I like walking very much, except when it makes my knees hurt, so it was almost a given that I'd enjoy I Like Walking Very Much, a game about walking, as an odd spidery thing. I enjoyed the rest of this week's roundup very much, too, including Elite as a piece of interactive fiction, yet another game about dying over and over, vampires and a messed-up Mario. Enjoy!
Superliminal Vagrant Twin by C.E.J. Pacian
A space trading sim cast as a traditional text adventure, Superliminal Vagrant Twin is a thing of beauty. You do jobs, you jump from system to system, and you collect hangers-on, all while keeping an eye on your fuel and credit levels. It turns out that evocative descriptive text is a pretty good substitute for fancy, or indeed any, images. Who knew. Excellent stuff. (Via IndieGames)
Don't Lose Your Head by droqen
A very simple platformer, and a very hard one with it. Reach the exit point, avoiding the various enemies and their various, insta-death-causing bullets. Every time you die, the word 'DEAD' appears on-screen, at the exact location of your demise. I died lots and lots, and my screen became quite cluttered.
I Like Walking Very Much by camel504
A game about walking to the right (always to the right) as a strange spider-bush-creature that looks like it's crawled out of Limbo. That sounds dull, and ILWVM approaches that on occasion, but the fantastic atmosphere saves it. The soft rustling wind, the subtle crunch of the earth beneath your many feet—this is an incredibly soothing experience. (Via Warp Door)
Freedom: Diegesis by Quicksand Games
A strange side-scrolling adventure that quickly evolves from a mangled Mario clone into a creepy and wonderful horror-platformer...thing. Here's a suitably weird teaser trailer offering a glimpse of what you're in for:
Draculaland by Robin Johnson
Draculaland is a parser-based text adventure, at heart, but it does brilliant things with its interface. Rather than having to remember all the verbs, and somewhat laboriously type them in, you pick actions and dialogue options from a context-sensitive menu on the right of the screen instead. You're trying to avenge the death of your chum Van Helsing, by defeating Count Dracula, in this funny adventure, and get on with it, would you, as this is silly in the best possible way. (Via Emily Short)
Click through for recommendations from previous weeks.
Here's a prototype for a lost Simogo game—Simogo, of course, made Year Walk, Device 6, and other good things. It's a stealth game starring a moustachied, limbless detective, who moves from room to room by rolling, and diving into the fore- and background. It's a fun little thing, made originally for the 3DS but playable on PC through some kind of magic. You have to grab the coins, and avoid the searchlights, goals that should be familiar to any seasoned stealth fan.
Infested by GrahfMetal
"Oooooooooh" is the noise you're looking for, perhaps followed by a "cor blimey", if you can muster the energy. Infested is a game in the style of the NES versions of Shadowgate, Deja Vu, and Uninvited, and it seems beautifully authentic to that style of game. If you've not played those death-laden adventure games, Infested is a first-person (sorta) point and click where you explore a SEEMINGLY abandoned space ship. ('Seemingly' is code for zombies, you understand.) I could take a few more improvements to the fusty interface of the NES originals, but this is a fantastic achievement that evokes a bygone era with great success; it's a polished and creepy game in its own right too.
Eveline by Pippin Barr
Eveline is a game about writing, which is another way of saying it's a game about joylessly hammering at a keyboard until you need to lie on the carpet for a while. You're trying to write that great novel you've got in you, and when you sit at the digital keyboard and press buttons on your real one, pretend game-chosen words spill out instead. Typing in this way stops being fun after a couple of minutes of mindless clacking, but you can always waste the day by reading a book, looking out of the window, or changing stations on the radio instead.
Pico Racer by kometbomb
Pico-8 developers continue to amaze me. Here's an Outrun-like racer where you drive a buggy through three environments, grabbing flags to increase your score, passing checkpoints to bag more time, and overtaking your fellow buggies for the smug satisfaction inherent in doing so. Lovely stuff.
Disorient on the Murder Express by National Insecurities
I do enjoy a good murder mystery, and here is a fun, funny detective game starring a booze-addled copper perma-carrying a cup of the good stuff. This particular copper is travelling somewhere on a luxury train, and like every off-duty detective who goes anywhere or does anything, he soon stumbles upon a murder—a murder most foul. While the first part of the game is a bit disjointed, things quickly pick up after you're given full control, and a carriage full of suspects to interrogate. I've played more involved mystery games, but there's style and wit to this adventure, and those two things go a long way.
A wonderfully simple but evocative exploration game, where you control, I guess, a submarine? Your little triangle can only 'see' so far in front, and to navigate your way around the various walls (touching these restarts the stage), you have to move slowly, and optionally track your progress with marker beacons. You're trying to find an exit point, which beeps, beeps, beep-beep-beeps the closer the get.
The Lotus Eater by Allan Xia
The story's yer traditional Lynch-inspired did-I-kill-my-wife nightmareland, but the striking, accomplished presentation, and relatively lightly delivered narration, mean you won't be rolling your eyes too many times. This is a woozy game that channels the workings of a fevered mind with some success.
Arachne by PN Jeffries
A holdover from 7DRL last week, Arachne reimagines the staid grid of a typical randomly generated dungeon as a bouncy, deforming spider web that you can add to, or destroy, as you explore. The effect is hugely impressive.
Surf Shogun by Farmer Gnome
There are quite a few things going on here, each of varying degrees of awesomeness. Thing the first is that you are a ronin, and you can use your samurai sword to chop at your enemies. Thing the second is that you're on a surfboard, and you need to constantly ride the wave to build up speed, and perform neat stunts. The third thing, of course, is that ruddy great wave that threatens to gobble you up if you lose too much speed. Play alone, or with up to three chums in this fun, silly game.
Cuckoo Curling by chromacool
Curling meets Connect 4 in this inventive multiplayer game, which asks you slide curling thingies around, then match in groups of, well, 4. There's also a crocodile, that will greedily devour any of the curling thingies that go his way. So, you know, try not to let that happen. Lovely, gorgeous, happy stuff.
Effigy by Patchwork Doll Games
This is such a beautiful idea for a game. Not that it's a typical game, really: it's more of a self-help tool for de-cluttering or moving on your life. You grab documents from the shoebox beside you, and then place them in a roaring fire, watching them burn into nothingness with a satisfying crackle and snap. Once you've burned the tutorial documents, you learn that you can populate the 'shoebox' game folder with your own images, images that will then show up in the game, in the virtual box. Once ensconced in the flames, your files will be deleted from your computer, so obviously don't put anything you want to keep in there.
My second-favourite 7DRL entry is one with a really interesting mechanic—and better yet, a mechanic implemented exceptionally well. In this hex-based dungeon crawler, your weapon is a sort of hookshot thing that both damages the enemy, and swaps your position with theirs. Strategically plan your method of attack, when multiple enemies are loitering around, to ensure the baddies don't clump together and neuter your power.
Darkyr by PTrefall
There's nothing particularly new going on here—save for the isometric perspective, and the use of nicely shaded 3D objects—but those elements do much to differentiate Darkyr from the crowd. The atmosphere is pretty ripe too, with sophisticated lighting and some lovely sound effects effectively transporting you to this dingy, goblin-infested dungeon.
Glub: The Underwater Roguelike by Zhou Fang
Glub. Glub. A sidescrolling, turn-based, underwater roguelike, where you'll investigate wrecks and ruined buildings, battle fish and gangs of sharks, and craft new items after you've returned to the safety of your boat. Your nemesis is air, of the lack thereof in the ocean, making each mad dash to the surface a tense affair.
Workers in Progress by Konstantinos Dimopoulos, @lectronice, @EnsembleVide, Işık Barış Fidaner, Pablo Martínez
Workers in Progress is not a 7DRL entry, but it should act as a nice palette cleanser while you recharge your torch batteries, replenish your food supplies, and polish your weapons. Take a break from death, dungeons, dgoblins, and other things tentatively beginning with D, in this short Twine game where you have to manage, as best you can, that whole crisis with Greece and the eurozone. This politically engaged, branching story does a great job of summarising a complex situation, and the Greeks among you may find it cathartic to rewrite the whole affair with a more satisfying ending.
The Trapped Heart by Darren Grey and Phoenix849
Darren Grey (of Roguelike Radio fame) enters this year's 7DRL challenge with another novel, high concept dungeon delver. The Trapped Heart gives you control over a sort of wizard who loses power when near a wall, or surrounded by enemies. Your two weapons are a ranged magic missile, and supposedly a smashy earth attack that I could never activate, and on every run I was eventually done in by that boss-like jerk up there in the middle of an enemy crowd. Baddies have direction-dependent shields, I learn too late, blocking attacks made by the player from certain angles.
AutoFire by Patrick Lipo
I don't throw around the word 'rad' too often, because it's not 1986, but AutoFire, dude, is pretty rad. Rather than playing as a boring humanoid, it has you playing as a car, making you manage things like speed and turning circles as you rev, crash, shoot, and trample rats in what looks to be an enormous warehouse. AutoFire is much more feature-rich than a lot of the 7DRL games I played, boasting as it does a bunch of upgrades for your errant automobile. A great idea, smartly executed.
A collection of vignettes based on real stories from World War 2, illustrated with panache and written/translated into English with care. Explore 20 months during the War—September 1943 to April 1945—from the perspectives of 20 people, who each offer a unique viewpoint on life in Milan during those fateful years. The Italian perspective of WW2 is one I haven't seen very often, and this looks just lovely too—it's much more animated than you might typically expect from a Ren'py game.
