The biggest difference is it doesn’t do that thing where you can used forced perspective to alter space, i.e., if you line up two disconnected pathways visually by changing the perspective you aren’t able to traverse them like the gap is actually closed.
1 Like
reYal
This one is tricky. While reYal is technically a puzzle game, I think it is better to say that it is an experiment. Because of this it is hard to say much about it as I think not knowing much about it has to be part of the deal for it to work. The vaguest summary I could offer that would at least give a general idea is that it is a look at recursion, what the store page describes as “you play as you playing as you to find out why.”
It lasts longer than one feels like it should (not very long, but my time was closing in on an hour (I made a mistake or two though)), can be a bit of a slog and I’d argue is at times intentionally annoying. I still found it to be worthwhile, it is a fairly thorough examination of a specific idea. I think one would have to be in a specific mood for it, and hence trying to answer the question “should other people here try it?” is rather tricky. I think it is the kind of experiment that some here would conceptually get something out of, but I also think that it is an experience many will bounce off of. Hard. I think it is neat!
Oh yeah, the game has one final touch at the very end. I initially thought it was cute. Hours later it struck me that there was literally nothing better/more fitting that it could have possibly done.
2 Likes
In Towayami, the entire world has gone completely pitch black, no lights can penetrate the darkness. You have to feel your way around your house to find a key that your parents have hidden so you can try to escape.
(Salty take: This is how you make a hidden object game when you’ve got no desire to like, do graphics or anything).
Cool premise, got stuck after making some very small progress. The game’s creator claims it is a horror game, which, maybe?
Tbh I got bored as soon as I got stuck. I might try again on a day I’ve got more patience/attention span.
1 Like
Karambola
I feel like I could just write “very Amanita Design inspired” and leave it at that.
Rather than a fleshed out adventure game you have nine individual scenes where you visit one of your friends and help chase their bad thoughts away in. It all has a very hand drawn look starring a series of truly remarkable character designs, in truth I was excited each time I got to the next scene just to see what new being was waiting for me there. In each case you click on something and see a crudely drawn manifestation of what is bothering them and have to solve an adventure game-esque puzzle(non-inventory edition) to cheer them up. Some of them are very basic, some of them are a bit unusual and a couple make really good use of background elements in the scene.
It takes maybe a half hour to get through and that feels about right. It is one of my favorite looking things I’ve come across in the bundle, and a low stakes adventure puzzle game is a nice way to spend a bit of time while looking at pleasant things.
1 Like
And now for something completely different.
Games made with Bitsy
A side effect of playing all these browser games in a short period of time is that I’ve started to pick up on the different game editors/makers used to create these more hobbyist games. I was familiar with puzzlescript before, and was introduced to some fine Pico-8 games, but the one that kept popping up to the degree I had to look it up was Bitsy.
I’ve posted a couple Bitsy games previously, no secrets (the one where you see a lot of random thoughts from the creator against a harsh white/black background) and ephemera of evalynn cott (in art school and all your projects are late). The big tell that you are dealing with a Bitsy game is that the title card is always a black box with the game name in white text against a solid color background.
The games are generally limited to two to three colors at a time, one generally used along with a darker shade to make up the gaming world and a different color to indicate things you can interact with. This gives them all a fairly recognizable if somewhat basic look. The other less immediately obvious aspect is that mechanically all you can really do is move your avatar around and cause text boxes to pop up. This can be caused by pressing into one of those different colored interactable objects, but can also be triggered by making it to a certain region of the screen. These limitations are fairly severe, so it was interesting (to me at least) to see what people did with this engine.
In the above game I’m Bored, Let’s Explore (Mall) it is basically a straight path through an abandoned mall. In this game (and the next one by the same author) the character you control is actually two characters, you basically guiding them in a conversation through an abandoned mall as they look at the closed stores and such. It… isn’t a lot.
In I’m Bored, Let’s Explore (Ruins) it is the same basic concept developed a bit more thoroughly. You still wander about and have a conversation between your two characters, but there are skeletons you can bump into that triggers a set of text boxes that simulate combat (that you always win). The curious thing is that as it is slightly less linear (more stuff to pick up, an optional room or two off the main path) on a second playthrough you can see some of the oddities of the engine as item descriptions pop up in a certain order rather than being tied to a specific item. The second tablet you interact with with always trigger the same description, so if you explore the left side of a room first instead of the right side the descriptions will then be all jumbled up. Beyond that curiosity, while more developed this is still rather thin.
