oh Fugl is in this. That is a real chill hangout.
3 Likes
HexaCycle
Despite technically being an abandoned beta (I am unsure why, it seems feature full and bug free) HexaCycle might be my favorite puzzle game from the (first) bundle so far. As it is a slitherlink variant, let me briefly touch on what that game is like for those unfamiliar with it. Slitherlink takes place on a grid of squares with a certain number of the squares containing a number between 0 and 3 which indicates how many sides of said grid square have a line along them. When it is finished you have a continuous loop whose line never crosses over itself. It’s a pretty great logic puzzler.
HexaCycle is built around similar ideas with a few key differences. One is that rather than form a loop you have a start and end point marked on the puzzle which you have to draw a line between that also never crosses over itself. The fact it is hex rather than grid-based means that each of them has six sides as opposed to four and the puzzle shapes can be much more irregular and unique compared to the typical squares and rectangles of slitherlink. The final difference, and perhaps the hardest one to initially wrap one’s head around is that it is seemingly color rather than number based (it is still number based at heart).
In the upper left corner of the screen is a sequence of colors between two and five colors long. Whenever a side of a hex is filled in with a line it moves to the next color in sequence. In the above picture if a yellow hex has two sides filled in it will switch to red and then white. If you advance past the last color you start over at the first color of the sequence. When the puzzle is solved every hex will be green along with that single continuous line being drawn from the start to end points.
This on its own results in a pretty solid puzzle game of maybe moderate difficulty, but the game quickly adds something that turns it all on its head. By the time you get to the normal difficulty puzzles three special hexes will be put into play. These hexes are the only ones that can cause other hexes to rotate through the color sequence without the line making contact with their sides. One of these cause every hex adjacent to them to shift one color every time they do, one causes every hex within two hexes of it to do this, and the last causes every hex located in a straight line from any of its sides to be affected.
I cannot overstate how significant these are. By the late game with rather large puzzles 90% or so of the hexes will be affected by at least one of these special hexes and often by multiple of them, having a single hex affected by half a dozen different special ones is not an uncommon occurrence. You will be faced with puzzles made up of several dozen hexes with many of them interconnected because of these special ones, having to identify which few ones you can figure out (generally the ones that aren’t affected by others are the best to start with) and slowly putting little bits of line here and there, eventually figuring out whole sections which likely makes other ones more solvable themselves. It can get very tricky, but it is very well done.
One may ask at this point why did they go with colors instead of numbers, and there is a good reason for this. As noted before in addition to the base difficulty level the color sequence can be between two and five colors long, and that probably affects the puzzle’s challenge more than said difficulty level. With five colors things are relatively straightforward, each hex in essence has five states and they are all fairly distinct. Ignoring the special hexes for a moment with five colors just by looking at a hex you can tell how many sides of it will have a line along them; if it is the third color in sequence then it will be two sides, etc. Now move to a two color sequence and if it is the first color either one, three or five sides will have a line along them. In essence with fewer colors in play each color gives you less info, and this can make a profound difference.
The game comes with 92 handmade puzzles in addition to a fairly robust random puzzle mode. There is thankfully a way to test mark hexes and a color blind mode. Really aside from a fairly placeholder feeling title menu it does not feel like a beta or unfinished game in the least. As is it deserves mention alongside the various Hexcells, picrosses and Tametsis that make up the upper crust of the logic puzzler subgenre and I recommend it wholeheartedly for any fans of those.
4 Likes
With my fave puzzler of the bunch out of the way, let me touch briefly on a few of the other ones I came across.
Inkanians
Inkanians is one of those “press a direction and have your avatar move in that direction until it hits something” puzzle games, if you’ve played any of the Quell games it is the same basic concept. The problem is that said Quell games are a lot better at it. The black and white mesoamerican aesthetic is neat but does not change at all during the game which works against it, plus the different block types could benefit from being more visually distinct. The puzzle design is solid with some tricky ones sprinkled in along the way, but without more variety the number of puzzles should have been cut down a bit. It’s fine, but more of a time killer than something to really sink your teeth into.
Theorem
Theorem has one of the best sounding hooks I’ve come across in a puzzle game in ages and frustratingly does so little with it. The base mechanic is that you rotate your block around these puzzles to pick up all the orbs and make your way to the end point. The trick is that one of your block’s faces can’t touch “normal” ground squares, only being able to be face down on the start, end and certain special ground tiles. The hook is that thanks to either falling tiles or ones that can be moved if you make one of these illegal moves but cannot move back to the tile you came from due to it no longer being present the screen flashes for a bit (seizure warning) and you are allowed to get away with it.
That’s such a great little twist, setting up not only a rule set but introducing a way to cheat at it through careful set-ups! Sadly the game only uses it rarely and it generally isn’t disguised all that well when it needs to be done. While some of the puzzles are good enough it feels very much like someone learning how to piece together a puzzle game, you will get a bunch of puzzles in a row iterating on the same concept/layout with a single extra twist involved almost like the dev was prototyping and decided to use all of them. If you kept only the best/most developed of these you’d have a better (if rather short) puzzle game, as is even with a couple legitimately cool ideas (the other main one is if you come across a raised square if you go down a different side you might trigger an impossible geometry perspective switch that lets you adjust the relative orientation of your block) whoever designed it still hasn’t fully developed in terms of actual puzzle/stage design. Perhaps down the road when they get more experience they will develop something that this game only hints at.
