I played that Gladiabots, which is sort of a PvP combat droid AI design competition. It is A) really, really hard, and B) responsible for unexpectedly eating up like four hours of my free time yesterday. Asynchronous multiplayer forever.
4 Likes
Side note, what I use for taking screenshots (Greenshot) is struggling with capturing images for a lot of these games when they run in fullscreen (yet oddly not when in a window) so if anyone has a good free light weight alternative they’d suggest I’m all ears.
Serre
Serre is a brief visual novel about a young lady who had an alien crash land in her greenhouse and decides to offer her some tea. Over the half hour or so this takes to read through you get a feel for the issues both of them are dealing with and the chemistry that they have and develop. About half the comments on the game’s itch page are praising it for being “Cute, Gay, lovely.” I don’t really know how bug aliens handle things such as gender but the human lady seems to view her as female, so sure well go with that.
They are pretty undeniably adorable together though. I’m generally not one who is drawn to adorable media but I think it is pretty hard to not smile while reading through this visual short story and feel glad that the two of them found each other. I’d recommend it.
Compel
This is a… technically action rougelite where you have to enter a series of rooms and shoot whatever enemies spawn before moving to the next room. Every room is an identical rectangle that shuffles between maybe ten or so enemy layouts as you move with the arrow keys and aim and fire with the mouse. It is kinda ugly and the movement is rather slow, but it is functional enough. If you get through I believe 15 rooms (which took me about 15 minutes to finally manage) you get to a boss fight you can retry as many times as it takes to win. On my second attempt I just stood in the corner and fired diagonally the whole time, never being threatened and winning. I wouldn’t recommend it, so here is what the boss looks like.
5 Likes
WitchWay
WitchWay is rather swell and sticks out from the pack a bit. A puzzle platformer that leans more heavily on the puzzle half of the scale, while most of the games I’ve come across (even the good ones) very much have a hobbyist feel to them WitchWay has the feel of professional craft to it.
It starts off as your typical block pushing exercise, you push the blocks to create a stairway to a higher platform or onto a switch to open up the way forward. These opening rooms cover all the basics, but aside from getting you used to how the game controls and basic mechanics function they don’t really do much to excite.
Fortunately you play as a witch and very quickly stumble upon your lost magic wand (the game framing is that you basically fell into a giant inverted-tower hole and have to climb you way up and out). Your magic in the game is rather specific and rather fitting as the one thing the magic wand lets you do is possess and control boxes.
If you fire your wand into a purple block you gain control of it and can have it walk (slide?) around, jump around and what have you. While before you could move a block to use as a step to a higher platform, the block can actually jump on you and use you in a similar fashion (while controlling the block you cannot move the witch). You play around with this, realize that you can climb on top of a block and then possess it to use it as a vehicle and it is pretty clever but one questions how much one can really do with such a mechanic.
Around this point (I believe it is right after you get past the first floor of these puzzles) you come across blocks that can levitate under your control, and this is when the game truly opens up. Now you aren’t always given complete freedom in terms of where these blocks can reach, if you look at the purple dashed outlines in the above image blocks are unable to cross those lines due to… let’s say magic (your player character can). Still, this allows much more of the space in each room to become part of the puzzle and the game does a good job taking advantage of this.
I want to point out a neat little touch the game has. Right near the entrance to each room on the wall there is a small portion of the overall game map so you can see where you are and be able to judge how far you are into a given section. There is no map you can easily pull up to view (there is a map room in the tower you can visit) as there is a pretty direct main path through the game, but it is good to have and if you look closely you can sometimes see what appear to be worn out room squares that don’t come up on said main direct path. You can probably figure out what that hints at.
The last mechanic I want to touch upon is that you eventually do come across lasers that can kill you, the only thing in the game other than thorns that can harm you (you restart at the start of the room with all progress undone if harmed). Paired along with this are flying blocks which can redirect the laser in a different direction and that can be rotated 90 degrees at the press of a button. The game rarely gets very hard, but these puzzles are probably where the game is at its trickiest.
It took me about an hour or so to first finish the game, but there was a lot I had missed. There are eight hidden bunnies to find in addition to three hidden keys that each unlock a large room containing one of three artifacts stuck behind the hardest puzzles in the game. Each room also has a closed eye in the background that you can open via touching them that you likely won’t even notice until a ways in that can be a bit of a puzzle in themselves to reach. Some of these are things you can see and merely have to figure out how to get to, but a number of them require you to examine the walls of the room to see if anything seems “irregular” and is actually disguising a hidden pathway elsewhere.
Worth noting is that in general when revisiting completed rooms they stay in their completed state unless doing so would make it impossible to cross (i.e. you had to fly a block you need for traversal beyond where you can reach from the entrance), in which case they return to their original arrangement. This makes it easier to backtrack for missed secrets as there is no way to warp to specific rooms (there is an elevator so you can get back to a given section).
