Random Games You Played Today (itch 1000+ game bundle thread)

falsedan · September 23, 2020, 11:50pm

Flat Kingdom

Starts with a picture of a controller on its splash screen: ‘Strongly recommended’, and yet doesn’t work with controllers. Enter to open, space to confirm?! DS4Windows got me there but still opening and interacting with the pause menu pretty much requires the keyboard. Lots of mean jumps and blind landings for something that looks and plays like an easier New Mario Bros. The central gimmick is ok with Square to go heavy & slow, Triangle to be fast, and Circle for double-jump is fun enough, but matching the enemy shape to your appropriate response on the scissors-paper-rock combat wheel gets confusing and tiring quickly.

A Wish Upon A Star

It looks like Monument Valley but is not as fun. Here you’re moving columns up or down (and sometimes side to side) to make a continuous path for the protagonist to the exit (a green rug). There’s some attempts at novelty, like a level with no exit and you have to slowly and painfully raise all the movable columns up to check if they concealed it underground. Too easy to move columns so they block the interaction hotspots for their neighbours, and you have to restart the puzzle. Really the most fun part is the dialogue is all pictoral and thus ad-libbing your own lines about how this girl is going to become an astronaut.

A Kishoutenketsu in the countryside

It’s good, I forgot it was a Puzzlescript game and kept restarting when I got myself stuck instead of pressing Z… Teleporting back to the start when you get a key is a great clue about how to proceed onto the next act. Each of the 4 parts has a different but related theme: sokoban in the swamp and rocky woods, hidden mazes in the brush and forest.

Receiver

E to eject a magazine, also E to drop a held magazine. Guess how long I spent looking for that magazine! I didn’t play the game long enough to really get it, only found a couple of tapes and discovered that I can’t hit the vunerable parts of a drone even under optimal conditions (easiest with the revolver). Here’s me (above) about to forget to cock the hammer after replacing the spent cartridges used to down that hover drone.

Anodyne

I expected something more Zelda and less Silent Hill 4: The Room. Maybe I am going to the wrong worlds? Mechanically, it’s a lot of Zelda dungeons that work well. There’s some plot that will twist sooner or later. I’m up to the blood hell world (above).

Dusk Child

Another Sophie Houlden game; aside she has brand-name recognition with my kids, dad she made that cool dice app. Pretty simple lock-and-key platform puzzler, nothing hard except a descent through a spike-filled room with a time limit in one part. Outsmarting these Eyedols is absolutely terrific.

VastleCania · September 24, 2020, 4:51am

I think this game is best considered as “Zelda, but decaying.” It’s a really cool game but stick with it through the rough patches.

username · September 26, 2020, 6:14am

I need to start writing up a few of these short ones at a time rather than do a huge bunch at a time, so…

Escape from Kabagahara

Escape from Kabagahara is mostly a brief text adventure game except that you get that tiny window showing exactly where in the woods you are. At the start you wander into the woods and rather quickly figure out that there is some creature in there with you who wants to tear you apart. Moving is handled by typing “go north/south/east/west” when possible and the image follows this, but it all looks alike and it is very easy to get lost especially when dealing with the beast. When it shows up you have to run or deal with it quick as these parts are in real time and that is a choice I am torn on. On one hand it ratchets up the tension, on the other I am not a fast typer and typos literally equal death so the difficulty for me was rather high at times. Still it is a cool self-contained experiment that’ll likely kill you a lot but can be completed in under five minutes once you figure it out.

Predicate

Predicate made me wonder aloud if I am awful at twin stick shooters or if this game is just nuts. You have standard double stick controls for your snake-like buddy here except that in addition to being able to shoot enemies you can also encircle them with your tale and crush them to death. Enemies are generally always some sort of sphere, the stages switch between kill all the enemies, survive an onslaught for X amount of time or defeat this boss, and after beating a few stages you can pick between two different power-ups (generally speed or shot related).

The thing is by about 70% of the way through (this is short stage based and doesn’t involve having to replay older stages if you don’t want to) the game got to the point where I was literally going nuts trying to make anything resembling progress. I had to set the difficulty to me being able to take five hits before dying and giving myself regenerating health to make any progress, and I was still having issues dealing with some of these stages despite being on what was one step above sightseeing mode. While not an expert at these games I am generally competent and this just felt like an absolute kick to the teeth. It tries some interesting things when not focused solely on enemy combat and the boss stages can add some interesting wrinkles, but with the base combat being a bit meh and eventual towering difficulty level (although maybe I just suck at it) it is hard for me to recommend. The previously mentioned Soft Body was comfortably better put together.