Atomic Reconstruction
This is a bit of a mess, but I will give them credit for committing hard to the whole chemistry thing. You are given a tight arrangement of hexagons and must produce a goal element via fusing together or breaking apart the various elements it starts you off with. The game does an awful job explaining all of this, and how it is handled is much more complicated than one would assume. There is a periodic table button because everything is handled by the elements actual (rounded to whole number) atomic weights, and you can only fuse together various elements if they add up to a valid atomic weight (and they will only split down to certain real elements, hydrogens do a lot of work to save the math). I don’t believe the game ever mentions atomic weights, I fortunately remembered just enough high school chemistry to eventually realize what they were driving at. Highlighting an element will show what it will break down into which is a huge blessing. There is later stuff with more complicated compounds I had to google help for just to even grasp what it was asking of me. On one hand I have to tip my hat for making a legit heavy chemistry puzzle game, and it isn’t that long, but sadly even when finally grasping the mechanics it still feels very brute force heavy as opposed to actually puzzling things out. I guess file it under noble failure?
Spring Falls
Finally we have a much more relaxing puzzler in Spring Falls. In this one you have to raise and lower bits of the environment to shift the water around so that the flowers bloom (often via making sure the grass is growing towards them as well as the water). It takes a little bit to figure out how it all works (and when new mechanics pop up I wish it explained them a bit better than just giving you an easy puzzle to mess around with until you stumble upon how they work) but it ends up being fairly well designed while also having a pretty distinct mechanic not really seen in many other puzzle games at all. It definitely is more of a “chill” puzzler but there are a few late game puzzles that legit had me stumped for a good bit, which felt frustrating (in a good way) as at any time there are only a few moves available to you and yet they still managed to really make you work for them. I’ve definitely played better and deeper puzzle games but this definitely does a good job making the most out of what the mechanics allow, in that way it is very fully realized. Definitely the strongest of all the puzzle games mentioned here.
7 Likes
Multiple times in this topic I’ve said some version of the phrase “this iffy game has a good concept, I would like to see someone else take a shot at it to see if they could make a better one.” This past week I discovered in a couple of those cases that someone in fact did so and said games were also in this very bundle!
Binaries
This is one of those “control two things simultaneously” games that litter this bundle but don’t worry, it is part of the saner subset of them.
Like the mentioned months ago Dee Dum you control two objects at the same time, but they do not move independently of each other (such as each being controlled by a separate analog stick) as each ball responds to the same controller inputs at the same time. When you press left both move left at the same time, if you press jump both will jump if they can, etc. As I’ve now played enough “control multiple objects at the same time” games to last a lifetime I say with great confidence that this is a much more reasonable thing to ask the player to do.
While Dee Dum was much more of a puzzle-heavy platformer this is more of a strategic actual platformer and I think it is better off for it. It is a lot quicker paced without becoming to twitch/reaction-time heavy, even most of the harder levels are less than a minute long when done successfully. It is smart enough to rarely put the player in situations where they have to do a bunch of things in quick succession while keeping track of two different areas of the screen, and when it does so these are generally some of the quickest stages in the game (I’m talking sub-ten seconds when successful) so dying more on them is less punishing.
Because of this through the game’s hundred stages it pulls off the rare task of being challenging without being absurd, a truly rare accomplishment among these sorts of games. The stages themselves are well designed and switch things up enough to rarely feel like a drag or that you are doing the same thing each time. The platforming demands aren’t generally that demanding with many stages allowing you a chance to get to a safe point and take a break to evaluate your next best moves (there are goal times to go after for the truly committed; I was not). It really is much more about figuring out which ball to focus on at which time or to advance first and it works much better than I thought it would. It has a habit of dropping little jokes on most of the screens and I can see the reception to those being divisive, but this was a case where I went to the Steam page afterwards as it was so well crafted (on top of everything else it feels very polished) I wondered if it was a hit indie game that I had just never heard of; it was not. As is out of the several bundle games that play around with ideas such as this it is probably the best of the bunch, only Dyo would really compete and that is a fairly different experience from the rest of its ilk.
The Sword and the Slime
Some time back I wrote about a game named Swung where you used the mouse to control a flying magical sword and use it to defend a cowardly knight as he made his way through several stages; it was awful and no one should play it.
Because of that experience I was very hesitant when it came time to play this game as it is possible that the concept just doesn’t work. After playing through this I don’t know if said concept can result in a great game, but it can produce a pretty solid one. The control scheme of the mouse moves the flying sword around, pressing a mouse button swings it and the slime that accompanies you roughly trails your movements (which is basically what both these games went with) is always gonna have an element of imprecision to it that I think does put a ceiling on the experience, but the devs here worked around it really well. Where Swung focused mostly on combat and platforming, both of which require a degree of precision and neither of which were done well there, this game is more about light puzzling and defending. You won’t have to deal with enemies charging and slashing at your slime that frequently, but you will have to keep the sword in front of it and time swings to knock arrows out of the way. You won’t have to make weird flying leaps to narrow platforms, but you will have to make sure the slime wanders of a moving platform at the right time to land on something below. It is similar in theory but less demanding, which basically puts things in line with what you can reasonably be asked to do.
