Random Games You Played Today (itch 1000+ game bundle thread)

[username]

Hidden Folks

Hidden Folks is basically a monochromatic Where’s Waldo, except instead of looking for one guy you are looking for a bunch of people/animals/objects in a sprawling lightly animated image. Just trying to find the right say person out of hundreds of similar looking ones is a crazy ask, but what makes it doable is that each thing you have to find is accompanied by a clue that gives an idea where exactly in the image he should be hanging out or what it is that he is doing. Most of them are visible but some require you to perform a given action in order to appear. Many environmental things react if you click on them (and most have a sound that accompanies this, I believe all of them just made by mouth by someone) and for example you may have open up a tent to find someone inside of it. Fortunately you do not have to find every single thing on a stage to move on.

I kinda respect the game as a well done “find the thing” game, and it looks pretty swell, but I really only found it interesting enough to play a stage at a time. If I was a good bit younger it’d probably hold my attention more.

Campfire Cooking

Campfire Cooking is a puzzle game that is 100% inspired by Stephen’s Sausage Roll and yet still has an identity of its own. Like in SSR your job is to cook both sides of a food product (in this game it is usually marshmallows) but this one is much more of a straight sokoban-type game. There is no changes in elevation and it regularly adds new objects and mechanics you must deal with as opposed to SSR’s “you start being able to do everything, you just have to figure it out”; basically there is a reason SSR got all the attention and praise while this is mostly unknown.

That said this is still a very solidly crafted puzzle game (with one exception I’ll get to). Probably the biggest twist in this game is that you can rotate wooden sticks/skewers 90 degrees at a time as long as it doesn’t land any food stuff off the grid and nothing is blocking you from doing so. The other big mechanical aspect is that you have to account for the sticks when moving around as those are what you actually control. In the above image you can rotate the wooden stick to the right but not to the left, as while the single marshmallow will stay in the same spot regardless if you try to rotate to the left you will bump against the metal stick which is a no go. This means many puzzles are about having to move the sticks around each other so that you an cook every bit of food (and with marshmallows you must make sure to not cook any side twice as that will burn it), such as in the above image where you will at some point need to get the metal stick to the right of the other one.

Upon this base a new mechanic is added almost every set of fifteen stages. Little pots of food must stay on a fire square at the end to remain cooking. You have squares you have to light yourself, or fires you must put out (and then likely re-light at some later point). Magnets can be attached to sticks and drag the metal pots around, at which point the sticks no longer rotate. Oh yeah, the sticks usually rotate when you move them (how else would you cook both sides of a marshmallow) which means the magnets also rotate when not dragging anything, although there is a way to push a stick with another one so that it slides over a row without rolling. This is why I feel bad describing it as a more basic take on SSR (even though it is) as it has all this stuff in play (plus more I didn’t get into), it introduces them at a steady pace that lets you learn each new bit and get used to it before adding something else before too long, the puzzles are generally rather well designed, you can skip a couple here and there so you never get truly stuck and perhaps most importantly it does have an identity all its own despite clearly being derivative. For the most part it is everything one would want out of a puzzle game…

…Except for the controls. I do not know how one screws up the controls for a game about pushing things around a grid but they somehow found a way. You move the sticks by clicking on them with the mouse and maneuvering them (I believe right click is normal movement, left click is to rotate sticks when possible) and the amount of times the sticks ended up moving too far or in other unintended ways was more than significant, it was a frequent issue. Even when it didn’t push something somewhere I didn’t intend or burn a marshmallow it was still more of a pain than I can recall any grid-based puzzler being, it may legitimately being one of the worse controlling 2d puzzles games I have ever played. Fortunately the game lets you take back an infinite number of moves so you can always undo these screw-ups (plus the ones that are actually your own fault) but it is a legitimate big mark against the game.

That said… I still found the game to be worth that headache. If I had to make a list of the best puzzlers this wouldn’t end up on it, but it is a really clever second tier puzzle game that had a ton of thought put into it with a good variety of puzzles. I’ve played a bunch of puzzles games that mostly go through the motions (just finished up Sokoban Land DX from the bundle a couple days back and it is 100% this), in this one it is clear just how much effort went into it and I appreciate it.

[username]

Today I’m gonna touch on a few games I’d categorize as “noble failures” as SB is one of the few places where people may care about those.

