I played this, it was fine, about 80 minutes. I spend a lot of time wondering who would plant their crops in the shadow of a hill instead of the north side of the valley.
1 Like
To be fair, I would completely believe that cultists who believe that some random guy is god’s new representative on earth would get bad farming advice from him.
1 Like
Rising Dusk
Rising Dusk is the most “Super Nintendo game that never got localized outside of Japan but just received a fan translation” feeling game I’ve played in quite a while. A large part of that is due to the aesthetic (the store page literally described it as “16-bit meets Studio Ghibli art style”) but it holds to the game design itself as well which feels like the kind of thing a team would try back then but would also run into “is this gonna appeal enough to be worth bringing over” issues.
The game is a platformer with some puzzle elements built around a gimmick I’ve come across twice before thanks to this bundle: picking up every coin you see can lead to problems. In the above image you see the blocks and platforms with numbers on them, if you have that number of coins or more they will disappear when you touch them. In that sense it seems to transform the game into an “avoid the coins at all costs and make it to the end of the stage” experience, which it often is, but that isn’t the whole story. You will also come across numbers in the background that only form solid blocks when you have at least as many coins as said numbers. Sometimes those blocks forming would be a problem… but sometimes it wouldn’t be and might even be necessary. In general many stages have two different ways to tackle them: with as few coins as possible or with as many as possible. If you just want to reach the end of a stage and don’t care about picking up any collectibles (golden cat statues or cassettes) you can pick either in this situation, but if you do want to gather them then you will sometimes have to play through a stage each way once. Sometimes it makes a notable difference while in others it only does so in a few select areas, but the stages aren’t long enough in most cases (one exception really) for it to be a bother.
Fortunately in the game’s twenty or so stages it has a bunch of neat little ideas that it uses once or twice before moving on to the next thing, not quite at the level Treasure would do but it is a connection my mind made at one point. You’ll have a stage where it is raining coins and you have to avoid them less the floor under your feet starts to dissolve, a stage that takes place in a multi-floor house through several rooms as opposed to the fairly linear 2d levels that make up most of the game, one where giant shadow creatures rise up from the sea and give you a ride, a forced scrolling stage that is actually two stages as depending on where on the overworld map you enter it from you’ll take it east to west or vice-versa, one where you have to explore a town to find coins to build enough of it back to get to the end but have to watch out for Tanukis who will grab your coins and run away, and so forth. All of them still make full use of the “sometimes anti-coin” gimmick, deciding rather than rest on that to mix things up as much as they could get away with.
The fact that it has some really swell sprite work and character designs doesn’t hurt. Apparently a lot of it is lifted from Japanese folk tales but beyond the big show-offy creatures you also have random characters spread across the game who have a lot of charm to them. Some of the backgrounds are really nice (saying this after I post a pic where it is mostly a blue-grey fog) and while it very much feels like it is aping some aesthetic choices from the 16-bit era that clearly inspired it it is nevertheless very well done.
There, that’s a much nicer background to make that point with. It moves a bit with some light parallax, like I said I enjoyed looking at it very much.
The game is also full of little extra things that don’t have to be there, but breathe much more life into everything. There is a temple that takes those golden cat statues you collect and let you try certain challenge stages, which basically are puzzle stages that test your ability to logic out exactly how the coin system works and properly path your way through some layouts much trickier than anything in the base game. The cassettes you can also find are used to unlock songs in the sound test, which rather than a menu is a club you can go to and have a DJ play. All the stages are connected via an overworld map sorta in the vein of a Super Mario World, complete with the occasional alternate exit that opens up a different path after. There is a town you stumble upon halfway through full of a bunch of characters you can try and help, plus a bunch of individuals off on their own half-hidden around said map that have their own deals going on.
That’s it, really. They had a good mechanical gimmick for the game with the coin deal, but rather than just rest on that concept the game feels like it had a ton of extra love poured into it. I truly enjoyed my time with it and was always looking forward to the next stage to see what else it had up its sleeve (I could have probably listed twice as many interesting stage gimmicks than I did). Fortunately the execution was strong as well, again if someone told me before I played it that it was actually a SNES game I never played back then rather than a game made by about four or so people I’d have believed them. If it was I don’t think it’d have been my favorite game on the system, but it would have been one of those random ones I would have felt fortunate to have stumbled upon and wished others had been so lucky.
10 Likes
this game is a real hidden gem imo! it’s another i found via random festival judging and then ended up playing through later. the mechanic may fool people into thinking that that’s all the game is… but it has the sort of off-beat feeling certain mid-90’s japanese games had that a lot of contemporary platformers don’t get anywhere close to capturing. also the music is good too. would much rather play Rising Dusk than a lot of the big prestige indie platformers of the past 10 years or so, mostly just because it feels less derivative and more unique than a lot of those.
