow this path/other skater closely within the given time limit” or “land a combo of X number of points” in nature, I was left feeling they were a good bit easier than the ones in episode 1 but that could also be due to my increased familiarity with them.
The control are fairly simple but the physics are odd, perhaps the JSR physics are odd too but it definitely takes a bit to warm up to them. They are in a word floaty, almost absurdly so, with you staying in the air a frankly absurd amount of time if you hold down the jump button the entire time, with said floatiness dissipating once you let go of said jump button (pressing jump a second time will not reverse this). This means you can link grinds between objects a great distance apart and with commitment can basically combo grind from the top of the map all the way to the bottom. It is no where near as deep as any other noteworthy skating game, be it in the Tony Hawk or Skate style approach, but it is fun enough to mess around with and the challenges take enough advantage of the mechanics here.
There are security guards which feel less bothersome than they were in the first episode, and I believe new to this ep are security cameras which will shoot balls of electricity at you if you are spotted (you will be spotted). If you get close to said cameras, even the ones mounted on drones, you can spray them with paint to disable them but it sadly resets if you save and quit only to return later. The city design is good with a nice mix of powerlines, pipes and roof edges to grind around but it does feel a bit less… let’s say ambitious than what the first episode offered. Whether this was a time constraint or a “hey, this got to be perhaps too hard to wrangle” correction is hard to say, but it is noticeable.
Butterflies will not replace JSR, it is smaller in scope and while colorful can’t match said game’s style. That said I’ve found both episodes so far to be worth dropping a few hours into, I don’t think they’d convert anyone who dislikes skating games into a fan but as-is they are pleasant enough. Apparently a third episode is maybe in development (its kickstarter failed to raise the $1500 it was asking for) so perhaps it’ll resurface again in the future, I doubt they have a classic in them but if this is the best they can manage that is respectable enough.
5 Likes
so in the context of the game, is that line ironic? I still can’t wrap my head around what they’re doing
Oh, that was just me hand-waving aside the whole “I wanted to play the game and that’s more important than if it is interesting for you to hear about” line I ended my first paragraph with. The actual intro to the game itself is about fascists taking over Japan or Tokyo and these skaters standing up against it via graffiti I guess. I think the narrative is more just about setting the stage for the game itself (why you are tagging things, why there is so many cameras and guards around) than any actual statement.
ah, so, like, “Japan is one of only two countries never to have had a successful revolution in its history,” is in the context of an imagined future without any of Japan’s past?
If I had to guess whoever made the game heard something like that once and thought it was neat without ever having checked to see if it was in fact accurate (I believe they are French), of course I just deleted all the screenshots I didn’t use but I believe the next line was along the lines of “that’s why they were so unprepared when such-and-such came to power and declared this portion of Japan its own independent state”.
1 Like
it tracks that the French would hold a category to such arbitrary distinction as to produce a wrongfact
Building Relationships
Now I enjoyed A Short Hike a good deal, but I know it is a rather divisive game here on SB; I recall some complaints with regards to being too polished or leaning on Nintendo-esque design tropes. Building Relationships is a game very much in the same mold that no one will ever accuse of being too much of either of those things. Does this elevate the experience to something a bit more meaningful, or without those does the whole thing fall flat?
Building Relationships ultimately does not answer this question. In this game you are a living house on an island that goes on a double date, talks to other living houses, and can do a couple… well one activity. Interesting enough concept, unfortunately it is marred by some of the worst controls I’ve come across in a 3d game in quite a while. It doesn’t appear to be an intentional QWOP-esque “let’s make movement needlessly complicated for humorous reasons” approach but a simple case of things being screwed up. Eventually you upgrade your double jump to a 10k+ jump which lets you basically fly around quickly enough that the lack of any fine movement control becomes less of an issue, but before then the simple act of trying to walk up to a sign to read it becomes markedly difficult as one tries to make sure said house goes the direction one hopes and that the controls don’t bug out and send you moving in a random direction on its own unless you press a different direction to cut it off (this happened several times in the twenty or so minutes the game lasts).
Beyond talking to the few other houses in the correct order so that you can trigger the ending all you can do is find the nine somewhat hidden treasure chests and go fishing to try and catch at least one of every fish type; each fish is actually a truck. The fishing is rather boring and repetitive for an activity that takes up roughly half of the playing time if one chooses not to skip it, although to be fair it does have the single best joke/twist in the entire game (I won’t spoil but it is a legitimately rather good one). The writing is just sorta there and while the island is fairly compact its design doesn’t really lend itself to playing hide and seek with treasure chests.
The one thing I will give it is that the lofi polygonal graphics are rather nice. They are very basic and fuzzy, it doesn’t really lend itself to screenshots all that well but I found the aesthetic to feel rather warm if that makes any sense.
Again I don’t like to be too harsh towards random itch games that are basically given away for free. Someone had the idea to make a tiny A Short Hike-esque game about talking houses and did so, that’s perfectly fine! It’s just I try these games and beyond just exploring random games for the sake of it (which is the main reason I do so) I sometimes have to write about them (because the only other random game I played this week was a below average take on Super Meat Boy which I can’t think of a single thing to say about) and it basically comes down to if there is something here that despite its modest origins would be interesting to a theoretical larger audience. Sometimes the answer is “no, not really”.
