After playing through Water’s Fine I followed the dev on twitter and these are some good tweets
(Water’s Fine is great BTW)
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I’ve generally been writing these up after I finish them but I want to switch things up and write about one I just played a bit of today (and may not finish) because it is a Random Game Name classic…
*deep breath
I Have Low Stats But My Class Is “Leader”, So I Recruited Everyone I Know To Fight The Dark Lord
Or as I remember it, the jrpg where the entire town decides to join you on your quest as you aren’t a particularly good fighter.
Screw tradition!
Yes, yes I do.
So yeah, it is a RPG Maker game where you have an absurdly large party and the joke is how much that breaks things. It’s a good joke, but how the game tries to account for it (or doesn’t account for it) is interesting on how it warps things.
The biggest change is that it doesn’t even try to bother with an actual overworld to wander around as I assume it proved to be a problem with that many sprites moving at all times. The knock on effect of this is that the game also lacks random battles, every encounter now being scripted and generally preceded by conversation with the enemy you are about to face. In that sense it is almost a jrpg boss rush as every enemy I’ve come across through the first world has had a ton of HP. Due in part because of this (but moreso because it’d be hellish to implement at this scale) there is no leveling up, you pretty much start the quest as strong as you are gonna be and with whatever abilities you are ever gonna have.
Those abilities are where things start to strain and perhaps fall apart. Everyone in your party has a minimum of three skills and maybe as many as eight. There is no way to search for a given ability, meaning that if you want to find a fire spell or a particular buff you have to scroll through all 99 characters until you find one with the ability you are looking for. There is a guide on Steam that lists the basics of these, but even that is rough on specifics. Complicating this further is that rather than just limiting the player to just fire/ice/wind/earth you have categories of damage such as social or financial which combines to just flood you in options. Add in a few abilities that lack easy categorization (a few characters can basically bind a foe in a contract where they take 10% of any damage they deal out, which is normally minimal but if they happen to use an attack that hits everyone…) and it takes forever to get through any battle. I assume part of that is the point, but it ain’t exactly easy to deal with.
The other difference in battle is that rather than let everyone in your party take an action followed by the enemy, you get to take a certain number of total actions before the enemies respond. For example a given enemy may attack after every five of your actions, but you can use those actions however you see fit. You can have a single character take all five of them if you so desire.
I don’t have a great feel for the story yet beyond it being an obvious parody. I know that at a certain point the battles can get a bit more unique, one of the given examples is having to give someone a haircut so you have to find the party members with a given slashing attack for it. There are apparently over 100 episodes in the game (all episodes so far have only had a single battle in it) and it feels like it may be too much, that the joke will get very old by then.
I am unsure if I will finish this. I think my plan will be play some more tomorrow and after that just see if I feel like doing a few episodes a day, but I could see getting bored before the finish line and tapping out on the experience. Still it is definitely its own thing and felt it was worth sharing about.
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Mu Cartographer
Man I really slacked off on writing these games up.
Mu Cartographer is about exploring an alien world/dimension. You do so via a machine you are never told how to actually operate, placed immediately in front of a control panel with odd gauges and buttons while being left to your own devices. You aren’t really even given a stated goal, you just kinda have to mess around with things and try to piece together what they actually do along with what you are trying to do. In that sense it is a puzzle game.
…It also doubles as a pretty swell visualizer as that center circle can give you some downright pleasant shifting visuals to take in. Due to the nature of the game I can’t really go into how things are supposed to proceed as figuring that out is about 75% of the game, but I will say that if you pay attention there are some things that will indicate when you are on a right path or once you start to grasp how things work where you should perhaps look next. Generally all you are greeted with is constantly shifting colors and shapes but if you tweak things just right and set your frequency in the right way…
You may on occasion sneak a peak of something else entirely. What I will tell you is that you can drag and drop any of the gauges/controls to any location on the screen that you like (but don’t be like me and pull on so far to the side that you can no longer see a scroll bar). There is also a narrative you slowly piece together and a finishing point, but really the draw is figuring out how everything works and then seeing what happens when you figure that out. I will say that even though it is likely in the 90-120 minute range it is probably just a tad bit long, once you figure out how things work and just have to do things the “just doing things” part is a bit repetitive and could have been cut down just a little bit.
