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

I liked this game’s non-combat focus but the map annoyed me and I also found the later puzzles to be a bit poorly signposted. A mixed bag is definitely a fair assessment. I feel like most folk here would dig it for a few hours though.

I got around to this many months back and forgot to actually add any thoughts, but this is pretty on point. Worth noting is that the writing is very teenage angsty, like… well let a few screenshots speak for themselves:

It is very much like this and it pops up relatively frequently, but I will say that there is an earnestness there that does save it a bit. As a game it is hard to say whether it is a first person adventure game you sometimes shoot in or a FPS you sometimes just wander around in, but the shooting is pretty basic so let’s lean towards the former.

It is a classic case of “let me just throw everything into this one game as who knows if I’ll ever get another chance” and while it is uneven it is a rather interesting ride just to see where things will go next. You jump between vastly different locations where your goals and even the gameplay itself can swing wildly, it tries to ask deeply philosophical questions albeit in a somewhat adolescent way, hell let me go full spoiler and post something from after the ending:

It apparently has fairly complex morality/choices system that I didn’t know actually existed until after the end credits. The ambition is definitely there, the execution is not consistently so, it’s been long enough since I played it that I lack any more specifics so yeah it is something some of you will get something from and others will bounce off of hard.

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A few quick hits.

The Tower: The Order of XII

The tower is one of those puzzle games where when you press in one of the four main directions you keep moving in that direction until you hit something, hopefully something that won’t kill you. All you really have to do is make it to the exit, but it is one of those games where it is always good to check a few moves ahead to make sure you don’t toss yourself into a dead end. It adds in a new mechanic every so often, be it portals or crystals that let you perform a single attack on an enemy (there is no combat per se, an enemy obstacle may just float between two blocks you need to jump between hence having an attack stored allows you to do so). The pixel art is simple but is done well enough and it has a story that is a lot of nothing but does have NES-style cutscenes of solid quality. For the main mode I’d recommend it as a solid example of this kind of puzzle game with a nice middle of the road difficulty level. I cannot recommend any of the puzzles in the other modes as I found two that are literally impossible to complete due to either dev oversight or a baffling bug (one of the safe surfaces required to beat a puzzle kills you if you touch it) which is unforgivable in a puzzle game, but if you ignore those the story mode is free of said issues and is a good 60-90 minutes of puzzling.

No Delivery

Described as a pizzeria crpg with procedurally generated dungeons, it is more accurately described as a 5 Nights at Freddy’s-type horror game where you explore around the place at night and find “other” areas within that are basically a series of rooms randomly selected in one of three difficulties, the third of which is required to be completed for plot progression/unlocking new areas. Every time you die you roll a new character (equipment gained is stored on-site) but it is really more of just getting one of four different classes.

I am torn on it. It is not my preferred type of game and I was very bad at it, but I think the bits in the pizzeria poking around are good enough and have some decent bits of horror visuals. A bunch of it feels optional and not blatantly spelled out as well. The dungeons are literally a set of random rooms that may have jrpg-style battles in them (or not) that to me seemed to be a bit harsh in terms of difficulty. I then learned that if you save and quit it switches the rooms around so I just reloaded the save if I saw a tricky room up next and scummed my way to the bosses in good shape. It is terrible form but I actually enjoyed seeing the rest of the game that way so I consider it fair game.

Luna

Luna feels like it’d be swell if I was seven years old. I love the almost diorama feel of these little circular scenes, and while the story isn’t much it does teach a good lesson that kids should learn. The gameplay though is so thin and slight (and awful with a mouse thanks to jacked sensitivity, use a controller). You basically have to put various plants around these scenes until every section is revitalized and then solve some very basic and kinda dumb puzzles, and that’s the game. Still I did like the little animals you meet, good enough likely kids-only title.

forma.8

It is yet another metrovania (although a spaceship one so you have free movement in any direction), but I kinda love the aesthetic. I don’t know what this artistic technique is but it pops up a lot in the indie space but this game IMO might make the best use of it. The game is much better when it focuses on exploration than combat and does lean more in that direction, but while the combat is different it isn’t particularly good although at some point with more abilities it becomes more manageable. That wouldn’t be the reason to play it, the main reason to give it a shot is that it is a true lonely game in a world that I thought was just lovely to look at. In fact we’re just gonna shift into “cool screenshot” mode for a sec.

If you think those look cool and are fine with “fine” metrovanias then it might be worth putting some time into. If they don’t do much for you the rest of the game probably doesn’t have enough going for it otherwise to be worth playing over the million other metrovanias.

