yessss. I’m still trying to finish it, but these god damn customers!!
1 Like
This is a short narrative game about intimacy, and how uncomfortable it can be to experience. It’s like that meme, the mortifying ordeal of being known in game form. And it also reminded me of how David Cronenberg’s movies, like Crash and Dead Ringers get at intimacy in a very round about way through eroticism. There’s nothing in this that is as explicit, but there is stuff in here that seems erotic. And maybe it isn’t really erotic, but that it is confusing and unfamiliar feels poignant. Which I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game try to do, so for that alone I can recommend it, but I can go further and say that it was a cohesive and moody experience that is worth spending just shy of an hour’s worth of your time to either be confused by or, maybe, feel a little seen?
7 Likes
The Space Between is great!! one of the best short “walking sim” narrative games i’ve played i think. it slipped under the radar due to COVID but i was on the IGF jury that voted to give it the Nuovo award this year so hopefully that got more people to look at it. another eerie lo-fi first person game we nominated for IGF this year that’s on the bundle is PAGAN: Autogeny which is also very worth checking out.
4 Likes
Oh that’s so cool to hear! I really loved PAGAN: Autogeny as well, both these games are really amazing evolutions in the walking sim space.
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So I finished up The Witcher and now that I’m not tied up with a lengthy crpg I have time to dig into this bundle beyond just short browser games and take too many screenshots, so I started with…
Hatch
Can you guess what happens to that egg when you press enter? Hint: it’s the game name.
Hatch is a first person… kinda platformer where you have to climb a giant tower. The first problem you have to deal with is the sun (which looks like a giant somewhat tired eye in the sky). If you step into the gaze of the sun you have about five seconds to get back into shade or you die. If you look closely at that screen you can see the darkening redness along the periphery that indicates that you are in its view, although the almost constant geiger counter audio in the background that gets very active when you do so is probably what you will notice most immediately. There is more than enough cover on the ground to make your way towards the base of the tower while getting used to this mechanic.
Things on the ground otherwise seem fine.
The second problem you have to reckon with is the tower itself. Notably it is massive. This is the view from the ground and the flat textures sort of hide how absurdly tall it is. Simply put… this is the tallest tower ever. I don’t know what the tallest video game tower-type structure is relative to a roughly human-sized player, off the top of my head I want to say Grow Home but the answer now is obviously Hatch, the game with the utterly ridiculous tower you must climb.
Fortunately the people of Babelville left some useful hieroglyphics that serve as a useful tutorial, doubly so as I can save myself a paragraph of writing by just posting this. In this game you jump some but climb more. If the surface is leaning forward at all relative to your position you can climb it by pressing against it, if it is leaning towards you or is perfectly vertical you cannot.
This is where I started my ascent and you can get a rough idea of how one would make their way up. Those first few blocks are clearly inclined away from you, you can see how it generally leads to the right, and it is all in the shade so you can figure it out in relative safety (there is no fall damage, nor any enemies or combat). The black post with the glowing tip is a checkpoint, if you get cooked by the sun you respawn at the highest one of these you reached.
Screenshots become much less useful moving forward as due to the climbing mechanic you get a whole lot up close looks at rock textures, but I would be remiss if I didn’t note that once you start climbing up the tower and look up you can see what appears to be a sky whale flying way up there. If that doesn’t make you want to climb up to go see it then clearly you are not me.
The main thing you do is look around trying to find a jump you can make or a surface you can climb up, but I cannot overstate how much of a complicating factor the sun is. One side of the tower is basically shaded from it at all times and is the preferred route when available but often you will have to deal with areas where large portions are exposed to the sun, you having to take advantage of overhangs or other irregularities in the tower to keep away from its gaze. Sometimes you just have to make a run for it and hope you can reach cover before you expire.
You struggle for a bit with an area, get past it, find a cave in the tower that leads up, exhale when you see another checkpoint, but always climb higher. If I had to describe the energy of the game it reminded me most of Tiny & Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers and TRI: Of Friendship and Madness. The latter for having a similar “if you create a triangle that leans (not too steeply) against an existing surface you can walk onto it and the gravity shirts in that direction” and the former for a similar scale and sense of experimentation in terms of how to find a way forward. All three of the games are a bit “off” mechanically from what one would consider the norm, all are very indie in terms of budget and presentation yet have big ideas, big scale. They feel like they are pressing against something, where vision meets limitations.