Don’t Wake The Night

Don’t Wake the Night is an interesting experiment. You basically play as the spirit summoned by this tribe of eight or so individuals in order to rule on an issue they’ve been having. The thing is that you have no real knowledge of why you were summoned or what has gone on with them beforehand. All you can really do (you are invisible to them and can’t directly communicate with them) is mess with the environment in ways that splits them up into different pairs and listen to the conversations they have to try and piece together not only what is going on, but who is to blame if anyone. It is an intriguing as hell set-up… but when it came time to decide on a judgement the three options available to me made it clear that I was still missing something as I barely understood said options and what they meant. Now I could see someone else having a better feel for it and the whole thing working much better, but I felt so far off that I wonder if perhaps its was just much more vague than intended.

Life in Captivity

Life in Captivity is a cross between sokoban and The Game of Life (not the board game). Rather than try to explain the latter up above is a screen cap of the game itself listing its rules.

The games mix together as such: in general you still have the basic sokoban goal of putting a certain number of blocks onto a certain set of goal squares. The problem is that you may not have enough blocks to achieve that, or they are arranged in a manner that makes it impossible to accomplish. This is where the Game of Life part kicks in as you can press the space bar at any time to cause one turn of that to go into effect. You arrange the blocks you have so that any vacant grid square that is touched by three “live” squares (yourself and the other blocks) will gain a block, but it is possible that when arranging this one of the already living blocks can die if you aren’t careful.

This all sounds very complicated and it is. Eventually you figure some of it out and can make some progress but it proceeds to a point where it became way too much for me to keep straight and the last few stages were completed via a mix of brute force and absurdly inelegant solutions. It really isn’t worth playing but I can’t help but appreciate how outside the box of an idea it is.

Conversations with Emma

Conversations with Emma is a short mostly text-game about a conversation with Emma Goldman, who according to its store page was an “international anarchist who conducted leftist activities in the United States from about 1890 to 1917”. It is a solid thought exercise to think what radicals of prior eras would think about life today… but this game sadly focuses on some of the most obviously “she’s obviously not gonna approve” subjects possible. If you are the thin audience for whom this game would appeal you already likely know that Emma would not be down with Amazon. There is a theoretical alternate version of this where it instead focuses on things one today would assume to be progressive but someone from 100+ years ago would perhaps criticize or be confused by (or be against for bad reasons), but that is not what we have here for the most part sadly.

Dee Dum

Dee Dum is a puzzle platformer where you have to get tall block and wide block to their goal locations. What makes it tricky is that both of them respond to your button presses at the same time. If you press right both try to move right, and both will jump when you press jump. What this requires is you looking at the environment and trying to figure out how to use it to separate the two blocks and restrict the movement of one for a while to get them arranged in the proper manner. It sounds both simple and tricky, and it is, but on the conceptual level and moment to moment level it kinda works.

Why I put it under “noble failure” is that there are a few bigger scale issues that hold it back. It has 75 levels but it re-uses the same stage layouts five times each (yes, there are fifteen of those) and while I generally approve of re-using space but recontextualizing it here it is a bit much and you do end up often doing the same actions in a similar spot in the same way in multiple puzzles. Basically it feels very much like padding. The other issue is that the jumping physics aren’t quite consistent, which given that you have to jump in specific ways at times (such as to get one block on top of the other) is an issue. What makes it a bigger issue is that you get between one and three stars for completing a stage based on how many jumps it takes you, and the final 40% of the game content is locked behind a frankly bit too high of a star requirement. The star system works well enough as figuring out the minimal number of jumps to complete a stage can be just tricky enough… but having to repeat a jump because it didn’t go as high as it normally does or didn’t register on the rare occasion it is timing dependent means you have to restart the stage due to no fault of your own if you are repeating a stage to get enough stars to advance, and that kinda sucks. I would love to see someone straight rip this game off as it’s close to being something pretty good, I think it just needs someone with a bit more design chops.

[BustedAstromech]

@username

I would love to see someone straight rip this game off as it’s close to being something pretty good

This is solid; has some of the same problems you mention where the star scoring system is in conflict with the platformer bits, but otherwise checks out. It’s a multi-character game but uses a flipped plane for momentum puzzles like ibb & obb.

[username]

Some more quick hits.