I liked WitchWay a lot. While not a particularly hard or long game (100% probably took me a bit over two hours, but I play a lot of puzzle games so YMMV) it is very well crafted all around. The mechanics are fully fleshed out and the puzzles do a good job of exploring them fairly thoroughly, and I can’t name one that felt janky or poorly conceived. I can think of a few that had cool twists midway, or secrets that truly required you to use what you had available to you in a very different manner to reach them. The pixel art while not breathtaking is very clean and would not stick out as substandard on a more curated storefront. It seemingly was made by four random people but if I heard that it was the passion project of a few professional programmers in their free time I would not be surprised, it has that extra bit of shine to it.
If this is a genre of game you enjoy, I’d say this is definitely recommended.
11 Likes
Okay here’s the thing: whenever I come across a browser game in this bundle I almost always just play it for a bit as they are generally either very short or high score based. Combined with the very short downloadable games I’ve tried there’s a bunch I haven’t bothered to write up yet as there often isn’t a lot to them… but now I’m getting backed up and having trouble keeping them all straight. Here’s a big batch of them to clear out my backlog a good bit.
Patches of Adventure
Patches of Adventure serves a useful purpose. When judging any set of things you need a scale, and any scale needs a top and a bottom; Patches of Adventure is the current bottom. The goal is to find four seeds in a fairly small gameboy overworld map, but mechanically it is an outright disaster. Movement is slippery as hell, it is basically impossible to move just one tile. The game of course has a forest section full of tight passages near “teleport tiles” maybe a single shade of green different from the normal ground one that warp you back to the start.
That is bad, but worse is the firing mechanic. When you pick up a seed you can now fire a projectile that only serves to break pots which are blocking your path to certain areas of the map. I did not know this for a while as the collision detection is so outright broken that I basically had to fire a dozen shots at any given pot before one happened to register as hitting it and clearing it away. Nothing is good here, don’t play it.
Zepton
This is actually fairly neat. Zepton is a voxel rail shooter made for the pico-8 and while it is fairly basic I really dig how it looks. I think it loses something in screenshots as I struggled to get a good one, I’d recommend giving it a shot just to see it in motion. There isn’t a ton there to really dig into, but in terms of a thing you pick up and try for ten to fifteen minutes I think it is rather swell.
Bird Bakery
Bird Bakery is one of those programs that basically lets you create a character (or a bird in this case) by selecting one out of five or six options for each body part or attire. This is the bird I created using it.
Life: The Game of Chance
Life: TGOC is a tiny choose your own adventure game where you start as either a female, a black man or an asian man from the country. No matter what choices you make you can’t truly succeed because of the circumstances of your birth, and the game always ends with a text plea to give opportunities to those from unprivileged backgrounds. It is a nice thought but basically going “Sorry you were born black/female, your life can’t go well” is a bit fraught even if likely well intentioned. Also as a choose your own adventure game it’s kinda poor.
Pretty Puny Planet
This is another choose your own adventure browser game and while it doesn’t seem to have any point to make, it isn’t that bad of a time waster. You start with a random planet and are presented with three (and eventually four) options, and every time you make a choice one hundred years pass before you can make another. At the top of the screen you have numbers that show how rich and happy your planet’s inhabitants are, but pretty much any choice you make can potentially have good or bad consequences moving forward. Discovering fire lets them better survive random ice ages but also results in things sometimes burning down. These choices also affect your planet’s appearance, for example if you invest in research said planet will wear a labcoat until another choice replaces it with something else. It is pretty silly overall as some choices can result in bizarre tangents (see the screenshot above for examples), but trying to figure out how to get the different endings entertained me longer than I would have expected. It is dumb fun, and that’s okay.
Super Bernie World
A Super Mario Bros. knock off designed to get out the vote for Bernie Sanders. At the start of each world you have a prominent republican politician say something which is then countered by Bernie saying something that rejects what they claim, and then you play through a few stages culminating with said GOP politician replacing bowser. It is cute that the koopa replacement turtles have McConnell’s head but I can’t lie, this is an awful SMB knock off to play. Aside from the power up blocks none of the blocks can be “bumped” from below or broken or anything really, the jumping physics aren’t great, even when you hit the flag at the end of a stage it doesn’t feel like you are actually touching it at all. Bernie deserved better than this.
Fidelity
Basically a game of “can you spot the difference” except as a horror game. You have a 4 room apartment and you have to click on the thing that is different or wrong. If you click on enough things correctly in a row you advance the story a bit. It’s actually not a bad idea, but the main issue is that by the end of the game some of the differences are so tiny that they can be absurdly hard to find. I had screenshots of all the rooms and couldn’t figure a bunch of them out. You get three guesses and if you are wrong all three times you have to restart that section over, and it took me way too long to get the I believe five in a row correct to get to the ending. The story is thin but it does feel a bit creepy.
