Kids is another game from that Itch.io bundle, and is very surreal. You interact with figures – ostensibly children – in various ways, making them clap, swim, but mainly jump in a big hole. I’m not sure what the purpose of all this is. There’s bound to be some moral or deeper meaning behind what actually happens, but I’m not seeing it. Maybe there isn’t and it’s just a quirky clicky toy. Or maybe it’s all about how mindless children …
Wulverblade is a great looking side-on beat ’em up, in the mould of Golden Axe or Final Fight, set in 120AD in what is now Scotland. You play one of three blue-painted Braveheart-ish Caledonians who are forcefully evicting the Romans from their lands, mostly by smacking them with swords. Levels are dark and blood is frequent, and it’s far more violent than either of the games I likened it to, but it’s a great example of the genre. There are …
I go into this game a lot more on episode 36 of the ugvm podcast, but briefly, Flowlines VS is a game where you join paired hexagonal tiles in a grid up with one another without letting the lines cross. I’ve probably not explained that very well but one look at a screenshot should clear it up: There are over 400 levels, and for the most part they’re very easy. A couple caused me to try a few times, but …
This is one of well over 1500 games that came with the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality on Itch. To be honest, I didn’t think I’d even bother looking at the list of games once I’d donated as there were just so many, but I did have a flick through and this caught my eye as something someone had recommended before. It’s a series of screens, where you have to take a little vehicle from the left through a …
Can I just say, that it’s simply unacceptable for games to not have save points – even if only a suspend-and-resume type – in this day and age? There are four chapters in Stories Untold and you’re not able to save during them, meaning 45 minutes to an hour might pass. Sure, on the Switch you can put the console to sleep, but that means you (or anyone else) can’t play another game in the meantime, and with Animal Crossing …
Cynically, Island Saver is an advert for NatWest Bank, superficially dressed up as a save-the-planet first person eco shooter. You clear up and recycle rubbish, you clean the plants and animals, and you endure banking related puns as you go. Shoehorned in is a primer on what a bank is, and you’re taught about interest, currency exchange, loans and tax collecting. And of course because this is an advert, the game is free. So why did I enjoy playing it …
It was a little while back I played the first two games back to back, so I was expecting the story to make little sense. But then I remembered – the story makes little sense anyway. This final game in the series unfortunately ditches the (mostly) one continuous game style of the second game and returns to disjointed sections like the first game. To start with, the game is a bizarre full motion video title, before moving into the more …
I’ve done enough of these picross games now to know there’s very little to say about them. For the most part, for the Jupiter developed ones (like this) at least, they’re pretty much the same. The different thing in this is “clip picross” mode, where parts of a larger puzzle are unlocked as you play through the other puzzles, and then you complete these parts to make up a larger picture. It’s a bit like in previous games but instead …
This free sort-of-followup to Thimbleweed Park came out as a surprise recently, so of course I picked it up. It’s built using assets from the original game, as an experiment or prototype, but aside from being short it’s a properly playable thing. You control Delores, one of the characters from the first game, who has returned to Thimbleweed Park after a year away. She’s taken a temp job as a photographer for the local paper, and the aim of the …
This has been very cheap on the Switch several times, and the graphic style piqued my interested. However, I’d never bought it because reviews put me off – it’s not the driving game it appears, it’s incredibly short, and there’s very little to it. But a free copy on Epic Games? Ah, gwan then. The reviews were right. Although there is driving, it’s little more than a mechanism to tell the story. You can’t really crash, the car will actually …
Another PC game? Why yes! Because it’s not on anything else and I’ve a Steam Link set up and it was free on the Epic store and I wanted to play it and life finds a way. It’s a gentle little game, where you play as a bird who needs to hike up a mountain. Doing this is made easier by finding golden feathers, some of which are scattered about and others from completing tasks, which allow you to climb …
Flashback is a great game. It always was a great game and I was slightly worried playing it might reveal it to be all rose-tinting. Luckily, once I’d turned off all the graphic-ruining “modern” filters (which are on by default), it turned out it was still excellent. I remembered the plot, and most of the first half of the game (the bit in the jungle and the bit in the city), but I thought that completing the Death Tower gameshow …
After the “fun” that was Crush Crush, I thought I’d try another clicker game. Time Clickers is properly free, with no IAPs needed to unlock anything. It’s a lot simpler in structure than Crush Crush too. The fact that there’s a ceiling you can hit, and there should be no barrier to getting there in a realistic time was appealing after the issues I had with Crush Crush. It is less interactive though, and there’s no funny dialogue or real …
Another game I really enjoyed, but rarely completed, back in the day. Some people suggest that the C64 version of Action Biker is superior, but they’re wrong. It’s a totally different sort of game, for a start! This version involves you riding around a town, searching houses for parts for you bike to enable you to travel underwater and in an area which is pitch black for some reason. You need to find your friend Marty (for some reason you …
Way back when, this was one of my favourite games. The main reason being that it had a built in level editor, but the catchy music has remained in my head for decades. My copy was one of four games in a compilation, the other four being Panzerdrome (which was impossible), Tidy Tony (which was a bit like Atic Atac only rubbish), and Steelyard Blues (which I liked until many years later when I found out it was a hacked …