Still I found it to be a really neat concept executed fairly well.
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I don’t really want to write up 1365 but it isn’t on the spreadsheet and I’m never gonna remember games I skipped on said sheet if they get added in later, so I’ll have to drop this here. It is a very basic platformer (so much that it might better be thought of as a very basic adventure game) where you walk through the halls of the school dealing with your anxiety and the things that cause it to flare up. I could see it being therapeutic for the person who made it but it is very thin mechanically and very on the nose thematically and… just ain’t all that good. I hope it helped them at least.
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I think I had mistakenly assumed this was just a visualizer toy thing, I’ll have to check it out
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So I went and did a quick count yesterday and I believe I am at just over a hundred bundle games played (I believe I am currently at 99 beaten, 101 played) so to celebrate I will write up the game that took up the most of my free time…
Bewildebots
Bewildebots is a puzzle game where you have to move each of the little robot guys into one of those goal stations, which sounds like it’d be rather easy. The issue is that you don’t control just one robot at a time… you control every robot in play at the same time. If you press to turn to the right literally every single robot will turn to the right at the same time, same with deciding to take a step forward. If a single one of the bots dies by say walking into the laser fence that surrounds each stage they all lose and you have to restart said puzzle (or just hit undo and continue from the move before). Fortunately once a robot enters a goal station it is stuck in there and you can cease to worry about it.
The puzzles are only on 5x5 grids so there isn’t that much to deal with, but every twenty stages it adds in a new element to further complicate matters. Initially you just have to deal the addition of arrow tiles that send you moving in that direction (and can be used to rotate a single bot independent of all the others), but that is followed up by tiles that warp you to a different place and floor tiles that fall away after you step on and off of them. Finally they add in doors that can only be opened by another bot stepping on a specific tile and it gets rather tricky. Still, the puzzles are compact enough and can only have so many bots on them which means there is a ceiling to how tricky they can end up, you complete all five chapters and 100 puzzles…
…and you unlock 100 7x7 puzzles, which is markedly more difficult…
…which are followed by 100 9x9 puzzles which can get very difficult.
If you were counting that’s 300 puzzles in the game, which explains why I had to spend so much time on it. In a better world there would likely be half as many, not that half the puzzles are bad but they don’t really add much beyond just being more and hence making a lot of the middle portion of the game just blend all together. They also continue to add elements back in every twenty puzzles, so if they add arrows after the first 20 5x5 puzzles the same will happen after the first 20 7x7 and 9x9 ones. What this means is that by the time you hit puzzle 120 you know exactly when each element will pop up for the remaining 180 puzzles (which likely makes up 90% of the actual play time) so there really isn’t any sense of “I wonder what else the game has up its sleeve?” for much of its runtime.
Still it is a puzzle game with a gimmick unlike any other I’ve come across, and it is developed well with a bunch of puzzle that really put it to the test. It did seem a little bit buggy (I also had a lot of freezing on my end that is likely due to playing it on an older PC, the dev tried rather hard to fix it so I consider that a positive) but they are mostly on the minor end. In terms of being a puzzle game I think it is one firmly aimed at those who are pretty big fans of the genre already, and it is way too long, but it’s pretty solid nonetheless.
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Are those conveyor belts? Is this Robo Rally except…stacked across space instead of time?
The arrow tiles work a bit like conveyor belts, you step on one and end up wherever the arrow says you’ll end up.
I played a bunch of games where they only do one thing well or there is just one thing I want to mention about them, let’s get through a bunch of them so I can clean out my screenshot folder!
I liked how brazenly orange The Trolley is at all times.
The Adventures of Elena Temple created a whole long fake development history for the game to explain why you could pick from several different displays that made it appear like it was on a certain bit of hardware, and then made the selection screen look like a history exhibit going into said history.
FWIW it’s actually a fairly solid little throwback exploration platformer. You gotta find enough of the main treasures to leave, have infinite lives and while the controls are… let’s say chunky they are consistent. It also comes with two bonus smaller dungeons to explore with their own traps and gimmicks.