Because of this it frees the game to throw a bunch of short stages your way over its 90 or so minute playtime with more variety than one would expect. As your sword can only move while in the light and early on the slime becomes a moving light source due to something it eats (slimes will eat anything that gets in their way and become larger due to it, this becomes key with you having to manage its size from time to time including having to cut it down yourself at times) you generally must keep fairly close to it whether that means timing its way through an obstacle course, keeping enemies from getting to it as it rides a platform, avoiding weird purple glowing things that depower the sword while trying to keep up with said slime and so forth. There is probably only so much one can do with this concept but this game seems to explore most of them and then gets out of there. It is a case where they took an odd, somewhat limited gimmick and designed around it just about as well as one could reasonably ask. With Swung I saw about how bad it could all go, and with The Sword and the Slime I think I saw just about the best one could get from this specific set-up. It isn’t great but it is nevertheless solid, and with these odder concepts and controls that is really all I ask.
7 Likes
So I took a glance at the newer giant bundle and in doing so noticed that F J O R D S is in there. F J O R D S is swell, I did a whole topic on it here a few years back full of lots of screenshots and a failed attempt to write a compelling let’s play of my time with it. Here’s a link to it:
That probably spoils way too much of the game though so maybe just play it if you think it seems neat. Let me just steal the trailer from there…
Next time we return to original content after this rerun.
3 Likes
Even in Arcadia
A student project clearly built with zero budget, you wander around the launch party for a new product/planet and basically spy on the conversations people are having. There are only five or so “main” characters in this thirty minute story and you can probably figure out most of the details with two playthroughs. Narratively it is about corporations and forced obsolescence on a planetary scale, and the story is rough in spots but otherwise “alright I guess”.
Why this worked for me is tied much more to the presentation. Everything in the game feels like it is made up of pictures clipped from elsewhere and arranged here, and each of these flat images will face towards you no matter what you do as there is no “behind” to any of them. There are some games like that already in this bundle, but what this game has is that since you cannot really interact with anyone or anything you just watch these unanimated almost paper dolls move through this multi-room environment having their preset conversations on these specified routes… but every character in the game loops back to their starting location by the end at which point the whole thing starts again from the beginning with absolutely no pomp and circumstance.
My grandparents used to have this model ice skating rink with several skaters taking their paths along the ice and they all seemed very independent, but if you watched it long enough you could pick out that everything on it was synced up on a definite loop. This reminds me a great deal of that and while it is at times rough in the execution (some characters finish their bits earlier than everyone else and literally just go back to their start location for several minutes staying perfectly silent until everything starts over) it is the first “story loop” game that I’ve played that has quite this feel and made me wonder if something could be done with this particular twist on this sub-genre.
Goopty Goo
Goopty Goo is a short, simple single room platformer built around a single gameplay idea: You have to jump on and bounce off all the cubes on the screen without hitting the floor to win the screen. I basically try to do this in every video game that has me jumping on things already, so a game specifically designed around it is perfect for me. It is maybe fifteen minutes long and fairly one note (which is fine for a fifteen minute game IMO) but otherwise does exactly what it is there to do.
Retrace
On its store page Retrace has a quote that describes it as a horror game mix of Nier and the Zero Escape games; it is actually just a short(er) Zero Escape-esque adventure game. A weird event results with you and three of your friends ending up in a weird house, and depending on which one you team along with results in you going to different places and generally at least some of you dying. After playing through all three of these routes you begin to notice ways in which they overlap and interact, and in doing so can start to plan an approach that just maybe can result in everyone living and being able to escape.
The story manages to avoid devolving into the absurd madness that the games that inspired it often did (you can decide if this is for better or worse) but the puzzles that are here are very thin and the narrative on its own isn’t particularly compelling. That said if you always wanted to try one of those games but didn’t want to put in 10-20+ hours it takes to complete them this one while worse can be hammered out in a couple of hours if one is interested, and there is something to piecing together the exact course of action through the various routes to save everyone.
Run Jump Fail
This is stealthily one of the more mechanically interesting things in the bundle. It is one of those “intentionally awkward to control” games where you have to make your way through a series of short obstacle courses, and it is pared down enough that at times it feels as much like a proof of concept than a fully developed game of its own. What sets it apart in my mind is that while a bit awkward initially there is nothing inherently wrong with its approach to what is in essence a 3d platformer, and unlike say a QWOP where mastery is intentionally unlikely and the goal is mostly to keep upright as long as possible here you can get a good handle on what makes it peculiar and how to manage that without too much time investment.