6 Likes
Emuurom
Emuurom is IMO a very Select Button game. It calls itself a nonviolent Metroidvania but there is no Vania in here and in truth only so much Metroid. What it feels like though is genuinely mysterious. The game rarely tells you anything at all, even getting out of the first screen requires you to figure something out about how the game works on your own.
As such I don’t really want to say too much about the game itself (I also decided not to share many screenshots). I will note that while nonviolent you are not the only creature in this small world, and figuring out what the other inhabitants do is probably the first layer of coming to terms with how to proceed. It feels cute if perhaps a bit linear, and in truth I accidentally stumbled on the ending of it in just under nine minutes (I had tried the browser version previously so I had already discovered a bunch of how things worked).
I was also judged to have only had about 26% completion. See, in order to complete the game you have to find something and while that something has a fairly clear primary purpose… it introduces some other messier things as well. The primary purpose changes how you see the game world as is, but when playing around with it you discover things that walk the thin line between glitches and intended behavior. You start to notice that some of the boundaries in the world are fuzzier than assumed, and that even now there are specific things that I am unsure if it would be possible to reach or not. I played through a couple more times poking around and experimenting generously and got up to 81% complete, and I know where some of that last 19% is… but not all of it.
This is all complicated by the ending revelation that the game itself is not in fact finished, that ideally it will return in a larger more complete state at some point in 2020. Maybe some of what I see beyond my reach is simply not yet “in play”… but I already reached some of it.
Don’t get me wrong, this ain’t an icebergvania. The available map is tiny, and while it has secrets it’s not like you are gonna find a whole larger game hidden there; with knowledge you could probably 100% this in 15 minutes. What it does do is keep its cards close to its chest, it didn’t get rid of any “buggy” behavior that happened to add to the experience, and it understands the value of some paths being a bit less obvious. Of all the games I’ve played so far, this is the one that reminded me the most of all of you.
IMPORTANT NOTE: there is a browser version of the game on its itch page, but it is very laggy at points to the degree that I wouldn’t recommend playing it that way. The download is less than 4mb, go that route.
11 Likes
Another round of short, mostly browser games.
Saving You From Yourself
So I clicked on this game not knowing what it was about, and then saw an image I remembered from Random Game Names:
…And yeah. Listen, this is a really short choose your own path visual novel (like potentially two minutes long) that has a point to make, makes it in a very blunt, not particularly nuanced fashion… but is a very fair point to make. I also ain’t gonna pretend that I am anywhere near the right person to judge it beyond that.
LEGIT TRIGGER WARNING though, for anyone who has had to go through a situation like this I could see it easily dredging up bad feelings associated with it if they exist.
River Tiles
This is a neat little puzzle/strategy game. You get a randomly generated field made up of tiles that generally indicate if a square is a forest, plain, village or crops. You also have two points on the perimeter that at a point in the future will flood, and a point where the flood has to exit. You draw tiles from a stack at the bottom to try and adjust the map so that when you eventually draw your fourth water tile (which means the flood starts) that the water from both points can reach the water exit while sparing as many villages as possible (water can’t cross forest tiles). This is complicated by a village only being viable post flood if it is not underwater and has access to both another village and some crops. The latter is kinda tricky to figure out (thankfully the village tiles pulse after each turn if they are in danger) but overall it is a decent little game to mess around with.
Hermit the lone sluggish caterpillar of the Sea
A high score game where you play as a hermit crab who has to grab shells that drop onto the sea floor that he can use for either defense or to throw at enemies. For whatever reason I had trouble internalizing the controls, having ones less keyboard key in play would have likely helped a bit. Regardless… it ain’t very good.
Super Sellout
An automatic runner where you play as a superhero who is trying to avoid obstacles while helping as many people as possible in a minute’s time. The thing is being a superhero is expensive, so before each run you are offered a number of sponsorships that earn you more money for each person helped but make your job much harder. You can be weighed down by things you have to carry, there are more obstacles out there that clog things up, that sort of deal. It is mechanically rough but it is a cute concept, worth it to play once with minimal sponsorships then again with as many as humanly possible. Then you can probably stop.
Drake
Drake’s a kinda ugly action game where you play as a dragon man who has to fight through six stages to save his island. This is a tricky one, as the controls are a bit rough and the stage design is serviceable and yet… there are a few different kinds of enemies and while they aren’t that hard to deal with you generally have to deal with them in slightly different ways. Because of this while playing the game I got into a bit of a rhythm of “okay, this enemy popped up in front of my I have to deal with them by doing X” that wasn’t without its charms. There’s also hidden orbs and captured villagers in each stage to find in order to unlock the true final boss or area (I didn’t bother). It is very much on the easy side as it just throws health replenishing items your way. It is hard for me to vouch for any actual aspect of the game but it has its moments. Not sure I’d recommend going out of your way to look for them.