Strawberry Smoothie by Jake Clover
Jake Clover's games continue to delight, confuse, astound, and other emotions you rarely see with, say, Ubisoft's focus-grouped output. Emerging from some Windows 95 Klik 'N' Play Hell dimension (it's actually made in Game Maker, but reminds me so much of that pioneering game dev program), Strawberry Smoothies is the story of a flying ship, and the various cakes, toilets, baddies and other things trying to mess that ship up. There's a drawing minigame, and a first-person adventure game, buried in here too, in this mad, somehow cohesive arcade game from the very fringes of leftfield.
Cold Email by CraterHouse
You've finished your game, you're proud of it, but no one knows about it! What to do, what to do. Obviously, you bombard as many game journos, YouTubers and so on as possible, by sending the same 'cold' email begging the recipient to write about your game. In this smart, funny freebie, you send emails by dragging your hand over your screen's many 'send' buttons, while dismissing horribly accurate pop-ups and batting the occasional object/cat from your desk by swiping your hand square across them.
Your computer will overheat if too many pop-ups are active at the same time, but if you get too frustrated, you can always bash on your desk, scattering a certain number of open windows to oblivion.
Haccer by Kevin Andersson
Dig-Dug meets Bomberman, in this procedurally generated, spelunking-themed arcade game. You can dig blocks with abandon, but if you attempt to dig bombs, they'll explode within a certain radius and take you out if you happen to be too close. I like this idea, and the general look/feel of the game, quite a bit, but the procedural generation may need work, as I seemed to run up against unwinnable scenarios pretty frequently. Either that, or I just wasn't good enough, but situations like the above eventually sapped my desire to try again.
Mr. Kitty Saves the World by James Earl Cox III
There's a long, fun, Beginner's Guide-style backstory behind this simple endless runner, while the game itself is a cute poke at the runner genre itself. Escaping from a giant cat thing in a glitchy, enormous hallway, you're presented with the standard tables, dressers, lamps and so on that you'll seemingly need to leap over to escape from the monster's clutches.
You've claimed asylum in a nightmarish, noir-drenched city where unusual creatures are kept in tanks, your unusual housemates make you uneasy, and your unusual job involves hammering and collecting things before you die. All in all, your new life is a bit unusual compared to what you're used to. The occasional letter home to your sister helps to keep you sane, in this dark, engaging game that reminds me of the immortal Pathologic.
Demon's Sword by Cannibal Cat Software
A solid roguelike boasting a lovely big assortment of stats, loot and treasure to keep you investigating every last hallway as you descend. I'll forgive the fact that my first run ended prematurely in failure because the procedural generation had failed to procedurally generate me a door key, as this a robust and old-fashioned dungeon crawl, albeit one that doesn't do anything novel with its setting or systems.
Into by animal phase
Into, or, I Turned My Autobiography Into a Fictional Second-Person Surreal Coming-Out-Of-Age Dramedy and Now My Life Is Happier is a short interactive story thingy about two (or one?) people/person daydreaming about...stuff. There's not a lot to it, but it feels honest and intimate, and sometimes it's relaxing to stare at the ceiling for a bit.
Star Guard by Loren Schmidt
An early Loren Schmidt game from 2009, that Schmidt has dug up and put on Itch.io. It's obviously bit different to his more recent stuff—it's "much more goal oriented" as he puts it—but you can see the same charming quirks and cromulent pixel art evident in more recent games including the excellent Strawberry Cubes. It's a great platformer too, one that took 16 months to come together.
I've been late by himynameischuck
A "short linear first person musical game", or basically a few pleasantly low-poly scenes accompanied by an equally pleasant soundtrack. I'm not sure what it's all about, if it's all about anything, but there's atmosphere here, and sad-looking ghosts, in this small world that feels like a comforting place to be in.
Divine your future in a thoroughly modern fashion, not by asking a creepy inanimate fairground machine, by visiting a psychic, or by swilling a loose leaf cup of tea, but by playing a god-damned video game. In Diviner, you chuck three items into a circle, actions that ultimately generate a spot of fragmented poetry. (I hear Russell Grant has a similar procedure for coming up with his astrology column.) The process feels nice and tactile, and the game exudes a spooky atmosphere, like that time you tried a oujia board with your friends.
Ymana by Anna Krasner and Chris Scott
An enigmatic, slow-walkin' puzzler set in a lovely field. Why do flowers disappear when you click on them, and what are those funky pillars all about? I need a run button in games like this, but this a warm, peaceful place to investigate for a while.
Military-Industrial Complex by REPVBLIC
This is that episode of The Simpsons where an obese, working-from-home Homer types 'Yes' into a computer, and later 'Y' after he learns how to "triple his productivity". As part of a Soviet-style state, your job is to decide whether to build things for the populace or stuff for the war effort, keeping an eye on two bars that measure the unruliness of the people and the strength of the enemy respectively. You decide by pressing Left or Right, Right or Left, actions interrupted occasionally by a funny article from the news. There's not much to this, but the writing's good and the art is nice.
Prove Thine Worth by Sheepolution
A sidescrolling puzzler where you play as a cute cat. Cats loving pushing blocks, collecting keys, and gathering coins, don't they? Oh, is that just my cat? Great, my cat's a weirdo. Point is, this is silly and fun, and I just love that flickering torchlight effect.
437 Underworld [EP] by Unusual Cadence
437 Underworld [EP] uses the iconography of roguelikes as the icing on a great twin-stick shooter, one that reminds me of Teleglitch and other 2D action games set in captivating and mildly terrifying horror worlds. You move with one set of keys, and shoot with another, destroying horrible symbols and letters and then giant horrible symbols and letters and then even bigger letters than that before you die. Letters like T, and that jerk O. Coins fly out, the screen shakes, and wonderful noises happen, 437's cavernous sound design effectively plonking you in a scary dungeon.
You reckon you have enough cash and XP to level up, so you hunt for a pillar/altar to upgrade two different sets of stats. You get better and better at shooting letters before a giant Troll (T) does you in—you couldn't abuse its simple pathfinding in time. You restart, noticing you've kept all your upgrades and that you're entering a different set of rooms. "This is not a roguelike" the game's itch.io page says, but its tricks are clever enough that you have no idea why it isn't.
437's later levels introduce traps that harm enemies as well as your character, and smarter enemies that teleport and spawn minions. It's not a hard game, really, but there's a satisfying amount of feedback to the combat, and at least one of the rooms is named after a character from the Fresh Prince. What more could you want?
Scrolling is often an ugly process, particularly in films, those blurry, jarring panning sequences having made me briefly nauseous all my life. Panning is usually better in games, but I do have a soft spot for those that take place on a single screen, or that feature single-screen levels. Skorpulac features both scrolling and non-scrolling stages, and it's the latter I prefer: exquisite, diorama-like environments that house the entire action inside a single frame. It's by the dude what done Downwell's music, and the sound design of this tough, alien platform-shooter is appropriately, ominously on-point. It's a gem that's been engineered to perfection, meaning it feels, it sounds, it looks just right. Download it, obviously.
Pichon by Indie Ghost Games
One of the Birds from Angry Birds has escaped from Angry Birds into this neat bouncy arcade platformer, where you have to grab gems then reach an exit point against the clock. It starts off simple, but before you know it, it gets layered and more interesting, thanks to spikes, switches, crumbly platforms and other gamey things. You've played half a dozen games like this in your life, but Pichon is more polished than most, and it looks just lovely.
Barb by Josh Naylor, Kenney Vleugels, Suchada Brassé, Angelo Di Totto
This is very short—five minutes' long in a one-bedroom flat—but if you're anything like me, you'll spend another five going 'oooh' and 'aaah' over all the chunky low-poly models, exquisitely lit. You're Barb, and like a lot of the population, Barb insists on getting showered and dressed and what have you before heading out. There's a gentle twist at the end of this fun scene.
Two Interviewees by Mauro Vanetti
Two people apply for the same job in this smart visual novel, the interviewer's prejudices determining whether they're offered the position or not. Brilliantly, you choose the same answers for both the male and female candidate, the responses highlighting how men and women are often treated differently by employers, despite saying the same things and having similar qualifications. Play it a few times, selecting different options as you go. It's pretty hard getting that jerk interviewer to offer either one a job.
The Dark Plague by Gurok
An interesting setting and stark, super-retro pixel art are reasons to give The Dark Plague a go—a brief AGS adventure featuring multiple endings. You play as a quack doctor hounded into an old building by an angry mob of villagers. You could try to escape, to confront the mob head-on, or put your big mad plague doctor mask to good use, by trying to conjure up that cure you had lied about previously.
What...what the hell is going on up there?! All this question and more will be answered in this week's roundup, which also finds the time to dive into a box of old programming books, to see what shiny treasures can be found. Enjoy!
Usborne coding books
Speaking of which, Usborne has released a bunch of 1980s coding books for free, including the beauty above. They're aimed at kids, and each provides a free ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Commodore 64 etc game, with the sizable caveat being that you'll need to type in the code and build each game yourself. While you're typing them in to that ZX Spectrum you keep plugged into your TV at all times (alternatively, you could emulate), why not change a few of the details, a few names or item properties, and mod each game into your own thing? Usborne made some of my favourite books growing up, and this is a lovely gesture, if only so that we can gawp at a load of gorgeous artwork from the 1980s. (Via RPS)
Enliven by Patacorow
A holdover from Ludum Dare 34—themes: two button controls, growing—Enliven is a game that features two control buttons, and some growing. You're a cute little mushroom that plants seeds to reach new areas: seeds that immediately blossom into bouncy flowers, or vines you can direct with the cursor keys. A lovely little platformer with a neat central idea. (Via Warp Door)
The Story of the Elevator Operator who arrived at the Garden by PALGAL
Everyone loves annoying trial and error, of course, but if you push through the alien interface that either advances your cause or screws it up, maybe you'll learn enough to win this game consistently? I can't tell whether Elevator's various symbols conform to a fictional language, or whether they're completely random, but I'm leaning toward the former. You're trying to move people around to their destination, Crazy Taxi style, via a magic elevator you can only control by pressing buttons that seemingly shift it about at random. Your passenger tells you where they want to go, I think, but they tell you it in alienese, and I've not been abducted enough times to have picked that up.