LaserCat

Describing LaserCat as like VVVVVV except without the gravity flipping feels like it doesn’t really say a lot yet it feels kinda accurate. They feel inspired by the same sort of Spectrum era exploration platformers. The giant building/structure you explore here is basically a series of rooms arranged in a 10 x 10 grid that contain various platforming challenges, with the biggest thing being that due to how things are arranged it often isn’t immediately obvious how to get to a certain room or even area of the map. This is due in large part due the various one way almost conveyor belts that often span several rooms across various floors which are often the only way to reach a certain area, although it often isn’t obvious at all where they lead until you decide to take the ride. Your goal is to find the 30 keys hidden… okay not really hidden but placed all around at which point you can open the final door and take on the final challenge. Of course each time you pick up a key you have to answer a trivia question to gain it or else you will be struck dead because of reasons.

I personally love me a good minimalist platformer and this is a rather solid one. It’ll probably only take an hour or so to complete and there really isn’t anything there that sticks out as exceptional but I enjoyed that entire hour.

The Hex

The Hex is basically the Pony Island folks trying to make something bigger and more ambitious as a follow up. You take turns playing as one of six characters at an out of the way hotel that will see a murder take place at some point later that evening. Each character basically represents a different video game genre and when you play as them you will end up going through flashbacks that are played like said genre, except full of Pony Island-esque little touches and the like.

By going through each of their stories you learn about each character, what brought them here and what the larger overarching narrative is about. I don’t know that any of the sections actually plays all that well, they each have something at least half-clever about them that comments on some aspect of the video game industry or fandom but I feel how much mileage one gets out of that will vary wildly. I was a bit of a low vote on Pony Island so I also didn’t feel like this necessarily worked entirely as well. That said I did generally want to see where things went next. The last bit seems to be the most well-received as it is designed to be the payoff but it feels a lot like a different game I played that handled it a ton better IMO (knowing the name would likely spoil a large portion of The Hex but if you don’t care it is The Beginner’s Guide).

I could see a random SBer love the game, hate the game or just be left indifferent by it so I wouldn’t pretend to offer any kind of recommendation, but if you liked Pony Island or the above description giving it an hour probably isn’t the worst idea.

One Night Stand

One Night Stand is basically you waking up next to a strange woman after spending the prior night drinking, realizing you have no clue who she is and having to deal with the ensuing freak out. It deals with it fairly maturely, you can be a real dick but it does seem to try and be realistic about it. It feels like it wants to be replayed several times to see the various ways it can go which is where it stumbles just a little bit. One being that what decisions lead to the better endings can be rather arbitrary feeling, the other being that even with this much of it is very linear with text skipping options that really could stand to be a good bit quicker. Still I don’t think it is possible to have a run take more than fifteen minutes and it is good to have games that focus on less explored aspects of life such as high levels of awkwardness.

[jdoe]

I didn’t love The Hex, but the Fallout Tactics section where you initially cheat your through with downloaded mods and then have to repeat challenges without the mods and negatively handicapped was really inspired. Really clever and funny idea that actually was a cool game mechanic, made the whole game worth it despite most of the other game parts being average.

Also I would be shocked if the final section wasn’t an intended parody of the spoilered game.

[username]

Stowaway

Since I just put a bunch of pics from the game in the screenshots thread I figured i should at least mention the game itself. Pictures here BTW:

Den of Screenshots (Part 1)

[image] [image] [image] [image] [image]

What I’ve learned this year is that there are a ton of “hey I stumbled upon an abandoned space ship, let me piece together what happened most often via picking up discarded pieces of paper and plentiful audio logs” games out there, and I could do with less of them. When Stowaway came up I initially groaned because of this, although to be fair it takes place on a space station that has a skeleton crew in place that then stumbles upon an abandoned space ship. Fortunately my worries were misplaced as this is not only not in that particular genre but is also fairly well put together in its own right.

What sticks out initially is the presentation, which is all gray scale through a filter except for rare environmental highlights that are colored to make them stand out, and the other crewmates who each have their own color and are also almost a bit distorted. It stands out, even more so when it becomes clear that you will spend much of the game with the light not working well and hence have to depend on your trusty flashlight, resulting in a circle of grey details surrounded by utter darkness.

The pleasant surprise is that this is not a walking around finding notes and solving simple puzzles game, this is a “oh hell, that ship was abandoned because of something hostile and alien and now it is on the station and the lights are failing” game. Now it isn’t a stealth or action game, it is basically a… well running sim as you are forced to dart around the station trying to get systems up and running or figure out where someone else is while hoping that you don’t stumble upon something truly awful, or that something awful doesn’t stumble upon you.

