This bundle has me thinking that everyone making games is either a very boring divorced dad or was raised by a very boring divorced dad
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Destructivator was dope,
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Qavo
Qavo is pretty dope and the first “oh hey!” surprise of the bundle so far. I got away from my string of gamejam selections and dug into a still small but more substantial puzzle game. The basic concept for the game is more or less lifted straight off of Continuity, which for those who don’t recall is a puzzle platformer where you have to slide various rooms around on screen in order to solve them. You’d see something where taking the stairs up in your current room leads to a dead end in the next room, but if you slide that next room out of the way and slide a room that has a switch up there instead you can then advance. It isn’t the deepest puzzle mechanic in the world, but it is fine for what it is. If you played The Pedestrian that works in a similar fashion.
What Qavo has over Continuity is that it has a bit of style. Probably 90% of the game is built around a yellow/black color scheme that is rather simple but works and “pops” in execution. Whenever you solve a puzzle you get a screenwipe in the black and yellow “caution” pattern that matches the one that all the floors are built out of. It is very aesthetically consistent throughout, heck there is only one music track throughout but it is a banger.
It starts fairly easy with just a few rooms, you pressing a button to zoom out and slide the rooms around to where they need to be, then pressing another to zoom back in and resume moving your little block guy around until he hits the right switches and eventually opens the exit door and goes through it.
It does ramp up until it culminates in some massive array of rooms that take a good while to figure out how to approach, although it is generally more along the lines of “figure out the next step” rather than having to figure out some global strategy to implement. The only time it really stumbles is when it asks you to do some actual timing-based platforming as the controls aren’t quite up to that, thankfully the penalty for dying is basically just respawning in the current room (or just outside of it if you entered into too quick a death).
It took me about 75 minutes to make my way through its 25 puzzles so it is still on the brief side but it feels very much like a “legit” game. I don’t know that it’d have enough for a non-puzzle fan to dig into, but if one does like to dip their toes in that genre this is a nice not to demanding one to give a shot.
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Nice! I was trying to make a Random Game function in the spreadsheet but could not figure it out for the life of me.
ACtually I spent like 5 more minutes on it and figured it out, there’s a new tab at the bottom that will give you 3 random games that change every time the sheet is edited. I might make a script that will not change every time it’s edited, but for now that’s what we’ve got. The website above might be better
One of the games in this package is titled Throw Cubes into Brick Towers to Collapse Them. The name tells you everything you need to know, other than that you can also throw dynamite.
I was about to add this to the spreadsheet, but several others have already endorsed it there.
Edit: A large tower of small bricks will collapse under its own weight if you give it a minute.
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I was excited about Omeganaut because I was willing to settle for even a very sparse indie take on StarFox but it’s way too clunky to really spend any time with.
In the unfortunate event that I play a game that doesn’t offer much I’m gonna try to pair it along with something of worth to avoid being too negative. Also if me posting thoughts and screens of random tiny games of questionable worth (as opposed to actual hidden gems) becomes tiring let me know.
Plana Gravatatis
This game is a mess, but an interesting enough one to put a few (and only a few) minutes into. The result of a 48 hour gamejam to “combine 2 incompatible genres” is basically you starting with 15 seconds and walking around a bunch of procedural generated hexagons with random warp points that also add time to the timer, where you can jump as many times as you want in the air, and if you press space bar at ill-defined intersections it rotates the camera view and you can walk along the hexagonal structures on a different dimension (you always move along x, but after pressing space the new x may have formerly been y). The actual goal is to last as long as possible and gather yellow orbs for points to set a high score, but you basically end multi-jumping through space having the relative gravity shift when you near a different hexagonal structure wondering what the heck one is supposed to do.
Dusk Child
Dusk Child is… well I’m sure someone would try to call it a tiny Metrovania but I think that is wrong, it is more what would have in an earlier time been called an adventure game. There’s no combat, with one button serving an unknown function (it does two things I believe) and the other just resulting in the player character describing what they are standing in front of in text on the bottom of the screen. You basically have to figure out how stuff works and use that knowledge to get past obstacles or open doors.
