SPOOKWARE from Adam Pype and Viktor Kraus is a gift to a broken world. Easily gaining Halloween Classic status, SPOOKWARE imagines if WarioWare’s namesake was less of a stinky capitalist and more of a Jigsaw.
It’s one game of WarioWare with a high score of twenty, with one speed up at halfway. It’s tough! The microgames all only use the four arrow keys, but when you’re slamming all of them to rotate a garage door to stop THE GRUDGE from getting in, things start to get tricky. The horror inspirations range from Slenderman to your standard cow abduction, and after playing for an hour I laughed when I realized on their website there’s only ten in the mix. “10 BLAZING FAST MICROGAMES. EACH ONE SPOOKIER THAN THE LAST ONE!” as game’s page boldly states. I still haven’t been able to beat it.
Look at that little guy!
Adam Pype is currently teasing a follow-up to be featured in the Dread X Collection 3, so as SPOOKWARE’s protagonist so often rumbles, “hellll yeaahhhhh.”
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.
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.
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.
I miss Games of the Month!!!! I’m gonna bring it back, kind of!!! Soon!
School is a lot as usual, but taking things slowly is the best I can do for now. I haven’t played as much as I would’ve liked, but we’ve still had some real killers in early 2019. First off? Baba Is Goooooooooooood.
I already called Baba is You “2017’s best puzzle game” when it was just a genius half-hour bit of puzzlecraft. Now that its ten-ish levels have grown to two-hundred-ish? Uh, you should probably toss your $15 at Arvi “Hempuli” Teikari” as soon as possible.
Part logic puzzle, part light programming, Baba Is You won’t fail to make you feel like a genius, then a complete moron, then the smartest human being who ever lived dozens of times over. You physically move the rules of the game around the screen with a Sokoban-style grid, and whatever you spell out becomes the law of the land. Push the word “Wall” away from “Wall Is Stop” and then enjoy your new ability to walk through walls. Tired of playing as Baba? Spell out “Rock Is You” instead, and live out your dreams as a rolling stone.
It’s an incredible mechanic that I’ve never seen anywhere else. It’s also a mechanic that makes so much sense as soon as you see it in motion it’s impossible not to want to try it yourself. Every person I’ve shown the game to has been able to dive right in an begin enjoying puzzles within a minute or two of figuring out what they’re looking at.
Every level in the game is either teaching you a new mechanic, or testing your knowledge of a previous one before building something brand new on top of it. If you decide the puzzles involving robots aren’t for you (I’m bad at them!), just skip onto one of the other dozen or so levels you have available at any one time. There’s a shocking amount of variety here that brings me back to my old Super Mario 3D World point: it’s never afraid to have a good idea and toss it away for another one. After several hours I’m still hitting breakthroughs with puzzles and stumbling into stunning realizations about the limits of the game. Baba Is You isn’t for everybody, but if you’re willing to really stretch your brain across some creative puzzle solving, you’ll find a lot to love.
Need to get spooky and you’re somehow not in 2018 yet? Maybe this just wasn’t enough spookin’? I’ve got you covered. On with the show!
Halloween is almost over! The spookiness has nearly headed out for another year! I couldn’t find my laptop charger to finish this post earlier this morning! Ahh!
Go ahead and throw on that Rockwell x MJ classic, and let’s do the dang spooky thing.
Welcome to a brand new Getting Spooky! It feels like the world around us is too spooky all the time these days, but now it’s time for a fun kind of spooky, if you have the mental capacity left to do so.
If this isn’t the best kitten since that angry banana baby… I don’t know who is.
Okay, now that we’re all spookily warmed up, it’s time to get genuinely unnerved.
Hereditary is one of my favorite movies of the year so far. I can’t remember the last time a movie put me on edge as this one did throughout the entirety of its runtime. Watching this in a crowded theater of similarly uncomfortable people for two hours is an experience I’m super glad I was able to have. I hope the lady who stood up during the credits and proclaimed “I need to talk to Jesus!” ended up okay.
Enjoy scrolling through @BrianLeeWow‘s tumblr of mirrored photos of Halloween costume models. It’s… something.
On my way home last night (OCTOBER 30th!!!!!!) I saw a brightly lit Christmas tree in someone’s window. That truly instilled horror in me in a way I didn’t expect. Yikesabunga.
You goottttaaa watch Mandy.
The less you know going in, the better. Just know that it’s a VERY hard R rating, and it will make you squirm in your seat. And then… only after you’ve paid your dues, Nicolas Cage delivers his best performance in years.
Oh right, video games.
September 1999 is a short story told in about five minutes. I very much enjoyed those five minutes. You’ll put the pieces together as the scenes progress, if you can focus on something other than just how incredible the visuals are. Seriously, you need to see it for yourself and decide whether it’s real footage or not. Maybe the most exciting thing about September 1999 is that the developer, 98DEMAKE, has spoken about plans to continue making stuff like this. I’ll be right back on day one for whatever comes next.
Another in 2018’s incredible run of horror movies is Annihilation. While not exactly a “horror movie” through and through, there’s enough spooks to go around in this one to qualify.
It’s one of those movies where people obliquely refer to “that scene”, but there’s actually a handful of different things they could be talking about. And they’re each as weird and innovative as the last.
Horror anthologies are one million times my jam, and the finding out that Supermassive is diving into the genre gave my hopes for 2019’s horror output a huge bump. The first one’s on a spooky boat! Sure, why not!
Berat Pekmezci’s art is at its best when his skills with color are used to their fullest. This is one of my favorites.
What a vibe! I love it very much, and you should check out the rest of his stuff. Fall rules.
Here’s your reminder of some of my favorite weird movies you should absolutely watch if you wanna get all spooked and have a fun time:
The Invitation
Pontypool
Creep
It Follows
The House of the Devil
The Ritual
If you haven’t played Just Shapes & Beats, first off, go do that because it’s one of the best games of 2018 by faaaaaaar.
Second, gosh I’m super upset that these aren’t actually in the game now! Ughhhhhhh. They’re beyond excellent.
Hey, you. Yeah, you with the thing. You should totally have a short horror film watch party.
Anthologies are my favorite horror for a reason: they are made to not give you time to get bored. Lots of horror movies drag on too long, or just barely have anything to say in the first place. With short films, though, even the bad ones only waste like 12 minutes of your night!
For starters, check out:
Don’t Look Away, and The Smiling Man are both also pretty weird and good. There’s dozens and dozens of creepy short horror things on YouTube, and the quality ranges pretty wildly. It’s a ton of fun to spend a couple of hours in the dark with friends just blasting through them though.
Fair warning, you’re gonna stumble across Still Life, and it kinda sucks. So maybe go ahead and skip it.
(If you watched it anyway… man, what was up with that ending? I was waiting for some cool twist the whole time, and that was it? Of course they were SPOILERS people. How else was that gonna play out? I feel like I had a dozen better ideas just while watching it.)
Was that spooky enough for you? No? Well… what about…
…
…
NOW!
See it got scarier because I made you wait and then yelled it.
Okay it’s 11pm on Halloween and the spooklocity is leaving my body to build back up through another year.
hippochippies 