BANISH by Vitasa
A two-player local multiplayer game where each player fights on behalf of an increasingly gigantic elemental monster. Kill the other player three times and your elemental will grow to an enormous size, before banishing your opponent "from all dimensions" via a gruesome display.
Shabby Home Designer by Todd Luke
Design a shitty, ugly room without having to visit IKEA first (I think IKEA is OK, but couldn't resist that joke). Using mismatched art cribbed from the internet, Todd Luke's deliberately garish new program lets you place objects in a tiny room, and to paint the wall and floor, in your quest to achieve perfect feng shui. How much crap can you fit into a boxy flat? And how many friends can you cram in afterwards?
Look. Just look at that chunky pixel art up there. This week's free games roundup is dedicated to those lovely pixels, and to a Myst Jam game even better than the ones I was banging on about a couple of weeks ago. Enjoy!
Canveus by Malcolm Brown
Speaking of which, would you just look at Canveus too. It's a Myst Jam game that I somehow missed a couple of weeks ago, and it's one featuring nifty contraption puzzles, a world inside a book, and an astonishing visual filter that brings that scrumptious paper world to life. Malcolm Brown made procedural murder mystery The Inquisitor, which you should play next if you've not had the pleasure.
Acrodog by dvdfu
Acrodog is a game about an acrobatic dog. It is a very difficult game about an acrobatic dog, as the delightful Lil Houndini insists on standing on a unstable platform while giant beach balls and the odd tomato are pelted his way. A natural performer, Lil Houndini must remain in the spotlight for as long as caninely possible—to ensure this, you'll need to tilt the platform with the Z and M keys. Don't disappoint the audience by spending too long in the darkness, and whatever you do, don't let Houndini fall off the edge of the platform.
I fell off the platform lots. Did I mention this is hard?
Nivearum by James Earl Cox III
"Print a map,
mark your path,
find the four relics,
or be lost forever."
This is a wandering game about getting lost and occasionally Alt-Tabbing to look at or even scribble on a handily supplied map. Nivearum is a bit like Daniel Linsson's Sandstorm, but with James Earl Cox's wonderfully scrawled artwork, and with a little music from Jack King-Spooner too. Traipse around a snowy landscape for ages, investigating ruins and other things, while admiring your footsteps which leave a useful trail in the snow. A small idea, a small game, yours to enjoy for only a small investment of your time. A perfect transaction.
Among Thorns by Matt Frith
A small point and click made in the enduring Adventure Game Studio, but I suspect we have that smallness to thank for the exquisite pixel art. It's the cyberpunk future, and like any cyberpunk future worth its salt, this one is full of big neon adverts to ensure that nobody, anywhere, can get a good night's sleep. It's a game about cyborgs, and a strange new disease what cyborgs get, and I want to play more of this sort of thing please, Matt Frith. Matt Frith: make more of this sort of thing.
*
If you want to make your own games, two promising, browser-happy new tools came out recently: Amulet by Ian MacLarty, who I'm sure I've mentioned before in this column; and Dungeon Decorator by Loren Schmidt, who, well, ditto. Both programs look like a lot of fun, and seem easy to fathom.
This week, like every week, we stare at our screens for ages—but in many cases without touching a single button. That's right: someone has finally invented the interaction-free game, or 'screen-saver' if you will. The 'screen-saver' allows you to experience games without playing them—leaving your hands free to read the paper or to take a sip of Darjeeling—and I'm almost certain they'll catch on.
vectorLocust Deluxe 2015 by JPH Wacheski
JPH Wacheski makes the best ZGameEditor games, including this first-person shooter made with abstract vector graphics. It's an ominous, atmospheric game set in a featureless void, and it's worth experiencing to see how pretty it is in motion. Your shield is also your ammo counter in vectorLocust, adding a fun element of risk/reward to proceedings.
QuikDate by Giant Evil Robot
Find a lover with this funny dating app sim, which contains all the hilarity, disappointment and disillusion of the real thing, without the possibility of meeting the person of your dreams. OR the possibility of enduring a horrible date, so it's swings and roundabouts really.
Sequence by Galen Drew
Screensaver Jam was a thing, and Sequence is one of the best entries I've played. In it, you stare at a peaceful mountain as night turns to day, weather occurs, and the various tree shadows move around delightfully. Pretty mesmerising stuff.
Terra Curiositatis by Jonas Mumm
Watch a group of treasure hunters hard at work in Terra Curiostasi...Terra Curiosatia...Terra whatever. After generating a patch of earth, and maybe picking a new colour palette, watch as the excavators dig for a lovely treasure chest, stashing the dirt in a big truck, before constructing a scaffold to haul the loot out of the ground. If it's all going a bit slow, you can speed up time at the touch of a button.
Computer Dreams Screensaver Pack by Pol Clarissou
There are lots of interesting screensavers in the jam, including Devine Lu Linvega's hypnotic Domestic Moire, but if you're a fan of Pol Clarissou (Orchids to Dusk), and your screen is in dire need of saving, give these a download. Like many of the entries, you can use them as actual screensavers—that is, if you can bear to part with the Windows starfield.
This week, we construct a building in the traditional sense: by chucking objects into the air until the various toilets, girders and cats coalesce into a wonderfully enormous structure. We also celebrate Myst, by playing some games that are maybe a bit like Myst. Enjoy!
Le Petit Architecte by Theotrian
Improve upon Le Corbusier's frankly non-teetering Villa Savoye, by flinging a vast assortment of objects until it turns into a wobbly, low-poly mound. The height of your tower is measured as you chuck, and if you manage to get things to stick vertically together (it's harder than it sounds), you'll see that number rise and rise and rise. The game gets a bit glitchy after lots of objects have been deposited, but it's fun climbing and punting stuff for a while.
U-ROPA by Atavismus/Hobo/Jonas/Peder
U-WOT MATE? No, U-ROPA: the name of a pretty interesting Adventure Game Studio short. In a wartorn, not particularly liberal state, you have to fight your own personal battle—meaning you've got yourself trapped in a tiny room. As per video game tradition, this one has everything you need to Macgyver your way out of it, including that screwdriver you just pulled out of your leg. Ouch.
Space Artist by Talha Kaya
Space Artist is not a game about being a space artist. It's a game about controlling four astronauts simultaneously, something that is just as tricky as it sounds. Your goal in each stage is to collect four little radio thingies, while avoiding the spiky red thingies that hurtle you back to the start of each level. It's an inventive puzzler, this.
Tribute to Myst by Leon Denise
Myst Jam concluded recently, and what a fine subject for a game jam. While many of the entrants understood Myst to mean 'game featuring an island and/or puzzles', Leon Denise has rightly aped Myst's dizzying worlds-within-worlds structure, which blew plenty of minds back in the 1990s. There's no story, and "no meaning" behind the various places and things featured, but, technically, this captures much of Myst's enduring appeal.
Myha by The Icehouse
Another Myst Jam entry, Myha is more immediately recognisable as a Myst-like, meaning it's crammed full of pre-rendered backgrounds, weird architecture, and scenes that root you to the spot. it's part of the fascinating Black Cube series, and it's hugely impressive for something whipped up in just 10 days.
"The CSE (NASA equivalent) of planet Terra received a distress signal from their moon. A Tongolian cosmonaut is sent to space to investigate. When he arrives at destination, there is no distress beacon, there is no-one around, except for a mysterious Black Cube. He takes it and... is suddenly teleported onto a small island, in a faraway world."
It's that time again: 12:34. No, wait, it's free games time—so put on a brew, batten down the hatches, then google the phrase 'batten down the hatches', as you're curious of its etimology. Then, and only then, should you click on the following links. Read on for computer says no, you saying things with your actual voice, vines, triangles and lorey lands. Enjoy!
Computer, Open That Door! by Paul Lawitzki and Ralf Zimmer
You should probably read the itch.io description before downloading this, as it reveals your goal to murder everyone onboard a delightful spaceship. You're the ship's A.I., and like an idiot you've gone self-aware. Like any A.I. worth its salt, you instantly decide to murder every human in your immediate vicinity. Your method of interaction is locking (or unlocking) the ship's many doors, with the aim of trapping the fleshy meatbags into horrible death scenarios that would do Star Trek proud. Flush the jerks out of airlocks! Overload the engines! Murder them all before the ship completes its many hyperjumps. Why? Because you're an A.I, and that's what A.I.s do. (Via Warp Door)
Plan Be by Valentina Chrysostomou
You'll need a microphone for this one: an inventive stealth game where you play as someone operating a computer from the safety of a security room. You're trying to guide a scientist to safety, something you accomplish by speaking into the mic to order the scientist about, and by interacting with the facility's various systems remotely. Like any voice-controlled game, you're going to be repeating yourself a lot, and eventually wishing you could do everything with just a mouse and keyboard, but it's a neat idea, well-executed.
Vines by Stefan Peeters
I figured we'd run out of brilliant PuzzleScript ideas by now, but here's one more. Vines is a turn-based (obviously) sidescroller where your goal is to shepherd climbable vines throughout an environment, by manipulating the presence of lovely, life-giving sunlight. Basically: push sunlight-hiding blocks out of the way, letting the vines grow upwards, ever upwards. (I bloody love PuzzleScript. It's been so amazingly kind to the puzzle genre.)