What makes how it handles odd is that much of the focus on the running and jumping is placed on the feet. Your box fellow at regular intervals hops between his right and left feet so you have to be constantly aware which foot you are gonna land with. On wide straightaways this is of little concern but when you start having to jump between increasingly narrow platforms or make your way along a thin strip of ground maneuvering slightly back and forth with each step it becomes something a bit different than pretty much every other 3d platformer I can recall playing. As someone who is always interested in seeing how other early 3d platformers dealt with the prospect of it before Mario 64 spelled much of the basics out and is a particularly big fan of the time trials in Mirror’s Edge due to seeing a well considered 3d platformer take its own distinct path I found it a very intriguing experiment to play around with, and once I wrapped my head around it and got to some of the trickier courses I found myself pulling off some precise little techniques hopping my way through them.
The biggest issue is the camera which you have to manually reposition yourself (and there is no option to invert the Y axis which should be illegal) which often leaves you having to decide between repositioning the camera while hoping your footing remains good or having to take a jump with poor depth perception due to the current camera angle. It isn’t a deal breaker but it is a shame. Still while it definitely isn’t one of the best games in the bundle it did scratch this very particular itch for me as it gave me a deceptively well realized alternate take on a 3d platformer to mess around with, and for that I am thankful.
11 Likes
Just some brief write-ups today for games with at least one (and sometimes only one) interesting element.
Ring of Fire: Prologue
This is such a tease as this is a demo for a game that is coming out at some theoretical future date, but the little bit that is there is stylish enough that it was an intriguing if brief taste. You play as weird masked detectives investigating a murder scene. While there is some pointing and clicking around the single room to try and piece together what happened this is paired with having to take things you find and type them into a google equivalent to get further info, and if you want to go elsewhere to interrogate someone you will have to figure out what the address is so that you can enter it into not-google maps in order to get directions. It fortunately was not insultingly obvious as to what you had to type into search, hopefully the full game will manage to avoid that pitfall. The very brief interrogations basically had you choosing between different questions or approaches, not really enough to figure out how much depth it is going to have. If it was less stylish I’d probably forget about it, but I dig the aesthetic a good deal and everything does seem at least mechanically solid so I’m willing to keep an eye out for the full release when it does eventually appear.
Path Out
Path Out is a half hour long RPG Maker game chronicling a Syrian teen’s childhood in Syria up to when his parents had him flee the country due to the ongoing civil war. What makes it something a bit more than that is every so often the game pauses and a video pops up in the top corner of the actual person who lived through these events (and who also developed the game) to offer additional background on what happened, explain the limitations of what the game can actually show or sometimes just outright criticize the game outright. It does have the effect of bringing the story more to life as it becomes impossible to ignore that this is something that someone actually lived through, but it also doesn’t cover up that the game part itself is very generic and rough around the edges. I think the worth of the former outweighs the weakness of the latter, but it is a clever idea I wish was attached to something a bit better.
Three Lesbians in a Barrow
Part three of the Parsnip/Testimony of Trixie Glimmer Smith trilogy. On one hand, this is clearly the least developed of the three games, taking place in a single location with a story that isn’t particularly fleshed out. On the other hand, the characters are still well written and even if it feels a bit side story-esque if you enjoyed the previous games there really is no reason you wouldn’t enjoy this. This game probably doesn’t belong in this specific post as I liked it a good deal, just be aware that compared to what came before it is rather thin.
Luminous
Okay I’m not gonna lie to you, mechanically this game is rough. It is designed to be a more methodical “chunkier” action platformer (just look at that sprite if you don’t believe me, nothing that looks like that is gonna move that quick) but the combat is just plain bad and the jumping isn’t quite up for some of the later obstacles they throw your way. That said I dig the hell out of what is a fairly unique retro aesthetic and it is short as hell (four or five brief stages tops) so I was able to put up with it. I’m not sure I’d recommend others do the same, I just wrote about it so that I could show people the screenshot.
Yi and the Thousand Moons
I’d say this is more of a musical EP you play through than anything else, which is a polite way of saying that the game part is mostly nonexistent and of poor quality. That said while we have a lot of rhythm games we have very few outright true musicals in game form, and for this musical folk tale they clearly sprung for professional grade singers and musicians which is very notable compared to how… not that most musical interludes in games come off as. I appreciate it as an experiment that leans almost entirely in the opposite direction everyone else takes and am glad it exists.
The Search
I try not to write-up bad games just for the sake of going “look at this bad game!” as it is pretty obnoxious. Allow me a moment of weakness to mention The Search, which is a short Myst-like if Myst was linear, lacking in environmental storytelling and featuring writing such as this:
Perhaps you are interesting in reading about how the teaching of Jung and other philosophers relates to the process of creating art, for me this is the rare game where I started to resent how pretentious it all seemed which is impressive given it probably is less than 45 minutes long. I know some of you like Myst (which IMO is swell) and might be starved enough for games like it to be willing to mess around with even a poor one, in which case all I can say is good luck.