Come Back: Chapter 1

Come Back is a short point & click adventure game on a tiny grey and green island. I think I prefer my point & click adventure games small as there is less for me to get crossed up on as I don’t know that I’ve played one where I didn’t get hopefully stuck at one point (I did here and it’s less than an hour long). This is very much not a revelation or anything noteworthy, it basically is “would you like to play a low friction game in this genre for about an hour?” and that is fine. Wandering around screens and figuring out mostly basic stuff (and the one tricky bit I had to look up) isn’t bad to do every so often. My only real knock against it is the story which is at times more front and center than I’d like. Not to spoil but it is from the perspective of a guy whose lady is no longer around/with him and the notes all read as (intentionally) unsympathetic but blind to that fact and it didn’t really work for me. You can ignore most of it safely, I did.

username · September 28, 2020, 6:00am

New Ice York

New Ice York is the bluest game I’ve ever played. It is also insane. If I had to sum it up mechanically it is basically a series of fetch quests broken up by mini-games in various other game genres, but that really doesn’t explain what the experience of playing it is actually like. The story makes no sense, the artwork is intentionally ugly and eye searingly blue and characters that are very much that. It is very rough around the edges (it might be all edges) but there is a certain appeal to it and even in a medium where “lol random” might as well be its own genre it still manages to have an identity of its own. You might hate it, or dig it, or just be confused, or all of the above. At the very least you will occasionally walk into a building that will sear your eyes, like so:

Imagine it scrolling as you walk to the side and shudder!

Extreme Meatpunks Forever

Extreme Meatpunks Forever is a game where you follow a bunch of queer/trans teens around a fallen United States and kill a lot of fascists by climbing into mechs made of meat and beating them to death. That is a pretty tremendous scenario for a game, and the world building behind it is rather strong. Most of the characters are pretty great, messy and flawed as hell. Because of all this it is a game I really wanted to like, and yet…

The game is basically split between visual novel and fighting sections (see above). The fighting is… not good. Each character has their own abilities but basically you have to hit people until they fall over the edge of the playing field (i.e. you can only win via ring out) and you can get decent at it but it is just sloppy as hell. I pretty much groaned whenever it came up and was glad whenever it ended. While the characters and world building are pretty strong, it kinda feels a bit like the writer didn’t get around to the story part of it until episode 5 (out of 6) at which point it feels rather tacked on and rushed.

The characters carry the day enough that I’d still recommend it to the interested, but after doing such a strong job setting the table I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit let down by them not managing to do more with it, hopefully season 2 with this as an established base can reach higher.

That said every time one of them climbs into their giant meat mech you get a bit of their internal dialogue and I think it rules every single time. Plus the mechs all have great names like ROOTS AMONG ASH and CRASH QUEEN.

a_new_duck · September 28, 2020, 1:18pm

Yeah, I really like a lot of Heather Flowers’s other games and I was really hyped to play this one, but the combat was so dreadfully dull, repetitive, and just not engaging that I didn’t really like it. Honestly, the writing doesn’t quite land for me at the end of the day, either, despite some really cool moments, ideas, and general atmosphere. The worldbuilding is intriguing but never really delivers, imo. It is, however, very cool whenever one of your characters boards their mech.

I am hopeful for Extreme Meatpunks 2. The designer of Lucah: Born of a Dream joined to work on the combat, so it should be more interesting from that standpont.

vodselbt · September 28, 2020, 3:56pm

I love the presentation for Escape from Kabagahara. And New Ice York is something that stood out to me in this bundle, gotta get back to playing through these damn video games!

username · October 2, 2020, 7:15am

Collared

I know at least one of you wanted an anthro puzzle game (anthro content almost entirely limited to the title screen).

Collared is a fairly slow puzzle game where you have to make your way through buildings and making your way to the checkered exit square (and grab all the coins along the way if you are cool like me). The gimmick with the game is that your collar gives you psychic powers that allow you to rotate any four building squares clockwise as long as they aren’t marked with a red X or you aren’t on it. The also mix it up by occasionally having you rearrange pipes so that certain steam powered door blocks are open (so that you can walk through them). It is a nice concept but sadly a bit flawed. Making your way over even a few squares generally requires having to rotate squares a dozen times, and once you figure out the proper sequence of moves to get through these environments you end up doing them repeatedly in most of the 40 or so puzzles in the game. If you are a big puzzle fan (like me) it is interesting enough to pick away at five puzzles at a time over a period of time, but if you are only a casual puzzle player you can likely safely skip it.

Pichon

Pichon is a platformer where you don’t have a jump button as you are bouncing all the time. It helps create a slightly different flow as the timing element isn’t built around button presses but tied directly to your movement itself, but I really wish the controls were just a tad bit tighter as it sometimes asks for relatively precise actions from you. It took me about 45 minutes or so to finish its 20 or 25 stages and I thought it had a good amount of variety given the short length. I had a good time with it and then forgot about it until I looked in my screenshot folder.