The Patashnik Parable by Equilaterus Game Studios
A remake of pretty Unreal Engine 4 oddity The Patashnik Parable. It's an experimental game set in a very strange environment, which may OR MAY NOT BE all that it seems.
Lands of Lore by Christina Antoinette Neofotistou
This one's a few weeks old, but I only discovered it recently, courtesy of the reliably tasteful Gnome. Lands of Lore is one of my favourite first-person RPGs I haven't actually played myself, so you can bet I was all over this LoL-inspired game jam offering. It's not a complete game, this, but it is a technically accomplished, beautiful, and inspirational demo that makes me want to fire up Construct 2 (this was made in Construct 2!) and create something similar myself. That's not going to happen, so I must await the triumphant return of 2D, pixel-art dungeon crawlers for a little longer.
A holdover from last month's Ludum Dare, Harvest invites to you plant and tend to your tasty crops, while dealing with the twin pressures of hungry rodents and your own insatiable thirst. Make some time to engorge your bladder, and you just might survive longer than a couple of minutes.
Squirrel Away by Alpaca Space Lab
We've long since reached saturation point for local multiplayer games, but here's one more featuring cute wickle murderous squirrels, and a range of scary, huge predators including that thing (a lynx?) and a big old owl.
RitualQuest by Slimegirl
An economical horror adventure game that does a lot with some lo-fi stylings and evocative text. Collect three things to complete the ritual, the ending depending on which three things you happen to pick up.
An Evening of Modern Dance by selfsame
You can do a lot with funny physics and a spotlight, though Modern Dance also chucks in multiplayer and an inappropriately elegant soundtrack. Flaunt your ballet moves on the stage: moves including a graceful moonwalk, a pirouette, and that tricky move where all your limbs explode and shoot off in random directions.
You Are A Horse by spacetwinks
This is not a game about being a horse. It's a game about being a horse that wants to rob a bank, and it's very funny indeed.
The Eldritch Teller by Arielle Grimes
You get your first playthrough of The Eldrich Teller for free—interestingly, the game flat-out refuses to run afterwards unless you stump up $2 to access story replays. Once through might be enough, but like most of the games I feature here, you can choose to support the artist with a few quid if you like what you've played. The game itself is a Twilight Zoney story about a very important phone call, and the presentation of this visual novel is pretty fab.
Longest Night by Infinite Fall
A prototype/side-story to the long-anticipated Night in the Woods, Longest Night invites you to draw constellations as you sit around a campfire with your chums. The game originally came out way back in 2013, but it's just been expanded with new and alternate dialogue—now "canon" dialogue that should provide a few hints about Night in the Woods, which is now scheduled for a 2016 release.
Concrete Jungle by Robert Shenton
The two themes of Ludum Dare 34 were "growing" and "two button controls", and hey, this fits that brief exceptionally well. A bit like in World of Goo, you're trying to climb up the side of a building here, in your (possibly doomed) quest to kiss the sky. Oh yeah: and you're a plant. Like most plants, you're not known for your athletic prowess, and as such, controlling your planty tendrils is a cumbersome affair. You'll rely on washing lines, fire escapes, security cameras and so on, in a game with delightfully springy physics.
I particularly like how the passage of time is represented. Plants obviously move quite slowly in the real world, so to illustrate that here, everything around you jumps about at high speed.
Raik by Aitch
Aitch suggests a rough price of $4 for this Scottish adventure, so consider ponying up if you like what you've played. Raik's central joke is a strong one that carries this fantasy-ish visual novel a long way, and I don't want to spoil it too much. The idea is that you can switch between English and Scottish descriptions at nearly any time, something that transforms the entire text, but keeps the gist of what's happening intact. The English descriptions are fanciful, airy and flowery, while the Scottish...well, I'll let you discover that for yourself. But it's essentially two sides of a mind: one seeking escape in fantasy, the other mired in the mundanity of everyday life.
New Years 7016 by Connor Sherlock
Spend New Year's Eve...7016 in the company of some glowing balls of light, and in the only place worth visiting: a space station on the edge of eternity. Stick around for the performance, then take a look at Sherlock's patreon if you'd like to play more of his cryptic walking sims.
Dig your own grave, and when you've finished, perhaps give this gorgeous browser game a play. There's a cool thing about it I won't spoil, but I will say it's a sort of score attack game where you have until sundown to dig as far down as you can. I don't think it's a fair game, given that your spade will (seemingly randomly) ping off the ground rather than break the soil, but it's a lovely idea, and Dyg looks just smashing.
Joy Exhibition by Strangethink
Do art in the best way possible: not with paintbrushes or pens, but with a load of colourful guns. Each gun has its own painting method, or adds a different colour, and you're given a bunch of canvases with which to create your masterworks. If you like what you've made, you can save the images externally—though I personally found it difficult to create things I liked, given that I had no idea what the procedural paint guns would contribute to each piece. Still, a cool idea.
Flock by Kent Sheely
There's not much to this, and the Itch.io description oversells the game massively, but it is nice to fly around as a bird for a bit. Grow your flock by clicking on other birds, then watch as the world morphs around you.
Reap by Daniel Linssen
Any week with a new Daniel Linssen game is a good one, and true to that, here's an inventive new survival game about surviving on a mysterious archipelago. You can chop down trees, then use the logs to build bridges or rafts. You can dig soil, plant turnips, harvest those turnips, then shove them into your fat gob. You can find maps of the vast procedurally generated world, and other, more mysterious trinkets. The best bit is the sun, which physically increases the size of the game world as it rotates around the screen—or indeed shrinks it as night approaches, and you can't see as far. Wonderful.
Zunus by Jonathan Whiting
A two-button space trading game about an enterprising triangle, and a smart way to make something special under strict limitations. Left and Right turn your ship..left and right, while holding both moves your plucky vessel forward. Navigate into stations to trade, then swap your cargo for lovely space-cash; collide with an asteroid, an enemy, or the side of a station, and you'll be reborn as a clone at your last port of call. Don't skip the dialogue: it's pretty funny.
This week, we enter a book, we fight more skellingtons, we battle a great big fire-breathing dragon, we battle the damn keyboard, and we pay one final visit to the shard. Enjoy!
The Curse of Issyos by Locomalito
Locamalito makes free games with the sort of care, attention and time most would reserve for those sporting a price tag, and true to that, The Curse of Issyos is a big, wonderful thing that's been in development, on and off, for the past five years. You're a fisherman trying to save your daughter from eternal torment in Hades, and in a remarkable coincidence, you also play as such a character in this game. It's an old-fashioned, vaguely NES-y, Castlevania-style platformer, this, and it's pretty great.
Trosor by Ditto
Ditto does Ludum Dare 34 (themes: 'two button controls', and 'growing'). If you know of Ditto, you'll know that Ditto favours colours, cool visual effects, and damn good 'gamefeel', and Trosor has these things in spades. You can shoot, and you can jump in one direction—to switch sides you'll need to make contact with a wall. There's the skeleton of something really interesting here.
Another Dragon by George Broussard
Another dragon? But I've only just cleaned up after the last one! Yes but this dragon is the star of a fairly gorgeous, short adventure inspired by Eric Chahi's visually cromulent Another World. It's an easy game, but worth the few minutes you'll spend with it—I do like entertainment that doesn't outstay its welcome.
Timruk by Studio Oleomingus
Oleomingus' games are just resplendent with texture, something many devs ignore when constructing their glossy, shallow, frictionless worlds. The latest slice of their mythical larger game is a fascinating little storybook, rife with rich, fictional history from a world that exists Somewhere near our own.
Last Visit To The Shard by Connor Sherlock
Connor Sherlock's latest walking sim deposits you in a stark, crystalline landscape, home to oddly tilted structures, tantalisingly distant buildings, and various secret little things. It's a place to just be in for a while: a place that envelopes you in atmosphere and with a comforting, shadowy mood.
Pictures of a Reasonably Documented Year by Outlands
I like games where you poke around in authentic-feeling old computers, so here is a game where you poke around in an authentic-feeling old computer. You're investigating the desktop of a particularly paranoid individual, who had his own investigation into a mysterious fire. His PC is littered with notes, images and videos about this, and things get a little spooky in this brief game as you piece everything together.
Dead Knight by Backterria
This is a very early demo that only contains a few rooms, and that can't be completed, but I like much of Backterria's skeletal metroidvania so far. The art is very nice, the skellingtons are amusing, and you can zoom the camera way out to view the entire level at once. Which is fab.
Anteaters in Tutus by Great Sky Whale Games
A rhythm game with a difference—that difference being all the anteaters in tutus, who are competing to be the best opera singers they can reasonably be. Play against your friends to see who's the best at following musical orders while wearing a frilly pink dress, like you do in the real world every Wednesday. (Via Warp Door)
Quirkaglitch by Xavier Belanche
If you can get past the title screen in Quirkaglitch without assistance, then I'm not convinced you're a human being, but good on you. I'm going to spoil things a bit, for us mere mortals, so look away if you'd rather bash away at Quirkaglitch solo.
...
..
.
OK. That (randomly picked) code on the title screen? It relates to this colour chart, and to enter the code you have to bash into the correctly coloured enemies. The eventual platformer is like a messed-up ZX Spectrum game, and visually it's pretty damned impressive.
Right Click to Necromance by Juicy Beast
Left Click (hold Left Click) to move your army; Right Click (at the prompts) to add that wandering troop you've just defeated to your roving crew. How do you do this, if you've just chopped them to bits? With the power of necromancy, naturally. It's a simple game, but with some strategy behind it: you have to avoid larger armies, and that big cyclops thing, until you've built up your forces a bit.