Backspace Bouken

We have cross over from the weekdaily random game names topic! This is a typing game dungeon crawler and I legit love the absurdity of that mash-up. When you encounter an enemy their dialogue appears and you must type it back at them at a decent pace to avoid taking damage with typos slowing you down. Your main resource is spaces which these encounters use up, although when you come across a sign you can backspace it to steal all the spaces off of them (you can also use contractions to save a space when typing their dialogue). Between these is actual first person dungeon crawling, you go up the tower trying to make a mental map of the grid layout, you have to hit switches and such to open up doors and alternate paths, etc. The story is… I don’t recall the story, you come across NPCs and they talk a decent bit but it is all rather silly. It in truth is a minor game, as a dungeon crawler it is pretty bare bones but for a goof it is actually a solid typing game. Also a tip: you cannot set the difficulty as it is set by your performance in the game’s very first battle so… I’m not saying tank it but maybe don’t try to do your absolute best.

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Oh Jeez, Oh No, My Rabbits Are Gone!!!

This rabbit game is the oddest thing: a straight up Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee-type puzzle platformer.

You have a hundred rabbits that go missing and have to get them back, but rather than pick them up you have to issue verbal commands like “hello” and “walk” to get them to make their way to various rabbit holes and hence safety. The system is a bit different than the one in the early Oddworld games (press one button to bring up four command options you pick with one of the four directions with a button being able to switch to four more advanced/specific options) but it is very much in that mold and it is the first game of that type I’ve come across in a number of years.

That said the game does have some differences from its inspiration. For one while those Oddworld games were very much on the hard side if you wanted to save everyone (heck, even if you didn’t) this game is very forgiving. Enemies are uncommon, there is a menu option to reset the screen you are on in case you mess up, I don’t think the rabbits can actually be harmed, the game overall is on the easy side but not insultingly so. The other main difference is that it takes a step in a metrovania direction. It is stage-based but each stage is pretty open in which direction you can go and puzzles you want to solve first, except rather than gain any kind of power-ups you do generally find a key equivalent or some other way to open a door/obstruction that blocks access to certain regions. This does help with placing some hidden bunnies and alternate character palettes (the only other collectible thing you can find) and give it some sense of exploration/teasing of things you can’t yet reach, but is otherwise a fairly soft touch in this regard.

The game switches things up by adding little variants to the rabbits every so often or some area-specific things to interact with. Some rabbits are scared so you need to reach them and physically pet them to calm them down before they will listen to you, some have special abilities you need to take advantage of to get them home, that kind of thing. Area specific stuff include bubbles that let you sink to the bottom of bodies of water you otherwise could only float on the surface of and see what useful things are down there (naturally you must avoid spiky stuff that would pop said bubble). None of it is particularly revolutionary but it does its job of keeping things fresh for the 4-5 hours the game takes to complete.

Overall the execution is pretty solid, every so often it would have me jump forward when I instead was trying to jump up to reach a platform up above and there were times the rabbits were a bit temperamental in terms of listening to my commands (you have to be facing them for them to hear you) but these were mostly minor inconveniences. The Oddworld games were better but very few games bothered to follow-up on what they did, so to stumble upon one that tries to do just that and manages to do a solid job of it was very welcome.

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Lord’s work here.

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Myth Bearer

How do you get me interested in a classic-style rpg? By basically making it a puzzle game!

On its surface Myth Bearer is a fairly by the numbers rpg. You wake up in a dungeon you have to escape, you slay a lot of monsters, level up, get new gear and defeat a great evil. In this regard it is all standard and unexciting. What makes it stick out and gives it its own identity is how open it is with every bit of info.

When you click on an enemy you are told exactly how much HP it has, how much damage you will do to it if you attack and how much damage you will take in response. The core of the game is optimizing these encounters, and most of the design is built around reinforcing this. You have to click on an enemy on the tile next to you to attack once (which prompts a counter attack) as no enemy in this game will ever attack you on its own. Once an enemy is defeated it will never respawn, but this is balanced out by useful items (gold, arrows, potions) also being limited in supply and not respawning as well. Fortunately when you level up (the only info I didn’t see clearly spelled out was how much XP you got for defeating an enemy, although it is the same among enemy types of the same level) you regain all your health in addition to gaining one HP and raising your attack by one. Given that enemies are often placed in a way that they are blocking key paths around the map and there will be higher level enemies hanging around lower ones the game becomes about figuring out how to reach the next level without ideally having to use up one of the rare healing potions.

