Killa Penguin
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It’s frustrating because I really like Ether Loop. I hate starting with that weak laser gun every time, and I find the RNG and vagueness about how everything works (what do items that “increase luck” actually do?) incredibly aggravating, but I still played for 7 hours, which is how long it took me to beat the game. Procedural generation can be a blessing in certain circumstances, but never when it’s depriving you of the tools you need to stand a fighting chance.
While wasp swarms didn’t prove crucial to the gameplay like I expected they might, being able to domesticate them with hugs is nevertheless a handy metaphor for Dwarrows‘ gameplay—a little painful, but so charmingly weird in its positivity that it’s easy to overlook some rough edges that break puzzles and cause your town expansion to grind to a halt.
Despite looking like a management-style game and bearing many of the signature elements of such a game, the goal isn’t necessarily to follow the rules. In fact, there isn’t really a set “goal” that you’re aiming for, as bad endings can be every bit as amusing as good ones, and you’re mostly figuring out how much you can get away with before experimenting with killing and sparing people based on coin flips, the voice of Grim’s conscience that sometimes confronts you in the mirror, and whatever capricious whims strike when reading a short synopsis of a person’s life. There aren’t any bad decisions, after all: just ones that can accidentally wipe out the human race.
All 9 levels are paced well, being superbly balanced so that they’re doable but difficult, and the combination of Project AETHER‘s ubiquitous leaderboard and numerous short challenge levels allow it to last longer than you’d expect given its relatively brief campaign length. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, however; there are a fair number of bugs to contend with, and some of the stages have backgrounds that are a dull orange or red that obscures enemy projectiles in an annoying way.
Hypergalactic Psychic Table Tennis 3000, or as I came to know it, “that game I’m totally going to copy/paste the name of because there’s no way I’m not screwing up such a mouthful at some point,” is a game that answers a question that gaming has left unaddressed for almost 50 years: what if a Pong paddle could enter into shallow Mass Effect-style romances with its opponents and experience an existential crisis? This is a game that takes Pong, throws some interesting mechanics on top like magical abilities and paddle durability, and then goes so completely bonkers with its writing that it’s impossible not to respect it.
How many other games can keep you glued to the screen for 20 minutes while a little cartoon guy chops away at a crystal? At the same time, the tendency of some to ascribe brilliance to media tinged with novelty is misguided. Any meaning that runs deeper than the shallow concepts directly addressed in-game will be more a case of your imagination running amok than the game trafficking in deep ideas. The Longing definitely won’t be for everyone, but as an interesting departure from what ordinarily constitutes a “game,” I’d say that it’s worthwhile for the most part. Just be aware going in that it can run out of steam long before you’re finished.
Billion Road‘s local and online multiplayer modes capture that mercurial Monopoly spirit that’ll have someone flipping the board over and storming off in no time.
I decided to track down an original PS2 copy and alternate between the two versions, first playing through the original game before jumping back to the PC version I’m reviewing to get an idea of what’s similar and different. There have undoubtedly been improvements, but there have also been some unnecessary and arguably questionable changes that hardcore purists will find aggravating because of how they alter the gameplay (which is to say nothing of how they contribute to two major difficulty spikes). The original version of Destroy All Humans! was deeply flawed, however, and the remake’s quality-of-life features easily make it the definitive version.
The prospect of finding another game that cleverly establishes emotion rather than just throwing a sad pianist into the background and bombarding the player with frowny faces was appealing to me, and it lived up to that promise in most respects. Still, I can’t say that I found Spiritfarer particularly touching; the underlying premise of growing attached to a bunch of characters before shepherding them to death’s door (literally) has potential, but in practice, the gameplay is so distractingly repetitive and the writing so wordy that only a third of the passengers made me feel anything but irritation. This is a brilliant 5-hour game that completely loses focus by insisting on lasting for 20+ hours.