What helps a great deal IMO is that the game is a nice trim sub-thirty minutes long (I didn’t time, might be comfortably under). This results in the game gaining and maintaining momentum, when things start to go bad they stay bad as there isn’t stretches of things seeming well or for big plans to be hatched, things are frantic and desperate and rapidly falling apart. There is almost nothing to the game mechanically beyond “run here, now here!” and a story that in broad strokes one could probably predict within the opening minutes, so on one hand it is easy to dismiss. That said thanks to this bundle and other things I’ve played a bunch of games that do stuff like this and this one has the benefit of a presentation and pacing that many games of this ilk lack, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t appreciate it.

[username]

Dominique Pamplemousse and Dominique Pamplemousse in "Combinatorial Explosion!"

This is the direct sequel to the original Dominique Pamplemousse game, which is an issue as the original game had two different endings. Hence we are now stuck with two versions of the protagonist, one for each ending decision. Upon realizing this fact about their existence the pair decide upon the only sane course of action: determining which of the two is in fact the canon version.

So yes, this is pretty much another Dominique Pamplemousse game in terms of tone, a mix of absurdity and comedy with pretty likable if downtrodden lead… except there are two of them now. That said it plays a good bit different than the original which was very much a claymation point & click musical adventure game. This one has pretty much removed all of the adventure game bits in favor of moving very much towards being a visual novel. I think this helped the experience as the original wasn’t particularly great at being that, this basically streamlines the experience and allows you to get to the clever writing, odd encounters and bizarre character designs much quicker. The other change is that while the original game committed to being a musical with probably 90+% of the lines being sing here it is at most 20% which is a shame. I get that it is likely much harder the prior way but it sadly loses a bit of its personality due to this, although I must admit that it has a surprisingly catchy ending tune.

So you basically run through several distinct encounters trying to figure out who is canon, no one really helps you, the game makes a few observations or comments along the way and it is over in maybe an hour… but it’s a pretty good hour. It is less ambitious than the original and the ending is something I am torn on, but maybe it’s not the destination but the journey that ultimately matters. It’s not a perfected ideal thing but I think that’s half the point and I wish there were more things like it out there.

Micron

Micron is a puzzle game built around the same basic concept seen in many “reflect the light beam/laser so it hits a certain point” puzzles that manages to establish its own identity by replacing the lasers with distinct balls/bullets. They fire at a set rate from either one or more origin points and hence introduce a timing element to the proceedings which ends up making a tremendous difference that allows all sorts of different puzzles to be built around it.

You are given a certain number of mirrors to deflect the shots with that you have to place in real time, and because of this it is possible to create a path that hits a certain switch, then place an additional mirror in the path to redirect it elsewhere now that you no longer have to worry about the original switch. Once you figure this out the game will create puzzles where multiple switches have to be hit at the same time, or where hitting a switch causes one door to open and another to close and you have to time your way through said doors in time with the switch being hit. It sounds tricky in writing but in practice it becomes fairly intuitive… and yet there will still be some puzzles that will feel very “I have no idea how the heck I can not only do this but have it times correctly.” In terms of puzzle games its first chunk (51 puzzles long) is pretty breeze but it will bite you at times in its second half, a few of them are definitely above average difficulty but you can generally skip them if you want to move on.

What really makes the game sing though is that this game is legitimately musical. You start with a base beat as the shots fire from their origin point, with extra beats being added each time a shot is reflected off a mirror or hits a switch, culminating in a legit song when you have the solution laid out as you have to hit the exit point five times in order to exit giving you a quick loop to enjoy. If playing with a controller that rumbles it thumps with each of these beats and hell… if it worked with the trance vibrator it’d probably have more of a following >_>

It adds in different colored shots that can only pass through lasers of the same color and a few other twists along the way, if one doesn’t get too stuck it is probably good for a few hours of puzzling. I admit that I walked in expecting it to be a bit simpler and derivative but it surprised me by being one of the stronger puzzle games I’ve come across in the bundle so far while being much more distinctive than I thought a game of this ilk could be.

[VastleCania]

@username

Micron

this is essentially blix, a flash game on shockwave.com from like 2000 or something. i was thinking about this game the other day in fact. this looks similar down to the game being extremely rhythmic and musical. i should play this

edit: fuck it had a press release: https://www.gamezone.com/news/shockwave_debuts_addictive_game_blix/

there’s no video of this game that i can find and i’m not certain where one could even find it

[Gate88]

Ooh, there was a freeware GameMaker game similar to this that came in 2002 which took me like half an hour to track down (by trawling old freeware sites in archive.org)! Turns out there’s an entry for the game itself: https://archive.org/details/Reflexion_game

Stood out at the time because it was much more polished than most freeware/GameMaker games. I remember the puzzles getting pretty tricky, too. The main difference seems to be that there is only 1 ball, and you only rotated mirrors, not placed them.