3 Likes
I feel like I haven’t directly commented on this in a while and I may just be in my own head a bit, but I just wanna write something in case anyone cares or was worried or anything.
I picked playing through a large portion of this bundle (I think the game count was between 350 and 400?) because it sounded like a neat project and I have a lot of free time with the whole pandemic thing going on (I will get that vaccine someday!) so why not. It has been a number of months and between this and the random game topic I could see it coming off like I’m just still doing this for perhaps compulsive or less than ideal reasons, maybe just stubborness.
So, for the record, I’m still enjoying playing all these random games and seeing what’s out there! I do sometimes hit a stretch where a bunch of games are a bit underwhelming but even during these runs I find it interesting seeing what these various people were going for and where it did and did not work. Plus most of these games are on the short side and since I have a randomizer pick what I play next there’s always a bit of excitement in seeing what is gonna cross my path next.
I also have weeks like this one where I played Rising Dusk, which I think could maybe just slip into my top ten games from the bundle list (I probably think this about thirty or so bundle games so far), and I’m not even 100% sure it’s the best game thrown my way this week. Overall it’s just been a much more rewarding experience than I imagined it could be and I’m actually a bit worried what happens when in like six or so months I run out of games from it.
16 Likes
Let’s clean out my screenshot folder some more.
…and yes, it appears that while I wrote up half the horror games I played for Halloween I forgot to get around to the second half of that (and yes, that gives you an idea how backed up I am).
please
Please is a short horror game (think 15 or so minutes) with a single gameplay notion behind it. You work in what appears to be an apartment building and you keep getting photos of things you have to fix (and some visions to go along with them), with the game being finding the place in the building that matches the photo. You start to get peaks at what is going on in the world (spoiler: it is maybe spooky) until you quickly get to the big revelation. It’s fine, I dug the blocky polygonal look, works for spooky times.
Location Withheld vs. Location Withheld Demake
This is two versions of the exact same brief single room horror game, except with the latter version being a demake to make it look like a PS1 game. I only took one comparison shot so we’ll have to go with that one.
Shoulda picked a better one. Anyways the twist here is that the Demake version struck me as far superior, and not just for purely aesthetic reasons (aesthetically the roughness works a lot better for me in this genre FWIW). In the original version there is a lot of “pick up this item, use the controls to awkwardly turn it around until you find the relevant part” in it, in the demake you click on something and it automatically orients itself in the optimal way to see what is important about it. Playing through the game back to back it turns out that dropping that whole aspect of it improves it markedly! I now want more demakes of games that show how much time was wasted in the original versions of stuff that ended up making it worse.
Sanguine Sanctum
This was the last horror game I played for Halloween and in fact wasn’t supposed to be played for it, the first game the randomizer picked afterwards was this one; turns out it was the best horror game I played for the holiday.
This one is good for a good couple hours, and it does this by basically being several different short scenarios stapled together. The storyline justifies it and is fine, but the appeal is wandering through disparate blocky PS1 environments and this game offers a surprisingly wide variety of them.
You go to these various places to gather stuff for what appears to be a giant pit of blood in the center of the hub area as one does, and while they are (usually) enemy free and walking sim-esque there is some variety to what you have to do. Sometimes you just wander around strangely colored cityscapes looking for the thing you need to pick up but others have puzzles or odd mechanisms you need to figure out the workings of. There is even a bit of a meta puzzle in the hub you start might pick up bits of info for (it is optional).
I didn’t find most of the horror games that disturbing, or even that mechanically rich. What they offered was a chance to wander through some atmospheric places (usually with early 3d-esque graphics) and take them in, and this game did the best job of that of the bunch. If you wanna give any of these a shot, this is the one.
The Guilt and The Shadow
The Guilt and The Shadow is basically a lower budget Limbo-like if they replaced puzzle platforming with adventure game puzzles. It didn’t quite work, but I’ll give it a mention just because of the look it went with.
It’s a bit of an odd mish-mash! I don’t dislike it (I mostly just think it is funky) and it isn’t enough to suggest playing the game to look at, but enough to justify posting a screenshot of it.
5 Likes
NO THING
Okay you’re gonna have to bear with me on this one as this is kinda an odd one to explain.
NO THING is basically an autorunner where all you can do is press left or right to turn. There are about ten stages that add in some slight variables (biggest one is how later stages add a good bit of verticality) but mainly your goal is always to keep on the path ahead of you. Sometimes you just have to make your way through the entire course once to complete the stage, other times you have to complete a certain number of laps, a couple manage to do both somehow. Every time you make a turn the game keeps count and the completion percentage creeps up, and when it is near 100% the exit section of the stage appears… or you will just jump straight to the next stage, it depends. Oh yeah, you are constantly accelerating and while there are some pick-ups that spawn that can slow you down a bit (or speed you up) by the end of every stage you are just barely in control as you blaze through everything trying to hold on by the skin of your teeth.