Tangrams Deluxe was a whole bunch of these puzzles, but the dev grouped them by theme (ex. cats, buildings, letters) rather than by difficulty so not only is the difficulty inconsistent you also get a ton of similar shapes in a row as like 80% of the cat heads are made of the same blocks in the same arrangement. Just a classic example of how to get the least out of what you’ve built.
Metaware High School (demo) is about as meta a visual novel/possibly dating sim can be, with them all knowing that not only are they just characters in a game but that this is also just a demo. This feels like a legit love/hate kind of experience but I found it fun enough in a Stanley Parable kind of way trying to figure out how to trigger all 10 or so endings. It’s a bit clever if perhaps not quite as clever as it thinks, but it also has a giant dance off ending so I give it a yay.
down. has a cool Silent Hill look to it but for a five minute game about depression it kinda feels like it does so in a bad manner and as a game it is literally walking to the right for several minutes so maybe just look at the screenshot.
Vignettes probably deserves more of a write-up but it basically feels like Windosill as an actual puzzle game. Basically you rotate an object and when looked at a certain way it shifts into a different object, and your larger goal is to find all the various objects that can be shifted into plus several other various optional puzzly things the game never really goes out of its way to tell you much about. That is pretty swell as it gives it more of a mysterious feel, but I wish the basic shifting mechanic was a little less strict as it often felt like I tried something and it didn’t work because it wasn’t 100% exact. The game includes a rough progress map that shows object change paths you have and haven’t found yet that kinda admits that it doesn’t quite work as cleanly as it should, but it is still a solid experiment that does some rather neat things and often refuses to hold your hand in the least despite being very “for kids” appearing. Kids sometimes need to figure things out on their own too.
10S is basically a tennis themed bullet dodging enemy rush rougelike that takes place over a series of different tennis courts which… certainly is a unique combination of elements. It is fine, a couple control choices bug me and it can get brutally hard near the end but it’s good to try things that are legit different. I’m mentioning it because after you beat the main mode it unlocks an open world mode where it randomly generates a world, gives you the ability to now turn towards the left or right (with the mouse, when any sane person had mapped the regular mode controls to a controller) and has you battle enemies by whacking them directly with your racket, which is new, or bounce their bullets back at them, which is mainly what you did before. This mode has issues but I respect how absurd a post-game reward it is.
Night in the Storm has you running around a lighthouse to fix one of the three things that can break all night so that no boats crash into the shore. It’s pretty basic, more of a proof of concept than anything else, but I dug the actual lighthouse it takes place in.
The Supper is a kinda ghoulish tiny point and click adventure game that is rather well done and has some pixel art that I just dug the hell out of. You do awful things to awful people and it is rather dark thematically but hey, in this type of game I want it to look swell and not have the puzzles get in my way too much and this does both of those things. Recommended.
POM SIMULATOR 9000 sounds like it should be a dumb meme game but it somehow is instead a visual novel about the immigrant experience, not feeling comfortable in your own skin and other serious topics while featuring a key autistic character that comes off as both sympathetic and legitimate. Also you get transformed into a little dog for a while. I’m still so confused at the choice of that name weeks after the fact.
Interactive Portraits: Trans People in Japan is basically what it sounds like, a reporter interviewing several trans people from different walks of life in Japan in 2018, except they also get cute pixel creature stand-ins. It isn’t much of a game but it felt like a good thing to exist and be able to read through.
Affinity would be in the jigsaw puzzle genre of game except rather than have the pieces be traditionally jigsaw shaped they come in all sorts of shapes like you can see in the image above (to be fair this is well into the latter part of the game, earlier ones aren’t quite as complicated). To me it felt more like assembling a model sans instructions, but by being this much more elaborate it managed to be both chill yet still a bit challenging in a way that held my attention which I don’t think a single other jigsaw game has managed to. Worth noting is that the 70mb zip file you download unzips to 5.4 gb which is a hilarious level of not bothering to optimize.
This game basically shows you the worst possible version of every viewpoint and asks you if you want to damn them to hell or not. It is a spiteful game and I do not believe anyone here would want to see how they handle the single trans character in it. I mention it just so others know to probably avoid it.
Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once The Fat Lady Sings!” is a claymation musical point and click detective adventure game with much of the dialogue actually sung by what I assume are not trained singers. It is an absurdly wonderful concept that doesn’t quite go as well as one would hope (I think too many of its jokes don’t land well) but charm carries it a long way. It does have a bit of It’s Pat-esque “we don’t know if you are a boy or a girl” with its lead which might be a drag for some.
Magic Trick is a skating game where you are also a magician. Unfortunately the controls are very rough which is a killer, but I did appreciate a skating game going for a more whimsical colorful look.
…That’s enough for now!
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That was made by Squinky who is enby themselves so it was more inspired by their own experiences (along with a lot of stuff in the rest of the game). They made a sequel, too.
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a completely normal dating simulation that is definitely completely sweet, innocent and normal is just so no budget and low effort that I kinda loved it for that fact.
All the characters are stick figures, everything is drawn on graphing paper, hell the soundtrack is literally I assume the dev going “da da dadada~” somewhat musically. The story is literally mocking dating sims, the characters in them, the devs themselves and whatever else comes up. Every so often random bits of dialogue are actually voiced and I am 99% sure it is just random friends giving their first take.
To argue that any of it is good would be a tricky argument to make. I would say that in a certain way it is kinda charming. It has a certain energy and enthusiasm, a real “outsider” just making what they can with no real illusions beyond that.
Like I said, there is an enthusiasm in there under everything else. It’s about twenty minutes long which is about what it could support, I am unsure exactly who would enjoy that twenty minutes or not, hopefully these pics and words will intrigue those who should be and scare away everyone else.
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Been playing this, I agree with everything you’ve said. One other thing worth mentioning is the strong narrative sense of the game despite having zero text. I thought it was a fairly-abstract puzzler and then got to camping (Green) world, which was lovely to work out the metapuzzles for selfies and discovering the DLC Magic Hut (Purple?). Casting all the spells gives a secret ending link to the WIP demo (same for getting the telephone ‘number’) and some text revealing:
the original intended plot
R.I.P
Congratulations, you found our deepest secret.
Here lies what’s dead to us. A failed attempt at making Vignettes a somewhat narrative game rooted in real-world places. While the idea of telling a full fledged story without any word nor character was appealing, it turned out to make for a very boring game.
After rushing to meet a deadline, we met up and both agreed that we were unhappy with the direction the game was taking, and restarted from scratch in order to make something more playful and fun to toy around.
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Yeah, there’s being so much stuff in Vignettes that can be figured out but doesn’t have to be is perhaps its biggest strength IMO. I almost had the magic section figured out, I successfully did the third and I think final spell but as I didn’t know what to do afterwards I touched the main object and seemingly undid everything and didn’t feel like doing it all over again so it’s good to see what it was gonna do.
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Dawn of a Soul
Sometimes you know a minute into something that it is very much for you, and that was my experience with Dawn of a Soul.
I seemingly misplaced my soul and this lady who surely isn’t a demon or anything says I can have it back on one condition: that I solve all of her puzzles. Fortunately I like solving puzzles and prefer having a soul so I agree.
This is a number puzzler, and unlike many of the number puzzlers I mention on SB this one actually involves math to a degree. You are given a target score at the bottom of the screen (in this tutorial puzzle it is 3) and you have three red circles connected by a line with a 1 in the center of each. You highlight the circle at either end and draw a straight line along the path through the other two circles, 1+1+1=3 and you are one step closer to having your soul back.
Yes, the lady demon is subtly in the background at all times; how else would she know if you solved her puzzles or not?
Now if you just had to trace a line through a series of 1s that’d be too simple to be much of a puzzle game. Most puzzles have multiple colors in play containing either the number 1, 2 or 3. Whenever you jump from one color to another (in the above image, from red to yellow or vice-versa) you gain a multiplier. Switching one time multiplies the total of the numbers you have traced a line through by two, switching seven times multiplies said total by eight. You cannot just change colors at will though, you can only change colors once for each six points you are currently tracing a line through. Your cursor has six spots around it that fill up to show how far you are into this at a given moment, plus a number to the upper right of it that shows how many changes you have built up so far.