Intrepid is the first I came across that did something fairly unique with the engine. The game is basically an Indiana Jones set-up where you grab an idol and then have to try to avoid death from the trap it triggers. Aside from the idol there aren’t really any marked interactable objects, but you will trigger various hidden ones as you try to escape. Almost all of those text boxes end with “you died”. All the Bitsy games seem to send you back to the title page when you hit an ending, but this is the only one that really uses it along with multiple endings to simulate a player death. This makes the game into a process of elimination style puzzler as you try to figure out exactly how to escape the predicament you trigger. It probably will only last one five or so minutes to figure out, but it is a pretty clever use of what the engine can produce.
And then, finally, there is 36 Days a Week. The set-up feels fairly standard for what a Bitsy game could offer: You find yourself stranded in a labyrinth, and the only way to get the door out to open is to collect the 36 “broken” poems contained within. They are broken as most of them are in several pieces in a given room; in the above screenshot you see them as the white circle each line appears as, as well as the average quality of a line of poetry in the game. So yeah, basically you wander around a giant maze collecting all the white circles each of which gives you a line of text.
This seems like it’d be a fairly dull exercise, but it has one twist that ended up capturing my imagination: the labyrinth is an impossible space/object. As an example when you exit a given room on the left you may end up in a different room than you would if you tried to do so at a later point… but not always. If you go right and then immediately try to return to the left you may end up in a room you’ve never seen before. Add in that there are several room exits (I believe near the theoretical edges of the maze) that serve as warp points that send you elsewhere and it becomes a true effort to try and find everything contained in there. The closest comparison I can make is to Antichamber, the person behind this game found some peculiarities in the engine that basically breaks the standard room layouts and after a bit of just wandering around wonderfully confused I was forced to figure out exactly how it functioned to hopefully find the few last bits of poetry and make my escape.
At a point I think I finally figured out how it was handled and was able to trigger access to a wide variety of rooms from certain exits out of a central room (no, I won’t say how). The exit point finally let me leave, and I was free of this impossible maze.
It is… tricky to recommend it as I don’t know if one who didn’t play a bunch of these games shortly before would find it as neat. I legit got a kick out of how fluid the maze is and the adventure I had trying to explore it, and it is the kind of oddity that some at SB would appreciate, but I think most would find Intrepid the most rewarding of the bunch.
7 Likes
So good news I finally looked through every game in the bundle, only took five or so weeks. I also added all the “interesting” ones to my backloggery page so I can more easily pick one at random. I think the number of ones I marked as such is between 350 and 400 (between ones I’ve beat already and various browser ones it is hard to get an exact count) so… yeah, that’s gonna take a bit of time.
Honest question: do people want me mentioning and writing up a few sentences about mostly poor games here for the sake of “so hey, that’s what it is about and maybe it has a single interesting thing about it”, or would it just be better overall to just focus on games that even if mediocre have something about them that sticks out? I don’t care much either way, but I keep going back and forth between “people who look in here probably care about finding hidden gems in this 1700+ game bundle and making them sort through a bunch of write-ups isn’t helpful” and “it is interesting to see what is out there, even if it is bad/a mess”.
The Indifferent Wonder of an Edible Place
The Indifferent Wonder of an Edible Place, beyond being a hell of a name, is a satirical take on a satirical poem about a shameful event that took place in India 1961. Except the satirical poem it is based on never existed, and the event doesn’t appear to have actually happened. That doesn’t make it untrue.
On the surface the game is about eating this tower. The various television sets surrounding it tell you which block to eat, and via a mechanic not worth describing you find said block and eat it.
After eating each block you are greeted with a bit of the “fake” poem about these building eaters. The event it is about is listed in the store page as:
As noted before, it doesn’t appear that this actually happened. What did happen and which it does refer to is the demolition of Babri Masjid, a 16th century mosque that in 1992 was torn down by a mob of hindu nationalists. The same strain of hindu nationalists that are more or less running India today.
In short it is a game about erasure. It is a game about whitewashing ones history and in doing so trying to whitewash its future as well. It is a game less about the “big” figures behind such an undertaking and more about the regular individuals who actually carry it out because they are hungry and it is positioned as a way to be fed, to be worthy… or perhaps because they just don’t bother to actually think about what it is that they are doing. Or in this particular case they know what it is that they do but don’t really see another way.