I found it to be pretty pleasant. It is basic but it had a few cute little twists or ideas, for example early on you learn that you can put a heavy object on a pulley to cause doors to open. At one point you pick up a bucket, which isn’t heavy enough on its own but you can find waterfalls that can fill it up and add enough weight for it to serve that purpose. However it has a hole in the bottom, so you now have to hurry to get it to the pulley before it empties out (putting it down resulted in the hole becoming plugged which is close enough to making sense). It isn’t a big revelation, but it is a cute little idea. There is only one gained ability that mainly only serves as a lock & key deal, but how it is initially presented adds a certain something to the brief experience.
It’s less than a half hour long and may be only about 20 minutes, and at that length I found it worthwhile. It is also by Sophie Houlden who has another bundle game I played (that I think was better than this one (it is Pumpking)) that I’ll get to at another time.
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sophie houlden is rad, she makes good stuff
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I tried another free browser game she had up on her itch page afterwards and it was also pretty swell, also made me realize that I need to try more pico-8 games.
Also I did not play this game (yet) but I just found out that one of the more aesthetically pleasing random game name games in recent memory is in this bundle so let me once again drop on SB the trailer for BOREAL TENEBRAE:
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I played Night of the Consumers! Harkens back to the time when you could just make a game about makin a burger or sliding beers to people, the real life shit, and it would be fun and make you think about real life differently. This game is all about trying to stock shelves and not get fired. What it really does well is project all the unpleasant and gross feelings about the subjective experience of working retail and makes a world out of it with nasty customers, stupid demands, high anxiety, etc. It reminds me a lot of Banjo Gyro! This game looks disgusting too, like it’s company policy for the closing shift to mop up the floor, the walls, the shelves and ceilings with a puke bucket.
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Visual Out is pretty cool. It’s a metroidvania that’s much more about interacting with the environment non-violently than many are. It explains very little, so it can be a little too mysterious for its own good but it also allows for some genuine “aha!” moments.
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Cardinal Chains
Yeah… like I’m not gonna gravitate towards the number puzzler.
You have one or several squares marked X which serve as your starting point. Your goal is to create one/several paths that cover every number on the board, but starting from the X you can only continue the path onto numbers that are either the same or larger than the number you are currently on. If you look at the green path in the image above you see it goes X-1-1-4, but it has to stop there as the only number next to it is a 1 which is a smaller number (that is the extent of math knowledge you need).
It is a simple concept, but one that works pretty well. I wouldn’t recommend sitting down to play it for long stretches of time, but once you get past the easy first 25 or so playing 15 or so at a time is a good little chill puzzling session. Game has 500 puzzles so it’ll last you a good bit. I dug it.
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1977: Radio Aut
Somehow another bunch of games and stuff got added to the bundle after the fact (the spreadsheet will never be complete at this rate), none of which are particularly known but I happened to give this one a shot.
It is a very short visual novel that is basically a (very) slightly gamified wikipedia article, but it is about a person I had not known about and a struggle I never really paid much mind to. Over the several minutes it lasts it basically takes you through the life of Peppino Impastato, an Italian socialist activist who dedicated his life to taking on the mafia in Sicily. There are a few moments where you are given choices what to say or do but they don’t seem to change much or are used mainly for thematic reasons. During the background at times you can hear some of his actual radio broadcasts that got him into a bit of trouble, which would likely be more effective if I understood more than a few words of Italian but I still think it adds something to hear his actual voice.
It’s not really something one plays and it is very brief, but it takes its subject matter seriously and I feel I gained something from it.
Breakout Poetry
It is a basic Breakout clone where the blocks have words on them, and the order you break them determines the order of the words in your poem along the side of the screen. There’s only four sets of words that you can choose from, the position of the word blocks never changes and the actual Breakout implementation is iffy. If it played a bit better and randomized the words and their positions I could see this being something that would appeal to some, but as is I just don’t think it really works.
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Pumpking (HD)
I was going to include a poll to see which set of graphics people liked better, but we all know the correct answer.
(It’s the pico-8 graphics)
(I’m saying it, I did a good job on getting the comparison shots right)
From Sophia Houlden, the creator of Dusk Child, Pumpking in either form is a spooky themed 2d platformer with a 10 minute time limit. It is a single (ideally) several minutes long stage with lantern checkpoints and a limited number of lives. If you can beat the boss at the end in under 10 minutes and without losing all your lives you win, there really aren’t any big gimmicks or twists along the way.