7 Likes
Must clear backlog of thoughts slowly but surely…
Signs of the Sojourner
I think this game is somewhat known, but just in case it is an odd deckbuilder where your cards represent how well you can talk to others, and being able to match enough symbols to build a chain means you communicate well while not being able to do that results in the opposite. It’s a solid little system if a bit easy/simple on the micro- scale. The complicating factor is that when you visit further lands they have different symbols entirely, and taking on cards with those symbols means you have less of the ones common to the places nearer your home which makes communicating with people from those lands trickier. Is that an accurate summation of real life communication? IDK I guess in certain cases I can see parallels but I feel that going home and not being able to communicate as well with your brother feels like a bit of a stretch, but in terms of a game mechanic it forces you to balance and choose between both home and away options and that is probably the central tension in terms of choices. Plus if I’m honest it is more interesting than most other video game conversation systems in terms of the possibility of failing and not just picking options from a menu.
As a general rule I am rather bored by deck builders and this managed to hold my attention through an entire playthrough. The fact that it is probably rather tricky to hit a “hard fail” state and that there are so many places and story beats that they can’t all be hit in a single run does make choices feel more important without being haunted by the specter of screwing it all up. I didn’t bother with any further runs as, you know, still a deck builder but I think if one is more open to those types of experiences and want a more narrative/choice heavy take on them this is probably a good game to put some time into.
Escape From Life Inc.
This is basically a Lost Vikings style puzzle platformer mixed with a metrovania apparently made by a 15 year old. Is it as we say “rough around the edges”? That it is. Does it still have its charms? I would say yes. I am someone who has a soft spot for a dev who just decides to try and toss everything into a project even if it is more than they can reliably even try to handle much less polish, and this very much falls into that category. It often jumps between regular platforming, puzzle platforming, story sections, boss battles, minor takes on stealth among other bits probably a bit more than is advisable but I think it works in its favor. There is an exuberance to it in addition to some freshness (while the pieces that make it up are not new, people generally don’t mix them together like this). I wouldn’t say the puzzles are ever brilliant but there are some good puzzle ideas in play, there is a good balance between the three characters different abilities and how much they are leaned on (plus they each get their own metrovania-style power upgrades as the game advances) and accidentally sequence breaking in a puzzle game with unlockable powers can be rather scary when you realize what you have done but a unique situation to try and extricate yourself from. It is probably too rough for a general recommendation, but if one dug The Lost Vikings and is willing to put up with a rough game inspired by it then I’d say it is worth giving a quick try.
A Normal Lost Phone/Another Lost Phone
There is a subgenre of games that are basically about getting your hands on someone’s phone or computer and digging/“hacking” your way through it to figure out who the person who owned it was and what was going on in their life. A bit creepy if you think too much about it, sure. Ignoring that it is a solid set-up for introducing several characters, controlling how much you know about them and the situation around them in addition to trying to decide what the people in the conversations are leaving unsaid. That is, it is a solid set-up if the people developing the game are good at it, fortunately the team here is.
Both games deal with pretty mature topic matters but managed to handle them with in empathetic, respectable manner; Another got a bit… I don’t want to say preachy but “sounding like a pamphlet” at times near the end, but that is a quibble. In general they are relevant topics that games usually aren’t great at handling but are handled fine here. Mechanically in terms of puzzles it is a lot of trying to figure out passwords via hints elsewhere in the phone (a friend in a message says you always use important dates as your passwords, or asks if you remember wifi info, that kind of thing) so how interesting one finds that will determine how engaging that part of the experience is. Both are on the brief side (I’d estimate between one and two hours each) which keeps the pace quick while making sure revelations, or hints at them, aren’t spaced too far apart. There are a bunch of these kinds of game in the bundle but I’d say these games are likely the best of the bunch and hence would be the ones I’d try first.
8 Likes
Tumbleblox
If you have pieced anything about me together by now it should be that I’m pretty much gonna try any of the random puzzle games I come across in the bundle. Some are pleasant surprises, some are poor, and some are interesting messes containing unusual ideas. Tumbleblox is part of that latter group. This is one of those puzzle games where you can adjust gravity to flow in one of the four cardinal directions and have every free block end up falling in that direction, but it combines this with the existence of a block-shaped player character that you still get to control directly and have walk/jump around the stage. For whatever reason that is a combo I’ve rarely if ever seen in a full puzzle game and this game shows that it is a valid combination while also showing how it can become messy.
The decision made that both expands what is possible and introduces a high level of finickiness to the proceedings is the ability to shift the gravity at any moment. In general in games like this every block must move as far as gravity will allow them to before you can shift it again, here you can shift whenever you want in order to for example try and create steps the character can climb to reach a higher area. This also means that shifting gravity for a tenth of a second too long can screw things up dramatically (perhaps permanently), but there is no ability to take back a move due to how tricky that would be to implement given the fluid state of everything. In certain late puzzles this can be maddening, frustrating to the point that I wouldn’t recommend others to dive that deep into it. Here, let me try to show an example:
You are the smiling block fellow in the bottom left, all the other smiling boxes are clones of you that move whenever you do. All you have to do is get across that bottom hallway to the green exit blob, but there are five locked color doors in front of you that can only be opened by a block of that color pressing down a switch of the same color. If a door closes on you while you are on or falling through its square you will die. This means you have to figure out and account for five different puzzle sections at the same time, with that upper and pink sections in particular demanding particular “half moves” at key times to make them possible. Other sections require full moves, any time you try to shift gravity right you have to make sure a door doesn’t close on you (this will kill you a ton), an actual solution is many moves long, some of them require a solid level of precision and there is no way to undo or take back a move. Is this a good puzzle? Probably not, it likely requires too much precision for a puzzle of its length and doesn’t take into account the weaknesses of the mechanics. That said it is an interesting puzzle, clearly ambitious and requiring some higher level strategizing to solve even if balanced on a knife’s edge.