Given the nature of the bundle this was included in there are a lot of games in it that are about making a point; this is the one that has stood out so far as poignant if not powerful. Once I pieced together what it was really about the gameplay did not become much more interesting (it is a weak point but it is also designed to not get in the way) but the text, the poetry really hit me. It made me feel awful about what is happening half a world away, and in truth reading it at a time when a lot of stuff is being torn down over here isn’t the most comfortable experience in the world even as I by and large agree with it.
There are a lot of games out there, but not many that can affect how you look at things. The indifferent wonder of an edible place is a keeper.
12 Likes
Oh I think maybe this is the dev of some other interesting looking things so I need to dig this one out, they’ve been on my radar for a while.
1 Like
Studio Oleomingus, and all of their small projects are worth checking out:
3 Likes
This seems to be the “bigger” game they are working towards, which also looks like it could be snazzy.
3 Likes
I’ve been more excited for this than almost anything
what could be nearer my heart than a game with aspirations to Invisible Cities?
The people of Kayamgadh do not speak.
They are afraid that their words might penetrate the layers under which their bodies are hidden. Afraid that some phrase or name might,
through woolen caps and cotton plugs and balled bits of torn rags, enter their buried ears and insert itself into their thoughts,
prompting them to think of Kayamgadh not as they see it but as it is being described to them by the person speaking these words.It is a fear so deeply entrenched, that people now see the city with unwilling eyes, shaded behind their hands,
lest they be tempted into a sudden burst of verbiage whilst looking upon the wonders of Kayamgadh. a temptation that might resist the doctrine of their self imposed silence.For Kayamgadh is a wonderful city, where the craftsmen strive hard to put into form all that they cannot give words to,
and where the work of the craftsman is left undisturbed, for it is only looked upon and but never described by the people, who never speak.C 1804. From the Journal of Charles Henry Connington. As restored and translated by Mir UmamrHassan in 1962, from the original folio compilation by AzizUsta.
5 Likes
Above: The Fallen
Having your font of choice be so illegible that you have to write it a second time in normal text is such a sign of a good idea gone amiss that it… just fits this game perfectly.
Above: The Fallen is a puzzle platformer that is slightly more vertical than horizontal but whose main mechanical gimmick is that you have to control two characters at the same time. I’ve seen this before in ibb & obb (which was more of a straight platformer) and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (which is more of an adventure game) but this one goes a bit further by having you gain specific abilities for each character that you have to plan around. They actually introduce new abilities at a pretty solid clip, so that you receive news ones every half hour or so until you are done.
I would go into more details as it is a swell idea to build a game around but it sadly has a fatal flaw: the character controls and physics are about as bad as you will ever see. Jumps will randomly go odd, you’ll clip through platforms or get stuck on geometry, it really feels like it is barely just holding together. The game only rarely asks you to do anything too mechanically demanding so it can be worked around, but it is janky to the point of just not being that enjoyable to have to deal with. If the puzzle design was great it could maybe overcome it but it is honestly mostly just there with an occasional highlight.
I’d like to see someone else take a shot at playing through the game you can see how it could actually work and make something pretty good, but this sadly ain’t it.
3 Likes
Dogurai
I would sum up Dogurai as such: if one were the type to go playing through a bunch of random Gameboy games looking for an overlooked gem, they’d have been happy when they came across Dogurai were it an actual Gameboy game. It isn’t the most complicated thing in the world, you only need a couple of buttons and there aren’t really any techniques beyond your standard sword swing, a double jump and a slide when you press down and jump at the same time. I heard it compared to the Gameboy Mega Mans but it turns out it is because after the first stage you can choose to play the next four in any order, not because you get extra attacks for each boss you beat.
Still I found it to be an enjoyable game to slash my way through. The enemies after the first couple stages have just enough variety to keep things interesting, the environmental hazards get switched up enough and it tosses in an occasional one-off like a forced scrolling motorcycle stage. I assume everyone has played better, and there isn’t anything here you haven’t seen before, but it offers a few hours of solid enjoyment. The bosses for the most part are well done with numerous attacks and trademark tells without becoming too similar to one another. It is a bit on the easy side with a few exceptions, but you can choose to play with infinite lives or a hard mode that gives you only three where if you run out you have to restart the given stage from the very beginning. It goes a bit outside the Gameboy box by including some QTEs when fighting bigger enemies where you knock them into the air and have to press the same direction as the arrow on the screen to do extra damage. It is useful in speeding up some of the boss fights at least.