[VastleCania]

ooh i think you only rotated the “mirrors” in blix as well, come to think of it.

[username]

The site (not sure which one) butchering my beautiful Dominique Pamplemousse screenshots makes me sad

[falsedan]

The Fall of Lazerus has surprisingly professional voice acting, pity the dialogue & plot is a mess. It’s a walking sim on a drifting spaceship where a MacGuffin causes the player characters to have psychotic episodes & flashbacks to tramatic memories while doing fetch quests. Naturally there is a sour AI constantly ordering you about and bluntly stating the facts about your fallable physical existence after each hallucination.

The puzzles are pretty terrible, a lot of network building and some challenging (I refuse to take notes in games) memorisation. There’s a bit of Tacoma when hacking objective terminals: you can access the emails of the crewmember responsible for their function & you can pry into the petty dramas of the responsible engineer berating the jock engineer for getting blasted on quality loud.

The environment design was ok, everything felt hostile and anti-human without being dangerous. e.g. to get from Level 0 to Level 2 involves taking Elevator 01 to Level 4, transferring to Elevator 02, going to Level 3, transferring to Elevator 03, then arriving. The break room is next to the mess, but access is via the service tunnels that also go to storage, rather than putting a bulkhead in the kitchen.

I found one of the psychotic episodes really effective: the player characer is on their way to a birthday party and has to navigate an infinitely looping maze of stairs, but with a booming narrator speaking sentence fragments. You solve the puzzle by navigating the stairs so the fragments are ordered into a proper sentence. This method is repeated in a war flashback (escaping through tunnels), but I never spotted the clues at the junctions and wasted the good part of an hour trying to navigate it. The episodes overall are not very good, but they’re inventive (like an interpretive student film).

The interface annoyed me a lot. I hated manipulating doors or switch covers by clicking and dragging, and shift-to-run only works if you’re already moving!

It’s about 2 hours (less if you don’t get stuck in tunnels). Here’s the part where I recommend playing a different game because this one is pretty bad, but I liked it more than Tacoma’s saccharine environments & plot?

[username]

Let’s knock a few pf these out while I try to figure out how to upload screenshots in a not-broken manner.

You Died but a Necromancer revived you

The top image is me checking if imgur uploads are working any better (imgur lets me crop) or if they are still borked. The lower is a direct upload to the site which won’t let me crop so you are stuck with full size screengrabs that show my whole screen.

…Oh yeah, the game. It is a roguelike where once you clear an area you respawn at the start of the next one the next time you die, but all the rooms get randomly regenerated after each death. The game is generally about getting from your starting point along the perimeter along a spiraling path to the exit near the center of the screen, although one area does switch up the layout a good bit. The floor starts to collapse behind you rather quickly so you generally need to be moving ahead at all times, only stopping to have to avoid obstacles in your way. It is a decent concept but unfortunately I found the movement physics to be a bit slippery and just off enough to be somewhat of a hassle. The amount of deaths because I stopped lined up incorrectly with the next corner was a bit too high. I’m also not a huge fan of randomized level design, although I do appreciate the game giving you a few different difficulty levels for those who don’t want a truly absurd challenge. It’s not an awful way to spend an hour or so to get through the ending on normal, but I don’t know that I’d recommend putting more than that into it.

ISLANDS: Non-Places

ISLANDS feels a bit like a more mature Windosill, more or less. You start with a 3d model of a normal everyday object like a bus stop or an escalator with a glowy bit on it. You click on it and the object undergoes a bit of a “magical realism” transformation, such as it being lifted up to reveal a massive underground structure or it functioning in a quite unexpected way. Each object takes several minutes to be fully revealed with the full thing wrapping up in under an hour. I dig it, it is pretty creative and I wanted to see what it’d do with each object although I must admit it has very little proper “game” in it. I don’t think there is any real message behind it or larger point to it and it can at times be a bit too slowly paced, but if someone is prone to like something like this then i think there is a good chance they will end up liking it.