The game has a kinda surrealistic aesthetic to it, somewhat faux retro (the tagline for the game is “the year is 1994 and it is the future”) but kinda off in its own unique way. The soundtrack is some solid chiptune work, which is good as you will be listening to it a good bit. I would say every stage is approximately 50% too long, and the difficulty swings wildly from “not too bad” to “what hell is this?”. I think stage 3 or 4 is the second hardest in the game. If you turn too early or too late you can be right on the edge of the path in front of you and may fall off before you reach the next turn, or may not. So much of it in writing makes it sounds like an unpleasant experience, and at certain points I was beyond frustrated with it.
…But dammit if I did not find the whole experience compelling as hell. What I did not mention before is the story, which is about the simplest office worker (you) having to deliver something to the queen of ice. The story is present at all times as a computerized voice announces bits of text throughout your run. It also says the exact same bits at more or less the exact same time in each attempt at a stage (I think it is tied to the number of turns). This means that on the harder stages if you fail it many dozens of times you will here those same random bits of spoken words early on each time. This is clearly an awful design decision and yet…
I found myself in a flow with the game even when it went bad, and hearing an emotionless computer voice randomly go for example “they know me… from television” at the exact same turn each run became a kind of comfort, with me beginning to parrot them back at the game as the came up. I actually became sad when I finally finished that hellish stage as I wouldn’t hear it any more. At least I was called “simplest office worker” throughout. Note that I played this game in early November and did not have to look those up, some of those sayings are seared into my psyche at this point.
So I am left with a game that if I had to rate in anything resembling an objective way would probably get a very middle of the road five out of ten score as it is kinda simple, and it has design quirks that are likely not ideal… but it sticks with me. It stuck with me at the time, it just has this personality to it. I can’t strongly recommend it because… well if you read this far you’ve probably gone “this doesn’t actually sound that great” but I also kinda want people to try it as this is one of the games that crawled into my head in a way few other games in the bundle have both while playing it and afterwards.
Basically I don’t know if it is good, but ironically enough NO THING is definitely something.
EDIT: I realized I can just put the steam trailer for the game here which has the music and computerized voice all over it, which is likely useful.
9 Likes
I got this game on switch fo like 3 cents or something and found it to be the mediocre game you’ve described while I expected the interesting experience you described. I think playing it on PC with headphones might have helped, actually.
2 Likes
Today a few games that did at least one thing I found interesting while perhaps not being particularly good or noteworthy otherwise.
Syscrusher
…Okay we’re just getting the cheat out of the way first. Syscrusher is basically a single level FPS that has pretty good production values given its budget. It also randomly in an early cutscene puts a gameboy-esque filter on everything and I liked the screenshot I took of it, so here it is. The game itself is fine I guess.
Widget Satchel
Widget Satchel is an almost Metrovania with the following gimmick: the more “widgets” you pick up the slower you move and lower you jump. You would want to pick them up as near the end of each area there is an upgrade machine into which you can feed them to buy an upgrade (I think there might also be switches that only activate if you step on them with enough weight, don’t quote me on that). You also drop some when you take damage, although often times if you then kill the enemy that damaged you you get them back.
The potential in this concept shines through when one looks at how the level design had to be tackled. When you reach the end of an area you have the chance to buy an upgrade but only a single one, so the game needs to account for players picking any of them or perhaps not having enough to get any of them. To simplify it is best to think of the upgrades as keys for certain locks, if not opening up different directions to move in then at least different paths through the same areas. The game is mostly linear in terms of progress but does let you go backwards and explore earlier areas for things you possibly couldn’t reach before. There is potential there… but there is also a problem lurking.
If you start falling behind on your upgrades it can sorta spiral into a situation where you are always falling further and further behind. For example if you don’t have enough to buy an upgrade near the end of area 4 instead of entering area 5 with a new ability and low weight you instead enter lacking an ability and weighed down by the widgets you did not get to spend on said upgrade. This means many jumps are too high for you to make given how encumbered you are, which limits how many more widgets you can reach, which puts you more behind the curve (the upgrades increase in cost). This culminated in the final area that was meant to basically be an obstacle course except I was too heavy to actually complete 90% of it; the game offered a “too heavy so you can basically skip this section” shortcut for each setpiece that I instead took repeatedly, that was how my end game run… well slow walk went.
To be fair it is the rare game near this genre that could have markedly different runs from person to person or even playthrough to playthrough, sadly it is just kinda flawed and even when it is working right it isn’t particularly fun. It did show me a game design idea I’d be curious to see someone else take a shot at.
Hero-ing Addict
I’ll admit it, I did chuckle at the name.