I climbed for a long time. The game page says it should take 30 to 60 minutes, but I climbed for longer than that. I climbed so high that the skies grew bluer and bluer. I climbed so high that the constant geiger counter din slowly faded away and was replaced by music. I climbed so high that the sun could no longer see me, could no longer burn or harm me.
I climbed so high that the tower itself changed from a structure made of impossibly huge rock to something unreal, bits of objects hanging in space. As I climbed higher than even reality I began to climb less and leap more. Each leap a leap of terror, having to use my mouse and the WASD keys to leap over a drop thousands of feet down. Once the music started playing so very high up but so very long ago I stopped seeing those checkpoints.
I saw what appeared to almost be a flying island with giant broken pipes all across its undercarriage and gasped, each jump taken with my breath held. I climbed and jumped higher and higher and yet there was never an actual end point in view. I jumped from individual pipes and small bits of rock, none of them with that black pole with the glowing end that let me know it was now safe. I looked down at my hand and the area where the bottom of my palm rested when using the mouse was soaking wet. Still I climbed higher and higher, making so many literally breathtaking jumps in a row and yet never in sight of salvation. I climbed and I jumped and…
…I fell.
I maneuvered maddeningly towards the nearest pipe below me but I missed it as well, now falling fast and away from anything I could possibly grasp onto. I fell so far I saw the tower once again, and in doing so realized what I must do. I started falling to the side until I was free of the tower’s massive shadow and once again in view of the sun. The screen started to dim, the cacophony of the geiger counter filled my ears and finally I exhaled as the screen went black.
…
…That’s how I learned that there are invisible checkpoints on that higher up section. For whatever reason from that checkpoint I struggled to see how to make the jump that I obviously made earlier and fell a few more times, realized that it was dinner time and exited the game. I assume the tower will still be waiting for me there tomorrow.
17 Likes
I threw a wish in the well
Out came something from hell
I look to you as I fell
now Satan’s in my way
I tried the browser demo version of Mobius and it is a mess, but the central gimmick is so funky that I’ve committed to trying the full version to see if they can wrangle anything out of it. At the very least having to actively struggle with a camera in a 2d platformer as opposed to a 3d one will be a change of pace. Look at the gif up there, when the view of the stage shifts and rotates that is all handled via moving the mouse. Apparently in later stages you have a strict time limit, combining that with this camera system is the kind of potential horror I just have to investigate.
Also I got to the top of that tower today. It’s nice up there.
Ungrounded
Ungrounded is a game where you plant seeds that grow into trees that you climb up into the heavens.
…No I don’t have a type >_>
This isn’t really a game, it is more of a visualizer that uses math to produce procedurally generated trees via what I assume is witchcraft. Jumping and climbing (you are the little square in that image) is mechanically rough as hell. I was hoping for something along the lines of Pixeljunk Eden, but really the only think of value here is when the game produces a swell looking tree. That tree up there looks snazzy to me (dig the red/white/black aesthetic) and if you want to see more like it, go give Ungrounded a shot.
2 Likes
Algorithms that simulate plant growth are, conveniently, straightforward – like living organisms, it’s a recurring pattern that applies at multiple scales
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So I don’t know if this is just a case of me being me or not, but I’ve been slowly working my way through this bundle page by page and I was not prepared for how time consuming it is. I’m basically clicking every on every game and while there are a few genres which I’m just going “hard no” on I’m trying to watch the trailers, checking the comments on its itch page or if it is also on Steam browsing the reviews to see if a given game is worth a try at some point. I’ve been doing this since the bundle sale ended and I knew the list was finalized; I am at the top of page 18 of 59.
Also if a game is under an hour and not yet another horror FPS it is almost an automatic library add. I may be posting in this topic forever.
Played a game and took a bunch of screens but it is late so instead of that…
Forget the Brakes
This is a cute not quite infinite runner. You control both the front and back sections of a train independently of each other by using W and S to make the back part move up or down when it hits a junction on the tracks, and I and K (or up and down) to do the same with the front portion. It starts fairly simple but it becomes tricky to keep track of which each half is doing. Other factors then start to be introduces like junctions that forces a change in direction once you go over it (so if both halves are on the same section of rail they are forced to take different paths) and elevated off-track obstacles that will crash the train if the central connection between the two halves come into contact with it.
I found it to be pretty fun. I don’t know that I’d play it for long, but screwing around with it for a while was fairly pleasant.
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Please keep going!