It also “cheats” a bit on the Gameboy aesthetic a bit. The stages cycle between various Super Gameboy-esque color palettes, the backgrounds would sometimes be a bit more detailed than you’d likely see in a real GB game, and some bosses can summon more objects sans slowdown than I think it could really muster. None of that really bothers me, but I know there are some who would be irked by it. I don’t recall the exact limits of the soundchip so it may cheat on the music front as well, but it seemed close enough and the soundtrack was solid.
There is a hidden object in each of the four initially selectable stages that one must find to get the true ending, whatever that entails (I only found two). The bigger thing is that there is some hidden stuff sprinkled throughout, including divergent paths through certain stages. Nothing mind blowing, but again a nice touch. That’s pretty much Dogurai right there: it ain’t gonna blown anyone’s mind but it’s nice, and nice is good.
4 Likes
Looks like it’s actual GameBoy resolution too if I’m counting the pixels across the top correctly. 160 wide x 144 high. I love the look! That last screen is so evocative with so few shapes and colors.
1 Like
I mean, I had to crop the screenshots as it ran in a window so they may have lost a few pixels near the edges here and there so I wouldn’t try to go for an exact count based on these images alone, but that’s cool if it got the resolution right as well. I guess it is worth pointing out that you can run the game at I believe 1x, 2x, 4x and full screen, and at 1x the window the game runs in looks to be about the same size as an actual gameboy screen. You could also disable palette switching which I believe would cause the whole game to run in the pea green shade. I left it on and ran at 4x because I am a heretic~
1 Like
Okay so I have a ton of screenshots of various browser games or games that only took 10-15 minutes to play cramming up my picture folder so I’m just emptying it all out here now just to get things neater on my end. Get comfortable, this might take a while.
Central Limit Theorem
A high score chasing arcade style game where you rotate around the central point shooting at approaching enemies that come in three different colors that represent three different behaviors in order to prevent them from hitting the center for as long as possible. They leave a path of their color behind them even when shot, and when enemies cross the path of a different color enemy they gain the behaviors of that color type on top of their own. I didn’t really care for it as a game but kinda dug it as a playable visualizer.
Out The Window
This has an all-time great game concept where a bored kid is looking out the car window during a long roadtrip and visualizing a character who has to jump over the signs as they pass by. I did that as a kid and I am glad to know that I was not alone in doing so. The game itself is pretty bad.
ZAK
A maybe ten minute long action platformer where you run and jump and hit things with a pipe for freedom. It is alright with a pretty okay boss section at the end. It falls into the category of bundle games that I’d describe as “not a bad way to spend ten minutes but I wouldn’t go out of your way to look for it.”
TimeOut
TimeOut is an odd one. More or less a fleshed out student project, I just love the aesthetic of it. It is basically a 2d noir adventure game except rendered in 3d and it looks very swell. The base story conceit has potential too, taking place in a world where time is the currency everything is paid with. The problem is that it is so limited and brief that it feels more like a proof of concept than its own fully fleshed out thing. Darn pretty though and if there is ever a fully developed follow up I’d be intrigued.
IGEO
IGEO is a surprisingly decent little puzzle game. It is a sokoban variant where your goal is to get rid of every block in a stage. Pushing two like blocks together makes them both disappear, although different shape blocks can cause different things to happen when that happens. Push two cones together and a solid block is left behind after that could block something off, push two crosses together and a single shape of your choosing is left behind, cubes and spheres do nothing special when combined but a block can be pushed into an empty space and fill in the gap so you can walk atop it (these blocks count as gone).
It is a bit looser than I generally like my puzzle games in that there is rarely a single solid correct solution, in most cases there are probably a dozen or more slightly (or very) different solutions you can figure out. It still works for me as figuring out the routes you have to push the blocks towards one another is a legitimately puzzling endeavor, and there are some cool little twists and things you have to figure out sprinkled across its twenty levels. I don’t think any non-puzzle game fan will get much out of it, but it is a neat little thing for those who are.
Gunducky Industries
A keyboard-only Starfox inspired rail shooter… except often lining up shots is too difficult so you end up flying past many enemies who can’t hit you as long as you stay far enough away from them. It is rather flawed, but I found some minutes worth of enjoyment out of figuring out how to steer the thing with the keyboard (I believe WASD controls orientation and the arrow keys controlled the camera) and the second stage (first stage is ridiculously long) has a tighter canyon environment that actually requires some steering prowess. It also eventually requires you to be able to aim and fire accurately and that’s where both the enjoyment and myself bailed.