I also just remembered that you can get an extra star for completing a stage in under the par time, and another for completing it in under a certain number of deaths if that is the sort of thing that appeals to you.

Nonsense at Nightfall

Nonsense at Nightfall is a tiny cute gameboy-esque adventure game. Basically you can’t fall asleep, look around your apartment to try and find some pills to help you sleep and end up transformed into a cat. This is the first of several brief misadventures as you wander around this apartment building floor unable to fall asleep while transforming various times. The puzzles are… basically not as it is generally pretty obvious what you need to do next, but given that it is only about 25 minutes long I don’t think that is much of a flaw. I basically viewed it as a fanciful short story in gameboy form and I think it is rather swell at being that.

Digital Mnemonic Trip (D.M.T)

This is meant to be a visual trip and it certainly commits to it. You basically roll your ball through several environments picking up bits of music scattered all around the environment in order the gradually build that background music track (vaguely along the same lines as Soundvoyager). What makes it visually distinct is that the color scheme of the entire world changes every time you pick up a bit of sound, and you generally pick up a lot of those things almost constantly at times. This results in something that visually is almost overwhelming from time to time, it looks pretty cool but there really isn’t much to it beyond just looking at it. You can probably speed run it in several minutes so there not being much of a game here isn’t a big minus, and it probably has to be that short as I think if I had to play it for an hour straight my eyes would melt.

username · October 9, 2020, 6:41am

OneShot

About midway through playing OneShot I went “How the hell did this not end up with a following?” I then went to Steam and saw that it has sixteen thousand reviews that sit at about 97% positive and went “Oh, it did, I just somehow missed it all this time.” I blame SB for not mentioning it and no I’m not gonna check the search before typing that.

On the surface OneShot is just another RPG Maker adventure game (note: I have no idea what games are actually made in RPG Maker and which aren’t). You control Niko, a cat looking fellow who ends up in a strange decaying world that believes they are the messiah because the glowing orb they found is actually the new sun they have been waiting for since the old one went kaput. I was gonna write that you play as Niko but that isn’t quite accurate as you play as you, who from their perspective in their world view they view as god.

Yes, that means the game is a bit meta. I know some of you will find that neat and some will feel the opposite, but I must say that the game handles it really well. Without going too much into details while many meta bundle games I’ve played ultimately go in a “hey ain’t that wacky” or deconstructive direction with it OneShot treats it in a more matter of fact way that benefits it greatly. If there is a messiah then surely their must be a god, and only the messiah can communicate with him in that case, so your presence doesn’t break the narrative like it often would.

(Yes, you are visibly carrying the sun around with you on your sprite for basically the entire game.)

The narrative quickly goes in its own directions, introducing characters not only clearly in the game world but possibly just outside of it as well. A number of things in the world that seem odd from our outsider perspective are taken for granted by everyone within it and hence often times explanations for them do not come for quite a while. While the narrative does go in some dramatically different places it is anchored by the actual character work, primarily Niko themself. Deep down Niko is just a kid stuck in a strange world who mainly just wants to go home whose kind nature is tested by this dying place and while it gets close to being just a bit too cute at times it mostly works. Whatever you feel about the world, whether it is worth saving or not, you generally want to see the kid happy and healthy and back home.

Having good characters and a solid story is pretty good to have in a combat-free adventure game, but what makes OneShot stick out is how truly outside the box it gets mechanically. It is a game that can only exist on PC as it takes full advantage of this to throw all kinds of off the wall things your way. At the start the game basically tells you that you are better off playing in a window as opposed to full screen and it actually means it. The problem with this is that it makes describing any of this hard as it is literally all a spoiler, hence it is something you’d have to take on faith from me. What I feel I can safely say is that on at least one occasion the game threw something at me I simply have never seen in gaming before, and my first gaming console was a Coleco.

Does it feel at times gimmicky? Perhaps a little bit, but as with the narrative the game seeks to ground all of this stuff as best as it can; as opposed to breaking the 4th wall it intends to build something supported by all four walls if that makes any sense. The mechanical twists it does toss out there generally tie into the story being told and its characters, and in many ways the story is bolstered by the tricks it pulls. Basically while atypical and “out there” it has all been well considered and integrated as seamlessly as could be managed, and it all comes together to form something rather neat.