More of a gameplay demo than a full game, your only weapon is a sword that changes colors every few seconds without your input that can only damage enemies of the same color. With the mouse you can shoot one of three different colors to paint enemies to better deal with this. You can only shoot three colors (red, blue and yellow) while the sword can become one of six colors so there will be times where you have to consider shooting them twice (red and yellow equal orange, etc.), or just trying to avoid them until the sword changes into a more useful color.
It is a very awkward system and the game doesn’t do a lot with it, again it feels more like a demo scenario just to get the system working and run it through a few different scenarios. The combat definitely needs work, although I must admit I didn’t mind the simplistic hand drawn graphics. Still I have to give it to them, I don’t think I’ve played a game where the entire combat system was built around a concept like this.
Escaped Chasm
Escaped Chasm is one of several games in the bundle that is basically a short narrative Gameboy Color looking adventure game where you wander around a house or location, reading descriptions of things and maybe solving basic puzzles before something triggers the story advancing and you do it all again. This one has animated cutscenes which gives it more personality than most, but that’s not why I’m mentioning it. All of these games end up feeling very tile-based even when there is nothing explicitly like that. Maybe it is just due to every object you press again feeling somewhat square or rectangle shaped. This game has a bit of reality breaking down to it, and near the end you get this:
That tile-based feeling breaks all the way down at the same time reality does and it felt genuinely unexpected. Even moving around the room became tricky as you could only step over the smallest cracks. It doesn’t make the game genius or anything, but it felt genuinely neat.
9 Likes
It didn’t overstay its welcome which is its most redeeming quality imho.
I did enjoy the vocalizations of all the robots you fight though
1 Like
I played this today!
It is okay. I made it all the way through the game on my first run with ease (I had 3 or 4 lives left over and that was with me playing reckless as hell in the final several stages) so if that was not intended I am either really good at games or it is maybe a tad easier than it should be. It ran fine but for whatever reason none of the buttons on my controller did the moooove thing (or if they were then the game needs to be clearer about something happening) and I never bothered with slowing things down.
The amount of text boxes either when you first play or select how to play (I forget which) is a bit much, I started to think it was an intentional goof but I’m not exactly sure. I know one of them covered the moooove thing but maybe I should have read it closer?
I kinda wish that the enemy explosions were a bit bigger so that I could create some absurd chains, but that is probably a bad idea in terms of game balance so maybe don’t listen to that.
I very much played trying to only put down strategic farts (which I mean, true to life) so I never really had the meter run out although it got pretty low at times. I liked the “you haven’t killed anything in a while so an unstoppable killing thing will appear and stalk you” touch as I also played games as a kid where that was a thing. I kinda wish it had a music cue or some sort of dramatic sound with it, although since killing a single enemy makes it vanish it may just not be able to produce the tension its brethren often do.
Mechanically it seemed fairly solid. Making it so that you could only attack in a certain central area was a nice touch I appreciated. I generally could figure out all the enemy behaviors pretty quickly which is good, I sometimes ran right into a bullet I didn’t see beforehand but I think that was more due to my attention being occupied elsewhere than them being hard to see. I also liked how one wave generally flowed into the other.
As is I had a good time playing through it but don’t know that it is something I’d come back to. It feels like I saw all of what it had to offer, there really isn’t much in the way of a challenge to work against and while there in theory is high scores to chase I only think I saw what my score was after my run was finished (it was 77,685 BTW) which doesn’t really help with that kind of experience. Also in complete honesty I’m personally not someone who usually goes after high scores. If you are cool with it being a bit of a single serving experience I enjoyed it on that level.
1 Like
Another few quick hits:
Outpost Horizon Station
Fun fact: there was a 50% chance this is the game I’d have some of you high score chasing if my name came up next.
I guess it is closest to an arena shooter, the arena here being a circular set of platforms you run and jump around as you try to survive as long as possible while also scoring points and chaining kills. It lacks a bit of variety but it does a good job capturing that “hold control of the situation for as long as possible, lose it and scramble desperately in a likely futile attempt to regain it for a few more seconds” flow. There was an objective to last two minutes and it seemed almost impossible to me. My wrist started to hurt if I played it for too long but in small doses I found some pleasure in it.
Color Jumper
Color Jumper may have been one of the stronger unknown precision platformers (i.e. Super Meat Boy-likes) in the bundle I’ve come across. It has a fairly simplistic look but a solid gameplay hook that adds a fairly unique wrinkle to the experience: each side of the cube you play as is a different color, and every time you press the jump button you also rotate 90 degrees. As for why that is important… well I only managed to take a single useful screenshot for that.
Any object in the world can only be interacted with or in essence “exist” if it is touching the matching side of your cube. As the yellow side is facing down into that yellow bar it is solid and can be moved upon, if any other side was touching it he cube would fall right through. This adds an entire new dimension to the experience if playing a game like this. Generally you only have to focus on making a jump or sequence of jumps while avoiding obstacles and the like on the way to the goal. Here you also have to make sure your orientation is correct as well while often making your way through a tricky set of movements, making sure to press the jump button an extra time or three mid-air to spin yourself into the aforementioned correct orientation or else it all falls apart. It adds techniques like jumping through a colored platform from below due to the upper color not matching it only to land on it solidly by having the lower one do so among a few other little twists only really possible with this set-up.