Orbis
When a red disc comes up you swipe it to the left, and when a blue one comes up you do so to the right. That’s about it. There are a few powerups and when you get enough in a row it does ten or so in a row for you automatically at a very high speed. On a phone it’d probably be a solid way to kill a few minutes every so often. It comes with an android download so someone else could test that theory if they wanted.
Conversations With My Anxiety
This is a short visual novel about a guy dealing with his anxiety (literally as seen in the screenshot) during an awkward first date. Showing that things being awkward is fine and not the end of the world is a good thing, but it is such a slight game that it’s really hard to recommend.
Masks
A brief text adventure about being trapped in a Hong Kong university during a government crackdown on protests, which surely isn’t timely or something that’ll ever come up. What’s there is well done but it is maybe three minutes long which kinda undercuts the attempt to build dread and tension.
Kintsugi
One of six or so objects break and you have to put them back together. The thing is the pieces don’t move far from where they originally fall and when you pick a piece up it automatically smitches to the correct final orientation, so it is pretty brainless. I’d say it could be a decent little chillout experience except it lasts maybe two and a half minutes, so I have no clue who it’d be for.
ARGH-P-G
This is designed to be a rapid speed roguelike where you can speed through all fifty floors in about fifteen minutes. I gotta be honest, I could never figure out how to attack and nothing on the page really explained how. One class has a bow and arrows that are automatically fired whenever you come across an enemy, so I took that one and made it to about floor thirty before I ran out.
Arigatou, Ningen-san!
A five minute long game where you arrive in a new town and have to pet every animal there. Would have probably been better on a touch device, but even ignoring that there’s maybe five animals in the game that take maybe five minutes to find.
Try
Using puzzlescript to make a game that randomly generates sokoban puzzles is impressive as hell. The issue is that it doesn’t really care if they are actually solvable or not. That’s the point as the game is about trying and when you should stick with something or give up, but doesn’t really make for a satisfying gaming experience. The best part is that the last one it generates is always an absurd monstrosity, such as the one pictured below.
Grievance
Grievance is a just a straight short story where you click on things occasionally. It is one of those deals where there are three protagonists it jumps between in order to figure out what really happened. It was short enough that seeing what was actually going on was enough to get me through, but beyond that it doesn’t offer a ton. Not bad if you stumble upon it, don’t go looking for it.
Barrel Roll
A flying game except in this one you are give intentionally broken controls that force you to rotate (i.e. barrel roll) all the time and is an absolute disaster to try and use. I enjoy the joke of the concept but I really hated doing anything in here.
Viv and Bob
An actual gameboy puzzle game (you can download a rom and run it on actual hardware… probably) with a pretty clever twist. You have two characters with different abilities who are trapped on opposite sides of a mirror and must work together in order to solve the rooms. The thing is they see different things because of the very slightly different perspectives they have (in the above image only one of them can see the numbers on the objects and the wall that show where they go). It is a pretty ingenious idea that they only scratch the surface of as there are at most ten rooms in the game. What’s there would be a good intro stage in a bigger game, one that I hope someone actually makes someday.
TV Guide
Sort of a barely animated comic along the lines of what you may have seen on very early cd-rom “games”. You click on parts of an image to progress the story and when it ends you hit the change channel button to see another one. It’s basic and goofy but I kinda dug it.
Draw Nine
A choose your own adventure story with a mild randomization element. At the start of the story you are given nine random cards (out of three types) and at nine points in the story you have to play one of them. Some times it goes well, sometimes less well (I don’t think you can outright fail). There are a few times where you can go to one of two different places on the otherwise straight narrative path. It is kinda neat to play through a couple of times to see how things could have went differently, but that’s about it.
Lacrymo Tennis
A game where you run back and forth to hit tear gas canisters back at the police to protect protesters. The game is dreadful but that’s a damn fine theme to go with.
Acid Trip
This is a game where in concept two bars of different color spin around you and you have to shoot them when of a matching color, but it functioned so poorly that I think it might be straight busted. I ended up firing to the upper right as fast as possible while triggering a power-up every time one appeared and lasted a good amount of time. The visuals got a bit weird but can’t really recommend a game that I don’t think is even in a functional state.