Apparently there is a large fan community out there that absolutely adores the game, and I can’t say that it isn’t deserved. I don’t know if it is a SB kind of game as there isn’t something else out there quite like it, but I think it is clever as hell and has a pretty solid heart to boot. I’d like to write much more about it but really it is something best experienced for oneself, hopefully some of you do so as I believe it is very worthwhile.

username · October 12, 2020, 6:19am

Watch Me Jump

I’d say this was one of the more surprising games I’ve come across in the bundle so far.

A visual novel/rpg/story-type game with crude graphics about a fictional WNBA star isn’t exactly a game pitch that excites me, but as it is only about 60-90 minutes long it ended up on my giant list of things to try from the bundle. The randomizer said it was up next so I put it on, played it in one sitting and something odd for a game happened to me: the story stuck with me.

I am in the camp that thinks that stories in games generally aren’t great. I still like some of them, but generally if I want a story to dig into I look to a different medium (also I have questionable taste so no one should listen to me, my entire participation in this topic has been a cruel mistake). I’m not saying that Watch Me Jump is high art, but it feels like it was written by someone who might actually be a writer first as opposed to a game dev first. I found out after the fact it is written by a playwright and adapted from a play which makes a good deal of sense in retrospect.

The quick summary of Watch Me Jump’s story is the lead is the best female basketball player in the world who ends up in a bit of a scandal the day before the WNBA finals. If I had to describe it though I’d describe it as messy. Messy not in that it is sloppily put together, but messy in the way life is often messy. What initially seems like a fairly cut and dry situation rather suddenly shifts from black and white to rather gray, and the characters all reveal themselves to be flawed in various ways and degrees.

After it takes the various turns it does and the story ended I legit found it scratching away at the back of my brain for a few days after. There were disagreements where it seems like there was a more right and more wrong side and yet I found myself siding with the more wrong ones, how some who were portrayed as mostly good did some things I had a real hard time overlooking while at the same time willing to cut more slack for some who definitely screwed up more. How at the end there seemed to be a few paths forward and I couldn’t help thinking about where these characters were gonna end up, were certain things salvageable, should they be salvageable…

So yeah, Watch Me Jump has no real gameplay beyond some dialogue choices that don’t seem to shift the narrative too much, amateurish at best graphics and poor animation. Over a hundred games into this bundle and it is also clearly the best written so far with some actual craft put into it (there is an early moment of whiplash I can’t spoil that really turns everything on its head). Again, a narrative WNBA game is clearly a hard sell, but as noted up top sometimes you find diamonds where you least expect.

username · October 14, 2020, 5:31am

Space Hole 2016

This also isn’t listed on the big google docs bundle spreadsheet, so it goes here. Space Hole 2016 is very much a ball rolling game in the mold of Super Monkey Ball, at least I assume so I’ve only ever played Kororinpa. I guess the difference here is that moving the stick changes the ball’s rotation rather than causing the stage itself to tilt, which makes… some sort of difference I’d wager?

My favorite thing about the game is that they just asked a random Seattle rock band to just use their first couple albums as a soundtrack rather than find something more fitting. I thought the band was swell enough and it feels very out of place, so it generally put a smile on my face.

At some point you unlock the ability to transform your circle into a square or drop an explosive (used most often as to launch you, like a jump that can very easily go very wrong) at the press of a button. The square thing rarely felt fully fleshed out but the bomb jump was pretty swell. The stages themselves were generally of the abstract shape variety with a few exceptions, but there was a pretty solid variety of layouts and challenges in there.

Game itself seemed rather solid although near the end it became a bit more demanding than I could manage. Fortunately by then I had beaten enough stages to unlock the final one. There didn’t appear to be any time being kept or goals to be beaten, just get to the glowy cube near the end and you win. Again I don’t have any familiarity with the Monkey Ball games to compare directly but while definitely low budget this would probably entertain a fan of those games for a few hours.

ellaguro · October 14, 2020, 6:37pm

this game looks interesting to me based on your description because i like ball rolling type games so looked it up and apparently there is also a Space Hole 2018 and a Space Hole 2020. lol

km · October 14, 2020, 7:39pm

Beverley Crusher is perhaps the ideal name for a band making the soundtrack to this game

username · October 15, 2020, 4:09am

Space Hole 2018 is in the bundle as well!

username · October 23, 2020, 6:33am

Explobers

Oh hey it’s that game @a_new_duck made, this would be really awkward if it was kinda bad. Fortunately it is pretty neat!

Explobers is a puzzle platformer I want to describe as midway on the continuum between Lemmings and Lost Vikings, except I never played the latter so that might be off by a bit. Your goal in each stage is to get at least one of these fellows to the goal at which point the stage is complete (yes, you can strand others in positions where they can’t possibly reach the goal and that’s perfectly okay). You start each stage with one of each explober type available for that stage located at the start, with the total number of each you have available noted at the top left. There being (up to) three different types is the Lost Vikings bit, the Lemmings bit is that… well there needs to be sacrifices made to reach the end.