Koshka’s Kofe
A fifteen or so minutes long what appears to be pencil drawn visual novel about a young cat lady who takes over her estranged father’s coffee shop after he passes away. It mostly deals with her dealing with her complicated feelings regarding her father, but also touches on things like holding onto the past, is that possible in the face of progress, corporations eating up small businesses and the like. It also has a basic coffee preparation minigame you must go through to make the cups of coffee. One gets the feeling that at least the complicated feelings part was personal to the writer. I’m a much worse evaluator of writing than video games, but I thought it was okay for what it is.
Ephemera of Evalynn Cott
A game about being past due on numerous assignments in an art school. It plays like a basic adventure game where you have to go find where your projects are, talk to three of your classmates, and then when you go to the computer to send the email saying they’ll be late you warp back to an earlier time, which then repeats another couple times. I believe the purpose of this is to see how your relationship with the classmates has evolved over time. The issue is that the game is just too thin and underwritten for it to really work. It is maybe four rooms big and ten minutes long and while certain games in this bundle have managed to make their point in that short a time this one struggled to. The graphics are at least somewhat interesting to look at, but that’s about it.
Dawndusk Dream Sewer
I really do dig this art style, it is relatively distinct. The thing is that the whole game is just going through several rooms and talking to the person in it and all of them are just so edgy. This is all in a sewer, existence there is bad, etc. If there is a larger point it is trying to make about something it went over my head. I put on the spreadsheet that I’d almost recommend skipping all the dialogue and just looking at each room if you like how it looks and I think I stand by that.
1 Like
You Used To Be Someone
There is two basic things one needs to know about You Used To Be Someone.
One, it is a short narrative game/walking sim about a person in the midst of a major depressive episode. This sort of colors everything so if that isn’t an experience you’d want to wade through right now then it is likely best to hold off. Two, its aesthetic is straight funky. There’s virtually no 3d models in the game, most objects are straight photographs of things mapped onto flat polygons. I can’t tell how easy it is to tell in screenshots but when moving the camera it really sticks out.
The “game” is basically you deciding that you finally need to get out of your apartment for a bit after staying indoors way to long due to being unable to muster the effort to do anything else. You basically walk around and can enter a few establishments that are still open to see if anything catches your fancy.
The NPC designs are just bonkers. Pretty much everyone is a monstrosity like this, and I love all of them.
I think the game handles is subject matter fairly well. With this set-up you’d figure the payoff is eventually going someplace that will knock you out of your funk, but here that doesn’t work. You visit places that at a prior time would have excited you but at best now only serve to remind you of a better time that is long gone. Still while there is no happy ending it treats at least getting out of your room and stepping out for a bit like a worthwhile step, and that feels fair.
Mobius
I got around to finally trying the full version of Mobius as well.
This is how most of its stages look at the start. You have to run around and grab every coin in order for the exit door to open up. There’s never any non-boss enemies with you mostly only having to worry about spikes in terms of things that will kill you.
In most stages you will be prompted to click the mouse button at some point, at which point the stage is transformer into a mobius strip that often reveals parts of the stage that were previously impossible to see. It’s a very neat effect, but it unfortunately rarely gives you a particularly great view of everything. You will have to move and rotate the playing field by using the mouse and while I eventually got somewhat used to it it never really handled well.
A few twists and turns are introduced as you get further in, but mainly at the end of the day you are left with a fairly poor platformer that is simply presented in a way you haven’t seen before. The controls are functional but not particularly fun (if you just barely hit jump you have a smaller jump, anything else is the full height every time; this becomes important early). If these stages where presented in a typical way, as a large number of them could be, it’d come off as incredibly basic. There is also one stage where you have a limited time to pick up every coin and that is a rough idea with the camera system in place.
The high points are the boss stages, as they drop the whole mobius strip deal and instead just have the stage rotate under your feet as you try to keep up and grab all the coins. It’s perhaps the least creative of the bunch and not coincidentally the best realized. If the whole game was like that I’d say give it a shot. As is I say you can safely just play with the free browser demo if interested just to see how the mobius strip deal is implemented, actually rotating the stage you are playing on in space with the mouse is a fairly neat visual and gimmick. Said demo contains about 50% of the full game so while you’ll miss the most advanced stages it’ll give you a pretty substantial taste of the experience.
4 Likes
The World Begins With You
The World Begins With You belongs to a class of adventure games that I would summarize as the sons and daughters of Ico. You wake up in a strange abandoned place with little to no set-up and have to figure out how to make your way through it. Much of what is going on is left unsaid.