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My friends and I have started a small game club where we’re playing one of these games together a week. Here are two of our weekly games so far, and then something else I picked up:
The Wolf’s Bite
It’s a cute little “competitive adventure” game that feels like those revisionist fairy tale retellings that were popular in the 90s. It’s got a really charming aesthetic. The writing didn’t always work for me and it’s hard to play skilffully, but it’s been popular with my friends’ young kids. Consider playing it with 'em if you got 'em.
Parallax
This is clever and stylish. It’s a switches & portals game from a first-person perspective taking place in two parallel but slightly connected worlds. It gets a little too confusing for me fast, because I have a hard time keeping track of what’s doing what where (this is why switch puzzle games I prefer to be in 2D), and since the emphasis is on puzzle-solving, the fact that you can fall off the often narrow platforms pretty easily adds a platforming element that I’m not sure fits with the rest of the game. However! If you enjoy brain-teaser stuff or just enjoy seeing cool two-color 3D scenes, it’s worth playing with. I got through 12 of the 32 levels.
Water’s Fine
After fucking with 20XX again for a few minutes, as briefly documented in the games you played thread, and thinking about the Rogue Legacy 2 format (and my mixed feelings about Rogue Legacy), I was feeling pretty down on roguelite progression structures. Randomized nonsense that you’re going to get through much easier after you fail a bunch of times is just not that compelling a prospect for me.
Water’s Fine is a roguelite kinda thing that is really smart for a lot of reasons, including that to make progress, you have to return to your homebase with what you retrieve, so actually you can’t just coast on incremental progress made through failed attempts. It’s stylish and feels good and I also like games about diving. The procedural generation has a ton of variety to it in clever ways.
This game fucking rules. I’ll probably play this more than most games.
6 Likes
weirdly i know all of these games.
the wolf’s bite was some random game i played jurying for a festival and thought it was cute but not what we were looking for at the time and i entirely forgot about until now
parallax was another festival game i played years ago that i remembered and then forgot and remembered again, mostly because of the aesthetic. nice, not bad puzzle game. there’s another game called Fabric on Steam that this reminds me of as far as a very solid puzzle game that definitely left an impression one me but not something that i’d consider uber-exceptional.
all of the person who made Water’s Fine’s games are fabulous. Long Live The Axe is one of the best/most original platformers i’ve played in years.
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I’ve been following her for a while and picked up Long Live the Axe forever ago but never actually played it. She’s got a bundle of her stuff on sale for $3 so I just picked it all up and cant wait to dive in (HAR HAR) to the rest.
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Both Parallax and Water’s Fine are games I’m looking forwards to getting around to, I’ve almost started the latter a couple times now.
Tonight We Riot
This was the one game in the bundle that stuck out as particularly topical, so may as well get to it at the possible peak of its relevance. The story is… well I’ll let the game handle that.
That’s not a typo in the first image BTW, I captured it a second early.
So yeah, this is a game about the moment when the socialist uprising happens and the people take control of the streets and the country from the capitalist elite. I assume that setting may appeal to more than a few here.
The game plays a bit like a 2d beat 'em up, with the main difference being that rather than it being one to four individuals (six in the case of X-men) against a constant stream of enemies you are basically in charge of an angry mob. You still have direct control over only one individual but you can vaguely direct where the rest go (if you don’t they will generally press forward and attack on their own), and when you decide to throw an object at something everyone else does as well. It makes larger groups particularly more effective in this context as while you may have sixty cinderblocks to throw in your inventory (don’t ask me how someone can hold sixty cinderblocks) if you decide to throw one, and nine others are throw by your allies, you still have fifty-nine left as opposed to fifty. Against larger enemies that force multiplier can be very effective.
Rather than having lives like a typical beat 'em up if you fall you switch to direct control of a different rioter, so as long as there is someone fighting alongside you dying won’t end the stage. That said those fighting alongside you can fall dealing with enemies even if you aren’t controlling them, so you can go from six “lives” to one fairly quickly if you aren’t careful. What feeds into this and the overall theme of the game is that you are never playing as one special revolutionary or leader. The race or gender of the person you are directly controlling can change from one stage to another, which really sells the focus on collective action.
As you make your way through you will come across buildings full of disenfranchised workers who will join your cause at the press of a button. There are also a few occasions where you are fighting an enemy mob lead by a leader that will switch sides if you kill said leader first. It is remarkably easy for rioters to die, so gaining more is always handy.
At the start of each stage you will be greeted by a satirical newspaper front page, let’s just say that they are very on the nose.
