Tag: Indie Games

2020 Doesn’t Deserve SPOOKWARE, but We’ll Take It

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.”

Here’s a bonus directly from the Dread X Collection 3 page about the sequel, SPOOKWARE @ The Video Store:

I am ready for the skelebros.

Check out SPOOKWARE on its itch.io page!

September 25, 2020
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
JUMPGRID is a Punishing, Heart-Pounding Puzzler

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.

https://youtu.be/Ag-xI72ReUA

If you’re ready to make the jump, give JUMPGRID a shot on Ian Maclarty’s itch.io page.

March 6, 2018
This Strange Realm Of Mine – Doom of the Poet

Phew. This one’s a doozy, huh?

Have you ever wanted to play a game about dissecting consciousness that starts off under the guise of a Doom clone? Me either! But I’m glad I did.

This Strange Realm Of Mine’s Steam page describes it as “a First Person Shooter mixed with poetry and psychological horror.” but I’m not sure even that prepares you for what you’re in for. You’ll start off shooting at spooky monsters through some dark corridors with nothing but a pistol and a torch, solving a few simple (but well done!) puzzles. After escaping, you’re dumped into The Limbo Tavern and are told that there is still work to do.

This tavern is where you’ll spend your time in between each of the game’s stages. NPCs eventually gather here as it becomes a haven for those lost, and you’ll get to know these people before jumping back into These Strange Realms. Where you jump back into, though, is what makes @Encaved‘s latest project so unique.

If you’re wanting to go in blind, I suggest you stop reading here. If not, well, it’s about to get weird.

I had expected that first stage to set a precedent for what’s to come. Nope, not at all. The next stage is familiar enough, you find out that you have to bust into a gang of rat’s headquarters to get to your next objective. After you start popping off rat heads in the alley is where the game shows a bit of its hand. Graffiti is painted all over the walls of these streets that the rats call home. You follow the story of them coming up with a name for their gang, how they feel bad about picking on certain members of the group a little too much, and more. This fleshes these characters out… but only after you’ve smeared that flesh all over the walls with your handgun. Once you break into their tower it feels like a page was taken directly out of the Hotline Miami handbook. You brutally take down scores of these people as you climb higher into their base, eventually finding their boss and, if you choose, splattering his brains all over his room after you get what you want.

And that’s just level 2.

Each time you complete a mission, you head back into your safe haven, have a chat with everyone hanging around, and then head back out to see what could possibly be next. And trust me when I say I don’t think you’ll be able to guess. You’ll go through Minecraft parodies, explorations of social anxiety, and entire genre-shifts. I was glued to my screen as I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning just to see what they might have come up with next.

This game sounds perfect right? Uh, well…

If you’ve played the game already or paid attention to the word “poetry” in the game’s description, you might notice that I’ve neglected to mention a pretty core tenant of the game. That’s because I think a bunch of it isn’t any good.

This isn’t to say that the writing is a total loss, though. There are bright spots in the dialogue that legitimately hit points of shocking poignancy, but they come in between literal name-checks of Rick and Morty characters (it’s a good show with some bad fans) and 2deep4u discussions of religion. Those aforementioned discussions coming from a guy sitting in a cell with some Suicide Squad level of “deep thoughts” scribbled all over the walls. There are moments in the game’s story where I couldn’t figure out if the developer was making fun of people like this, or actually was one of them.

These instances of annoying writing are luckily limited to only about two of the game’s characters, and the rest of the cast is allowed to have some surprisingly thoughtful expression. One of my favorite characters is a girl who fights against her anxieties to be an optimist, and shares some personal stories with you along the way.

Personal is a word I keep coming back to when trying to describe this game. For better or worse, This Strange Realm Of Mine feels like a deeply personal work of an artist. It just happens to be really fun to play.

If you’re ready to jump into someone else’s mind and shoot some monsters, check out This Strange Realm Of Mine on the game’s Steam page.

September 21, 2017
Cat Bird! – A Hearty Helping of HAL

After playing a couple dozen hours of something like Dark Souls or Hellblade, if you’re like me, you want to balance that out with something light, happy, and not-at-all soul-crushing. Games like Kirby and BOXBOY! are prime examples of games that exude joy. HAL Laboratory is a company filled with people who make magic fit onto a cartridge, and with Ryan Carag’s latest, now we have a tiny ball of HAL inspiration that fits in a tiny app on your phone. Cat Bird! is here! (more…)

September 1, 2017