The mechanical key here is that if you kill an enemy with an attack you don’t take damage in that exchange, so any enemy you can defeat in a single turn will never harm you. This means you have to balance out say seeing an enemy with 12 HP where you only have 10 attack and determining if it is best to try and take it out with two attack now and if you can absorb the damage that requires, or if it is best to out it off for now and return in another couple levels when a single strike will defeat it.

This is pretty much the gameplay loop for most of the game, but it is oddly compelling and does become a bit more involved the further in you get. You will have to take on enemies that have very high stats but by that point you will have a bow and arrow that will let you attack from safe range, but again there are a limited number of those in the entire game. By the late game you will also have access to a magic system that can be very powerful but you then have to manage MP on top of everything else. For example you can cast a spell that lets you gain one MP back every time you defeat an enemy if you find it, but that will likely mean having to kill five enemies to make up for using a say “be protected from a single hit” spell once.

A side effect of this is that I am pretty sure you can probably screw yourself over, but also means you can probably speedrun things in a half hour or so if you know exactly what you are doing. It probably took me about four or so hours to reach the end, and I was scared that a late mistake (I had missed a set of armor that raised my defense from 8 to 16 for a while and hence had to make certain sacrifices) put me in bad shape, but by then I had enough stuff available to me that I was able to make a run on the final enemy and more or less burn through resources to take it out.

Overall it is a very focused experience and the puzzle part of my brain really enjoyed figuring out what would be the optimal path through the game, figuring out if I could risk taking out a higher level enemy blocking access to a different part of the map and have enough HP left to still reach the next level up or if discretion is the better course of action. I assume some would find it boring but as a fully fleshed out almost formal experiment I think it is fairly successful.

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Oh wait so this game is Tactical Nexus lite?

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a rich heritage of analysis paralysis RPGs, from King’s Bounty through Desktop Dungeons to our glorious Tactical Nexus

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I haven’t played that but… maybe realllllly lite? That game looks like madness while this doesn’t get nearly that level of technically demanding.

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Remnants

This is gonna be a short one. Remnants is an RPG Maker walking sim where you wander around some underground areas for a bit trying to piece together what happened in the past in theory but mainly are just taking in the sights. That is generally unexciting, except that the sights are as such:

So if you think these places look snazzy then it is very much wandering around in this game for a bit. If you don’t then there is no reason to. I have nothing more to type really, I personally loved the aesthetic.

Also I couldn’t get the game to load initially, quoting a comment on the store page: “I had to set FullPackageFlag=1 in RPG_RT.ini to fix this.”

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Palace of Woe

Palace of Woe is a game by the same person behind previous bundle games 10S and WATER’S FINE that takes a familiar base in a fairly unique direction. When you first start up it feels very much like a top down Zelda game in terms of overworld layout. There is no traditional combat (we’ll get to that in a second) and it is much more maze-like, but that is where my mind first went. Your overall goal is to find all the treasures hidden around the map, which allows you to approach the end game section of the map. This is in one part trickier as it is very hard to simply walk from point A to point B, the paths you can take are fairly winding and there are some hidden-ish passages you need to keep your eyes open for. The other reason it is tricky is because sometimes things are blocking your path.

(I kinda love all the enemy designs BTW and it is taking all my will to not just flood this post with all of them.)

I did say that there is nothing resembling traditional combat, and that is true whether you think that means action game or rpg combat. Instead… combat is a puzzle game.

When a battle starts you are faced with a 5x5 grid with your and the enemy’s energy bar on each side of it. You are given a shape you have to place on said grid wherever you choose, and you can see the shape coming up next and one piece you have in hold that you can switch with the active piece if you so choose. Your goal is to place these pieces on the grid in order to complete horizontal or vertical lines, at which point the line disappears and the enemy takes one point of damage. The thing is that if you place a new shape over a square on the grid that is already occupied you take a point of damage for each square you do this for. There is also a clock ticking down for each shape that will place it automatically if it hits zero, which ramps up the tension and often forces you to scramble.

The clever part of this is that every enemy type has their own unique shapes that come up in the same order each time you confront them, which further gives them their own identity and difficulty level. As you get further across the map some enemies start throwing some rather complicated shapes your way that you have to fairly rapidly figure out how to piece together, and as they are often larger you can go from near victory to taking several hits of damage in a single turn. This allows them to place some high level enemies in early places that you’ll stumble along and be terrified of initially that you can then double back and try to challenge later on, which is tricky in a game in which you gain no abilities or “levels” in the course of playing.