The thing is, it’s a pretty well designed stage. It is smartly laid out, ramps up well, has its ideas and works its way through them in a fairly professional way. There’s only one small set piece that I think was a little bit funky, yet I think I only died there once or twice so I guess it was more of a psyche out than anything. The boss is the rare occasion of a boss fight that is truly built around the same gameplay and concepts as the stage itself, while also being by far the sternest test in the game.
It controls fine as well, once I realized getting extra height via jumping on enemies works the same as it does in Mario games I really didn’t have any issues with it aside from a couple of jumps near the end where I kept bonking my head on a low ceiling and screwing up my jump (this seemed to happen more with the retro pico-8 graphics compared to the HD ones, although the sample size is so small I can’t say for sure there is a true difference between the two).
Anyways I noticed that she had another free pico-8 platformer up on her page, so even though it isn’t in the bundle…
Curse of Greed: ULTIMATE
Curse of Greed: ULTIMATE has two full stages (which can be played individually or back to back in the ULTIMATE mode) which combined are roughly the length of Pumpking (i.e. it is also about ten minutes long front to back). This one actually has a cool not immediately obvious gimmick and is pretty okay, so if this is something you’d want to play go do so before reading on.
The first time you play it you likely do so the same as you do any 2d platformer. You run around, jump over spikes and grab the coins as they come up. In this game you have a health bar so you can take a few hits before dying (it also has lives and checkpoints) and can pick up hearts to fill it back up, but after a bit you notice something unusual: your health bar is made up of 100HP and while every coin you pick up gives you $100 it also takes up one point of your health bar. A couple ain’t bad, but for me by the time I noticed it about 80% of my healthbar was now gold and a single hit killed me as I couldn’t have more than 20 HP max. It also doesn’t reset when you die and because of this I accidentally picked up my 100th coin and instantly fell over dead and went to the game over screen even though I had a life left. It noted my greed.
The second time you play you now realize that the coins aren’t your friends and you have to avoid them wherever possible. The stage now looks very different: all of the easy jumps you took the first time through have coins in the way, forcing you to have to take a longer trickier route. It actually works in terms of game balance as if the less greedy path seems to be too difficult or your health is low you can generally take a safer route at the cost of having to eat a few coins.
It feels a tad bit sloppier than Pumpking but I do really like the gimmick, and through both stages there are some very clever set-ups where you often have two routes through a given sequence. I have a soft spot for minimalist looking platformers (LOVE is also in the bundle, go play that if you haven’t) and I think Sophie has shown in these two games to have a good eye for level design in this space.
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This Strange Realm of Mine is on the bundle:
i played it a couple years ago after it went on sale on Steam because a random person on Twitter recommended it.
it’s sort of a narrative first person game with FPS segments. it’s described as “psychological horror” and i guess that fits in some ways? but not really in the way that you’d expect… or maybe even want it to fit.
it is one of those very very interesting but definitely flawed games like Soul Axiom. the story/dialogue is like overly long and dense and kind of adolescent and high school-ish but there is a mood to the game and esp the visuals that is extremely unique. it jumps around to a lot of different environments and has a lot of interesting ideas and is definitely something that’s stuck with me even though i was saying “what is this even trying to be about” half the time i was playing it.
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Only got a couple scraps left then I am out of notes and screenshots (I’ll get more at some point) so to make up for how thin these two are… have a poorly crafted gif!
no secrets
This is described as “a collection of thoughts on 4 sept 2017” and that is basically it. You move to boxes on a background that hurts one eyes (you can kinda see what it looks like in the gif, in practice it moves much faster) and each one has a tiny little blurb in it. That’s the whole game. It takes a few minutes to read all of them, the gif has a few of them that fit in a single box so if you want more of that go on ahead.
INDECT
This isn’t even a game demo, this is basically a prototype. It has a brief tutorial and a single level that is maybe 60 seconds long, that’s it. I dig the background skyline colors and the jump animation is hilarious to me (every diagonal jump is basically a double flip) but this is basically nothing, just a test to see that the base controls even function. I can’t recommend it as there’s literally nothing there.
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