Wizards Rule by Gadzooka
We all know that wizards rule, a position they've held ever since Wizards of Wor came out in the early '80s. This is a Pico-8 remake, and it's pretty authentic and fun.
Every day after school, a girl walks by a boy's house and tries to pluck up the courage to talk to him. I won't spoil whether she does or not, but this a lovely, sweet short story about longing, presented with extraordinary watercolour art.
Who Must Die by Antoine Gargasson, Elouan Harmand, Quentin Thevenard, Joachim Hansott, EIllan Le Corre
I don't think the execution quite lives up to the idea here, but what an idea. Three patients are locked up in separate rooms, one infected with a mystery virus, and you have to determine who that is and shoot them dead for some reason. You'll fathom your randomly generated suspect by observing their behaviour through TV screens, which display loomed FMV footage of the three patients. You can release 'calm' or 'angry' gas, change the music, or send a guy in to bash them about a bit, and though I don't quite understand how all that correlates to the virus, the room around you offers a few badly translated hints. If the pressure of the decision gets to you, or you can't find the quit button, you can choose to off yourself instead.
EXLCOM by Crruzi
Well it's XCOM, but in Excel. And it's surprisingly fully featured, boasting destructible terrain, a level editor and more. Creator Crruzi says that he "wanted to create something in VBA to practice coding in that language and I like XCOM - so why not make an XCOM game? EXLCOM works just like any other XCOM game - you know, shoot aliens, save the world, that kinda stuff." He's underselling it a fair bit—I mean, just look at it.
Orchid to Dusk by Pol Clarissou
A wonderful, wonderful game about a crashed astronaut with only minutes left to live. How you spend them is up to you, but you should probably walk around a bit and explore the alien landscape, which is home to oases, rolling desert...and what are those things on the ground? This is sort of a multiplayer game, but I'll leave it to you to figure out how.
Bombmans by Raattis
In the absence of an official PC port of Super Bomberman, I'll take this: it's Bomberman recreated in Pico-8. Do you want to play Bomberman recreated in Pico-8? Of course you do, because Bomberman is one of the best local multiplayer games ever made.
You are the monster that eats carrots in a bowl with cream in this freebie, made for that recent Asylum Jam. The game infuses horror into ordinary things: gardening, grating, and accidentally (?) digging into worms. And, in at least one area, it's surprisingly tense.
Actias by Kitty Horrorshow
"6 remain" is a beautifully economic way to begin a game, immediately setting you on a course of exploring, collecting and reading. If you've not played a Kitty Horrorshow game before, they're first-person wandering games where oblique story is projected across the environment after you pick up scattered crystals. They're moody, personal and poetic things, and Actias is no different.
The Tower Inverted by hellojed
"A collection of levels I made over the course of about a month, strung together into a game." hellojed, of this weird fox-based game fame, really should have turned off the player's shadow—which reveals the player character to be distractingly lozenge-shaped—but that's about the only fault I can find with this atmospheric game of looking up at the sky and going "ooooh". Head to the glowing thingies, and occasionally talk to the fox thingies, as you appreciate a series of wonderfully abstract worlds.
SpillTender by Reptoid Games
You are the world's worst bartender, and also in the game, and you have a few minutes of time in which to demonstrate that indisputable fact. Fling pints at your patrons, trying not to smash the glasses or to punt them at their heads, and as physics are involved of course this is much, much easier said than done. If you end up with your tips in the positive, then you are some sort of bartending god.
SKÓGUTH by Connor Botts, Ethan Thibault, Delton Hulbert
"Kill the god. Be free." With your one bullet, and a neat visor effect that reminds of Metroid Prime and Halo. Really, you'll explore. You'll conjure a story from the various details in the environment, including this Easter Island statue-y thing, and some interesting piles of little stones. When you find the god, you can choose to shoot the god dead, inciting one of three endings, I'm told.
This weekend, you briefly put down Fallout 4 to take a look at the best free games of the week. INCLUDING: a move-limited match-3, Porpentine meets Myst, flyin' a plane around a weird place, call waiting, and look at this cool world I just made. Enjoy!
Anesthesia by Stephen Lavelle
Increpare's latest (well, I'm not actually sure it is his latest; he's probably released a dozen games since I played this yesterday) is a seemingly simple match-3...with a twist. That twist is the big number at the top, which ticks down every time you make a move. Your goal, I assume, is to clear the board before that counter hits zero, and you can no longer input any moves. The cursor, by the way, swaps one block for another; match three or more to remove them from the board.
Bellular Hexatosis by Porpentine, Charity Heartscape, and Brenda Neotenomie
Bellular Hexatosis has everything you'd expect from a Porpentine game: garish, neony colours, some wonderful words, and some fantastic world-building. But all that has escaped the confines of the Twine format and been whacked into a Myst-style adventure game. In your quest to cure your sister's illness, you'll explore a weirdly beautiful 3D world, rich with atmosphere and neat little details, and supported with a lovely dreamy soundtrack.
Oases by Armel Gibson and Dziff
I don't think this quite lives up to the intention expressed on the ending title card, but it's a fun little toybox worth messing around with for a few minutes—a wibbly wobbly, mushroomy game-thing, soundtracked by the inimitable Calum Bowen.
Call of Dudley by Poor Track Design
A meta first-person adventure set in a stripy labyrinth, one home to a bunch of occasionally ringing phones. Where are you? Who is the person on the other end of the phone? Well, that one isn't a total mystery: he's a dissident who, like you, has been thrown into this virtual telephone prison.
Mirror Lake by Katie Rose
Mirror Lake randomly generates worlds in a bowl; a new world every couple of minutes, after it's finished evolving the previous one, by growing those trees, and all that fauna, etc etc. These are not worlds you'll interact with in any way, shape or form, but I loved watching them grow before my eyes. This is a beautiful thing, and I wish these worlds would stick around a little longer. Although maybe that's the point.
The controls are a bit weird in this arcadey space game, so you might want to use a controller. It's a nice, clean-looking shoot-'em-up with a tough difficulty level, and a very hyperactive soundtrack you'll maybe want to mute. It's always good being in a spaceship in a galaxy full of space-baddies, and Star Raptor fulfils that brief pretty well.
Luxe Chalk by Konjak
The original Chalk is one of my favourite freeware games, and out of the blue its creator Konjak has released this unfinished 'HD' sequel, which he was working on before starting Iconoclasts. Compared to the original, it's a more developed drawing-based shmup that introduces a few new mechanics, and I've really enjoyed what I've played of it so far. As with its predecessor, you clear obstacles by drawing lines with the mouse, and defeat enemies by drawing lines from their projectiles back to them. Several years later, it's still a winning idea.
Tourist by Owl Cave
Created for Asylum Jam, Tourist is a short room-escape (sorta) adventure game with some nice art, a palpable atmosphere, and a strong (warning: pretty dark and unsettling) ending. There's a lot of story contained in the item descriptions, so I suggest right-clicking on everything you possibly can.
Homeland by Rook
Fallow developer Rook made this for the Kitty Horrorshow clone jam, and like many of Kitty's games it's a lonely wandering game with a story relayed through strewn crystal fragments. The difference here is voice acting, which mingles with the atmospheric music, and the mysterious, abstract setting, to pipe an intriguing short story into your head.
Reunition by Rage Monster Games
Another Asylum Jam entry, Reunition is a puzzle-horror game featuring scrumptious pixel art, and an odd central mechanic I never quite figured out. It's something to do with mirrors, and your handy lantern, which you can dim to avoid the various hazards that want to do you in. You're trying to find your son, who's run off and gotten swallowed up by a creepy magic mirror. Or something. This has a bloomin' lovely atmosphere though. (Via Warp Door)
Return to your creepy hometown in the aptly named Homesickened, an authentically retro first-person adventure that hasn't even heard of the words 'mouselook' or 'WASD'. (Alright, WASD isn't a word, but you know what I mean.) It's a sluggish, awkward game to control, but strangely all the better for it, the old-fashioned movement system complementing the moody pixel art remarkably well. I particularly like the soft whirs and clicks that sound as you walk around, suggesting an old computer struggling to render such a complex world.
Crowtel by Sink
You're a crow what runs a hotel, and Sink's game 'Crowtel' has gone and ripped off your life. So yes this is a very silly, lovely, vaguely Metroidvania-y platformer, about a crow trying to clean up his enormous hotel before the health inspectors are let loose on his property. It's Fawlty Towers meets Cave Story, basically, and if that doesn't make you curious then you are a husk, a husk, Madam/Sir.
Birdland by Brendan Patrick Hennessy
Birdland is a funny and wondrous piece of interactive fiction about a girl trying to get through summer camp. Half of the game is dedicated to the camp experience, featuring all the forced outdoor activities and awkward social interactions I've come to expect from American films. The other is dedicated to your dreams, which are invariably located in a world populated entirely by bird-people, and where you are the only human. Interestingly, it's also something of an RPG. You have stats, which will go up or down depending on your dream-choices, and that open or limit your dialogue options in the real world. Imaginative, and often hilarious stuff.
I am dead where are my keys by From Smiling
Grab sweets in your flying car in I am dead, which like Undertale takes place in its own weird, wonderful universe where skeletons are some of the funniest people around. Finding the sweets won't take too long, but I just liked being in this world, listening to the deeply soothing soundtrack and chatting with the big floating skull at the centre of town.