Raik

Raik is a clever little text adventure that at the press of a button can be changed between two different languages, english and scots. It tells you up front that it is a translation of the same tale and that you should try to make it through the Scots one to see how much you can grasp a somewhat unfamiliar tongue… but this is somewhat of a misdirection (I included the same screen of text in each translation above). In english the tale is a standard bit of fantasy adventuring, but in scots it instead is basically the tale of someone who suffers from severe anxiety trying to make it through the day. It is a pretty solid glimpse into how it is to live with anxiety and the associated struggles. Hiding that in the markedly less common dialect is a pretty clever conceit although I must admit that I am unsure if the dual language/narrative construct really aided in making its point. At times it feels like showing off more for the sake of showing off than anything else, but that doesn’t detract from its message.

Swung

There are multiple games in this bundle that have the gimmick of “you don’t play as what is the typical main character, instead you play as a magic sword that slays everything to protect them and more or less drags them through the stage”. I’ve only played one of them so far so I can’t say which one is the best, but having played the one I feel I can say with good confidence that Swung is the worst of the bunch. The conceit of “the brave knight is actually a coward getting drug crying through dangers by a magic sword” is cute and may be the only good thing contained. The controls are rough, the knight will at times decide to walk into a pit of spikes on his own, the physics are simply a mess, the stage design can be straight up poor, combat encounters are often laid out poorly. If you have the bundle, read the first line of this paragraph and went “hey, that’s not a bad idea” then try literally any other game like that in the bundle instead of this one which I only wrote up just to yell at.

The Night Fisherman

Since I’ve abandoned being nice there is one other game I want to yell at. The Night Fisherman was always displayed prominently on the bundles front page and also on the front page of itch itself. Its heart is in the right place, taking a strong stance against the virulent anti-immigrant sentiments pervading the UK. The thing is… it is literally the opening scene from Inglourious Basterds except on a boat and referencing modern day UK. It is a short game almost entirely of dialogue and most of said dialogue is lifted straight from a well known movie. I openly question the worth of that. I’m okay with directly comparing certain folks in the UK with nazis, but this is one of the laziest things I came across in the bundle so far and sadly it was one of its most featured.

[Mikey]

ISLANDS kinda drove me nuts because it was so slowly paced. I think on itch I left a review that said it’s more like a museum installation than a game

[username]

ISLANDS is undeniably slow paced and I can see how if one wasn’t in a more laid back mood it could be more than bothersome.

Fossil Echo

I played through this over the past couple of days (and am writing about it now as it didn’t work with my screenshot program so I’ll forget about it otherwise) and I have a brief story about it. I was playing through it and even though it is generally fairly strong presentation-wise it struck me as odd how certain scene transitions were a bit odd. It felt like if the game required the player character to do some sort of atypical animation it just found a way to skip it. I didn’t pay it no mind as these games generally have weird bits like that and given the clear effort spent on the already present animations how coming up with single use ones could be a drain on time and resources. I get near the end of this tale, a tale that I got the broad strokes of but was still a bit hard to figure out, and upon reaching the final door the game basically went straight to the ending credits. It struck me as a bit funky until a moment later when a notion struck my brain.

It turns out that if you don’t have the right codecs the game will simply skip any cinematic videos that comes up. It turns out that despite being a bit over an hour long (at least that’s how long it is when you skip every cutscene) the game has a bunch of those, which I learned upon perusing a playthrough on youtube. The thing is… while it gives the game an actual ending it didn’t actually help the story all that much? Portions of the game are flashbacks experienced in a non-sequential order which does make it a bit tricky to put all the way together. Beyond that though, there are environmental bits of storytelling that pretty much let you deduce the broad strokes of a similar if vaguer story than intended. Also I am kinda certain now that they decided to go with animated cutscenes whenever confronted with something that would have been a pain to animate in-engine which… I have no clue if that is a good approach to take or not.

Oh yeah, the game itself. The game plays almost like a slightly more responsive cinematic 2d platformer, think more along the lines of Oddworld than Another World. I saw several people compare the presentation to Ico which doesn’t feel quite accurate but I get what they are going for. You spend much of the game trying to climb an absurdly tall tower, with flashbacks to moments of your journey before reaching said tower. It has a notable stealth element as while you can (literally) get a drop on enemies to KO them generally if they see you you are likely gonna die. The parts that aren’t stealth are generally platforming challenges, either in a series of upwards autoscrolling climbs or optional challenge rooms which dip a toe into precision platformer-type challenges.