I’ve mentioned before the value of playing flawed or bad titles from smaller or individual devs just to see what happens when best practices or established ideas are either unknown or ignored. It generally will have down periods but you will come across some set-ups that are just plain unusual, and I think that has worth even if unusual often doesn’t exactly equal good. I’d say this game is more flawed than bad (in truth the first half of the game isn’t even that flawed, it is more the game eventually asking more than it should of its mechanics) and as a puzzle game fan even though it could be very frustrating I was glad to see some set-ups that felt truly unique.
…That ended up longer than I expected, oops.
11 Likes
Just wanna say that your dedication to this project is mind-blowing and I’ve really appreciated reading these posts
4 Likes
Well thank you, it just feels a shame to have taken all these screenshots and not do anything with them.
(About 25 games left to play FWIW).
Lenna’s Inception
As I stated before in my subjective experience Lenna’s Inception probably “won” the bundle as the randomized Zelda-like with solid production values seemed to be the go to “what unknown game out of these hundreds of options should you try” pick in every article or convo about the bundle. Because of that I don’t feel like spending too much time on it but IMO it was kind of a mixed bag? The randomization is technically speaking probably impressive but I ended up with a pretty well designed first half of the overworld and much less well arranged second half and dungeons that had to be Zelda 1 “wander around and combat focused” types as opposed to ones with any kinds of puzzles. The final dungeon is the strongest in the game as it is much less straightforward, of course it is also the only one in the game that is not randomized…
At this moment it is worth stating that I am not a huge fan of randomized world design in the vast majority of cases as I’m only likely gonna play through a game one time so I prioritize design over the novelty of not knowing what might be thrown my way in a given run. That might color my perception of this just a bit. Combat is okay in a Zelda 1 kind of way (enemy behavior is a bit limited) but I thought the bosses had decent variety. There is a bunch of stuff going on under the surface both in terms of narrative and alternate ways to tackle certain obstacles in order to trigger hidden endings and other such things. Basically there is some stuff to dig into here but the quality of much of it seems tied to how interesting a world your seed produces, I think I’d personally rather just play one of the actual 2d Zeldas instead.
Gambol
Yeah I stole that screenshot from Steam, you try taking screenshots of a Meat Boy-esque game while playing it sometime…
Gambol is a precision platformer with the gimmick that you have a triple jump that recharges any time you make contact with any “safe” surface (i.e. anything that doesn’t kill you). It is a simple if pretty neat twist on the basic genre formula and the game does a solid job of building levels that take advantage of it. It manages to be tricky without becoming maddeningly so like many of its compatriots, and if you ignore the collectible golden triangles that difficulty would drop even lower. My biggest complaint is that it seems to register down button presses (which cause you to do a divebomb move) if you even breath near the button. There are better games in this sub-genre in the bundle and you can on occasion feel the jankiness poking through (I jumped through a wall and out of the level proper a few times in rather repeatable ways) but if you like these sorts of games, like I do, it controls well and hits all the notes you’d want it to. Basically if you get struck by the feeling that you want to try a game like this it is a fine mid-tier offering.
Adjacency
Adjacency is a puzzle game where you need to get every tile to be the right color. When you click an already colored tile every tile adjacent to it becomes that color whether it is already filled in or not, and while this seems very straightforward it quickly reveals itself to be much trickier than one would guess (I feel like I write this for every puzzle game). A lot of care ends up being spent making sure that certain colors stay “alive” (if you overwrite the last tile of a certain color there is no way to bring it back) and you often bump up against the dreaded “I only need to change this one tile’s color, but doing so changes this other tile’s color, and to fix that two other tiles will be messed up” situation.
That takes you maybe halfway through the game, at which point different obstacles/mechanics get introduced that make things downright complicated. Tiles that can be rotated around, electrical grids that only activate when their “on switch” tiles are the right color and which tiles they manage can only be interacted with and hence colored when powered up, and my mortal enemy tiles that can hold two different colors. These tiles have one main color and second one they hold in reserve and my brain just failed to grasp which order I had to have these absorb colors to change all the surrounding tiles to one color while the back-up color takes over that initial tile, thankfully you can take back moves or I’d have gone nuts (that sounds complicated in writing, it’s complicated in practice too). That is sort of the rub with this game: it is undeniably well made with well considered mechanics and twists to said mechanics, but it is also different enough that I think it is about impossible to predict who will take to it and who will just be flummoxed by it.
Night in the Woods
I mean, you’ve heard of this already. I just also used to call my pet bird a trash bird so I needed an excuse to post that screenshot.