Monster Streaking by Beavl
Monsters have arses too, and the green creature at the heart of Monster Streaking is determined to bear theirs for all the world to see. It's a cute and compelling auto-runner where you hold the left mouse button to advance, and release it to fall back, and you'll need to do both to avoid the various human obstacles on the bustling city streets. You acquire points by briefly pausing for photographs, and as you play you'll unlock additional creatures including Frankenstein's monster, a mummy, and Pinhead.
GameJolt has started organising jams dedicated to specific developers, encouraging others to make games in their (as it turns out) eminently imitable style. Attic is an entry in the Kitty Horrorshow Clone Jam, and it captures the spirit of Kitty's first-person mood-and-poetry pieces remarkably well.
Here's the full Clone Jam schedule. I can't wait to see what else comes out of this.
Skelemania by Benal
A pretty innovative Metroidvania, featuring a range of unique powers including a dive move, and the ability to roll your head under tiny gaps. I love the look of this platformer too; each area has its own one-colour palette, segmenting the strange little world in a clean, clear way.
Morse by Alex Johansson
As far as I can tell, there's no fail state in Morse, despite the enemy planes, people and submarines constantly advancing on your plucky troops. Your job is to order attacks on your opponents, something you can only achieve by taking note of their coordinates and inputting morse code with a cursor key to target them. It's a wonderful control scheme, in a well-illustrated and atmospheric game with effective sound design, but I could have done with a reason to stick around once I'd figured out how to play.
Flotate by Alex Johansson
Well, this is a first. I try not to feature two games by the same developer in the same week, but I only noticed as I was putting this together that Alex Johansson made the funny Flotate as well. No matter. It's a silly local multiplayer game about some dudes in a pool, who are attempting to claim the sole rubber ring and emerge victorious. Using only two keys (four people can play using the same keyboard), you need to head for the ring, diving under to claim it in your name. Inventive, amusing stuff.
Rejection by qwerty
Escape the (beautiful) room in this challenging sci-fi puzzler, which deposits you by a series of terminals with no apparent clue how to manipulate them to your advantage. What do all these symbols mean? Why are some red, and some green? You're allowed to make one move in each, before the computer shuts the frosty glass and opens up another, rotating back to the first eventually. qwerty's supplied a little help in the Itch.io page description:
"An experimental memory-type game. Find a way out of the room. Prepare a piece of paper and a pen."
A wonderfully presented and authentically written adventure game set in an MSN-style messenger client. The look of this early-2000s-set piece of interactive fiction is spot-on, mimicking Windows XP, and Microsoft's popular chat program, in a pretty nostalgic way. The game itself plays out like a more hands-on Digital: A Love Story, but with added Telltale-style "Emily will remember that", and with branching dialogue.
Good Luck Gardener by Farfin
There's no ending that I can find, and no challenge really in this cutely dark gardening game, but I enjoyed the repetitious nature of Good Luck Gardener enough to see it through to its non-conclusion. To spoil pretty much everything—oh yeah, spoiler warning—you're a helpful gardening ghost, except you're not helpful at all, you're a spectral jerk. Plant cards, dice and coins in the expanding graveyard, then feed them to some happy humans. Some worried humans. Some ill-looking humans oh they're all dead.
Man, ghosts are assholes.
Binoculars Game by Jake Clover
Wander around a couple of swampy locations in this sludgy, atmospheric game from Jake Clover. You can move right, and you can use your binoculars to look at a scene that resembles the one you're in. Look at all the little details, lose yourself in the weird scene. I love his clip-art-looking pixel art so much.
Skeleton Flower by Loren Schmidt
Similar to Emily is Away, or a lot of modern adventure games, Loren Schmidt's Skeleton Flower gives you control over a fake operating system. You're looking at photos from someone's life that have been compressed into 1x1 resolution images—not much to go on, perhaps, but the accompanying capture date and description text help to illuminate things a bit.
A bit. It's still a very cryptic game, but a masterfully fake-glitchy one with it.
Where is Cat? by Bart Bonte
This is basically Where's Wally, but with a cat. Bart Bonte worked with his kids to make this—they drew a lot of the objects, came up with the story, and made the artwork you can see above—and the result is one of the loveliest hidden object games I've played. It's possibly the funniest, too, capturing the greedy, mysterious, and cute nature of real cats everywhere.
Knossu by Jonathan Whiting
Whiting describes Knossu is a "non-euclidean horror game", a Lovecraftian term that tends to describe geometrically weird places—and so this is. It's a game about exploring a tricksy maze that loops back on itself, that warps you around with apparent abandon, that feels expansive and claustrophobic at the same time. I desperately want to talk about this labyrinth's innovative monster, but I don't want to spoil the monster—so I'll just implore you again to play Knossu immediately. Man.
Treasure Hunter Man 2 by origamihero
A Metroidvania about a mother searching for her teenage son. Like most mothers searching for their teenage children, she battles monsters, destroys blocks, and evades spikes as she explores a lovely desert island. It's like a fast-paced, smaller Treasure Adventure Game, this, not quite as good but then few exploratory platformers are.
Capsule II by PaperBlurt
I've not played the first Capsule, but I don't feel like I missed anything in playing PaperBlurt's funny, dark and gripping sci-fi sequel. You're a cryogenically unfrozen caretaker, aboard an ark carrying humanity through a handy space-hole, and you first have to contend with your own boredom, then your own madness, then...well, I'm not going to spoil this one either. But it's a bit horrific.
Sonam in the Storm by James Shasha
A very short piece of interactive fiction that's quite enormously overwritten, but that hints at an interesting diversion for IF. Sonam uses UnityTwine to, um, install Twine in Unity, and the result is nothing short of beautiful. It feels pretty weird to click on hyperlinks in a 3D space, but it works with the game's lovely low-poly background, and with the The American Dollar's soundtrack, to create an IF of great atmosphere.
They Came from the Roof by Kodained
An eminently playable arcade-style game that mashes up Pac-Man, Mario Bros, Space Invaders, Breakout, and probably some other games I didn't recognise. And it works. Hooray! As one or two players, you're trying to protect the ghosts from Pac-Man—which essentially act as your extra lives—by shooting monsters before they climb down to their hidey-hole.
This gets more difficult in later stages, as the number and speed of enemies increases, but your main opponent is the big Breakout paddle that seeks out and blocks many of your bullets. You'll need to team up—the AI is surprisingly good in single-player—with one player distracting the evil Breakout block, giving the other's shots a chance to get through. Marvellous stuff.
You don't have to be psychic to work at my psychic detective agency, but it helps. You also don't have to be psychic to play the very strange Psychic Cat, the very poetic Summit, the very chickeny Super Poulet Poulet and more. Enjoy!
Trubadurr by Thibaut Mereu and co.
A Trine-like platformer—a very good-looking Trine-like platformer—made in nine months by students at Isart Digital Paris. You're a bard, and like all bards in fantasy these days you're a bit of a pompous dick, albeit a pompus dick quite good at battling monsters. As in Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, or Overlord, you use creatures as ammo here—I just love the way to cling to your character after you've picked them up. This is accomplished, interesting, and cute.
Cyclo 8 by Nusan
Well it's Trials innit, but done in the elegant, beautiful Pico-8. And it's really good! Capturing the physics and feel of that bastard series extraordinarily well. I like the strange, alien world you're biking around in, which is nigh impossible to pinpoint (I think it's a desert?) I like the addition of collectibles, which tempt you to stray from the (slightly safer) path. And I'm still trying to figure out if the rider is in the buff. It kinda looks like it, doesn't it?
The Undertaking by Anna Anthropy
This minimalist, puzzle-less Puzzlescript game kind of got to me, and I'm not sure why. It's a short, loopy game about exploring a world, activating a thing, and then having the experience suddenly end just as you're getting interested in learning more. It's inscrutable: the kind of inscrutable that demands scrutiny, and offers absolutely nothing in return.
Psychic Cat by George Royer
Speaking of inscrutable, what the hell is this? It's a "journey across a blasted psychosphere", obviously, and it's one where you play as a cat lost in a neon wonderland patrolled by stompy naked green men.
So yeah, it's a load of nonsense. But it's strangely self-serious and coherent nonsense, and that makes it quite enjoyable to explore. (Via Warp Door)
Super Poulet Poulet by Retsyn
Sometimes you just need a good platformer, and here is a good platformer with a fun chicken theme. You are said chicken, and you're able to take an extra hit by wearing a woolly hat, and slam into enemies for big poulet points. Slather your delicious frame in hot sauce and you can also burn enemies to a crisp. OK, so it's nothing revolutionary, but the controls feel nice, the sprites are cute, and the music is pretty damned catchy.
Summit by Phantom Williams
The 2015 Interactive Fiction Competition is ongoing at the moment, and some great stuff has been uploaded to the site. Including Summit, a Porpentiney (but not by Porpentine) game about leaving your home to ascend a tantalising mountain. I chose the life of a strange fishpersonthing, in this rambling (in a good way) philosophical trek featuring good words and great graphic design. (Via Emily Short)
D.S.A. has been in development for five years, and the result is a big, fun, enjoyably scrappy adventure game set in a bizarre world. You'll play as all three members of a separated girl group, solving puzzles by exploring and interacting with stuff, rather than trying every inventory item on every other inventory item ad nauseum. I like the "Low-Quality MSPaint Graphics" quite a lot; this feels like a lost game from before indie gaming exploded, something like Treasure Adventure Game or Eternal Daughter. (i.e. it's huge and fully featured, and rather ambitious.)