At the end of each stage you are graded on how many rioters made it out alive. If more than a certain threshold do you are rewarded with either a new weapon or equipment/attire that I never quite figured out how to put on, I think it may have to be done at the main menu. Getting through each stage is not particularly hard, but getting three gears would not be particularly easy in many of them.
I can see that this was a passion project for the people behind it and something that many would be rooting for… and it makes me feel like a jerk to say that unfortunately as a game it’s not very good. While it isn’t a pure beat 'em up combat in any game of this ilk is possibly the most important thing. At best the melee parts are functional with your tiny person bumping against various obstacles while hammering a button to hit them. Throwing objects, which makes up a rather large portion of the game, is best described as an adventure with (on a controller at least) having to aim with the right analog stick. There seems to be no auto-aim at all on it and if not throwing directly up or down (and sometimes not even then) you’re as likely to miss as hit regardless of your best efforts. The right stick is also used to direct the mob when you choose to which works okayish, but the mob AI is often downright suicidal and will do things like attack exploding barrels which almost instantly wipes everyone who isn’t you out.
There is something… darkly ironic about a game so socialism proud that it could almost be described as propaganda sounding so strong on paper and yet being a mess when put into practice, that’s a particularly rough fate. Some might like the theming enough that the quality of the game mechanics won’t be enough to take away from their enjoyment of it, and if not going for high ratings it probably only takes a bit longer than an hour to get through all of it.
Plus every so often this Russian speaking dog will join up with you to bite the police, and I think that is something everyone would enjoy.
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That is definitely a Greek speaking dog but I can’t translate any more
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That’s Loukanikos the Greek Riot Dog!
Loukanikos stood with workers on picket lines, participated in demonstrations, riots and general strikes against austerity, and withstood water cannon, tear gas and police beatings.
As with other riot dogs, like Negro Matapacos in Chile, Loukanikos always sided with protesters and barked at or confronted only the police.
He was present at nearly every outbreak of mass class struggle and social disorder in Athens from the beginnings of the anti-austerity movement, through the 2008 anti-police uprising up until 2012, when he was adopted and retired outside the city. He died peacefully in his sleep on 9 October 2014, aged around 10. Some have speculated that all of the tear gas he inhaled may have contributed to shortening his life.
He was a good boy.
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Omg this made me cry a little
Good boy indeed
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My apologies to Loukanikos, whose name was mentioned in-game once or twice and should have been a tip-off.
EAT GIRL
I am linking to the store page as I discovered something horrible after playing this game:
The program I use to take screenshots did not work well with this game at all (and also the next one, but that’s another story) so I ended up with a folder full of a couple dozen screencaps that for whatever reason only showed the title screen. There are very few images of the game online (which I have stolen and will use) and I believe the store page only uses the type of video files this forum eats up and disables, so if you want to see what it looks like that is probably your best bet.
The shame is that this is probably my favorite game out of the bundle so far, a true hidden gem. To give a bit of context and date myself, when I was a very wee lad one Christmas morning I found a Colecovision under the tree. That was my first experience with video games, and what you might not realize if you weren’t around at the time is that for at least a few years Pac-Man was its own genre with numerous games such as Lady Bug, Mouse Trap and Pepper II that tried to put their own spin on the formula. In a way those are some of my foundational games, and EAT GIRL is very much in the spirit of those games. Hell, the main character basically being “<” means she would have fit right in with that era of abstract protagonists.
The basics of the game are a bit reminiscent of Pac-Man Championship Edition. There are dots over a portion of the maze, and when you eat them all up a second and then third set will generally appear and once you finish them off an exit portal will appear. The main difference is that EAT GIRL takes is design cues from modern action-platform games like Super Meat Boy, not in terms of difficulty but of more contained challenges you can quickly restart if need be. You can die as many times as you want and while you do have a death animation you can skip it with a button press or just hit an actual restart button at any time to immediately restart the stage.
There are more than two dozen stages each with their own unique layout, and the game does a good job of giving them all their own flavor and types of challenges. Enemies can chase you, portals are introduced and they can be combined in ways that can have cascading effects. To use the screenshot above, those two orange diamond enemies every so often will fire in the four cardinal directions projectiles that can go through the maze walls (if you get to close to them they will also supernova, also as seen above). They are locked in place in this stage, and grabbing the first set of dots it feels like this stage will be a pushover. If you look closely though you can see that they are lined up with two sets of portals (the yellow triangles and purple diamonds), and portals can also transport said projectiles around the stage. What this means is that by the time you get to the second set of dots there are now multiple sets of projectile in play coming from numerous locations.