Stars Die
Stars Die is a brief first person adventure/narrative game where you ride a boat to a fairly alien looking island that popped up in the middle of the ocean and have to figure out exactly what the heck is going on. By that I mean both why exactly this strange island appeared but also who exactly you are (you aren’t an amnesiac, you as a player just don’t know who exactly you are playing as), what exactly is going on in the larger world and who of this science team that has already set up base there you should listen to.
While the game has a definite early path you are likely to take there is nothing forcing you to take it, leaving you free to go explore on your own and talk (or not talk) to the people you find around. The science team will go about their tasks even if you don’t interact with them, although the game is rather generous by having them wait in places for a bit and giving you a good amount of time to trigger meetings or conversations before it decides to proceed without you. I think in theory the game/story can just end itself if you wander off and pay no one any mind, but I never pushed things that far; I can’t see that happening unless one really wanted it to.
The focus of the game (aside from the environment design which is blocky but suitably alien) is the character writing, sadly in way too small font. This isn’t to say that they are tremendous fully fleshed out characters (the game is only 20-ish minutes long) but that they all sort of represent different philosophies in terms of how to view what is going on there (someone in a review said they were all basically archetypes and that is fair). In doing so it avoids a clear good/bad divide and instead focuses more on how would one respond if faced with a situation like this one. You will pick up some information over a playthrough but likely only so much so your knowledge is a bit limited when you have to decide whose perspective you align yourself with. There are seemingly several different endings based on which you go with and the two I checked out where dramatically different (one had entirely new areas seemingly just for them)… but the issue is that of those playthroughs 80+% of them was the same. This was perhaps due to a lack of imagination on my part but if I am going to play through a game several times I need the body of the experience to offer more variety than that. Still for those couple of playthroughs I did find it interesting to wander through and interact with on its level, I enjoyed the island itself and while I could see the… philosophical debate between the characters being a bit of a turn off for some I think it fit this specific situation well.
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Want to echo what VastleCania said, I love reading these posts.
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oh, cool, Myth Bearer was in the bundle. this game is by a Sword of Moonlight developer. it’s very inspired by King’s Field!
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Just a couple brief mentions today, keep momentum going.
Spooky Ghosts Dot Com
A fairly middle of the road tiny Metrovania (my completion time was 73 minutes) that I didn’t mind mainly because I dug the pixel art. I saw someone call it busy which… fair, but I found the enemy designs, particularly the bosses, charming and I don’t need much more than that to jump into an hour or so long game. Said boss battles were a bit on the long side but still probably the highlight of the experience, the rest of it was fairly by the book. I do have to give a tip of the hat to the little story that is there: a ghost was watching tv and saw an ad for Spooky Ghosts Dot Com and contacted them to get some new friends, except it was an ad for what is basically a ghost busting business you work for. Said ghost is not happy when he realizes you’ve been walking around his house attacking all his friends. It is silly but there is still something tragic about it all IMO.
Super Platformer Gun
File this one more under interesting than good. This is a puzzle platformer where you have a gun that fires two different types of platforms but you only have a limited number of bullets in order to reach the exit and maybe grab collectible files placed in a few of the levels. As a concept this is neat, sort of a cousin to the subgenre of puzzle platformers best represented by say Explobers. The problem is the execution which lets the concept down. The stage design is fine but rarely more than that, you rarely will see a set piece that will make you go “oh that’s clever” or “what the heck am I supposed to do here”. The controls and physics if I was feeling generous I would describe as rough, for a game that is built around jumping it has a fairly poor jump and the moving platforms you can shoot from your gun have significant collision detection and… “jumping off of this” issues. It is also one of those games that has a “surprise, the story is actually randomly dark” revelation despite little in the presentation or anything for 80% of the game supporting it. All of this makes it something I can’t really recommend… but a puzzle platformer where you have a gun that shoots different types of platforms is a pretty neat idea so credit is due for that, generic “maybe someday someone else will make a better version of this” statement goes here.
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El Tango de la Muerte
El Tango de la Muerte is a period piece that takes place in Argentina a century ago, telling a serious tale of love lost due to unforeseen circumstances; it is also a rhythm game.
I have no idea if this is a consequence of falling in love with PaRappa the Rapper when it was new but I am always intrigued by unusual music/rhythm games and this certainly qualifies as one of them. You control the game with the arrow keys having to time your steps across the grids/dance floors so that you step onto a square right when it fully lights up, which coincidentally happens in time with the music. It sounds simple enough, and perhaps it is if one is better at these types of games than me, but it was generally complicated enough for me to pass the levels but not with particularly great scores. Every other stage or so adds a different special tile you’d have to step upon to cause a certain effect to take place (one fires like a rocket to hit other tiles further away, ideally also in time with the music) but since those generally also must be stepped on in time with the music they don’t add a ton mechanically. They do seem to appear a bit earlier than regular tiles which had a habit of throwing me off in terms of which direction to move next, I am unsure if this is a me problem or a legit design error. It is a rigid system with there only ever being one correct path and doesn’t appear to have much hidden depth, but for a game that one can play through in maybe an hour tops it more than gets the job done while letting those who truly dig it spend a few more trying to get all three stars for each song.
Plus you get rhythm knife fights, who wouldn’t be interested in those?