There is a good chance that some of you have noticed the color scheme in every screenshot and in fact the only colors in the entire game. I am perhaps a bit dense and it took me to the ending credits to go “hey, this might be a trans story” because there was an actual trans pride flag in said credits with identical colors. Looking back at the screenshots I took and while it doesn’t outright say it… it is pretty obviously an allegory about that and I feel pretty silly for somehow not picking up on it. In retrospect it handles it pretty well!

Anyways it took me about an hour to play through this and I enjoyed it a good bit in spite of the message sailing over my head. It is a fun overworld to wander about and the puzzle battles have a nice push and pull where you can go from comfortable to screwed and vice-versa in the blink of an eye. Add in some really swell enemy design and one late twist that I cannot spoil that was amazingly well played and I feel very positive about it.

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Okay quick write up for a game I played earlier today that I wouldn’t recommend playing but that I found interesting in an abstract kinda way.

Zepball Deluxe is a project the developer made in high school that he only uploaded to put in the giant bundle to show his support, so we need not harp on the fact that it is bad. It is basically a pong-like where you can’t lose but get a point every time a ball hits your paddle. When you hit a target score you automatically move on to the next stage, which all have different arrangements sometimes including grey paddles that move around blocking the balls from reaching you.

The complicating factor is that the target scores you have to reach are insane. The game starts listing incorrect scores around stage 11 of 20 but that screenshot does show my cumulative score in the final stage is 11,238, with the final goal number being within a few hundred of that. When you reach said score you enter your name on the high score table, which since every score will be the same is instead calculated based on your total time. The thing is the physics are a bit simplistic and funky and the game itself not particularly fun, so I would arrange the paddles so that the ball would just start bouncing on and off it on its own and go do something else for a bit (in this case I dug up an old printed out ginormous slitherlink puzzle I had that Simon Tatham puzzle thing spit out age ago that I could never solve and picked away at that). In essence it became a game about not playing but setting up so that it’d play itself, and ideally exploiting the geometry or iffy physics or bugs so that it’d score on itself as fast as possible so that the next stage would pop up and I’d again move the paddles for a minute before going back to my other project.

Sometimes it’d take several minutes for the game to score enough point to advance, sometimes I’d luck out and get the balls bouncing in such a way that it’d take less than thirty seconds to do so. Basically playing the game would be dumb, it is legitimately bad, but finding the best way to not play it so that it finishes playing with itself via borderline exploits… that is at least interestingly stupid. That’s an actual concept I will think about for a day or so.

Anyways don’t play the game.

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So I don’t recall if I mentioned this but I am in theory approaching the home stretch of this endeavor, started with about 400ish games and doing a quick count I think I have just a bit over 50 left to check out. This ended up being the longest gaming project I have ever undertaken but it is good to feel like I am close to seeing it through and that I won’t have to do anything like this again for a good long while…

…hold on, next week almost a year to the day of the release of this bundle itch will be releasing another giant bundle to raise funds for palestinian aid that is already over 700 games. That is a very good thing/cause yet I am struck by the notion and slight concern that I might be doing this forever…

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This means I should write a bit about a few of these again, so…

The Testimony of Trixie Glimmer Smith

I know at leas one person here is a big fan of the game/series so this is just gonna be a quick mention from me (i.e. teeing this up if anyone else wants to jump in), but this is a pretty good visual novel. I really liked a bunch of the characters, the story was pretty solid (and the alternate paths were worth doubling back to check out), my only real complaint is that its predecessor likely due to being a point and click adventure game was much stronger aesthetically and it was a bit of a bummer to see that hit the chopping block.

Mini Ghost

Mini Ghost is a small 8-bit-esque metrovania. It is a very plentiful genre and this game lacks much of a hook of its own so it is likely a safe skip, but if one is in the mood for a game of this ilk that lasts only a couple of hours this is fairly well put together. The one mechanical quirk it does have is that it is very stingy when it comes to healing opportunities. There are a couple of places when you can heal but in general the only way to get health back is by filling the XP bar all the way up via killing enemies, so basically you get one health unit back for every twenty enemies killed (upgrades and progress does change this math a bit). You can save anywhere so it is possible to minimize the impact of this, and it is a rather small world so having to restart from the opening screen isn’t devastating, but it does push you to try and avoid taking any unnecessary damage more than many games in this genre do.