One type, the red circle fellow, can explode at a press of a button and take out any blocks located within its blast radius. The blue square ones can be frozen as a block, even in midair, to serve as a stepping stone. The green triangle ones can do either of the above. Once any of these things is done that explober is no longer an active participant in the stage and another one of that type if available spawns at the start.

You can cycle through the various explobers active in the stage at the press of a button meaning you can choose which one to use on your next move towards the goal. You can even use these currently not controlled ones in ways beyond their defining ability. You can hop on the head of one to reach a higher platform, or place one on top of a switch to keep a laser door inactive so others can pass through. You must be careful about this though as these are all temporary positions, for example if the other two use the third’s head as a stepping stone the third may find itself with no way to follow after them.

As noted you only really need one explober to reach the goal to pass a stage so as long as there is one left alive you have a theoretical chance to do that, and in general the difficulty in doing just that isn’t that rough. What can make things a bit more demanding and IMO interesting is that each stage has an expert goal score of explobers left alive that requires the player to take a much more optimized approach. Some stages feel like this means you can’t waste a single one in order to hit that score, in others (generally the longer ones) it is a bit more generous and spots you a few extra moves.

Going after these expert scores hence adds in a bit more tension as not only do you have to come up with the proper plan to reach the goal via placing blocks and blowing stuff up, but you have to do it in real time. You can have the greatest plan and end up freezing your blue guy a bit too high in mid-air, or accidentally blow up the bit of the stage you were planning on stepping on, and be forced to suddenly switch gears and try to salvage the situation. In the longer ones this can happen later on, you see you still have four various explobers left to play with and have to figure out a plan B. Sometimes you can’t! Often times it might just be possible.

This is actually where my one real criticism comes into play as for expert scores you often have to place those midair blocks just right (it has to be two background blocks below its maximum jump height or else an explober standing from the same jumping location won’t be able to land atop of it) and screwing that up can sometimes ruin plans beyond saving. To be fair the game does give you a slowdown button I assume implemented specifically to help with this, but I almost wish it was possible to take back a misplaced block placement. Of course if you do that you likely remove half the tension from the experience so it’s probably best as-is, but it’s the one part of the game that feels perhaps just a touch too harsh.

With 80 normal stages, a 12 stage side mode (which was very neat) and a very hidden extra 8 there was a legit chance that it’d all sort of blend together and become a bit “yeah I’ve seen this all before” halfway through given that the amount of verbs the player has is a bit limited. Fortunately that was not the case at all for me, and I have to credit the stage design for it. Yes there are certain techniques and tropes one will have to reuse a good bit, and certain basic obstacle types will be repeated, but the game does a good job mixing it up enough to keep things feeling fairly fresh throughout. Granted if I tried to finish the game in a couple sittings perhaps I’d feel differently, but given that I generally played it in 5 or 10 stage chunks I never felt like I was just going through the motions.

Also as you progress in the game you unlock various different graphics for it, mostly based on various older computer displays, I must admit to being partial to the christmas version.

Now I know this is a fellow SBer’s game but I’ll be honest with you: if I didn’t think it was okay I’d have just never mentioned that I played it to anyone here. It is legitimately rather well put together and good puzzle platformer. It is simple enough to figure out the basics early on without much trouble but proceeds to make full use of the actions available to the player and test their ability to pick a path through increasingly elaborate sets of obstacles. I dig it!

username · October 30, 2020, 5:49am

Do you know what this bundle has a ton of? Spooky games, which is perfect for this time of year. Unfortunately apparently horror games are more likely to simply not run on my aging PC than any other genre which suggests a degree of on-optimization inherent to the genre, so a bunch of games I intended to try got dumped into the “don’t work, deleted” pile (I’ll come back for Boreal Tenebrae on my next PC, it looks to neat to not try eventually) so here are a few that I did get to try that had are at least worth mentioning.

The Enigma Machine

The Enigma Machine is basically one half talking to an AI via typing into a computer terminal, and one half first person adventure game that slowly descends into horror. I mean, if it didn’t it wouldn’t get posted for spooky season. I think there is a good chance that most reading this can guess pretty much where the game goes based on that description, and for the most part they’d be right.

That said it is executed well enough, and I really enjoyed the dark, blurry late PS1/early PS2 aesthetic is had going on even if it made most screenshots hard to make out. It’s only about an hour or so long and climaxed in a very satisfying manner that actually goes outside the box more than the rest of the game.