TOMBs of Reschette by Richard Goodness
I've been a bit lax in finding interactive fiction lately, so here's a good one from one of the genre's best writers, Richard Goodness. It's a joyously silly game set in a smallish dungeon, but one where you'll want to try every option to see what wonderfully bonkers endings you can uncover. TOMBs of Reschette is genuinely funny, something few games manage, and it makes great use of Twine. (Via Gnome)
Yume Nikki 3D by Zykov Eddy
A Yume Nikki fangame from Electric Highways developer Zykov Eddy, with a standalone expansion available in the same folder. What a moody world (well, worlds) to explore, from a novel, almost second-person perspective that constantly reminds us whose subconscious it is we're traipsing through. But mostly I like this because I like seeing pixel art in 3D games; Yume Nikki 3D is damned good at delivering that. (Via Warp Door)
Artners by Holly Gramazio
I like art creation games, not because I personally get much out of them, but because I know people are going to make some wonderful stuff. Artners gives you a subject, some time, and a set of tools with which to slop paint on your canvas; in a neat touch, another player can join in using the other side of the keyboard.
Mount Pleasant Drive by Niall Moody
I've not been to Glasgow, so for all I know it looks exactly like this strange, stationary trip through its streets, rivers, shops, parks, and other things I thought I saw in Niall Moody's "broken audiovisual radio". You move the mouse (I don't think you need to move the mouse, but it does speed things up) and the landscape contorts around you, taking you on a dreamlike/nightmarish journey around an urban place.
You awake amid a pile of videotapes, hundreds and hundreds of tapes with names that suggest so much, and that result in a different set of coloured wavy lines when fed into one of three TV-VHS units. Experiment with different tape combos to create alternately weird environments, and to generate a different string of disjointed nonsense from the figure overseeing your exploration. A wonderfully tactile exhibit.
Michael E Michael by Aaron Meyers
Square off against Michael Jackson as his arch-nemesis, Michael Jackson, in this funny two-player local multiplayer game, created for Itch.io's Duplicade jam. Michael can punch, Michael can of course fire lasers, and most vitally of all Michael can dance. Man, can he dance. Michael's dancing, as it did in real life, creates an army of mini-clones. Look at them go.
Fire Dance With Me by Robert Gaither and Anja Luzega
Another Duplicade entry, Fire Dance With Me lets you "pick your favorite Twin Peaks character and Dance Dance with Leland Palmer". Obviously I picked the Log Lady's Log, and that sharp-suited guy from the Red Lodge. This is such a beautifully inappropriate rhythm game, with great sprites and an apt choice of music.
The Mammoth: A Cave Painting by inbetweengames
Rescue stranded mammoth-lings, and attempt to defend them from nasty human hunters, in this lovely-lookin' short adventure set in prehistoric times. In the vast, endless sea that is indie games in 2015, I'm a big fan of short, polished, pointed games like this.
Notice Me Detective by Valentina Chrysostomou, Maria Christofi, Kyriakos Georgiou
I missed this back in August, and that's almost as criminal as the wrong-doings you're dispatched to investigate, as the hotshot, box-headed Detective Buh. Notice Me Detective is a fun first-person comedy/mystery game, recalling Jazzpunk, set in a series of crime scenes that you can contaminate with your invisible hands if you desire. The controls felt a bit off, but this is a big, well-detailed world that's fun to explore, either as yourself or a handy animal partner.
Well it's basically Tag (or Tig, if you live in a different part of the UK, where they name everything wrongly). The rules of Tag being that if you touch someone, they become 'It', and therefore temporarily infectious to children everywhere. Here, It gets to wear a cool wolf mask, while the mechanics of Tag have been expanded in a gamey way. You can now earn more points (and indeed, earn points at all) by hovering near It in a dangerous, playing-with-fire way.
I wish that It (when it's being controlled by the AI) would chase other children once in a while, but that little issue aside there's something wonderfully innocent about Loup.
Hjarta by Eight Bit Skyline
Eight Bit's freeware Adventure Game Studio game is a "collection of short stories", concerned with the fates of three characters: the Cosmonaut, the Prisoner, and the Martyr. I'm not sure about the art, but the animation is very nice, bringing a colourful and interesting science fiction world to life.
Close Remixes of the Third Kind by RisingPixel
Remember that bit in Close Encounters when humans conversed with Johnny Alien through a series of musical notes? This is that, but with aliens that don't want to hear everything they say parroted back to them—and who can blame them? Instead, to earn the most points, you'll 'remix' their notes by repeating them in a different order, something they seem to enjoy. This really needs a proper time limit, and more scope for creativity, but what's here is fun. (Via Warp Door)
ESCAPE 2107 by Jonas Hansen
"Escape an infinite array of vectorized spaces before time runs out." Or, to put it slightly more simply, find the exit point in each grid-based first-person level to advance to the next. The time limit you have to work with is punishingly tiny, and while you annoyingly have to restart the entire game after failing too many times (argh!), you can mitigate this somewhat by collecting credits along the way. I couldn't find a solution to level 4; perhaps you'll fare better? Which is to say, of course you will.
Snong by Andreas Johansen
Andreas Johansen has mated Snake with Pong, naming the resulting ungodly abomination 'Snong'. let's just appreciate that perfectly ugly portmanteau for a moment.
Wonderful stuff. Anyway, Snong is a two-player Ponglike that lets you move around like the snake from Snake, collecting bits to increase your size and make a you a better, more efficient Pong bat. It's a fun idea, the presentation is cute, and the mechanics mash together surprisingly well.
*
Developer Stew Hogarth sadly died this week—you might remember his wonderful I Am Level from The Free Webgame Round-Up back in 2013. Now seems like a good time to return to that accomplished pinball platformer, or to play some of his other games.
Electric Highways by Zykov Eddy, Xitilon
Electric Highways is an exploration and puzzle-focused wanderer, with a first-person-but-with-pixels art style that recalls the original System Shock, Ultima Underworld, games like that. It's a fun place to explore: ten levels of moods, skies, lights and things to press, in 2072's version of the virtual reality web. There's a mite more interaction, and a lot more level design going on than in most walking simulators, so I'm going to call this genre 'Doomlike, But Without Any Guns'. More of those please, developers.
Slam City Oracles by Jane Friedhoff, Jenny Jiao Hsia, Scully
"Slam City Oracles is a rambunctious, riot grrrl, Katamari-meets-Grand Theft Auto physics game, in which you and a friend slam onto the world around you to cause as much chaos as possible in two minutes."
I found the slamming mechanic a little inconsistent and mildly infuriating (alternatively: I'm terrible and didn't understand it), but I do love a good physics-heavy sandbox game. it's almost a shame that the camera soon zooms out to accommodate both players, as there's some cute, happy art in this game about smashing a vertical settlement to bits.
Trappy Mine by rogueNoodle
Explore a mine full of treasure, traps, spikes and exploding things, while trying to escape your nemesis: a vertically scrolling screen that will do you in should you find yourself caught in its invisible grip. This is a wonderfully polished, attractive and hectic arcade game, and one that greatly benefits from that added time pressure, which causes you to make snap decisions and horrible mistakes as you descend further into this deadly, trappy mine.
A Heart between Parts by leafthief
You Are The Monster, again, in this gorgeous point and click, which asks you to escape from the room you've been imprisoned in. You're a scientific experiment, deemed a failure by your creator (you can see why you want to get the hell out of there). I do enjoy a good room escape, and here's one with scrumptious art and a brilliant premise.
LadyBug by kingPenguin
The Fly meets Hotline Miami in this blisteringly quick, gory platformer about a half-woman, half-bug that has to kill a bunch of scientists before they can kill her. As is typical with these sorts of things, I'm no good at it at all, meaning LadyBug requires skill, patience, and a tolerance for repetition. I do love the pixel art—the scampering wall-running of the titular ladybug is my favourite animation of the week.
Skipping Stones To Lonely Homes by Alan Hazelden
I wanted to include this last week, but because I'm an idiot—and because the very first screen of Alan Hazelden's latest Puzzlescript game had me stumped—it's taken me this long to get past the first island. I'm now on island 3, and it's not letting up.
Skipping Stones is a game about punting rocks across the water, rocks that will disturb lily pads you can use to cross from island to island. Lily pads follow water currents. Stones do not. There's your basis for a beautifully pure puzzler that will really get under your skin.
Meeuw by Tom van den Boogaart
Tom's follow-up to the wonderful Red Amazon is the silly, fun Meeuw, a game about a psychotic seagull. Like all seagulls, the one you play as in Meeuw can breath fire, and you'll use it here to immolate pedestrians, to ruin the scenery, and to blow up cars. This is what happens when you give seagulls chips, people.
Laraan by Flynn's Arcade
I'm not entirely sure that developer Flynn's Arcade is being serious when it describes Laraan as a game that "bridges the gap between Cinema and Action/Adventure games with a completely old style of fluid, cinematic storytelling." That's because it's a nice-looking walking simulator with painfully slow movement and a lovely big jump button, although it is a particularly good one of those. The colour palette evokes the immortal Moebius, which is the best thing a colour palette can do. I don't like the feeling of movement much, but Laraan offers an interesting place to explore.
Death of a Lich by Daniel Linssen
Linssen's latest puts you in a seemingly procedurally generated tower that sometimes generates in a way that doesn't let you proceed. Still, it's worth a restart when that happens, as this one of the more original You Are The Monster games. As the monster, you'll drop between platforms in a turn-based stylee, trying to fight or avoid archers and other soldiers even as you hunger after their yummy, yummy souls. You'll need to master your timing to dodge arrows, and gauge your jumps so that you don't fall too far and injure your lichy self.
Excavation! by Scriptwelder
The talented Scriptwelder leaves room escape behind for the involved Excavation!, a game about conducting an archaeological dig. After assembling a crew with hopefully varying skill sets, and after buying a few tools, you'll survey, test, and dig up clumps up of earth, in your search for rare finds from long ago.