Marie’s Room

If Gone Home is a genre, Marie’s Room is definitely in it. Taking place in a single room as opposed to an entire house makes it a much more compressed experience both in scope and length (unless you get very stuck I can’t see it taking anyone anywhere near an hour) it is executed well if a bit by the numbers with one key exception. While you wander around your friend Marie’s room trying to piece together what happened with her and reminisce by examining certain objects around said room Marie’s journal (which you have and are snooping through) gets progressively more filled in. This is a very clever twist as it gives us each girl’s perspective on these events and how they differ (and how their assumptions about how the other is feeling at the time often prove flawed) do a good job of fleshing out their personalities and character. There are enough of this kind of walking/snooping sim out there that I haven’t played that it is hard for me to place it within that particular hierarchy, but while not the best it struck me as better than many I have come across.

Sidewords

I rarely play word-based puzzle games, but gave this one a shot and thought it was a pretty clever thing to pick away with when I felt like my mind was in a vocabulary-friendly mood. You are given a grid with a word along the top and side of it, and using the letters from those words you must fill in the entire grid. When you spell a three-plus letter long word out of letters from both words all the grid squares where the used letters from each word cross are filled in with the word and can no longer be used to craft other words (as an example using the above grid, if you spelled out LARGE using just the L from metal the entire bottom row would be filled, but if you used the L and A instead along with the R, G and E from gear three-fourths of the bottom two rows would be filled in instead).

This offers a bit of strategy as you have to be concerned with both what words you can clears fill in now along with making sure you leave open the possibility of filling the rest in afterwards. Running out of vowels is bad, and it is possible to have a few spare squares left unfilled near the end that are arranged in such a way that it isn’t possible to fill them in, forcing you to remove some words and take another shot at it. I will admit that I brute forced my way through a lot of three letter combinations hoping that something that sounded like a word might turn out to actually be one. It is one of those games that don’t work as something you sit down specifically to play for a while, but as something you pull up for a bit to solve a puzzle or two when killing some time it does fill that role well.

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Semblance

Semblance is a puzzle platformer whose game description on its itch page uses the term playdough yet substitutes that for a more generic term on its Steam page. I now have questions about the game’s developer and their feelings regarding playdough’s legal team, but those will likely have to wait for another day.

The steam store page leans on the term “deformable” instead, and that’s a good one to go with. The main mechanical hook here is that most of the game world (and even the player character) is made of a legally-distinct-from-playdough substance that deforms when you jump or dash into it. A platform is too low for you to reach what you want to leap to? Jump into its underside a few times to form a hill in the middle of it you can then stand upon and leap from. Here is a gif of exactly that!

As you can also see the main goal for each of these puzzles is to grab a glowy thing which then causes a door to open and allows you to move on to the next puzzle. There is a system in place where if you die before you get to said door everything resets to its original position to keep you honest, but for the most part this objective is fairly straightforward.

As far as the mechanic itself goes it is both rather clever and well executed. On its surface it has the feel of “this is a very good idea that I worry you can only build so many distinct puzzles around” but they do a good job mixing things up for the four or so hours it’ll likely take to play through. You will have to deform the terrain to either block lasers or alter the direction they are facing, smash the player character against hard surfaces to change its own shape and properties (if you flatten it out the jump trajectory is a bit different for example), it just does a good job of tossing a new wrinkle out there regularly enough to keep things fresh and moving throughout.

Presentation wise a good deal of effort was spent on filling the screen up with stuff. Some would call it busy looking (the above shot is but is also a transitional screen with no puzzles) but I thought it was neat to look at, I dig the whole “there are a ton of roots everywhere” aesthetic although I could have went with a touch more color variety in each individual world.

The side effect of having so much of the game being deformable and being made by a small team is that it can be a bit buggy at times, but these are generally of a minor variety. The most common is getting caught in a wall you were smashing in to in order to reshape and having to reload. Fortunately it saves with each completed puzzle and said puzzles generally aren’t super long. I generally get angry when a game messes up and makes me redo stuff and I never got frustrated here.