Satan Loves Cake

Satan Loves Cake takes place in hell, where Satan runs out of cake and has to make his way to the local cake shop to get more. He does so by engaging in a mostly monochromatic exploration-heavy platformer. It’s not very scary, but I mean it’s in hell that is very Halloween. It is… alright, also about an hour long but it is more a time killer for those who like simpler platformers than anything else. The most interesting thing about it is probably the double jump which is really having to charge your pitchfork and shoot it downwards mid-jump which is at the very least more involved than the maneuver usually is. Only real downside is one bit near the end where you have to backtrack to a shop to buy something that wasn’t available before without the game really indicating that you should.

Strawberry Cubes

Has been talked about elsewhere on SB, possibly in this very topic. It is neat to poke around for a while and try to break and has a pretty darn great look. I don’t think anyone knows if it has an actual ending or even a point to the whole thing, but I think it is worth putting a session in just to see what it has to offer, bask in its mysteries and take in the creepy mood.

Tamashii

I played this before the bundle (and wrote it up in the giant what’re you playing topic back then), but this definitely fits. At its core it is a somewhat simple puzzle platformer but what makes it stand out is its all-in commitment to its fairly satanic aesthetic. It can be very harsh but it is strong enough in this regard to carry the experience, and it works against expectations just enough to add in just the right amount of unease to the proceedings.

Halloween Forever

A straight up Halloween-themed platformer. You play as a re-animated jack o lantern who spits pumpkin seeds on bats, chainsaw wielding maniacs and various spirits across I believe ten levels across five stages. It is competently done but it commits a bit too hard to its faux Nintendo roots by giving you no continues, forcing you to restart from the start when you use up your three lives. You can do that or play in the 99 live mode. I did the latter and found it a bit of overkill, one could reasonably finish the game with one, maybe two continues on their first attempt. As a game it is fine, nothing sticks out as particularly good or bad but I did enjoy the Halloween sprite work. I don’t know that I’d recommend going out of one’s way to try it eleven months of the year, but it’s a worthwhile October experience.

This reminds me that one of the first games I wrote up in this topic was Pumpking. Pumpking was pretty good, go play that!

Vincent: The Secret of Myers vs. Morfosi

vs.

Neither game is worth checking out (TBF Vincent is incomplete) but these apparently were made by two completely different teams and yet I swear they have to have the same character designer or something. They even have the same “draw a 6 and pretend it is an ear” bit! I would investigate this… but I’m lazy.

Please Follow

Please Follow is a 15 minute long walking sim that feels vaguely World War 1, if someone accidentally dug a trench into an underground chamber from another darker dimension. There isn’t a lot to it, but I like very polygonal, needlessly dark spooky environments and this game is almost entirely that. If you wanna walk through those for a quarter of an hour this does that really well. If you don’t, it offers nothing.

username · November 7, 2020, 6:29am

Two more games not on the spreadsheet, so two more I’m gonna write a blurb about here.

Ambidangerous is another one of those “each analogue stick controls a different character and you have to control both at the same time” games, also in the mold of a twin stick shooter. This one is fairly low budget with rather rough graphics, but what it does have in its favor is that it is the rare one of these (I have played several) that does feels actually playable by a human being throughout. It can be tricky at times as managing two characters at the same time via two different hands simply is, but it doesn’t end up being super demanding.

You basically have to make your way through four different areas in whichever order you choose, each area randomized each time you tackle it. You basically want to find the warp to the boss room in each area which can sometimes be right near the start (it is very random) and once you reach the boss a second warp to it is placed in the first room in case you die against it.

What the game has going for it is some interesting weapon choices. My favorite is a laser that forms a straight line between your two characters, frying anything in between them. What the game has against it is that it is simply very rough. Polish doesn’t exist and while that doesn’t have to be a negative, here it is severe enough to detract from the experience. Because of that it is probably a pass for most, but if you ever did want to try one of these simultaneous single player games this one is the most approachable even if not the best.

TorqueL was actually just mentioned in the “what are you currently playing” topic coincidentally, turns out that between this bundle and PS+ most of us probably already own the game! It is a real clever thing that often drove me nuts and had me cursing the fates.

Basically you play as a fellow inside a square who can move normally but slowly in a very limited way via pressing left or right, but who can move much more dramatically by pressing any of the four face buttons on the controller that causes a long block to shoot out of the corresponding side of said square. This is how you can kinda jump, get over obstacles and the like, but while you can exert some control over it it is rarely precise (or maybe I just suck).

What makes it hard is that what side each button corresponds to is fixed, so as you rotate the X button can cause the block to shoot out from the bottom, or the left, or at a weird diagonal that I found very hard to keep straight. They are color coded but as I played on PC the colors didn’t correspond to the button colors on my controller at all. What I ended up doing is just remembering what the button yellow and green corresponded with and more or less only used those two for 90+% of the game. This is very doable but possibly made certain parts harder.