4 Likes
Cleansuit
What immediately caught my attention about Cleansuit was its graphics, ironic given that it is in essence a text adventure game. I guess technically it’d be a different genre than that given that it has visuals, I was never the best at keeping all the various subgenres straight.
At the start of the game you are resting in your easy chair when you are interrupted by a pounding on your front door. Naturally it is a killer in a cleansuit here to murder the heck out of you. Your goal is obviously to avoid having that happen. There is a certain amount of time before said killer makes his way into the house (I believe it is determined by the number of actions you take as opposed to a real time countdown) which you can use to prepare yourself for his arrival. That or you can just answer the door, spoiler that ends poorly.
The upper 60% of the screen is a static visual of the room or what you are currently looking at with some text beneath it offering further details. You type text commands below this in order to move around and interact with things, fortunately there is only a handful of usable verbs you have to keep straight (move, look, use, get) so one rarely has to worry about making sure to pick the right term. Each time you look at something in the room or a given item you are given a new image on the top of the screen, while nothing ever animates this does a good job of making it feel like you are moving about and active.
The house itself is fairly small, I mean it’d be a decent sized actual house but by video game standards it is fairly constrained. You have a map of the house drawn in crayons that lets you know the rough layout and where each of the half-dozen or so rooms are, but beyond that you are basically left to your own devices to try and figure out what to use in order to survive. There is a fairly high likelihood that the killer will get you at least the first few times but each run lasts less than ten minutes.
Beyond that there is more than one way to win, based on the ending screen there are at least five different good endings (some with a variant) on top of I’d wager a good dozen or so different “you died” scenarios. Getting a good end comes down to basically finding a good set of objects around the house, figuring out how they’d work together in a rather adventure game sorta way (well more sensibly so than in many of those games) and hoping that you didn’t end up forgetting something that turns out to be the difference between life and death. I didn’t find every good end but it was definitely worth playing through a decent number of times to mess around with everything and see the various paths one could take.
I mentioned the graphics before, they are all static, fairly basic settings but there is a distortion effect put atop all of it that I found to be fairly striking. I’m sure its been done before and probably better (this is clearly a low budget game) but I found that it fit the setting rather well and helped with the mood. There is also a nice brief tutorial that shows you the basics in a few minutes that actually take place the few minutes before the game proper starts (basically has you get to the living room from the next room over and ends with you sitting in the easy chair) which is handled very well.
I’m not sure even if one went searching for every single ending it’d be possible to put more than an hour or so into Cleansuit, it is a very compact experience. I think that is to its strength though as this is a nice twist on the “killer trying to break into the house to kill you” motif that benefits from being text based as it pushes it more into the realm of figuring out what in the heck to do rather than have to worry much about actually executing it. It is short enough that failure isn’t much of a punishment and often teaches you something about how this overall puzzle fits together, and I found piecing it all together to be rather rewarding.
So as a heads up this is the last game I’m gonna write-up for this topic. For me it was an idea I had for a few years that I wanted to at least give a year to see how it’d play out and… well failure would be too harsh but it definitely was better in theory than in practice. I wanted to have at least one day set aside a week to play some small/random indie games and this did a good job of keeping me honest in that regard, although in retrospect I think taking some time off from those while really into an Elden Ring-sized experience would have been okay.
Still there was a pair of issues that was beyond my ability to fix. One is that by going truly random I often ended up with games that there either wasn’t much to really write about or worse, were rather poor. I played another game this week that shall remain nameless that even by the standards of “name your own price” itch games was poor. Awful movement glitches that got you stuck in place in a timing heavy “move at the right time to avoid projectiles” game, heck in a game with only fifteen stages it couldn’t even send me to the next stage upon completion correctly about four or so times. If I didn’t have time to get to Cleansuit I’d have to very politely trash that and… the odds of anyone here ever stumbling upon it is minimal so IMO it’d just be pointlessly mean.
The other issue I can’t get past is that I’m just not a good enough writer or “game thinker” to be able to write about a different game a week every week. I felt like I ran low on material many months back and would often look at a game and go “I have no idea what to say about you that isn’t just ‘this is fine’”. The thing is, a game shouldn’t have to worry about that, hell I shouldn’t have to worry about that. If I’m in a braindead mood and play a braindead game that’s okay and the fact that it doesn’t fit into the scope of some outside notion is the notion’s fault. Much respect to those who have to write for a living, shit’s tricky.
So yeah, I’ll still play games like this on my own time and if any of them make me feel like I want to write something about them (Infini seems likely to do so) we got that giant “game you played today topic” for it. If any of you dug this sorry it’s done, and let me finish by saying that even though I don’t think this ultimately worked I’m still glad I tried it and I did play some very neat games (ex. Pig eat Ball, Salad Fields, DEIDIA) during the course of it.
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The other issue I can’t get past is that I’m just not a good enough writer or “game thinker” to be able to write about a different game a week every week.
Just wanted to say that I’ve really enjoyed this thread and reading your experiences with all these different little games. I appreciate that someone out there is playing a bunch of games and thinkin’ about them. Trash diggin in the best way, I’d say
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