I played Tell a Dandelion a Secret for about ninety seconds, and it affected me more than most other games I’ve played this year. Maybe it’s the weird mental state I’ve found myself in over the last few months (I’ll post regularly again soon, I promise!) but I think it’s worth your minute and a half, too.
Bowler is an extremely weird game. It’s also absolutely ~my~ kind of game. I just wish it had stuck around a bit longer than it did.
Within the first five minutes of Bowler, you’ll know if you want to keep going. For me, I had already laughed out loud and had made preparations to continue playing it for the next hour if need be. Sadly, there were only about ten minutes remaining, and Bowler went away as quickly as it had appeared.
Since it’s so short, and the fun is seeing the surprise that’s packed into its runtime, I’m going to keep this spoiler free. The setup is as follows: You’re a little green guy who has entered into a game show in order to win an unspecified prize. And uh, that’s certainly not all that happens.
Brief moments of a story flash in between rounds, and this made me think that it was building towards something that, well, it really doesn’t. It’s an odd game with a unique sense of humor, and if you’ve ever enjoyed anything by thecatamites, increpare, or gargonherd, you’ll feel right at home in Bowler. I hadn’t heard of the developer, Piz_Wiz, before this, but they’ll be on my radar from now on.
If you’re up for seeing what happens once you enter a battle arena / game / cooking show(?), check out Bowler on its itch.io page.
No matter how many screenshots you look at of Chuchel on the store page, I guarantee you aren’t prepared for how weird it’s gonna get.
Chuchel is a point-and-click adventure game that never gives you a second to be bored. You control a hairy black blob who is determined to eat a cherry, no matter how many literal acts of god get in his way. Chuchel splits its puzzles into individual screens, so there’s no walking back and forth across through a maze to return a key to a door. Nope, everything you need is right in front of you, and it’s up to you to figure it out.
The game plays out as an absurd cartoon not unlike a sillier Tom and Jerry, where the main character can, for instance, pull on something so hard that his arms stretch out and fall off. The interactions are never so obtuse that you don’t know how to solve a screen, but they always lead to something at least twice as silly as you expected. I knocked on a small turtle’s shell once to get his attention, and when he emerged he pulled out an entire arcade with him. I’m telling you, it gets wild fast. It can sometimes feel like you’re playing through an interactive cartoon rather than a puzzle game, but the gameplay that is there never stops being surprising and fun. If you can somehow manage to finish Chuchel without gasping in awe or laughing out loud at least once, I’d like to know what kind of monster replaced your soul.
*MILD SPOILERS AHEAD* *JUST GO PLAY IT* *IT RULES*
As if simply being an excellent point-and-click adventure wasn’t good enough, Chuchel eventually becomes a genre-hopping journey through platformers, a Pac-Man maze, Space Invaders, and more. I was already all-in on Chuchel well before any of that stuff started popping up, but by encompassing so many diverse playstyles in this one little game, Chuchel became something really special to me.
*END SPOILERS* *IF YOU PLANNED ON PLAYING IT I HOPE YOU DIDN’T READ THAT*
It’s a creative, happy cartoon from start to finish, complete with a bouncy soundtrack and surprises every minute. There’s even musical interludes where you might otherwise see the commercial break! In a year where Celeste and Monster Hunter came out like three months ago, I needed Chuchel to remind me that 2018 still has plenty of love left to give.
If you have any room for joy in your life, go check out Chuchel on its Steam page.
Don’t be fooled by the cute dancing girl on the title screen. Super Weekend Mode isn’t playing around. You’re going to die a lot in this game; those skulls on the backdrop aren’t just for show.
Super Weekend Mode exists as some kind of crossbreed between Galaga and Rock Band. You control two paddles which each can be moved between two positions. You’ll swap them around to collect hearts, shoot at the boss, and avoid obstacles that mean you harm.
The thing is, though, that the stuff coming at you moves fast and sometimes unpredictably. As you’re frantically switching your two columns around collecting hearts and fire beams at the boss, skulls and enemies are headed towards you. If you don’t quickly dodge out of the way, your screen size shrinks, giving you less room to see what the next barrage of incoming objects will be.
This is where I think Super Weekend Mode is a bit too difficult. I’m fine with the fast switching, even though some of the objects tend to swap lanes with barely a half-second to process and react to them, but making the game harder when you play poorly seems unbalanced. This leads to “the poor get poorer” effect of being hit a couple of times, having a very tiny window to see the action, and having little other option than to just give up and try again from the (much easier) beginning.
Super Weekend Mode feels like an old school arcade game from top to bottom. The chiptune tracks feel authentic and as poppy as they ever were. The hectic vibes beg for you to play just one more round, and the second paddle can even be controlled by another player huddled around the same screen as you.
But the downsides of arcades, namely the quarter-munching, is alive and well too. You’re given three lives and you’re out. No matter how many of the seven stages you’ve completed, there’s no continuing. I typically don’t mind this, but some of the deaths feel a bit cheap. (When the LEVEL UP text appears on-screen, it completely obscures the action and almost always leads to a death!) The developer page also kindly informs you right away that the difficulty increases even if you do well on any particular stage. Whether or not you’re succeeding, the game is determined to take you down as quick as possible.
I’m all for difficulty in games, but feeling fair is an important aspect in keeping players coming back. I’m still really enjoying my time with Super Weekend Mode, but it just feels like it’s a few small updates from being an instant recommendation.
If you’re up for some punishing pew-pewing, check out Super Weekend Mode on its itch.io page.
JUMPGRID is a game of aggression. Right there in the all-caps title it lets you know that it means business. Death comes fast and often, and the electronic soundtrack never stomps thumping to mourn. Instead, a violently flashing screen and a screech greet you at every end. It’s reminiscent of Super Hexagon, in that you’re the only thing keeping the party’s pace down. You have to move, and you better move fast.
In JUMPGRID, you’re tasked with hopping between 9 dots on a grid. Like this:
You’re the glowy thing in the middle, and you can jump to any of the ones directly across from you, i.e., up, down, left, or right. Once you dodge whatever obstacles are flying through the grid and collect all nine green pieces, a warp hole to the next level opens up in the center and you hop along from there. Doesn’t sound too bad, huh?
Well… it gets rough. After a dozen or so screens, JUMPGRID feels like it’s just getting started. Very specific sequences of jumps have to be performed at exact times in order to collect all the shards and make the warp. Some are time limited, others have you follow a fast-moving maze and collect shards in order, and others just send way too much at your way to comprehend until you’re at least a handful of deaths in. You’ll respawn immediately though with every mistake, giving the game more than a passing resemblance to any number of precision platformers.
If you’re ready to make the jump, give JUMPGRID a shot on Ian Maclarty’s itch.io page.
If you’ve never played Stephen’s Sausage Roll, (which you probably should) it’s a puzzle game about maneuvering a sausage around a grid. The goal is to avoid obstacles to move one item on a grid to another spot on the grid, all while following an increasingly complex set of rules to do so.
Now imagine that instead of having a sausage, you had puppy dogs. Now imagine the sausages… I mean puppies are very stretchy. Alright, you know as well as I do that this explanation isn’t going anywhere and we both understand that now. Just, like, if you think puzzle games are cool then play this one.
hippochippies 