It can all be a bit tricky to wrap one’s head around, but once one does it becomes a pretty solid type of this game that also managed to establish an identity of its own. It can get a bit crazy as one gets to its final run of levels (I believe it has about a hundred) so i’m not sure if it’ll be completable for everyone, but if one enjoys these sorta of games I think it is worth giving a shot. Plus when you nail a run through a level it looks and feels rather cool, as I will show via this stolen gif:
Also it has some bonus levels one can unlock for getting enough medals or goal scores or something that twist the mechanics around in kooky ways, such as adding VVVVVV-type gravity changes on top of everything else. I appreciate their existence but they were beyond even my abilities and this is one of the rare game genres I’m okay at.
Bold Blade
Bold Blade is one of those “let’s take something to its logical extremes” games, in this case upgrading ones sword. The game itself is going to places on the map and fighting a few waves of enemies in a given location by basically moving around while swinging your large sword in circles around you. You gradually upgrade it to do more damage, become thicker or longer, spin faster and the like. Over the maybe half hour it takes to play through it can get a bit ridiculous, and it immediately loads up a new game plus that makes sure it can get outright ridiculous if one desire. Is it a particularly good game? It’s not awful, but no not really. That said I do appreciate a game that commits to the bit without overstaying its welcome and it does do that. I also enjoyed the game ending pixel image which I will spoil as why not.
9 Likes
Dujanah
I have put off writing about this game so long that some of the specifics have started to fade away unfortunately, leaving a sort of generalized feeling of what the game was like and how I felt while playing it. That said there are specific parts of this game that will likely stick with me for a good long time. Because of that and other reasons I’d consider this to be one of the bundle’s standout experiences.
Mechanically it most closely resembles one of those RPG Maker-esque adventure games where there are no battles and you walk around various places advancing the story and triggering events to advance it further still. Rather than the tile-based sprites those specialize in Dujanah is a visual wonder, much of it built in clay but also bringing in various other visual effects that make it so you are never quite sure what you will see next. In many ways it is worth playing through just to see everything within it.
I should also mention that the game does take some mechanical detours so you may find yourself driving around or perhaps playing a Metrovania if you so choose (these are mostly optional I believe). If I am honest none of them are particularly well executed but they are also more distractions and tangents than anything else, and there is no need to best any of them (I think) in fact I quit out of a few and the game did not care in the least.
The thing is… none of this really gets to the why of this game’s worth. We’ve all seen tons of games that have unusual presentations or gameplay systems, and quite often it is just to be “so random” or wacky for the sake of being different. Here it is hiding a core of sorrow and anger. I perhaps buried the lede a bit, but Dujanah takes place in the Middle East and is about a woman looking for what happened to her husband and child after they disappeared near a US military base. I feel it is safe to say that it is not all that positive regarding the US’s role in the area, and while that is not all of what the game touches upon it is the central thing it often returns to.
Again it has been some months since I played this and I can’t touch on every specific story beat or topic broached (nor would that be a good idea) but I do want to touch on something about the experience of the game that sticks out in my head, and it is about catharsis in games.
Super Metroid & Ico spoilers the next two paragraph
Much like most things in games this catharsis is generally of a violent nature, but when done well it can feel almost exhilarating. The first example that I remember really sticking out and the one I always refer to is the final battle in Super Metroid. You face Mother Brain and she busts out a scripted mega attack that basically cripples you and leaves you a sitting duck. At the last second the giant baby metroid rushes in and incapacitate Mother Brain before tending to you. While healing you Mother Brain awakens and begins to attack once more, the baby shielding you from danger by absorbing the blows itself. Finished taking care of you it turns its attention to the threat and charges, but a final blast annihilates it as the remnants of it scatter all over you. In that moment as you feel the greatest rage at your enemy you are granted the strongest attack in the game and proceed to do the space laser equivalent of pummeling Mother Brain to death, each blast sending its head and neck snapping back virtually unable to defend itself until it is destroyed. It is base, but I’d be lying if I said I did not find it to be satisfying as hell.
I always felt that the penultimate battle in Ico was a bit of a riff on this. You emerge into a giant chamber to find Yorda reduced to unliving stone with dark shadow creatures dancing around her, in your hands a sword that immediately tears those creatures asunder with a single strike. There are no pits to fall into and no Yorda to be captured anymore so you are functionally invincible, and as these shadow creatures start to swarm you it is less a battle than a slaughter. As you begin to revel in this massacre at some point you recognize this to be the chamber you were locked up in at the start of the game, and with every shadow you destroy one of the stone containers like the one you were imprisoned in starts to glow. At the height of this violent catharsis the game pulls the rug out from under you with the game’s true horror: all these shadows are the other kids like you who were brought here and who did not get away, while they may be monsters now they were victims exactly like you and this is the fate that awaited you. When it is over and you are the only being left in that now empty room I do not know the word to describe the particular feeling I had at that moment but it has stuck with me. I think Shadow of the Colossus was the better game, but that moment may have been the best thing Team Ueda ever designed.