There’s no better way of describing Foregone than calling it a Dead Cells-inspired action platformer that eschews roguelite elements in favor of hand-crafted levels and checkpoints. It is, for better or worse (depending on your viewpoint), a game suited to those of us who have become exhausted by the randomization and permadeath features many indie developers have been using as a crutch over the past half-decade or so.
I found much of the gameplay to be frustrating in a bad way, with plenty of cheap shots and unclear mechanics making the questionable momentum even harder to deal with, and yet I kept playing after unlocking the bad ending. I even kept playing after obtaining the normal ending, spending several hours slashing at random walls in search of the secret switches that have to be activated to get the best ending. Why? The easiest explanation is that the characters—most of whom start out as joke-and-sarcasm dispensers—had grown on me to the point that I wanted everyone to have a good ending. Despite all of my gameplay complaints, Batbarian has a surprising talent for growing on you.
Calling this game unpolished would be an understatement (in many ways, it’s outright broken), but the story is filled with enough absurd turns to work as a semi-comedic adventure, and the mechanics blend several genres together into something enjoyably old-school. Rune II: Decapitation Edition took its lemons and made lemonade.
Viola: The Heroine’s Melody draws inspiration from Chrono Trigger, Mario 64, and Cowboy Bebop, meshing all of that together into a lighthearted, uplifting game with a story about music and self-acceptance. All of these disparate elements somehow work when paired together, and while Viola doesn’t have the combat depth or staying power of the games it borrows from, its gameplay is clearly designed to play second fiddle to its memorable cast of characters.
Even after a dedicated tutorial and several early missions that function as another tutorial, figuring out Spacebase Startopia often feels like playing an obtusely old-school game without the benefit of a manual. That underlying complexity is also its greatest strength, however, because it allows the game to have a sense of constant discovery. At one point, I screwed up my early construction and left no room for the teleporter you need to move your hardier security mechs between decks, which came back to bite me when some bug-like creatures on another deck attacked. Around the same time, however, religious extremists planted a bomb, so I grabbed it and dropped it next to the bugs. This wouldn’t have eliminated them in most games. It worked here.
At the end of the day, How to Win is an amazing journey of people making insane suggestions and developers allowing those suggestions to shape their game in major ways. The same chaotic internet energy that birthed Boaty McBoatface was given free rein, and the pun-filled craziness that resulted is simply amazing to witness.
Luckily, I managed to find enough time to blow through Donut County after seeing multiple Steam reviewers compare Rain on Your Parade to it. Untitled Goose Game, Donut County, and Rain on Your Parade serve as a kind of cutesy meme-game trinity, though there’s a clear hierarchy. Donut County falls between the okayish but massively overhyped goose game and the more varied and creative Rain on Your Parade.
Legend of Keepers released into early access a little over a year ago, and I liked it. The final version is even better; whenever you see the name Goblinz Studio, you know that regardless of whether they developed or published the game, it’s all about numerous interlocking, straightforward mechanics from which a great deal of complexity can arise. Legend of Keepers is perhaps the best example of this to date.
It’s very possible to enjoy Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield despite these issues, especially given its stylish visuals and entertaining soundtrack, but the gameplay needs a few tweaks to make obtaining better times more comfortable and fair.
This is the ultimate “easy to learn, difficult to master” tRPG, being made up of a few basic stats that are easy to keep track of. That’s in addition to numerous more subtle mechanics that occur behind the scenes, and these can be safely ignored or manipulated for an even greater advantage over your opponents. Wildermyth‘s difficulty curve becomes incredibly uneven toward the end of its fourth campaign, however, and the fifth and final campaign’s difficulty arises primarily from a number of annoying mechanics that exist to waste your time. Still, Wildermyth is great. It feels like it’s one balancing patch away from becoming one of the best tRPGs on the market.
Somehow, these two negative qualities balance out and allow Minute of Islands to tell a story about obsession and stubbornness that’ll resonate strongly with people predisposed to those traits.