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.