Dujanah has some of the latter kind of catharsis in it, the complicated kind. While it has some definite similarities it takes it in its own unique direction, and at a particular moment it delivers a gut punch of its very own that is the first thing I think of whenever I remember this game. In a way it is very videogamey, what you see is very unrealistic and stylized and fantastic. But in another way it touched on something very real, very unnervingly real specific to that time and place, a mix of anger and sorrow and resignation and god knows what else.
I feel bad, I feel like I am unable to really describe this game well. It is mechanically rough, it looks great, it is at times insane and then depressingly real, it lacks polish but does not lack heart. Not everything lands, not everything is written well but enough of it does and is. One can use it as just a virtual sightseeing tour and it is gorgeously grotesque enough to be worthwhile as just that but under that is a ton of ideas and emotions and horrors, some virtual and some all too real.
15 Likes
I swear to bonglord the account got longer at 59 pages as I check today.
2 Likes
For real I swear Username is digging up shit out of this bundle that I never saw in all my perusin’
1 Like
I noted this before but they kept adding games to the bundle up to a day or two after they actually stopped selling it, it was kinda nuts! I also legit clicked on almost every single game in the bundle (I think I got more selective near the end), did you know there was a text adventure wresting game that sounded like it was written by a Limp Bizkit fan? I decided to not play that one as I’m a coward…
7 Likes
On Rusty Trails
(Couldn’t take screenshots of this one so I have to write it up while it is still in mind, images yoinked from store pages)
On Rusty Trails is an oddity. It is a precision platformer (think Super Meat Boy) that doesn’t feel or play like a minor variation on the same basic formula Super Meat Boy and its ilk are built upon. I wouldn’t necessarily say it is better than what the best of that subgenre have to offer, but it is refreshing to see someone (in this case the people who made Tiny & Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers) try something a bit different with it.
Probably the most mechanically unique thing about the game is how the player character sticks to every surface. If you are on a square hanging mid-air you can quite easily run repeatedly around all four sides of it to your heart’s content. It is a bit odd at first as you don’t maintain forward momentum just by holding a single direction (if you hold left until you hit the edge of a platform you don’t continue downwards, you would wait there until you start pressing down) but it is easy enough to internalize after a bit. The game isn’t focused entirely on this, many stages are still a “go from the left to the right until you hit the goal” affair but it does give it a fairly distinct feel while playing.
Of course this slightly dishonest as the real game mechanic it is built around is in fact racism.
Very early on you gain the ability to change from orange to blue and back via a button press (and an instantaneous costume change). Most of the platforms and objects in the game are either blue or orange, and they only exist as interactable objects when you are the same color. I can hear you saying already “but lots of games have color changing mechanics like this, that isn’t the same as racism” and that is true for those games but not so here. There are little orange and blue fellows sprinkled about who who will communicate via simple icons as you pass by, generally a thumbs up or heart when you match their color or a middle finger or poo if you do not. I believe the blue color checkpoints actually appear to be a pair of doors slamming shut if you approach while the other color, there are giant billboards in the background that fairly explicitly show the poor opinions each side holds of the other, it is pretty clear. It also has literally nothing to say about it which is certainly a choice, as a framing device it is definitely funky but while always there it does mostly stay out of the way. It is likely for the best.
There are a few other minor design choices that are also less than typical. Most stages have a number of little white diamonds that act as a collectible but can also be used to activate a checkpoint, which means the only way to complete a stage with all of them is to not use any checkpoints. This actually becomes its own little thing as they had the foresight to often put these checkpoints very much in your way, transforming them in essence into obstacles if you want to go the collectible route. It is odder still as once picked up these collectibles stay picked up even if you die. It is very much possible to go pick up all of the out of the way ones, die, run straight for the goal and get credit for collecting all the collectibles, a fast time and credit for no “deaths” (as they only count them when resumed from checkpoints). It is both profoundly unbalanced and user friendly, unless you hit a checkpoint by accident in which case you need to pause and manually restart the stage.
Oh yeah, there is also the question as to if it is actually any good. It is fine. Even skipping all the checkpoints it is generally much easier than these games generally are, and if one took advantage of the checkpoints it’d possibly just be legit on the easy side period. While there are things that can kill you nothing directly attacks you until about the final third of the game, it is generally a test of jumping (no double jump) and being able to switch colors on the fly. It’s generally good, but it also never really seems to be more than that. It wouldn’t be the first or second or etc. platformer I’d recommend from the bundle, but it definitely would be closer to the top than the bottom and I am again glad to see a game of this type take a chance by wandering further off the beaten path than its brethren generally do.
