I had no knowledge of what this game was going to be like, but from the screenshots I anticipated a narrative discovery game, hopefully with one or more toilets. Sadly, there were no toilets. But I was mostly right about the narrative discovery bit. Discoloured is a first person puzzle game, although the puzzles require discovery more than logic. You are transported to a 50s style diner, but everything is in black and white. By finding and activating red, green …
I was a big fan of Marble Blast Ultra on the Xbox 360, and this, apparently by the same team, coming to Apple Arcade was great… until I tried to play it and found it totally impossible to control with a touch screen. Then I realised I could use my 8bitdo controller with my iPad and, despite having to balance the system precariously on my lap, it actually worked well. Well enough to complete, even. So the game isn’t as …
Imagine if Another World was a point-and-click adventure game about a milkmaid in space, and all the dialogue was in rhyming couplets. Well, that’s Milkmaid of the Milky Way. It’s only a couple of hours long, but tells the story of how a struggling milkmaid has her cows abducted by aliens (as aliens are wont to do) one night and then manages to get aboard their spaceship to try and rescue them. The puzzles are mostly straightforward, with the exception …
It’ll probably take longer to read this post than it took me to complete the game. One Strike is a one-on-one fighting game with the sort of graphics early Game Boy Advance games had, with colour palettes to suit the very dark GBA screen. Games like Castlevania: Circle of the Moon looked hideous when blown up on a big TV via an emulator, and so does One Strike. As the name suggests, you need to strike your opponent just once …
From the possibly damaged brain of the guy who brought you the beautiful nonsense that was Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy, is Wattam. Presumably it is called Wattam because when you see it for the first time, you say “what? erm”. The plot is that everything has exploded and gone away and you, as a lonely square mayor has to bring everything back. And you do this by making trees eat your friends and turning them into fruit, by …
What a lovely little game this turned out to be. It’s these tiny little Lego dioramas each with a little puzzle in – get you little lego boy to the other side of the screen, or make machinery do something, or build a thing in a certain way. It isn’t difficult, although one of the puzzles introduced a new gimmick which I completely missed so it stumped me for a while, but it’s clever and looks incredible and if you …
Some years ago, I got Assault Android Cactus on Steam, and I played it a bit via my Steam Link. It was great, but booting my Mac into Windows and setting the Link up and everything needing updating every time I did so got old fast so it’s rare I ever bother these days. But it’s a shame because sometimes games like this just don’t get played. Until now! The “+” version, which differs in ways I don’t know about, …
No, not the same game again. You see, the game Celeste that most people know, and the one I completed already, isn’t the original Celeste. No, that’s a PICO-8 game which I’ve played before on my PocketChip handheld. I think I completed it too, but I have no record of doing so on this diary so I’ll have to assume I didn’t. Anyway, the original game was much simpler, with no story, 8-bit style graphics, and each screen is literally …
I’ve seen a lot of people praise Celeste since it came out. Many of them saying it’s the best of the “stupidly difficult platformer” genre, which is presumably also populated with games like VVVVVV, Super Meat Boy and Slime-san. But, although I’ve liked some of those games before, I wasn’t sure I wanted another. Then Celeste was on sale of nearly-free, so I got it anyway. And it’s good. Really it is. The pixel art is nice and the story …
You have to find and take photos of all the birds in a flat. I found, and took photos of, all the birds in a flat. And some other things, some of which it seems you need to take photos of in order to unlock more birds. I’m not sure what else there is to say about Toripon. You can get a copy here if you too want to find, and take photos of, all the birds in a flat: …
It’s another Pokémon game, and yes, it’s very much like all the others. In fact, it’s probably more like the slightly older games, like X and Y, rather than Sun and Moon as it returns to the gym setup those games had and Sun/Moon ditched. What is different, is that there’s a new Wild Area, er, area. This massive (for a pokémon game) part of the map is full of wild pokémon which change depending on where in the area …
I’m not sure I’ve ever played this before, but I was always a big fan of the original game in the arcades. I was a little worried it wouldn’t be any good, because of both being a sequel and the passage of time, but I needn’t have worried – it was excellent. It is, of course, more of the two-layer, door-entering, duck-and-shooting that the original was, and it played well despite being pretty difficult. You see, as well as having …
Time passed, and so I decided to play Mega-lo-Mania again. This time, I completed it on my new RetroFlag GPi – the thing that looks like a Game Boy but houses a Raspberry Pi. I played as Madcap, and once again (see previous posts) I reached the final level with nobody else having put anyone in suspended animation to get there with me, so I instantly won. It’s the best game, despite that.
Another nice little Apple Arcade game. This time, you’re a repair woman who is trying to make some money while visiting a town for some festival or other. You seem to be able to turn your hand to repairing everything, and despite having turned up with just a small suitcase, you’re equipped with spare parts for a watch, a music box, a handheld games console, and a slide projector amongst other things. Like Possessions, which I also completed today, it’s …
This is a little puzzle game where you’re give a 3D view of a room with some objects hanging in midair. The idea is to rotate the camera in such a way that the items appear to be in the correct place – flowers on a window ledge, taps on a sink, that sort of thing – before moving on to the next set of items. It isn’t hard, and the game is incredibly short, but it was fun and …