The game has very mixed reviews on Steam and I honestly don’t have a good idea why, I thought it was actually a pretty good little game. I guess if one doesn’t have experience with the more cinematic style of platformer the movement can feel a bit funky and the game will kill you in a room mercilessly until you figure it out, but probably 90% of the rooms are single screen and you always respawn at the start of one. I’ve always had a soft spot for that style of platformer and one that is halfway between a cinematic one and a more conventional one is fine by me. The optional challenge rooms you come across have pretty solid design and the rest is solid if occasionally a bit on the trial and error side. The presentation itself had a lot of effort invested in it, I am for games that have you climbing ginormous towers and it clearly was made by people who played MGS3.

Anyways if you don’t have this giant bundle A) I’m sorry that you don’t think black lives matter >_> and B) it is on Steam sale for 99 cents for the next week and a half. At the price of I didn’t even realize I own it/less than a buck I think it is worth giving a shot if it sounds like the kind of game one would be into.

[Mikey]

Yeah I liked Fossil Echo. I didn’t have the cutscene problem though, and I did rather enjoy them as a breather.

[username]

I think the game is likely better with the cutscenes in place, I was just struck by how much of the narrative held up without them. That and I now feel the need to document whenever my PC gaming adventures go off track a bit.

Rex: Another Island

Rex is one of those “retro-inspired while not being all that retro” games where it has the basic look of an older game but makes design choices that weren’t quite the standard at the time (also have way more things moving at once than any old system could manage). More importantly is that I am a fan of simpler throwback platformers and this scratches that particular itch even though it has a few moments more complicated than the rest of the game would lead you to believe is possible.

Rex is a fairly open exploration-focused platformer that lacks any metrovania-esque locks and keys, although you do get alternate paths and some areas that can loop back into earlier ones. In theory you only have to reach an end point for the game to be considered beaten, but it sort of nudges you into picking up all 777 coins spread across the world to get an alternate “better” ending. Picking up coins is tied to the checkpoint system. If you see a flag in the world you can hit it and that becomes the checkpoint that you spawn from when you die, but you also bank any coins you have picked up when you hit one of these checkpoints. If you die before reaching one every coin you have picked up returns to their original location, and the checkpoints have a cooldown timer that discourages you from picking up a single coin and returning to the flag repeatedly to cheese this system. The checkpoints in general of spaced out well enough that they aren’t entirely uncommon but there is the tension of moving into a new area and not having a ton of them around.

You can hop on enemies’s heads to kill them but this is a lesser focus in the game, much of the attention is spent on platforming challenges. These are generally well designed with some variety between the different regions. You have a double jump but that is about it in terms of special abilities, it mostly is just a test of standard running and jumping abilities. Worth noting is that at the very end in an optional area (i.e. you don’t have to go here on the way to the standard exit) there is a bit that is markedly harder than any other stretch of the game by a wide margin which I found a bit frustrating and perhaps a step more than the game could comfortably accommodate, but that is the only section of the game I’d make that complaint about. It is otherwise a tricky platformer that will at times challenge you but not to a ridiculous degree.

The game does have some nice little quality of life inclusions. There is a counter at the top of the screen showing the total number of coins in the area you are in and how many you have picked up so far, so you will always know how many more you have to find. At the press of a button you can pull the camera back to view much more of the map at a time, I’d compare it to looking only at the center square in a 3 by 3 grid to then seeing all nine squares at once, and you can still play in this pulled back view if you prefer. There are also warp points that allow for fast travel, the game world isn’t that large but it is a nice touch.

I don’t know that Rex is the type of game that would blow anyone away but I have a soft spot for comfortable, well made 2d platformers and this one definitely qualifies. It probably took me about 75 minutes to get all the coins and a bit more to find the five hidden gems for a different hidden ending, and it was pretty much engaging for that whole time. It is also on sale on Steam for 89 cents at the moment for you non-bundle folks reading this topic for some reason who might be in the market for another short 2d platformer.

[username]

Golf Peaks

Golf Peaks is a card-based golf themed puzzle game which… is a new one for me. Each of the holes is more or less a grid-based irregular shape and rather than take direct shots you have to play a card that causes the ball to go a certain number of squares in a given direction. Certain cards cause the ball to be knocked into the air (and over any obstacles in its path), some result in them rolling on the ground and others a combination of the two. The goal as always in golf is to get the ball into the hole, and 90+% of the time that requires using every card made available to you in the correct order and direction.