7 Likes
Polymute
Polymute is a top down view point and click adventure game (maybe, game genres are tricky things) built mostly around a single idea that somehow ends up feeling much more interesting than it had any right to be. It is a game I nearly passed on due to the snippiest complain: the gif on the store page made the controls look odd. Here is it:
The game is entirely mouse controlled and you just run to wherever the mouse icon is located when holding down one of the mouse buttons, which makes sense for a point and click adventure game but is worrying when on first blush it looks more like a Zelda-type experience. There is basically no combat and not much of a demand for precision so it is fine. Scrolling the mouse wheel switches you between three actions for the other mouse button: look at something, talk/read something, and transform.
The transform command is the big one. You play as a wizard who more or less only knows a single spell: how to transform into other things. The thing is that you can only transform into things you have already personally seen (and for the purpose of the game you have seen nothing before the game begins). What this means is that you should make a point of clicking look on every roughly player sized sprite in the game, which grants you the ability to then transform into said thing. The vast majority of what the game asks of you is built around this.
To use one of the earlier teaching examples (pictured above) there is a bridge with a demon on the other side that will repel you with an energy blast if you try to cross it (the rare things in the game that attack you knock you backwards or do other non-killing things). There are frogs on the same side of the bridge as you who will tell you that the demon thinks so little of them that it pays them no mind, so that if you were only smaller and disguised as say a mushroom they would swim you to the other bank. Fortunately there are mushrooms on that very screen so if you look at one and then transform into one near the frog it will pick you up and swim you across; this is helpful as as a mushroom you cannot walk for obvious reasons. Once over there you can advance to the next screen… or you can look at the demon, transform into one yourself and talk to them to see what is going on with them.
You can pretty much talk to every creature in the game, with maybe only one or two cases where you get generic dialogue from every one on screen. Sometimes it is important, often times it isn’t much beyond a silly joke but this is how most of the story and world building is handled. The basics of the story on their own aren’t much, but how you have to pick up bits of it here and there and piece it together makes it a good bit more interesting in practice.
Worth noting is that you can transform into a lot of things. If you get everything there are 65 different forms you can take and no, not all of them are useful. Many of them in fact seem useless, but you won’t know that for sure until you reach the end and there are some things I never figured out so who knows for sure. The game has a bit of a Metrovania flow to it as for example a body of water is a hard barrier until you spot something that can swim, same as a locked door until you find something that can open it. Fortunately it is fairly open in terms of what order to tackle things in as for most of the game until the ending “need A, B and C to get to point Z” stretch it generally felt like there were at least a couple different areas I could poke around in so I rarely felt like I was truly stuck (there was one time I did have to look up a hint).
From an intellectual perspective my mind goes “yeah but it generally wasn’t hard to figure out what to do as everything was solved by transforming and you can only do so much with it” but in the act of playing it I never really felt that way. Maybe I just have odd standards after playing a bunch of these games and was content to see how it all unfolded but I think a key bit is that it generally isn’t clear what is essential and what is optional, and that there’s enough hidden or mysterious stuff that one can’t really tell how deep it all goes. You can brew potions although only one is necessary, there were areas I never reached and locations I still am unsure if they serve a purpose or not. The final screen let me know that there are a few things I never tracked down, and I am pretty sure what they are based on scattered names and bits of info I read in books or heard from creatures. I don’t know that I’d go as far to say it is in fact a top down point and click icebergvania, but it does a good job both feeling a bit mysterious while containing optional mysteries you’d have to put some work into solving.
This all sounds pretty great… but the ending/final challenge is a big misstep. Without spoiling what it is exactly in a game that up until that point had been pretty chill you basically have to make 25 to 30 timed randomized decisions correctly in a row or you get booted back to the previous screen. It took me an hour to finally get past (the game itself is probably three, maybe four hours long otherwise depending on how quickly you figure some stuff out), it is unforgiving, it made my wrist hurt, I almost just looked the ending up on youtube, I legit dislike how that otherwise solid idea was implemented. It gets a full demerit for that.
That said I still overall had a swell time time with it. The graphics are basic and chunky in a way that some will be more okay with than others, the controls are a bit odd and having to select which of the many things to transform into feels like it could have been streamlined a bit more but I was otherwise pleasantly surprised by it. I don’t know what the standards are for something to be a “true” hidden gem, but at the very least it is a hidden good time.
12 Likes
See, the problem with always writing these late at night is that you throw your sleep schedule off just a bit and you end up too tired to bother for weeks at a time.
Hole New World
I do love me NES-style cinematic screens.