As a puzzle platformer I’d say it is of pretty moderate difficulty with an occasional spike due to a one-off puzzle that makes you go “how?” for a bit. There are some collectible things to grab that I think may unlock an alternate ending (I have no recollection what the story is beyond “uncorrupt the world” so it isn’t very important) but when not hidden they do serve as bits of bonus puzzles to try and figure out how to reach if you are in the mood to do so. In general I found it quite enjoyable to play through and even with the occasional bug it felt a good deal more polished than many other bundle offerings. I don’t know how some puzzle platformers with a mechanical twist and distinct presentation become huge hits while others don’t, but it feels like in an alternate universe Semblance could have been one of the ones to break through. As is I’d say it is probably one of the solider puzzle platformers in the bundle and worth checking out for the interested.

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Have you played The Floor is Jelly? Sort of a similar hook but the game goes in an unexpected direction at the end

I have, that game is fine but the two games play dramatically differently as The Floor is Jelly has a big focus on momentum alterations while that isn’t much of a factor in Semblance. I think I prefer Semblance of the two as particularly near the end in The Floor is Jelly it felt like it became increasingly less precise and I personally am not a big fan of that in this genre of games.

That said I checked and The Floor is Jelly is also in the bundle and is definitely neat enough to at least mess around in for a bit (I’d say the first 3/4 of the game are pretty well done) so I recommend anyone to go give both of them a quick shot and make up their own mind!

Speed Dating For Ghosts

Speed Dating For Ghosts is basically a visual novel short story collection in the guise of a speed dating meet-up. Depending on which rooms you choose to visit you will have the option of dating one of twelve ghosts and go through a bit of quick Q&A to get a feeling out for each other and see if you might be compatible. Of the twelve only one didn’t want to proceed to an actual date with me so it is rather forgiving. By splitting up the bulk of the game’s story among the twelve potential dates it gives the game the freedom to touch on a bunch of different characters and moods and as each date lasts maybe ten minutes it keeps up a pretty quick pace throughout. I also dug the hell out of most of the ghost designs, which is good as they make up virtually all of the game’s visuals. Heck, I dug it overall.

Shrug Island

Yeah like I could skip a game called Shrug Island and still show my face on SB. Based on an animated short also named Shrug, this is a short point & click adventure game with a neat watercolor aesthetic. What gives it its identity is that you play as two different characters separated from each other on the island. Each possesses slightly different abilities and occasionally have to open doors for the other character but otherwise are having to figure out how to bypass their own obstacles in order to make their way towards the other. The puzzles themselves are occasionally tricky to figure out due to the goals being a bit unclear but is otherwise on the simpler side. One character’s ability basically results in you having to find three hidden objects on many screens and while brief those sequences aren’t particularly great.

It is a pretty enough island to wander around, the hand drawn sprites combined with the watercolor inspired backgrounds and some alright designs makes this where the game most strongly stands out. There is also a notable focus on sounds and music, I have a bit of a tin ear but it seemed well enough done. There’s a bunch of point and click-style games like this in the bundle and it definitely isn’t the best of the bunch (that might go to MilkMaid of the Milky Way, might have to think about that more) but it does look good enough to carry the bit over an hour it takes and I think I speak for all of us when I say I’m glad shrug got an island.

Butterflies Episode 1: Rudies

The is a very SB user themed post. Anyways, look at the next screenshot and try and guess what game this one is inspired by.

If you guessed Jet Set Radio you have eyes and are correct. Running dangerously close to being an outright fangame you are given a small but open chunk of city to skate around, tag with graffiti and avoid security in. It is all open from the start with you finding various missions to attempt, with completing enough of them opening up harder ones to test yourself against. These range from getting a high score in a brief period of time, chaining several obstacles together without hitting the ground or simple get from point A to B in a certain period of time. I found the controls to be a bit funky (to be fair I also found the controls in JSR to be a bit funky as well) but after an hour or so I figured them out enough to make it much more manageable. The city design is legit pretty strong in terms of a skatable place, the Tony Hawk games still have it beat but there are decent enough lines and options in there that the challenges do a decent job of pushing you to see and figure out. While the skaters themselves are colorful enough the city is sadly a bit lacking in that regard, going for something a bit more realistic.

I had some fun with it, it is a bit rough around the edges and I never was the biggest JSR fan to begin with but I do enjoy other skating games a good deal, if unlike me you do consider yourself a big fan of JSR I think it is worth at least giving a look.

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Woah hey me.

Worst that is what the gang in JSR is called.

Hopefully this doesn’t ruin my SEO.

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Mixolumia is great. The music is fantastic. The central mechanic (match 3 or more bits) is pretty standard but the shape of the playfield and the manner in which the blocks slide apart is just unfamiliar enough to make things interesting and instill some panic when things speed up and the playfield starts to fill.

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