What it nails the most is its aesthetic. It relies very much on heavy lighting, the sun’s rays clearly illuminating definite parts of the environment around you. It isn’t a new look, but I like it and it is done well enough here especially given it seemingly wasn’t made on any kind of budget at all.
The problem is… everything else.
A decision was made to give the player no control of the camera whatsoever. Sometimes this results in one not having a great idea where to go next as the camera only shifts to show the route forward once you are basically on top of it. The bigger problem is when there are occasional platforming bits which seem almost set on a 2d plane but in fact are offset either further or nearer to the camera which you basically have to eyeball as best you can with regards to their exact location in 3d space. The controls are no more than functional which also does not help, but fortunately there isn’t too much of this.
Just putting this up to show the scale of things. The camera often pulls way back to give you a feel for just how tiny you actually are compared to everything around you, and it is a nice touch employed well.
Given that the game has no enemies the challenge becomes what sort of obstacles do you craft for the player to overcome on their way to wherever they are heading. The World Begins With You seemed to be a bit short on ideas in this area and hence we get things like this maze. You have to find some panels that move certain walls in the maze which allow you to get deeper in. It isn’t particularly entertaining, having walls move out of sight makes it a bit of a jumble to keep straight in one’s head, and the camera being so pulled away can make it very hard to actually locate the character whenever he is in a shadow. He’s almost dead center in the above image, at times I had him get stuck on some wall geometry and it legitimately took me a bit to figure out where he was.
The kicker is… in this maybe half hour long game there is a second maze section after this, that one with walls that are basically invisible until you are right next to them. I think this was a one person project and I can appreciate the accomplishment in getting something like this off the ground but it is very clear that while this person has a good touch for environment design they really would benefit from a partner with any kind of feel for level design.
…But I really love how the world they created looks. This is a true example of a mixed bag as I find the highs to be high and the lows to be low. For me it was a journey worth taking as it was relatively brief and I liked taking a trip through the space it created. If you look at these screenshots and think that it looks lovely it may be worth it for you as well. If you don’t… consider it a safe pass.
5 Likes
Today I crossed the 2/3 point in going through all the bundle games (the flood of ttrpgs starting around page 27 sped things up a good bit) so hopefully another week and a half and I’ll get through everything and will see exactly how many games I convinced myself to try.
Daydreamour
The best way I can describe Daydreamour is as the opening stage of a pretty solid platformer that was never actually made. Only about ten rooms in total that took me about a dozen minutes to complete (and a good portion of that was spent on one tricky set piece) it still managed to have a solid amount of variety. Sometimes you have to dodge saws and spikes, sometimes you have to deal with a series of platforms that disappear and reappear after every jump you take and it culminates with you having to run trough a series of obstacles as fast as you can to keep up with a scrolling platform. It lifts a bit from the Super Meat Boy class of platformers in terms of how it handles wall jumps but is otherwise no where near as demanding in terms of difficulty or precision. In terms of ten minute platformers I think Pumpking is the stronger of the two, but this is still well put together in its own right.
2 Likes
Kubyx
Kubyx is basically a minimalistic take on Super Meat Boy. There are some slight mechanical differences, you have a dive move that goes through yellow platforms and holding jump against green surfaces allows you to crawl along them (even as ceilings), but this is close enough to basically be a fan game. As far as fan games go it is alright right up until the point it isn’t. I don’t mind the basic graphics, but the controls are less precise than what you normally encounter in games of this ilk. For most of the game’s 30 levels this isn’t a huge problem, while it can at times be a bit tricky it rarely demands exacting precision.
And then there is the last couple rooms, in particular this one. If you notice in the top left corner the game keeps track of the total number of deaths you’ve had so far in your run through the game. At the time of the first pic I had 212, by the time of the second I had 450 and neither was the first or last attempt on said room. In fact after I crossed the 600 death mark I turned it off to get some air and discovered that the game doesn’t save your progress. I got back there and died another hundred or so times before finally getting past it. This room has very tight timing windows combined with very tight spaces you must pass through before objects arrive and kill you and at this point the controls simply cannot keep up. I think there is a stretch of rooms that make up the bulk of the middle to late section of the game that are pretty fun to jump through, but at the very end it may be wiser to walk away.
Can Androids Pray: Red
Can Androids Pray: Red is a short visual novel about a conversation between two damaged mech pilots in the aftermath of a failed skirmish that they both know will leave them dead by sunrise. This helps transform the short runtime into a strength as it helps set the stakes in what is in essence a philosophical discussion about god and the nature of life that otherwise wouldn’t have them. I would assume anyone who has dealt with even a minimal amount of cyberpunk works will have come across similar ideas to some of the ones this deals with, but I’d still say this short story is written well enough that it ain’t a bad way to spend 15-20 minutes.