In the above image that means you can’t start in that lower red section as 1+2+1=4 and hence you can’t jump to yellow. Without going through the whole puzzle step by step at some point you are gonna run trough a bunch of yellow circles to build your color jumping “meter” up (if you go from the lower left yellow to the upper left yellow you will raise 13 points which is good for two color jumps plus one extra point towards the next one) to make sure you have enough built up to go through those other sections that don’t give you enough points to jump colors on their own.
So at this point what you have to keep track of is 1) drawing a single line through this arrangement that touches every circle (this isn’t always necessary but usually is), 2) making sure said line builds up enough points at the right places so that you can jump colors when need be which basically means picking the right circle to start drawing your line from, and 3) you still have to worry about the target score at the bottom of the screen. If you notice on that line on the bottom there are two numbers listed, the lower number is the “good enough” score that gets you one soul shard back and the higher is the perfect number that gets you an extra soul shard (the final three puzzles require you to have every single soul shard so you need to get the better number eventually, but the lower one lets you skip and come back later). The game keeps an active current count at the bottom of the screen and that line is a meter that fills up and shows your current progress towards the goal. All in all that is pretty puzzling.
Of course the game adds further things on top of this as it proceeds. In the upper picture those grey triangles cannot have a line drawn over them, but if a colored circle connected to one of them is traced over then when that turn ends they will take on said color the next turn and can be drawn over. Yes, I said turns, the circle on the right side of the screen shows you how many turns you have to try and reach the goal number, I believe the highest I saw was four turns but that is rare. In the lower picture those purple diamonds are effectively any color and do not require a jump to trace over but you cannot start drawing a line from one of them, your line must start from a color circle. The latter of these new things increases the number of potential paths drawn through each arrangement but the former… the former brings math very much into the fold.
As noted earlier with most of the number puzzles I talk about you don’t really need much math if any. In sudoku you just need to know if you used a number in a row, column or group already. In picross or hexcells you only really have to count, they test your logical thinking but don’t care if you can multiply. Here though while math probably isn’t strictly needed… it helps a lot when you have multiple turns. In general when dealing with multiple turns you have one or two super short turns that set up a final very long turn (and rarely the opposite) but the multiplier will only really come into play on the long turn. If you have a starting turn that takes up four points and a following turn that takes up fifty with a multiplier of seven, the multiplier only multiplies the fifty and not the four. Given that you are aiming for an exact number (I believe always the highest number possible) it is entirely possible to spend a bunch of time trying to draw that second line to get all fifty points only to find out that the only way to hit that target number is with a first turn total of three points leaving fifty-one to be multiplied… or five points and multiplying times forty-nine. This isn’t a hard requirement, but doing the math will save you a lot of effort elsewhere.
And there are just further little details that put the screws to you just a bit more. In this one after a good amount of effort I finally figured out a path through this maze of numbers that touches every number and has enough points to always make a color jump… but the multiplier is two short (53x2=106, how many points short I am of the better goal number). What I didn’t mention before is that when you have multiple turns after a turn is complete the used numbers disappear, so the numbers you use that first turn affect which paths you have available to you on the second. You also nearly from the start have to keep track of how many lines lead in and out of every number, each except for the starting and ending one need at least two (for the line coming in and then leaving) so if you are careless with your pathfinding early on you can cut off later numbers accidentally. No, you can’t use the same number twice or cross over an already used spot.
This ignores the real cruelty when certain numbers just end up not being used at all, particularly when it is then tied in with multiple turns. A puzzle giving you extra points may seem like it is being kind, but you gotta both do the math to figure out just how many extra you have to play with and then figure out which points in the web are just a decoy. It is at times maddening.
…But I kinda loved it. I admittedly have a more math-based brain but I was, well okay still am the guy who when zoning out will like create a geometric arrangement in my head or on top of something I am looking at and try to draw a line through every point in it (too large a segment of every shower I take is me doing this with various tiles). I may in fact be the exact target audience for this game, so it is good that I found it!
For me while it is consistently hard it was rarely maddeningly so (one puzzle took me well over an hour and one or two others got close to an hour each), although again I am pretty good at arithmetic-level math. There isn’t a ton to the game’s look but I really enjoyed looking at all the geometric-like arrangements of almost flaming numbers. Plus I apparently got my soul back! What more could I ask of a game?