Dual Pong
Dual Pong is a set of a few different Pong variants where depending on the button you are pressing when the ball hits your paddle it bounces off differently. Also most of the time there are two balls in play. The problem is that I played it in single player and the AI opponents are busted as hell. I used the same attack most of the time and it worked 70-80% of the time. Maybe if you have enough local multiplayer friends who want to play pong it could be of some worth?
9 Likes
imo focus on the interesting, make a note in the spreadsheet for the remaining ones
1 Like
Online Simulator
Online Simulator is an odd bird. It is basically a mystery game, the mystery being what was going on with the person whose PC you are looking through and how to actually access most of what is on said PC. Much of it is straight bizarre, some of it is parody of computer stuff from the early millennium but a bunch of it is way out there. In particular the what I can only describe as the guy’s fetish is so strange I don’t know that it actually exists, and I usually assume that every fetish is probably real.
The thing is that within all of this madness there is some story bits in there that are dark and realistic and relevant in its look at abusiveness. It is such a striking contrast that I would love to know the intention behind it, but in truth I would love to know a lot about what lead to the making of this. What I can say is that it held my interest throughout the forty or so minutes it took me to get through it.
4 Likes
Vision Soft Reset
Vision Soft Reset is proof that the curation systems in place have failed. There is literally no good reason for me to have not heard of this game before the bundle came along, for me to initially decide to not put it on my play list because it looked like it might be a bit long only for part of the description to get stuck in my head forcing me to go back and add it to my list the next day. There is no excuse for the only mention of it on SB to be in that Random Game Name topic where the idiot behind it apparently didn’t read any of the store page and decide “hey this actually sounds neat, I should maybe tell people about it.” He failed us all.
When I played Hatch or Eat Girl, both of which I thought were great, I could grasp how they had no following as they were mechanical oddities that would only ever appeal to a certain small niche. Perhaps VSR was a victim of Metrovania fatigue (TBF, not really any 'Vania in here) but unlike so many of them out there it has something new and clever to bring to the template. The protagonist here is psychic, which manifests itself in a few ways but the main one can be in how time is handled.
The planet you land on is gonna explode twenty minutes after you land, which is a bad thing. It is simply not possible to accomplish everything that needs to be done in only twenty minutes. However, since when you are playing the game you are in essence just exploring various potential timelines as a psychic you have all the time in the world to explore the world.
At this point I’d wager at least one of you is going “oh, it’s Majora’s Mask” and… that is a reasonable touch point to start from. There aren’t a ton of NPCs wandering around going through twenty minute routines, but there are aspects of the world that are time sensitive beyond the whole imminent end of the world. Certain events only occur at certain times and other objects in the world are time sensitive (if you wish to think of them as doors, they lock after a certain amount of time). The thing to remember is that things aren’t looping, these are different potential time lines. Does that make a difference?
At least a little! See there are typical save points/rooms throughout the world, but when you save at one what you are saving is that exact moment in that timeline. Every health or meter pick-up you’ve found, any changes you’ve made to the world, and the exact time you make the save are all stored at this point. As you play through that first twenty minute period all those saves are put on an individual timeline, and if you die or reload from only the most recent one then it stays on it and everything works like it does typically. Still at some point you are gonna start to run short on time and will have to go back to an earlier save point, either the initial starting “twenty minutes left” one or a more recent one. When you continue from one of those you create a different timeline that branches off from that point, and anything you previously accomplished after that point is undone. You had four hearts? Now you’re back to two. That thing you spent so long trying to activate? It is shut down again.
How is it possible to make any lasting progress this way? There is one exception: the suit you are in has all kinds of abilities you never figured out how to unlock, and surprise surprise you find data on the planet that reveals how to unlock them. Since they are in essence just data and as a psychic you have complete knowledge of what happens on all these timelines you don’t forget this when you return to an earlier point. You may be back at the starting point but hey, now you have a charged shot and will always have one. Certain bits of terrain can be destroyed by those, opening up paths to new places, etc.