I believe the dialogue choices in here would mostly prove to be inconsequential, but there are a couple at the end that might provide some actual variance. Most of the game is static shots of 3d models, but I have a soft spot for the flat shaded polygonal look much of them have.
Concentric
Concentric is a very neat concept that I can’t actually evaluate. Your goal is to maneuver from the innermost rings to the outermost one to grab the power icon, and then return to the center ring to raise your power number until you hit the goal figure. The quicker you get the power and return to the center the more points it is worth, and the goal is to hit the target number in the quickest time possible. Hitting an enemy makes you respawn on the top of the innermost ring and serves to slow you down but you keep all of your gathered points. There are 26 different stages and while a number of them are pretty similar there is enough variety overall.
I’m the fourth best player in the world at this stage. That is amazing as this may be one of the least optimized games I have ever encountered. Even in the earliest levels it was hard not to notice how bad my framerate was compared to the video on the store page, to the degree that I don’t know if the controls are as imprecise as they seemed to be or if it was a side effect of how poorly it was running. To be fair I am on an older computer but… I mean look at this game. Look at the other games I’ve played in this topic. I’ve got 8gb of ram, running a game made up of two colors and several circles shouldn’t be a problem. This is why I don’t think I can properly evaluate the game.
There are a few different gimmicks the game busts out (incomplete circles, spots that once you cross become covered in spikes so you must find a different way back, etc.) but the last one is that a ghost follows you mirroring your previous moves. The last few stages combine this with turbo stages where everything rotates at at least double speed… and my god did this break things in an amazing way, especially that last stage. My PC was so overwhelmed by this that I got maybe a few frames per second and hence controlling anything became an epic adventure. I would have to judge how long to press a button to rotate to a certain point on the circle as the game would no longer show me any images between the beginning and ending locations. Remember that everything is rotating super fast, so holding down the rotate button for a half sec might rotate me around the entire outermost circle.
I couldn’t stop moving as an invisible ghost would catch and kill me… except everything was lagging so badly that I would go bump into an enemy and spawn back at the start location only to have the ghost from the first run materialize on top of me and kill me a second time instantaneously…except that it was running so poorly that the collision detection would often break down and the ghost would just appear atop of me and do nothing until I tried to move. Getting beyond the second ring became nearly impossible as there were a good number of fast moving enemies rotating mindlessly around rings demanding at least a small degree of precision to weave through.
On the occasion I made it to the outer ring without smashing into an enemy I’d have to judge how many fractions of a second I’d have to hold the button down to rotate far enough to grab the power icon without smashing into an enemy, except again the collision detection became so wonky that I’d often pass through it without it registering as having been picked up. On the occasion that it did register as having been picked up and I didn’t overrotate into an enemy I basically had to blindly mash the button to jump from circle to circle back to the center as the ghost was always on my tail even if there are so few frames that it was impossible to track its movement. I only very infrequently made it this far and if there wasn’t a clean straight path back to the inner circle I’d die; there was rarely a straight path back.
I didn’t check but I’m sure the gold medal time for this last stage is probably less than 30 seconds. If it ran smoothly that might not be unreasonable, but it would be boring. My final stage was a grueling contest of wills, of not only finding a way to do a seemingly simple task with every available tool broken but having to do it several times to gather enough points for the game to finally say you may pass. 30 seconds… heh, most of my lives ended in about a couple of seconds and it must have taken me about twenty minutes before I finally managed to somehow gather enough points to win. That’s a final fucking boss battle right there.
…I’m at the #20 spot on the leaderboard for that last stage.
3 Likes
i don’t have a huge post here but today i grabbed Fotonica from the bundle.
it’s kind of like a brainchild baby between rez and canabalt. you have a character that is controlled with one button. they either run, jump, or glide downward. you guide them through increasingly psychedelic wireframe scapes. i’d like it more on LSD but i do like it
2 Likes
Your Future Self
A self-described “conversation-em-up” Your Future Self is probably best considered a midpoint between a visual novel and text adventure, it is a fairly odd experiment; I kinda love it. Given that the game is mostly text it would appear to be tricky to get many usable screenshots for it, but instead I realized that I can save on having to type things myself if I let the game explain its own concept.
How does it start?
Oh that’s not good.
I do think I would recall having killed thousands of people now that you mention it.
Oh… well that’s a bad break for me, current me that is. What exactly am I supposed to do about this?
I mean, I can probably do that. Anything else?
…And that probably sets the table well enough.
After this intro you are dropped directly into a one on one conversation with your future self. You can’t actually see anyone, the game is almost entirely made up of text on what appears to be a CRT screen.
