Category: Free

Only One Minute Before Restart – Racing the Reboot

You know how irritating it is when your computer keeps popping up a prompt to restart and update while you have absolutely no intention of doing so? You’re gonna turn the computer off eventually, right? And it’s only 2am, there’s still stuff to do!

What if… wait for it… it was gonna restart whether you wanted it to or not?

Enter: Only One Minute Before Restart.

Made by Levi More for the Game Maker’s Toolkit Game Jam, you’re tasked with completing a quick series of puzzles/games in order to finish sending an important email before it’s erased. Playing like an extremely fast round of WarioWare, you’re given 60 seconds to figure out how to stop the reboot process.

You’ll fire arrows, play arcade classics, and scan through menus as the clock keeps ticking. As much as I wish there was more to see and do, it makes sense that the game is over nearly as soon as it starts. Additions of a few extra mini games and randomizing the order could go a long way in making this feel less like a one and done, but for a Game Jam its a perfectly enjoyable snack of an experience.

If you’re quick enough to beat a frustrating computer, check out the game on its itch.io page.

August 14, 2019
Guardian Sphere – Healthy, Wealthy, or Die

Are traditional bullet hells not punishing enough for you? Would you like them to be even more hectic, so that you and your co-op partner scream for, let’s say, thirty minutes straight? Pixel-boy and AAA’s latest Ludum Dare entry might have made just the thing for you!

Guardian Sphere is one of the most frantic and fun shmups I’ve played. Each of you pick a character, fly through and shoot bug creatures, and keep a close eye on your health. Health is typically prety important in things like these, but when the Ludum Dare theme is “Your life is currency” things get a bit more out of hand. See, the only way to afford upgrades is to spend what remaining HP you have by the time you find a shop. Things got a little too wild and you missed the enemies’ HP drops? No money for upgrades. Took a couple too many hits from that laser mantis? Whoops, that new ability costs 5 hp and you’re down to 4.

The risk/rewards comes into play even moreso when managing health as currency, especially when you’re down to 5 hp but that upgrade costs…wait for it, 5 hp. Do you sink down to 0 and hope that you don’t take another hit before killing a few baddies? That’s up to you! Though the problem of the rich getting richer is definitely at play here, the game is short enough that if you’ve missed several upgrades due to poor play, you’re only out 15ish minutes to restart and use your new knowledge to play better.

Everything feels incredibly polished, and the art and music on display here goes well past what I’d expect from a traditional game jam entry, though the version I played had a few patches since the initial jam ended. The only “real” issue to find is a mistranslation from French to English where “buy” and “bye” are swapped. There’s even a robust character select menu with characters who all have unique abilities (which are, frustratingly, never explained to the player!!) that’s totally cool and unnecessary for a game like this.

If you’re down to blast some aliens and trade your life for new toys, check out Guardian Sphere on its itch.io page.

August 14, 2019
Decimating Demons is a Delight in SACRIFIGHTS

In seven days, The Ancient One is going to mess you up. Bad. The only way to stop him? Fight the lesser minions of hell and eat their entrails to gain their power. Duh!

SACRIFIGHTS is FrankieSmileShow’s entry for Ludum Dare 44. And while I don’t think it nails the theming (Your life is currency) as successfully as safecrack, it’s a pretty fun time regardless.

You offer some blood, or guts, or uh, batteries and staplers that the bosses drop to the sacfiricial altar and fight whatever monstrosity is summoned. Clowns, spiders, demons and secretaries take shape and are quite angry with you. Thankfully, a magic seal keeps them in place for you to get some potshots in before they wreak havoc. Your first run through the game will almost inevitably go like this: Summon a bunch of monsters, maybe kill one or two by the skin of your teeth for some sweet loot, and then die to the final boss when he shows up and you’re absolutely unprepared. The second run is where things… kind of fall apart a bit.

Once you’re familiar with how the game works, you’ll try to min/max your process through the monsters. Eat what’s edible, summon what’s not, and grow incredibly powerful as events progress. You’ll eventually learn that most monsters can be decimated before the seal is broken, and they never even have a chance to move before they’re sent back to whence they came. The game is still fun to play because the monster designs are neat to see and each of them have unique quips, but once you see the seams there’s no challenge whatsoever.

And that’s cool, I guess! I had a pretty great 20 minutes or so between both of my playthroughs. I just wish I had been able to have a fair fight with more of them. There’s definitely more that can be done here, and if SACRIFIGHTS 2 came out tomorrow I’d be down immediately. Just maybe give the hellspawn a headstart when you try to take them on yourself.

If you’re up for meeting the minions of the abyss, check out the game on its Ludum Dare page.

May 16, 2019
Safecrack Is Fast and Frantic Frugality

Made for Ludum Dare 44’s “Your life is currency” theme, Torcado’s entry is well among the best of ’em. Though it’ll take you just 10 or 15ish minutes to blow through, safecrack is one of the most inventive incremental games I’ve played in quite a while.

If you’re not familiar with incremental games… you’re probably a better and healthier person than me. It’s one of those things like Cookie Clicker or Forager that sucks hours and hours away, promising you that by doing one thing over and over again, you’ll become better at, well, doing that one thing even better. They’re typically near-endlessly looping Skinner Boxes that trap you inside them for as long as your addictive personality allows. Thankfully, safecrack is one of the more ethical ones.

Happy with simply providing a dozen or so minutes of fun, safecrack has you upgrading ways to hurt yourself. See, you’re a safe, and you’ve gotta get all that money out of you somehow. As you take “damage,” money for upgrades flies out of you. Spend that money on more enemies to fill the screen with, or to make yourself more vulnerable to attacks, and you make more cash for new upgrades to die even faster.

I was surprised at how satisfying the upgrade tree was for such a small project. As you experiment with new combinations of enemies to harm you, you’ll occasionally think “oh, this is definitely the best way to take damage the fastest,” and then almost certainly stumble into an even more efficient way to kill yourself.

If you’re ready to hop into a quick bout of chaotic currency collecting, head on over to the game’s itch.io page.

May 16, 2019
It’s Paper Guy! – Slice, Dice, and Be Real Nice

Are you ready to fill your next fifteen minutes with a helping of pure, unfiltered joy? Well, here he comes… It’s Paper Guy!

It’s Paper Guy is a tiny game that a group of French students submitted as a final project at their university earlier this year. Without knowing much more, I can almost guarantee they passed. You play as the happiest man/boy/guy alive, Paper Guy, as he skips through the forest on his own little adventure. His dark secret, though, is that he can somehow cut through anything around him on a whim. Don’t care for the paper trees? Snip snip. Dog stuck on a leash? Slice that rope; he’s your dog now.

The game consists of a handful of different areas in which you hop and chop your way through some very light puzzles to make the world better for everyone else around you. Help out local office workers, hang out with your new pet, and use your terrible, destructive powers for good.

The game’s aesthetic obviously owes a lot to the Paper Mario games, but it never feels wholly derivative. A pleasant 2D adventure game where you have near complete control over the environment isn’t quite like anything I’ve seen before. It’s Paper Guy! winds up being a combination of clever and wholesome in a way that we really don’t deserve.

If you’re ready to hang out with the happiest guy in town, check out It’s Paper Guy! on its itch.io page.

September 8, 2018
Super Weekend Mode – Tough Love

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.

March 7, 2018