The game has 50 stages but you won’t see most of them on a given playthrough, certain stages have different exits which take you through different sets of stages in what can feel like a random order (I warped to 36, then back to 25 at one point). As noted it is an undeniably neat concept, but if you are anything like me there will be times where it feels impossible to do a seemingly simple thing and it gets legitimately frustrating. I would recommend giving it a shot if it sounds interesting to you, but maybe feel free to walk away at a certain point.

username · November 9, 2020, 7:08am

More short blurbs about games I don’t feel like writing much about.

Old Man’s Journey

Old Man’s Journey is an adventure/puzzle game about an old man taking a trip and reminiscing about his life. In terms of story, well if you take that story basis and try to guess the ten flashbacks he has while sitting on benches along the way you’ll likely get most of them right, it is very by the numbers. Mechanically it is a bit more interesting, most screens are full of hills and other bits of land that you have to grab and stretch out in order to create a path for the old man to take to the next screen. It is rarely that difficult to figure out but it is fairly unique and executed well for the most part (there are occasional bits with sheep that I’m still not sure I grasp). It is perfectly fine.

Runner3

I really love the idea of the Bit.Trip Runner games; I don’t know that I ever felt like they totally nailed it though. Runner3 doesn’t change my feelings, although I will say that they added a ton of checkpoints and easy modes for those who always felt they were too hard. I actually found out they are on by default and were added in later with a patch. I found this out as there is something in the overworld map of the third area that causes it to crash on certain computers, such as mine. However while they never actually fixed this bug they released a test branch near release that turns off a ton of extra things that lets it load for folks such as me… but that lacks all of the added in easy mode features they added in.

This would normally be a tough break, having the final area in a game you’ve unknowingly been playing on easy randomly turned up to normal/hard with checkpoints turned off; I did much better in the third area than I did on the second or even first area. It turned out that what I thought was iffy controls that regularly dropped inputs was a different unknown bug that was also never fixed but more importantly was not present in said test branch. What does this mean? It probably means no one should listen to my impressions on the game as the version you’d play would likely be rather different than the one I played. That said it seemed like it had a bunch of gimmicks and such combined with a graphics style that occasionally got in the way that kinda made it messier than one would hope. I mainly just included it here for more of my random PC gaming misadventures.

12 Labors

In 12 Labors you have to go weed a dozen statues in I think your grandad’s backyard while the rest of the family is in the hospital with him as he is maybe dying. This is mostly so the main character can reflect on how they’ve been a crappy person to many people around them and trying to at least acknowledge their issues, but I’m the shallow person who just liked how everything looked all grass covered and tried to guess what each statue was before I got to work uncovering it. Mechanically all you do is hold down a mouse button and drag it back and forth across the statue to have the weeds fall off of it which is almost insultingly simple and yet I kinda liked watching all the weeds fall away. It’s very short so if you like how the screenshot looks it may be worth a shot.

Once Upon A Crime In The West

Once Upon A Crime In The West is an interesting experiment that maybe owes a debt to that Return of the Obra Dinn game I never played. It is basically Hateful Eight: the day after as you come to an abandoned saloon/hotel in a snowy western mountain and discover it is full of dead primary color’d bodies (and one living if forgetful bartender) and you have to piece together exactly what happened here and who killed who. You can flash back to moments from the previous twelve days in order to piece together who each of them were, who were friends and enemies with each other and exactly why did such bloodshed occur.

You have to take pictures of each body, tack them to the walls of the cabin and draw connections between them as you figure out who killed who, and if you are correct the bartender’s memory will be jogged a bit more. It is an interesting conceit, with its main flaw being that if you just go through the twelve days in order it is a bit too obvious how things went down (also drawing lines between the pictures is finicky as hell). It is really close to being rather good, as is it is a near miss.

falsedan · November 10, 2020, 1:17pm

Passing the time with no internet with bundle games. Did you know? you can’t launch the itch.io frontend without an internet connection.

Attrition

Colourful WWI light wargame. Big maps are 10-15 hexes wide & scouts have 5 movement, so it’s pretty snappy. It has a couple of interesting ideas, like counterattacks, needing MP to make your one attack per turn, heavy fog of war, and suppression/barrage weapons reducing offensive strength instead of doing damage. But the AI is atrocious & just moves towards your closest unit, so standard tactics of ‘move to contact, pull back’ means the enemy happily move out of defences and stand in your defilade fire area, right next to your tank which they can’t attack because they used all their MP to get there.

There’s 17 maps in the single-player campaign, takes a couple of hours to go through them all. Some of them even let you choose some/all of your own force (2x artillery, 2x Armored Car, 0x Marksmen gtfo). They’re not as hard as Advance Wars maps, which is probably what you should be playing instead.