Red text is future you (current you is yellow text) and future you does not initially seem to be all that receptive to changing its ways. At this point the conversation starts. It is worth stating up front that for the most part while you make choices you can’t really steer the conversation away from where it is going. No matter what you choose at least in the short term much of what you and future you says is sort of locked in place. What can you really choose then?
You control the tone of how the conversation goes. Basically, well I’ll let the game handle this once more.
I’m sure you’ve noticed the various other things on the prior few screens. Both yous have stats in rationality, empathy and assertiveness that play a role in how likely a given tone is likely to work overall, while you also have an indicator at the bottom right that clues you in to future you’s mood (I guess to make up for the lack of any visual cues). I may start out best at being assertive, but if future me isn’t in the mood to hear it and is fairly assertive themselves it won’t always be the best play. Moreso your tone affects their mood moving forward, basically forcing you to vary it up.
When I say how likely it is that your tone will “work”, as the conversation proceeds this graph appears that charts how it is proceeding and if your tone works you will gain insight. What does insight do? In general terms (because specifics would be light spoilers) insight will be useful both in terms of increasing your stats and causing the narrative to proceed. This is basically what there is to the game part of the experience, and apparently a bunch of people who’ve played the game had a hard time wrapping their heads around it. The author put up a guide for the game for people who do get tripped up, and a helper mode that puts up percentages next to each option to let you know how likely it is to succeed. I don’t think it is really necessary and in truth I think the muddiness of whether something will work or not adds to things.
I haven’t touched much on the narrative as the game is at its heart a mystery. What I posted up above is basically the first few screens in the game that set the table, and I made sure the other screens don’t tip anything off. I will say that I really liked it a lot. You are always stuck with an information gap; future you knows what they did, doesn’t really deny it and stands strongly behind it (it being the deaths of thousands). When the initial answers seem to be soon to come the loop kicks in and you are back at the start of the conversation, your future self with no recollection of what was said prior. How do you buy time or shift things so that you can not only figure out what happened, but also convince yourself that what they did was wrong… if what they was wrong?
And if we’re questioning things… how are we here in this situation? Who put us here and gave us this ultimatum? Are they simply trying to avert tragedy, or do they also have other interests?
…What exactly is going on? I’ve read better in-game writing, and some concepts touched on won’t be new to many, but there is a creeping sense of paranoia that slowly grows that really works for me. You never see anything, hence you can never confirm anything except for the fact that certain bits of text don’t agree with other bits of text, and while everything proceeds you are stuck trying to figure out which bit to believe on top of seeking answers and changing minds and then you start the loop again except now the conversation is shifting a bit differently than last time. At least you have some certainty in the structures and forms of the experience…
…I’ve probably said enough.
As this is a text-heavy game that loops there will be a lot of repeated text. You can thankfully click on the screen to speed through it, but make sure it is repeated text before you do so. Also click on the upper half of the screen to make sure you don’t speed to and then accidentally click on a choice. Overall it is a formally odd experiment not quite like most if any other gaming experience I’ve had and I’d consider it to be a bundle stand out.
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Blitz Breaker
Blitz Breaker is very much in the Super Meat Boy/Celeste subgenre of platformers with one key exception: you can’t run or even walk.
You have a jump button that works as expected, but you traverse the stages by pressing either up, down, left or right. Doing so sends you flying in that direction until you hit a wall or solid object, at which point you stop (well, in truth you bounce off a bit) and begin falling towards the ground unless you press another direction and go flying once more.
I have very few pictures of the game because… I mean, you try finding the time to take screenshots in the middle of a fast action Super Meat Boy-esque platformer. That is my excuse, but I think the real reason may also be that this is a pretty great game and I got sucked into it. While I don’t think it threatens Super Meat Boy or Celeste for the very top spots I’m not sure I can name another one of these I’ve tried that is comfortably better than this.
The key with this type of game is the physics of the character you control, how precise they are and if there are any little details that you have to dig your teeth into. Blitz Breaker nails both of these. Through the hundred stages that make up the game I don’t feel like the controls were ever the reason I died, a good deal of precision was required at times and I often died due to not hitting a tiny window but it always felt like my fault. The little bounce after you smash into a surface seems like a minor thing but it becomes something you have to take into account. If there are spikes along that wall you can’t immediately hit up or down after contact, you have to wait a second to bounce far away enough to clear them while also hoping that you aren’t so close to spikes below you that waiting that tick is enough for you to fall into them. You then sometimes have to make sure you don’t bounce too far away that you end up aligned with something else fatal. Basically movement and controls feel like they have been completely thought out and the stages designed to take full advantage of them. Worth noting is that while the view always stays single screen, a given stage may require you to go through several single screens to reach the exit portal.
