Pesticide Not Required (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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What if Vampire Survivors was a chop-chop, dig-dig game? As in, as well as auto-attacking swarms of enemies with increasingly more powerful weaponry, you also plant crops, mine ore and catch fish? Well, Pesticide Not Required answers that question. As with other Survivors-type/Bullet Heaven games, there’s the usual kill things, get XP, go up levels, spend points on mostly random updates, and repeat. Only here, in order to progress, you have to buy seeds at the end of each day …

Un Pas Fragile (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Un Pas Fragile is a short narrative game about a frog who wants to do ballet. As all frogs do, I expect. It plays out over a few days, where you leave your house, get the bus, go to ballet school, and do some ballet. Of course, other people (er, animals) are not as accepting of your life choices as you’d like, so you get laughed at and bullied to begin with, meaning that you have to do some simple …

Souldiers (PS5): COMPLETED!

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From the name I fully expected this game to be a soulslike so just clicked nope-skip every time I saw it for sale. But then I stumbled across it on a Metroidvania Games You May Have Missed list and I re-evaluated. Then I noticed it was on sale for about three quid on PSN and so bought it. First thing I have to say about it is that it’s HUGE. I’m used to 2D Metroidvanias for being 8-10 hours long, …

Piffle (iOS): COMPLETED!

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Piffle, or more accurately, Piffle+ (it’s a free IAP-less Apple Arcade version of an IAP’d game), is a simple arcade puzzle-ish game that is a bit Breakout and a bit Peggle. You throw balls (which are cat heads) upwards at blocks, destroy as many as you can, and then they all move down a row before you have another go. Different blocks have different properties, like they can only be hit from certain directions, or they replicate, or they capture …

Goat Simulator 3 (PS5): COMPLETED!

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Apparently, there’s no Goat Simulator 2 for the sole reason that it will annoy people. Makes sense, when the main purpose of the game itself is to annoy people. Like the first game, you’re a goat who can lick stuff and headbutt stuff, with janky physics and silly things to do. Although there was a sort of plot to the original, it was pretty sandbox-y and directionless. Goat Simulator 3 is more structured, with events and actions to complete, which …

Cocoon (PS5): COMPLETED!

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Cocoon is a brain melting turtles-all-the-way-down puzzle game. Imagine your standard buttons to open doors puzzles, where you put an item in a certain place to make a door open or a platform move. Now, make it so that the item you moved is actually a container, which you can enter. Inside, is another world, with it’s own series of puzzles Complicate that further, by having several of these items, which can be carried inside of each other. And, sometimes, …

Chance’s Lucky Escape (Playdate): COMPLETED!

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A silly little point and click adventure game on the games console probably least suited to the genre. Although I suppose I did play Batty Zabella so perhaps not. According to the official Playdate podcast, Chance’s Lucky Escape picks up where a different game in the same universe – Inspector Waffles (which I’ve not played) is set. The Waffleverse? Maybe. Anyway, Chance is a dog who was supposed to be the getaway driver for the foiled crime in the Waffles …

Unicorn Overlord (Switch): COMPLETED!

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On the ugvm Podcast a number of months ago, Choobs spoke about Unicorn Overlord at length and the idea of battles within battles really appealed so I put it on a wishlist. I’ve now had the game for months but on a later episode of the same podcast, Kendrick dissed it and that put me off a bit so it got moved down the pile until I picked it out a couple of weeks ago. Well, Choobs was right and …

Mr Driller 2 (Switch): COMPLETED!

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It’s Mr Driller only on the Game Boy Advance, only on the Switch. It’s missing the many game types and variations from later games in the series like Drill Land, but it’s the same gameplay and just as much fun as it ever was. But hoo is it hard. The constant worry that you should just dash for the end rather than try to grab some air, or vice versa, when you’re low on oxygen. The all-to-easy way to miscalculate …

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami (Switch): COMPLETED!

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A silly point and click game where you’re a gritty noir-ish hard-boiled detective? And you’re a duck? Sold. Aside from being a duck, you’re every cliche known to the character. Your apartment is your office, you have no money, you’re going through a divorce, you seem to have a drinking problem – a full house. Desperate for work, you take on a job for an anonymous person who wants you to investigate a lunch theft from the staff kitchen in …

Viewfinder (PS5): COMPLETED!

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This is one of those puzzle games that makes you feel very clever. Not quite as clever as The Witness, perhaps, or Superliminal, which this feels a bit like. The premise is that in a future where climate change has broken everything, you’ve been put in a VR machine within which some clever people in the past supposedly found a fix for the planet but it was never put in place. You have to find out what it is. It’s …

Roguecraft DX (Evercade): COMPLETED!

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This is an isometric Amiga-based little roguelike on the Evercade, which is an update to the Commodore 64-based Rogue64, which was a free hidden game on the Evercade. There’s nothing especially new or special about it, but it’s polished and looks really nice. It’s simple enough – randomised dungeons with baddies that generally get harder as you do deeper in, potions (most of them with random-for-that-run effects), health to maintain, and so on. You can start with one of three …

Donkey Kong Bananza (Switch 2): COMPLETED!

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I’ve a mixed history with Donkey Kong games. Donkey Kong 64 I loved, for a while, until it became clear it was a nightmare of repetition and collecting. Donkey Kong ’94, for the Game Boy, is one of my favourite platformers. I hated all the Super NES Donkey Kong Country games with their stupid pre-rendered graphics and terrible physics and collision detection. The evolution of those for the 3DS and Wii, Donkey Kong Country Returns was better, and I completed …

Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered (PS5): COMPLETED!

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With the Lego game complete I had a renewed interest in playing the game it was based on. First I had a struggle trying to actually obtain it, as it wasn’t on the Playstation Store because it turns out I already had it on the PS4 when Sony gave it away a while back. So I thought I’d pay for the £10 PS5 upgrade for it but then it kept giving an error when I tried to buy it. Eventually …

Rohga: Armor Force (Evercade): COMPLETED!

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This is a bit of weird one. It’s mainly a side-scrolling shooter, only your big mech (or mecha? I can never remember the difference) can’t fly and at times you can move in and out of the screen which has a similar effect to flying because it’s all on a 2D plane. That’s not the only unusual thing though, as you can “build” your own robot from various parts for different weapons and legs and stuff before you play, and …