FLAMBERGE

Hmm, there’s cutscenes? Dialogue like an ARPG? But it’s a top-down skirmisher where you plan your moves before they execute. Absolutely terrible because you have a tiny amount of units (so accurate positioning is extremely important, there are less-powerful versions of most attacks that track in an area), the maps are very open, and your planning is for about 2 seconds of action, so you spend a lot of time wishing units would be autoselected when planning starts.

I made it to the first encounter after the tutorial, where two soldiers attack your two units while they’re in a ruined chapel. They came from two different sides and completely destroyed me when I dodged the archer up against a wall next to them and send the swordsman in the completely wrong direction.

Helpfully the game shows how to skip cutscenes in the first cutscene. I feel like if your response to feedback that your cutscenes are too long/slow/boring is to let people skip them then you’ve missed the point.

Il Filo Conduttore

Italian art game, click/drag on hotspots. About 10 minutes of looking at vibrant still lifes while making a ball on a string do something. I felt like this had the form of a game with a message/theme but it’s completely empty, the ‘puzzles’ are trivial so you don’t get any catharsis from completing it. Not as good as that Flash game about finding stars.

Kids

Art game about humanoids going in a hole, tubes, underwater swimming, running in groups, clapping. Occasional dialogue uses pre-teen voice actors. About 30 minutes? Much better than the string one, this made me feel frustrated, bored, curious, with foreboding, anticipation, apathy, but not much to make me question flinging kids into holes.

Firepoint

Board game adaptation. You’re a firefighter outside a burning house with 4 AP, 2 AP to completely extinguish a fire square, 1 AP to extinguish the flame only to smoke, 1 AP to open doors/move, 2 AP to move while carrying someone. You can chop through doors/walls with your axe, but missions have a damage limit and the fire will be doing quite a lot by itself.

Play a roguelike instead? The fun of boardgames is the interaction around the table, and solo variants try to replace that with ridiculously hard conditions so you’re too concerned with planning optimal plays to notice the lack of social stimulation. But because objectives are randomly distributed, you just get lucky, manage the fire a bit, and get nearly everyone out even with only a single firefighter.

Would have liked some puzzle challenges that did require optimal plays!

El Tango de la Muerta

This is my pick of the bunch!
Rhythmic movement on a grid, set in 1920’s Argentina. Move onto the square just as it flashes for max points, don’t stray onto unlit squares. Sometimes it’s hard to pick which voice in the music to follow & end up moving to the beat instead of the bass or lead, but it’s great when it works! You easily stride across the dancefloor to cheers, applause, dips and praise from your partner, this is easy, miss a rhythm cue, and stumble back onto the lit path, dodging cats etc.

There’s a plot which… exists, but the reason to play is the dances. There’s a few fights which are resolved as dances, with fisticuff powerups toggling between green (good) and red (bad) to the beat on the path.

I guess this is like Crypt of the Necrodancer? I would play this instead. If you like rhythm games this is probably way too easy.

username · November 11, 2020, 3:17am

They aren’t lying.

…I took a few thousand screenshots so far, I’m gonna sneak them in every chance I get!

username · November 11, 2020, 6:57am

Four Sided Fantasy

This is a pretty neat little puzzle platformer built around a screen wrapping mechanic. In general the screen scrolls normally as you move through the world, but with the press of a button you can freeze the screen as-is. During this if you say walk off the left side of the screen you will reappear from the equivalent point on the right side (if you played Kid Icarus yes like that). It’s a concept that pops up from time to time in games but this game is basically built around it and does a solid job with it.

The game is split into four seasons, and each one changes how the screen wrapping works in subtle (and sometimes not subtle ways). As an example in one season if you leave the screen in the foreground you will then pop up in the background, and the puzzle is figuring out how to switch back and forth between the two to continue to make progress. These little twists to the formula keep things feeling fresh throughout although I must admit the the one introduced in the final area took a bit to wrap my head around (and was sadly prone to occasional bugs which was a bummer). I completed the game in about 90 minutes (again, I play a lot of puzzle games so maybe for others it’d be closer to two hours) so it generally moves at a pretty brisk pace, switches things up fairly frequently then gets out of there.

I also should point out that there is more effort spent on its presentation than screenshots would indicate. It very much has this aesthetic that seems to pop up in a bunch of lower budget platformers I’ve come across in this bundle, but it does a lot of little things like switching how zoomed in everything is, playing with foreground elements and the like. Whoever is behind it cared enough that they wanted to spice it up visually and made smart use of what they had available to them to do so, and after playing a ton of these bundle games I do appreciate it.