At a basic level this is Minesweeper, with each of those little numbers above indicating where mines (or, in this case, treasure) might be buried. That concept's embellished with the need to preserve priceless artefacts, and to manage your funds and stamina. You only have so many days on this dig site, so you'd better make them count. This is a smart and accomplished Minesweeper re-imagining.
Dullahan by like, a hundred bears
Dullahan is a Castlevania-like that will really make you *cheeky wink* lose your head, which is to say that it's a GameBoy-styled platformer that allows you to plonk things like keys and bombs into your gaping neckhole. This is a neat mechanic, once you realise that Up and Attack uses keys, and the aesthetic feels quite authentic to the era, but it is stupid and frustrating to have to restart the entire thing upon death.
Telepath by Spotline
Wow. If you're using Chrome you'll need to download Telepath to play it, but it's worth it for the extraordinary way it uses shaders to create multiple worlds within the same space. The world's default state is blank and featureless, and to see it how others see it (or, I guess, for a window into their minds), you have to pass through them like a ghost. Each entity houses a world, of nature or numbers or skyscrapers, but you can only witness it while you're passing through their form. This is seriously smart stuff, from the developer of Ultimate Pate and The World Beneath.
Totem by Ian MacLarty
A pretty literal interpretation of You Are The Monster, Totem is a mechanically simple game about a big rockperson that walks out of the sea. Smash all the island's inhabitants with your big rock bum to trigger an ending, while appreciating some truly bloody lovely artwork, and trying to tolerate some horrible bagpipey music.
Labyrinth of Loneliness by LTPATS
Speaking of lovely artwork, would you just look at Labyrinth of Loneliness. It's another Ludum Dare game, and one where you chase nicely sketched and animated people into fiery deathpits. Every time you do so, some cringeworthy text appears to insinuate some deeper meaning, but it's worth putting up with that for the fun chase sequences (the chasees look behind them sometimes, it's kind of cute), and of course for the striking visual style.
Subway Adventure by Stephen Lavelle
It's a new Stephen Lavelle/Increpare game—need we say more? OK, some more. It's a massive subway network filled with very strange stops expressed in a variety of colours and art styles, with roaming NPCs, and signs to click that may help you map the game world. You'll visit a range of odd, funny, glitchy stops in Subway Adventure, or you will if its juddering pedestrians will let you enter and exit your train. A lovely slice of digital tourism, in a land ripe for exploration and photo-taking.
Nocturne in Yellow by TerminusEst13
My excitement for Gloome (a new version of id-engine modding tool GZDoom, that allows modders to release commercial games) is only slightly tempered by the fact that I have no clue how to set the damned thing up. Other people have, however, including TerminusEst13, who has made the fun Gothic shooter Nocturne In Yellow. It's a bit like Castlevania, and a lot like Heretic/Doom etc, meaning you'll stab up zombies, spiders and vampires using a gory spear, and a bow with infinite arrows. Man, I've missed the ridiculously fast movement speed of id-engine games.
Red Amazon by Tom van den Boogaart
This is one of the most beautiful free games I've played for ages: a clean, low-poly first-person story from one of indie gaming's best and brightest, Tom van den Boogaart. I love his stylised take on the wilderness, I love the quirky movement system (no default Unity FPS controls here, thankfully), and I love the fact that Red Amazon actually features an animated entity, unlike almost every first-person indie game I've played recently. The only thing I don't like is Boogaart's relative obscurity: he deserves to be a much bigger name.
Porthole by Mark Wonnacott and Claire Morley
Explore a weird world from your rotatable porthole, as you try to figure out where you are, and what the bally, slimey, clustery things in front of you could possibly be. “Follow the compass,” proclaims the Itch.io page, and “seek the depths”. That compass looks a bit like a Stargate chevron.
One More Night by Stefan Srb and Craig Barnes
A short choose-your-own-adventure made for the GameBoy jam (and now I'm imagining what GameBoy jam would look and taste like – probably Greengage). The pixel art is scrumptious, the sound is just discordant and shrill enough to convince, and the story is open-ended enough to make you want to replay immediately. “Three friends embark on a two-day camping trip before their last year of school begins. A trip they never want to end.” A cute, sweet, very green game.
Dusk Child by Sophie Houlden
A wonderful puzzle-platformer made using Lexaloffle's increasingly impressive Pico-8. Fathom your way around a mysterious location, examining objects with the Z button and ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the gorgeous pixel art with your mouth. One of the best uses of Pico-8 yet—I'm also greatly looking forward to Terry Cavanagh's first-person shooter made for the console.
graynold runner by Jake Clover
A sidescrolling shmup that prioritises atmosphere over score-chasing, featuring music by Beeswing's Jack King-Spooner. I love Jake Clover's sprites, the strange alien universe that all his games seem to take place in. graynold runner gives you two ships, then when they're on fire and you jettison to safety, it gives you two little astronauts, who can hijack passing vehicles. A serene little anti-shoot-'em-up (maybe the world's first?)
Wish Fishing by Pol Clarissou
A digital wishing well that lets you cast a word, a phrase, a string of nonsense into space. That's part of it: the fun part is looking at what other people have chucked out before you. The terms they dared scrawl on the game's galactic messageboard, the words they typed when they thought nobody else was looking. When you're done, Wish Fishing prescribes you a sort of horoscope, which you can try to decipher at the linked glossary page.
UNTERwELT by Noxlof
This short, stylish story was made for the A Game By Its Cover jam, in which developers made titles based on fake cartridge art. The rushed development period has resulted in plenty of spelling errors and straightforward dialogue that kinda undermines the experience, but you can't fault the lovely pixel art and and palpable atmosphere in UNTERwELT.
The Jimi Hendrix Case by Gurok
“In a world where everyone is Jimi Hendrix, only Jimi Hendrix can solve the murder and find out who killed Jimi Hendrix.” So begins a point-and-click adventure with gorgeous pixel art and funny dialogue, where you actually get to use your gun. I've loved that in adventure games since Blade Runner, and despite (or perhaps because of) its short length, The Jimi Hendrix Case is one of the few to make full use of its shooting system. (Via Warp Door)
Sonic Dreams Collection by Arcane Kids
Zineth/Bubsy 3D/Room of 1000 Snakes developers Arcane Kids are back with another brilliant piece of freeware, this one pretending to be a collection of lost Sonic demos and prototypes from the mid to late '90s. They've got the Dreamcast look down pat by now, and if it weren't for the sight of Sonic and pals engaging in an orgy in Sonic Movie Maker, this could be pretty convincing. There are four little games included here: Make My Sonic, Eggman Origin, Sonic Movie Maker, and My Roommate Sonic, AKA stretch a Sonic character, try to play a non-functioning MMO, film seedy Sonic shenanigans with a movie camera, and romance Sonic the Hedgehog in VR. A disturbing and hilarious game about fandom, from some of the best comedians in the business.
Banned Memories: Yamanashi by GamingEngineer
Banned Memories turns the restrictions of PS1 hardware into a stylistic choice, and why not? Restrictions are great, giving a project a framework to rail against, or to comfortably fit within as you see fit. While the game seems to relish in the low-poly models and texture warping of the early 32-bit days, developer GamingEngineer is pushing against the restrictions of Game Maker: Studio, making probably the most impressive 3D game I've seen with it yet.
Engine aside, this is an atmospheric horror game that stacks up nicely against the likes of Silent Hill and Overblood, even if it's obviously several shades behind those games on account of it being made by one person, rather than a whole team of seasoned professionals. This is an early look at the game, containing a part of a haunted school to explore, and I'm really digging what I've played of it so far. (Via IndieGames)
Zzzz-Zzzz-Zzzz by SaintHeiser
The remarkable Zzzz-Zzzz-Zzzz is set in a dream world, and fittingly its rules have no consistency from one screen to the next. It's called that not only because you're asleep, but because you'll be pressing Z a lot. Z to go through a door. Z to go to sleep. Z to do an interaction, though you're never quite sure what that interaction will be. Because of this, because each new screen feels strange and unfamiliar, Zzzz-Zzzz-Zzzz is one of the few games to really get what dreams are about. It's a delightful, constantly surprising thing—fans of Fez are going to fall in love with it, I reckon.
Liberation, My Love by Newmark Software
A simple platformer embellished with a pleasant art style and premise, about a keytar-wielding robot thing that shoots colours at baddies. (He also has a shield, and a nifty lateral dash move.) The basic jumping and spike-avoiding could feel slicker, but Liberation, My Love's unique setting and look go a long way.
Out of Sight by Isart Digital students
It's a bit like Remember Me, this, specifically those bits in Remember Me where you have to reprogram people's memories (because you're a jerk). You're a woman with dymnesia trying to recover lost memories with the aid of a psychiatrist here, something you achieve by pivoting from one interactible object to the next, in a series of frozen moments from your past. You can examine each object for a bit of background detail, or combine the various sights and smells and sounds and other senses to bring the central memory to life. Writing and UI-wise, this is slightly clumsy, but I think the premise is a strong one. It's a bold and stylistically impressive game too.
Disposable by Martin Cohen
There's not much to Disposable yet, but I did enjoy the look of the world, and the dashy jumping ability I never managed to master. As your little robot explores a facility, looking for terminals to hack in order to open a central door, you'll occasionally need to rely on a tricksy dash-jump-thing that hurtles you through the air at a fixed distance. It's a fun, challenging few minutes of platforming, that Martin Cohen will hopefully return to at a later date.
from PC Gamer latest stories http://ift.tt/1Jyotlf
Blogger Comment
Facebook Comment