What this boils down to is that it becomes at times a game of runs. You go where you can, make some progress and ideally unlock an ability and then end up resetting back to an earlier point. In my case I had a situation early on where I reached a new location with a bit over two minutes left on the clock and a decision to make whether to continue there or restart and try to get back there with more time remaining. I decided to stick with it and reloaded from that late save repeatedly as I explored around to find various numbers that needed to be combined into a code to unlock a door. In that timeline it only took me about twenty seconds to open the door, but it took a good twenty or so minutes to get the info to open said door. Of course a boss was shortly past it and while they monologued at me the clock kept ticking…
As you get deeper in these runs get increasingly complicated. I have to get certain things done within ten minutes in order to gain access to a new part of the map, but one of those things requires the activation of something elsewhere. However activating that thing removes access to a different part of the map that I also need to visit, so I have to come up with a route that takes you through these areas in the right order that you can finish in under ten minutes. Still once it is done I can save in that new area with a bit less than ten minutes on the clock, removing the need to do that specific run a second time.
The game in many ways is about using your new abilities and map knowledge to find more efficient paths through the world. New abilities open up shortcuts that let you skip many rooms on your way from point A to point B, plus there are secret paths you discover that can also link different places together. Even when not working towards a particular goal it can be useful to go back and establish a “better” save at a given location in terms of time as you never know when you may be asked to get someplace in what initially seems like an absurdly short amount of time (I stumbled upon “doors” that close after about 90 seconds from the start that gatekeep important abilities). It eventually climaxes in a grand run around most of the map, you needing much of that twenty minutes and all the abilities and shortcuts you can wrangle in order to gain access to the final confrontation. Just make sure when you are running around to remember to detour and pick up a few health upgrades…
The thing is even with health pick-ups you remain a glass cannon. I think you can get up to six hearts, and there are regular non-boss enemies that can hit for two hearts damage (which is what you start with). It raises the question of if you are psychic why would you ever even take a hit and the game actually addresses that in the very first battle. Every time an enemy goes to attack you will see a shadow of the attack a second before it occurs which basically replaces the need for “tells” before the attacks. Still even with this you will occasionally get hit by something, and while you have the ability to go back to an earlier point in the timeline in a macro sense you also can do the same in the micro as well. At the top of the screen is a meter that basically lets you rewind time, so when you bump into spikes, get shot or even die you can hold down a button that takes it back at a cost to that meter which I guess represents focus or concentration (fortunately some enemies drop focus in addition to health!) You gotta be quick though as the meter runs out fast, and if it gets low you are likely in grave danger. Similar things have been done before, but it really fits in with the whole concept in play.
(I wish I didn’t lose a bunch of my screenshots by mistake)
Now this doesn’t make VSR the best Metrovania I’ve played. The pixel graphics are fine but can’t match some of the heavy hitters, I don’t recall any of the music, it controls well enough but other games have more interesting movesets and combat to play around with, the world it creates doesn’t quite match others (although the variety of routes through it is rather strong), there’s only a few boss fights, and it’s only about five hours long. I think an argument can be made that it is the cleverest one I’ve come across though. It had an idea of what it could bring to the genre, which is basically a speedrunner mindset (in a less demanding form, a couple asks are tricky but for example on the final run I had about five minutes left over) wed to a unique-for-the-genre time system that is fully thought out and realized in a way that is sadly uncommon.
…And no one played it. No one even really knew it existed. I usually write these things some days after the fact but after playing through this over the last few days I had to come here and struggle to try and explain how Vision Soft Reset is special, a true hidden gem because letting it be unknown any longer than it has to be just feels like such a damn shame.
If Vision Soft Reset is the best game I discover via this bundle it would not be a disappointment.
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This is a great find, and a great write-up. Fantastic work.
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Clam Man
Clam Man is a comedic point and click adventure game, and that makes it tricky. Humor in games is IMO far from universal so trying to figure out if other people will find something funny I feel is beyond my ability to predict. That said, I found Clam Man to be pretty funny.
I rarely found it laugh out loud funny (although there is a song bit early on that got me) but I did find myself grinning fairly frequently while playing it. That said it is a bit soft near the middle when it has to actually stop and establish a bunch of things, and I think part of the ending was a bit of a swing and a miss, but in terms of a comedy thing I’d say it was funny enough.
Mechanically it solved the issue of obtuse puzzles screwing up the pacing in these kind of games by basically removing almost all of them. There are maybe three puzzles in the game total, with the trickiest one included being a half-joke that you have the option of just skipping if you want to. This in a sense almost “reduces” it to the walking sim version of a point and click adventure game, but I think that is a solid fit for what they were going for and being only a few hours long it generally keeps its momentum up except for the aforementioned sagging a bit in the middle.
So yeah, I liked Clam Man. Its brand of humor worked well enough for me to make it an enjoyable enough time.
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