This is a solid little concept to build a puzzle game around, and the game makes a good use of it with some nice little touches and twists along the way. You have your standard sand traps (which stop the ball from rolling any further and can only be gotten out of by knocking the ball into the air) and water traps (ball sinks and is placed on the nearest square I believe) but also some objects lifted more from the realm of mini-golf and other games. You will find yourself having to ricochet balls off of walls at odd angles to get around corners or make sure the ball stops on a certain square to set the next shot up, and eventually you will have to deal with patches of ice that will cause the ball to keep sliding no matter how light you hit it until it lands on something else and mazes of conveyor belts to try and navigate. A new one of these is pretty much doled out every ten or twelve holes and it keeps things fresh while giving you enough time to dig into each new obstacle thrown in your way.

It can end up being rather tricky at times, some of the later puzzles had me stuck for a good bit of time trying to figure out exactly how it would be possible. It never feels hopeless as you only have so many cards on each hole, but that doesn’t mean it won’t get hard for stretches of time. Overall I thought it is a rather solid puzzle game, if I tried to play through all of it in a run I’d probably get tired of it before it finished up but I only played through a single world each session and that kept it more than fresh throughout my time with it.

[falsedan]

@username

if I tried to play through all of it in a run I’d probably get tired of it before it finished up but I only played through a single world each session and that kept it more than fresh

For sure, I did two worlds each session and it got samey very quickly. There’s too many levels for them all to be equally challenging & engaging.

[username]

Manual Intervention

I would not recommend playing Manual Intervention as I did not enjoy my time with it at all. It is a 3d Missile Commander that takes place on a globe you have to rotate around. I didn’t care for it mechanically and each of its fifteen stages is way too long, most of the stages are a bit more than fifteen minutes long which is overly excessive given the type of game it is. Normally I would not write up a game I really disliked, but with this game I have a story.

I slowly made my way through this game by playing a single stage each day as a sort of “eating my vegetables” before I got to a game that actually held my interest. A couple days ago I got to the 14th stage and was given a new power-up that basically sets up the various turrets to automatically aim and fire on their own. You can’t spam shots constantly as each shot drains the recharging energy bar on the side of the screen a bit, but on auto it does this in a pretty optimal way. On this 14th stage I let it take control for a bit after I got bored five or so minutes into the stage, disabling it at times to recharge the bar so I could heal or do something else when the spaceships fly away to rearm.

The thing is… when I let the game take the wheel and play itself it was doing well, like really well. Since I wasn’t particularly enjoying my time with the game and had just unlocked the final stage I wondered what would happen if I activated the autofiring as soon as I could and just walked away. It was a bit before dinner so I set it to play itself and went to help out a bit, dropping in every so often to see how it was doing. Checked in after five minutes and things looked good, all the earth bases I could see seemed to still be standing. Checked in at ten minutes still good and I figured this might actually work. Sat down to watch it for a bit around the 15 minute mark and I was doing good but it did not seem to be close to ending.

I went back to helping but kept the game within earshot. Twenty minutes came and went and I could still hear it running, around the 25 minute mark I walked back to watch it and wondered if the last stage introduced a new mechanic like having to do something specific in order for it to end, and if I let it run for hours would the autoplay actually prevent me from taking enough damage to lose during all that time. Thirty minutes in and I started to honestly consider how long I could leave the game running without either winning or losing, just letting it battle itself forever like Tic-Tac-Toe in War Games and seeing if it developed enough sentience to realize how silly it all was.

I did not get that far as at some point after the half hour point the invading ships slowly launched kamikaze attacks which signaled they were out of ammo and the stage was ending. The thing is this was kinda busted as only one ship was trying to crash into a land base at a time, all the other ships stopped firing and the suicidal ship took several trips around the globe before deciding on a target. Autofire had no idea how to shoot these down so the crashing ship actually got to score a hit, but it wasn’t gonna do enough damage to take much out. When one crashed another started taking the long route around and I took pity on the game, took control back and finished them off to not have the game take another ten minutes on this last bit.

I finished with a score of 2 out of 3 stars (didn’t shoot enough ships down for the third one) with 99.9% of the population surviving. I watched the ending, closed the program, deleted its files and marked the game down as beaten on my backloggery page. One could say that I didn’t really beat the game since I didn’t actually play that last bit, but I think that recognizing that beating the game about a random employee having to actually fire the defense rockets to prevent an enemy attack from damaging the cities because all the automatic defenses were taken down (hence why it is called Manual Intervention) by setting the game to auto does more to defeat the game at its core than lazily aiming at missiles for a half hour.