Hole New World is very much one of those “love letter to NES” games that both looks better technically than they ever actually did while also being a bit more mechanically complex, just getting that out of the way as I know that is a turn off for some. You play as a potion master who has to save the world by throwing potions at enemies, each time you beat a boss you get a new potion type that grants new attacks or abilities (turns out that blood potions let you double jump, I feel that SB lore needs to be updated to reflect that). It also has a big gimmick that explains the kinda goofy name that I only have a single mediocre screenshot for.
There are no bottomless pits in the game. When you fall into one you drop into an upside-down world where gravity is reversed, and the big pitch is that you have to make use of switching between these two worlds in order to progress through the five or six stages that make up the game. In truth it is kinda undercooked, it isn’t used for long stretches and often when it is there it is less a choice you have to make and more “you have to play this next section upside-down”. It doesn’t detract from anything but it also adds less than what one would hope.
As is the game is alright. It does switch the level themes up a bit, one of them is very much a maze that is easy to get lost in (also involves giant bugs tunneling underground) for example. There is effort spent on level design which isn’t always the case in these games but it also didn’t really lead to anything all that memorable. The game at times later on will throw a quite frankly absurd number of enemies at you, like a “screw the NES, the SNES might chug with this many decent-sized sprites moving at the same time” amount that I rarely felt like I had the tools to completely deal with, on a few occasions I felt I had to tank a few hits in the hope that there would be a checkpoint around the corner.
I think if this was an actual NES game it would have been a b tier “flawed but fondly remembered by some” game, granted a chunk of that would be tied to looking better than other NES games at the time but yeah I could see a few kids being gifted this, playing through it a bunch and having warm memories. It is solid enough that if one wants to play a game like that it may scratch that itch. I doubt anyone will love it, but to play around with for a few hours it can get the job done.
There is one specific thing I do want to highlight and it is that I really enjoyed the final boss battle (a different boss is pictured above, seriously though picture a NES trying to handle that bullet pattern). The boss battles before it were fine enough, but that last one does a solid job of kicking you straight in the teeth and having you go “how in the heck am I supposed to deal with that?” It does have a bit of a gimmick to it that you will have to figure out but it has a real nice curve of going from “this is impossible” to “okay, I think I get this but it’s still rather hard” to “I think I might be able to do this”. It was probably my favorite bit in the game.
I also like between stages maps like this showing your progress, you even get to see the upside-down mountains!
10 Likes
Visual Out
Visual Out is a bit of an odd one, a game that I am pretty sure is flawed but is flawed in ways that may appeal to some here.
The thing that immediately jumps out about it is the aesthetic (which only screenshots so well). It is rather low budget but still fairly distinct, a technological feel with corruption creeping in. Given it is a Metrovania it is good that it is a neat looking place to exist in for a bit.
The thing that makes it a bit unusual is the rather odd abilities you gain combined with very little focus on combat. You start off with no actual way to harm enemies (in fact enemies don’t show up for a little bit early on) with your first ability being a sort of line you shoot out that can grab onto things and move them around. The next one is a ball of corruption that appears around you and can cause things within its radius to respond oddly. Eventually you do get a shot but it is basically a slower Yoshi’s Island type attack. Also each time you use an ability it uses up a charge (you can find extra ones around the map) and when you use them all up you are stuck waiting for one to slowly recharge, so it incentives the player to not just spam them.
The thing about the game is… it is very easy to get pretty lost in it. They do a good enough job of making the areas seem distinct enough despite the limited color scheme, but I think the map design likely just has some issues. There are a lot of paths that are essentially one-way ones, further complicated by the fact that the world can be in an “on” or “off” states that affects certain routes dramatically. What this means is that until you do a good job of internalizing certain parts of the layout it can be very “I want to get to this place I remember, but how the heck do I get back there?” There is also a good bit of “I don’t remember the one main place this new ability grants me access to so I have to go wander for a bit.” I think this is mostly a flawin this case, but I also know that there are those who like these games more in the mold of Metroid 1 than Super Metroid so this might work for them. There is a map but the game doesn’t tell you where you are on it except for in the save rooms, which also show you a section of the map immediately around your current whereabouts.
I would be remiss if I did not mention a certain late-game aspect. There is basically a puzzle you need to solve once you gain one of your final abilities (there is a bit more freedom in terms of what order you can get them in than one would guess, but there are a few key ones that will be gotten at certain points) that is apparently randomized to a degree and got me crossed up for a long time. The game explains very little and… I mean even knowing about the existence of a final puzzle is something I had to basically load up a video playthrough to even begin to figure out. I would say if one does play it to just look for a hint once you get what seems to be rather late with no real main way forward.
So yeah, it is a mixed bag. When I got on a good roll I was pretty into it, and there are a bunch of little things that you’re never actually told about and have to figure out for yourself. It’ll leave you to your own devices and that’s good up until the point it is not, and where that point is likely varies from person to person.
7 Likes