As noted there are a hundred stages (plus one) and generally a new obstacle or twist gets added in every dozen or so stages. Some are typical like lasers or moving platforms, but you do get a few more creative ones like filling at least part of the stage with water. Doing so alters the physics in important ways. On one hand it makes everything move slower, which should make things easier. This is countered by your bounce after dashing into a surface becoming more pronounced. This means you can now climb vertically by dashing horizontally into a wall repeatedly (I don’t know if that is how actual physics work, but it is consistent here) which introduces vertical passages with alternating spiked sections on both the left and right that one must navigate. The increased bouncing also sends you careening towards spikes you otherwise wouldn’t be in danger of bumping into, which changes how you approach certain set-ups compared to how you would when just moving through air.
The game walks the “tough but not too tough” line for the first 75% or so, after which point it can get pretty darn hard. I believe 2/3 of my total deaths were in that last 25% of stages, and most of those in the last handful. Every stage has a target time in order to get a star for completing it, and you gain more time via collecting the coins scattered about (which often also serve to point you towards the optimal path through a stage). This basically rewards you playing as frantic as possible, and the game is built for that kind of approach while still often giving the more cautious player points where they can pause for a bit (say by pressing up repeatedly to keep by a safe bit of ceiling) in order to catch their breath and plan their next move. There are also three purple bits in every set of rooms that if you collect opens up a warp zone containing three somewhat harder stages, and four green keys that open am extra bonus stage that is too nuts for me to bother with.
I assume by now most of you know whether you like this type of platformer. If you do, give this one a shot as it is one of the better ones. It’s probably the best game to play mechanically speaking in the bundle (well Celeste is in the bundle, but I played that before) that I’ve come across so far.
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@username you are the hero we needed but did not deserve. Thank you so much for curating this bundle.
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Thanks! I am somehow the right kind of idiot for this endeavor as thanks to Random Game Names I keep seeing random games next to no one knows of but excite me. A few days ago I legit went “Oh my god, this has Dogurai in it!” I’m probably gonna start it this weekend, I’m legit hyped.
It’s a gameboy Mega Man inspired game where you play as a dog samurai and instead of a gun you have a sword! It kept popping up on the steam new release for ages as it kept getting pushed back, and now it is out and I have it!
…That said while I’ll still be mentioning the games I play here I doubt I’ll be writing as much about them, I’ve fallen a bit out of the mood of writing several paragraphs about things. Still taking screen shots though!
Lieve Oma
Lieve Oma is a literal walking sim. You’re a kid visiting her grandma who goes with her for a walk through the forest to go picking mushrooms for dinner. Along the way you also talk with her, some of it just regular grandma/grandkid banter and some of it a bit more.
I used to go walking along the NJ towpath, which is basically a many miles long dirt path that runs along the canal and hence is mostly in wooden areas. I haven’t for a while as my ankle was hurt and then the plague fell upon humanity (it is not six feet wide and there is literally no walkable “off the path” area for much of it). I also no longer have any living grandparents. I miss both of these things greatly and hence this game did my heart a lot of good. The forest itself is very colorful with autumnal hues, the amount of game here beyond just holding the analog stick in a single direction and occasionally tapping x to progress through dialogue options basically doesn’t exist and yet I’ll probably play it again just to be in that place once more, it’s a really good gaming forest.
I also have to admit that I hadn’t stopped and thought about my grandma in a bit. It did make me a bit sad , but probably the good kind of sad?
So yeah, I found Lieve Oma to be a rather lovely thing.
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Lieve Oma was by far my favorite game I’ve played from the bundle and I enjoyed it so much I kept fighting the urge to post about it cuz I knew I’d end up writing 3,000 embarrassing words about myself and my family and picking mushrooms and doing tick checks and wishing all walking sims were so small and personal and intimate.
I didn’t want to sully it with my dumb bullshit.
5 Likes
I need to post about the game I won’t shut up about in like, any other arena, The Testimony of Trixie Glimmer Smith. I’m dropping this here as some kind of hopeful reminder to myself to do so in the next couple days.
oh dang i didn’t realize that had some cosmic horror shit in it, now i gotta play it
1 Like
A Wish Upon A Star is pretty cool. You need to guide a child to the exit of each level by raising/lowering/rotating parts of the environment (mostly pillars, some topped with staircases). You can’t manipulate parts you’re standing on, and some pillars are paired with others so standing on one also immobilizes the other. You can’t raise/lower pillars unless you can click on their sides; clicking on the floor tiles atop them guides the child to walk there if able.
It occasionally suffers from its isometric viewpoint and repetitive environmental elements making things a bit difficult to read. You’ll probably think you can move the child someplace only to realize upon rotating the stage that your eyes deceive you.
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this sounds like Monument Valley but less polished