The narrative is a serious tale of a young man who learns how to tango to impress a girl he likes at her birthday party, whose courtship gets interrupted by actions beyond their control that knock both of their lives way off course in darker ways than one would initially think and sees if it is possible to reconnect after that much time and damage. It isn’t anything to write home about but it is solidly told, and I give it some leeway due to taking place in an era games rarely do with a subject matter they often are plain bad at. The graphics have a bit of a collage style going on that I think works making it seem more “realistic” while still stylized and staying on a budget. The soundtrack is very strong, I am not particularly familiar with the intricacies of tango style music but to my untrained ear this sounded pretty high quality and distinct enough to further give the game its own identity.
Overall I’d say it is good! It’s rather brief but I’d recommend giving it a shot to those who dig somewhat odd rhythm games with little hesitation.
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I am down to the final 11 games on my list, kinda curious which unlucky game gets picked last. Anyways, backlog catch-up time.
Milkmaid of the Milky Way
There are a lot of point & click adventure games that very much want to be like the sierra/lucasarts games that obviously inspired them, but I think Milkmaid of the Milky Way might be the one I’ve come across that comes the closest. The aesthetics and style seem to be a solid match, the scenario (what if a farm girl from Norway stumbled upon an alien spacecraft kidnapping her favorite cow) is suitably strange, and in general it is a fairly charming experience… except for the rhyming. Every bit of dialogue or descriptions is delivered in rhyming couplets and it goes from cute to tiring very quickly. I did have to resort to a guide once or twice which is pretty much true of every point & click adventure game I’ve ever played. Admittedly this isn’t my favorite genre of game and hence my experience with the genre is less than that of many others but this has the real feel of a legit quality experience for the couple hours it lasts. I’d have to go back over every other game of this type I’ve played in the bundle to know for sure but this may be my favorite out of the bunch.
2000:1: A Space Felony
This is the other game by the Once Upon a Crime In The West team and is the same kind of “investigator visits a crime scene and has to piece together what happened” experience, although of the two I’d say that this one is less ambitious but better executed.
You arrive at a space station where the entire crew is dead or missing, some of whom are clearly murdered, with only the HAL-esque AI as any sort of direct witness. Your job is to wander around and take pictures of any potential evidence, which is usually in bright colors, which causes a quick cut to the person who hired you watching it on a screen and offering comments. These images then appear in the central AI chamber where you can ask said AI about them, although it is usually evasive or perhaps lying. Clicking on the proper images of evidence in the right sequence draws connections and the AI has a fail safe where it can’t lie when caught in a direct contradiction or something, which you use to draw the truth out of it.
The presentation is a bit on the simple side but pretty clean and well done, a couple bits of evidence were hard to track down but things are generally rather quickly identifiable. It isn’t particularly difficult to figure out what is connected to what and drawing the correct connections but it does flow pretty well. If you want the whodunnit part to be in any way hard to crack this isn’t the game for you, but if you want to spend an hour or so wandering around a space station piecing together what happened without much resistance with relatively slick presentation it can do that.
Celestial Hacker Girl Jessica
This is one of those marble rolling platformers where the marble you roll around happens to also be a hacker named Jessica.
Unlike most other ball-rolling games this one has relatively little in the way of precision demands, instead going with a more exploratory platformer focus through often surreal environments while you try to find the goal (which is a cake). Later stages do require you to dodge enemies and lasers, but compared to most other games of this ilk the challenge never climbs that high. That’s perfectly fine, it is nice to have one of these games that decides to be a bit more chill rather than absurdly demanding. It might have just struck me in the right mood but I actually had a good time putzing around its stages for the 45 or so minutes I put into it, it is literally teeming with hidden warp zones so one could jump around and speed to the end if one desired to. Clearly an asset flip game and a minor work, but I don’t know I kinda dug it.
Fugue in Void
Fugue in Void is probably not worth playing. It is a 35 minute long walking sim where the first several minutes are a slow cutscene and control is frequently taken away from you as you approach the end. I also don’t think it is really about anything, if there is any kind of narrative it is literally unsaid. Why even mention it then? Visually it has some creative takes on brutalist architecture that sometimes crosses over into odd geometric… digressions, which if one is a particularly big fan of it then may be worth putting a half hour into just to look at. If not then I’ll just end this post with some screenshots I took of it so people can get a taste without having to actually deal with the act of (barely) playing it.
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Today I finished up Tales From Windy Meadow, a renpy visual novel where you go through three character specific chapters in any order you want (that do cross over a bit due to taking place simultaneously) before playing a final fourth chapter that ties everything together. It sticks out because of being fully 2d sprite animated like a 16-bit side scroller, and the story and world is pretty okay, but that’s not why I mention it.
I mention it because it is the last game on my list.
I… did it. It took well over a year and playing through approaching 400ish games, but I’m finally finished with the bundle.
(Certain games didn’t run on this PC because it’s old so I’ll revisit them in the future whenever I get a newer one, and there is one word game I’m still picking away at, but screw technicalities).
I’ve still got some games to write up and screenshots to share in the future but for now… it is time to dance!
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You are a true hero
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it’s truly remarkable that we’ve managed to offload all the actual gameplaying to a single poster
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