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As a heads up, some of the lesser known bundle games have disappeared off of itch (and the internet in general) and itch does not allow you to download them even if you technically had it in your library after paying money for it (granted it was a fraction of a penny) so be forewarned that that is a thing that can happen. Now I will never be able to update the spreadsheet with my thoughts on The Old Man, truly the world’s loss.
I will actually write up some games in this topic again at some point, I’m still playing bundle games I just got tired of writing about them. I finished up I Have Low Stats But My Class Is “Leader”, So I Recruited Everyone I Know To Fight The Dark Lord and the battle system ended up being pretty swell. It is legitimately three times longer than it needed to be as it ran out of different ideas and resorted to straight padding before the midway point. The final battle took me at least 75 minutes and I don’t think it was because I did anything particularly wrong. I forget what I wrote before, but it is definitely a “try it if you think the concept of a 99 person jrpg party is interesting, feel absolutely no need to finish it as you’ll get what it is early enough”.
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Highway Blossoms
I feel like I heard good things about this one so I roped some friends of mine into playing it with me for our game club. An American southwest lesbian roadtrip VN sounds like fun. This game is not fun (also it seemingly has no choices whatsoever? at least not after two hours). It hates the southwest, it hates women, it hates people in general tbh. The only thing it has any love for is shallow-as-fuck eroge protags and their equally shallow objects of desire. The use of indigenous landmarks as part of a wacky treasure hunt is reckless, tacky, and ultimately racist. Gonna promise myself to never read another lesbian love story penned by men and am unfolllowing this studio and its members on itch and twitter. I hate this thing.
Little Cells
This was fun and worth playing. It should absolutely be played on a phone, not with a mouse. If I had an Android phone, I’d install it and probably get mildly addicted to it. The mechanics are clever, though they feel a little underexplained and maybe a little incomplete. Cute, though, and fun for a quick burst of varying intensities.
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that’s a real shame. i remember someone recommending this game at some point. if you’ve never seen it, the movie Desert Hearts (which i imagine was probably the inspiration for this game) is a famous lesbian film set in the southwest and i remember it being pretty good. it’s on the Criterion collection too, so it’s probably available for streaming on different platforms.
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This movie sounds so rad and imma try to watch it soon.
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I dissed Highway Blossoms on Twitter and six hours later, its director followed me???
FAKE EDIT: This is the name of my upcoming light novel series
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Jumpgrid
I was aware of Jumpgrid since a bit before its release (I actually owned a copy before the bundle gave me another one) and was under the impression that it was a minor hit. Based on the number of Steam reviews and the in-game high score table it apparently was not. This is a shame as it is pretty swell.
(This is another game where it is too fast/involved to take screenshots of, so I’m yoinking this off of the steam store page.)
I sort of want to describe Jumpgrid as a mash-up of Super Hexagon and Super Meat Boy; it might not be accurate but it feels about right. The heart of the game is you dodging around the intersection points on a grid (I preferred using a joypad but I assume one could easily go with WASD or the arrow keys) avoiding obstacles and grabbing all the squares in a stage in order to open the exit out of there. It really needs to be seen in motion so hey, here’s a gif of the stage pictured above:
This is an early stage but it gives a good idea as to the flow of things. While the stages get markedly harder than this they on average can be finished in seconds and often require you to do so. This gives it the feel of often being a mad dash trying to avoid various things thrown your way while trying to grab those squares as quickly as you can possibly manage. Because of this the game is rather brief, there are a hundred stages split across four sections and it took me just under eighty minutes to complete all of them. There is also an infinite mode where you go for a high score, after five minutes worth of attempts I was up to #22 in the world so… yeah, wasn’t a big hit.
I am a sucker for this kind of quick fire precision challenge and I enjoyed the hell out of this. I loved getting into a flow state for a little bit with it, and while you are generally doing the same basic thing throughout I found there was enough variety in the stages for it to not be an issue. The only time I felt it faltered a bit were a few late game stages where the playing field rotates and what direction up currently is rotates along with it. Still I’d say that the base concept ended up being very well realized here and if this is the style of game you enjoy then I’d recommend it easily.
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