Mechanically there is one other addition that is unique to EAT GIRL. The longer you go without hitting a wall the faster you move. At max speed you will start to have orange sparks trail behind you, and if there happens to be any wooden boxes in a given stage at that speed you can break through them. Usually this is handy, although sometimes it has complications one has to judge on the fly (ex. I can more easily reach the other side of the stage, but said boxes are also keeping an enemy pinned away from me). Building up the necessary speed is often part of the challenge, either via a series of tight corners or having to find a way to maneuver around slower enemies in the way. There are also some enemies that are faster than you at your slowest speed but slower than you at you fastest which can make maintaining speed and distance key. You can also stop on a dime at the press of a button and maintain all built up speed and momentum when you resume moving, which doesn’t come up often but is at times very useful.
And then there is Greg. Going back to the Colecovision for a bit, my favorite game on it was probably Venture. The thing is that Venture also had my first video game fear: the dragon. If you stayed in an individual room for too long an abstract green dragon appeared in the top corner with a loud noise exclusive to it, and after a moment would head straight for you in a straight line over walls or any other obstacle. Venture also had a mechanic where after you shot an enemy their body stayed for a few seconds before disappearing and was still lethal to touch, so you could block your own exit for a few agonizing moments while the dragon appeared and beared down on you.
Greg would get along with the dragon. A blue face with jagged teeth, in certain stages he is there from the start and he does not follow the rules of the maze at all. He floats over the walls while always heading in your general direction. Worse yet for the entire duration of the stage there is a constant sound of chewing, and it is very unpleasant. Fortunately Greg is not quite as instantly lethal as the dragon, it is possible to juke him and buy yourself more time but he is still a throwback terror that reminded me a good deal of my first gaming nightmare.
There are other nice touches around (that would benefit from pictures). You select the stages from an overworld, which you still wander like a Pac-Man character despite no longer being trapped in tight one square wide corridors. This allows you to skip a level if you find it too tricky or annoying, and in perhaps my favorite touch later levels are blocked off and later made available in the same manner they are in Metroid II. Yes, there is a layer of (multi-color) lava that descends whenever you defeat a few levels, allowing you to reach new parts of the overworld. The overworld also does a good job of teaching you certain mechanics and alerting you of certain… oddities to look out for. There are secrets out there and an actual postgame for those who want to dig in a bit more. It isn’t an icebergvania, but there is some nice stuff hidden out there.
Overall though… it’s just really solidly put together with well thought out stages. The presentation is very much a throwback with some atmospheric touches, it is very well considered throughout. The challenge is that it is a kind of game that I have a great deal of nostalgia for, and that makes it tricky for me to know if it is the kind of thing that will appeal to others who don’t have a fondness for this somewhat lost genre. I am convinced of its quality, I just don’t know if it might be for a niche or not. What I can say is that I love it.
…except for Greg.
Next time: might be a couple smaller games as I reckon with also losing every screencap for a visual novel.
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I’ve played through a decent chunk of Fossil Echo, a platformer about a boy climbing a tower. It mixes in stealth segments based around navigating guard patrols because you can’t fight. You can knock guys out if you jump down on to them from up high, but opportunities to do so are uncommon.
There are brief animated cutscenes, some flashing back to the boy’s original journey to the tower in reverse-chronological order. There’s no spoken dialogue, just a lot of that non-verbal grunting etc. that you see in a lot of no-budget animation projects.
It’s nothing revelatory but it’s quite good and really (imo) pretty to look at. If you’re good at platformers it’ll take you about an hour, maybe a bit more if you’re like me and need to bang your head up against some of the tougher sequences before you can pull them off.
All in all a pleasant surprise. Here’s a sans-commentary let’s play of the first bit of the game:
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Is late and I’m tired so gimme a short browser game!
Stealth Fishing
It feels a bit like a goof on Metal Gear as you play as Frank the grey fox and are basically fishing while avoiding spotlights and occasionally other obstacles. I believe Z and X move the boat while the arrow keys control the hook, and if either get spotted you lose. The score constantly climbs slowly, and different types of fish when hooked and brought to the boat are worth different amount of points. There isn’t a lot to it and it does feel a bit sloppy, but it promised a special game over screen if you reached 1000 points and I played the ten or fifteen minutes it took to accomplish that. Here is what it looks like:
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