Button City (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

Button City is a cute little game about a fox who makes friends at a local arcade and becomes a member of a four player team of players of some sort of MOBA called “Gobabots”. The main plot is about trying to stop the arcade from being closed down, but there’s also story about the other characters in the game, many of whom have personal issues to overcome, and you can collect new robots to use as your avatar in …

Super Adventure Hand (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

One of the great things about the Steam Deck, especially with Heroic set up so it can seamlessly work with my GOG, Epic and Amazon game libraries, is the huge number of free games I manage to accrue and actually play. Super Adventure Hand was a recent one, free on Amazon Gaming, which I’d stumbled over on the Switch eShop as “eeeer, dunno”. Can’t argue with free though, can you. And, I’m glad I didn’t pay full whack for it. …

Samsara Room (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

Name Samsara Room Developer Rusty Lake Genre Puzzle Platform PC, Mac, iOS, Android Release Date February 2017 Modes Single-player Languages English Website Rusty Lake Another rummage in my itch.io library, and up came this game. “Rusty Lake?” I thought. “Where have I heard that name before?”. Turns out, they also did The White Door, which I remember liking. Why not, eh? It’s more abstract than that game, with very little in the way of words to help you. It’s essentially …

StarBoy (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

While having a rummage through the various itch.io charidee bundles I’ve bought in the past for something to play, this caught my eye. I think it’s the way it’s superficially a bit like Minit and Gato Roboto, although it’s not really much like either of those games. What it actually is, is a short platform, all in black and white, with a lot of wall jumping and some puzzles. These puzzles are mostly of the type where you have to …

Doraemon: Story of Seasons (Switch): COMPLETED!

It’s been a while since I went cold turkey on Animal Crossing, so I thought I’d inject a bit of something similar when this came up on sale on the Switch eShop. Apparently it’s the first Doraemon game to be officially localised for the West, but it’s also a Story of Seasons (née Harvest Moon) crossover title. How that robot cat/farming game amalgamation works is like this: The plot is about Noby, Doraemon and chums being magically sent back in …

Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Switch): COMPLETED!

There was no doubt that I was going to instabuy a new Mario game. It might not be a sequel to Super Mario Odyssey, but New Super Mario Bros U was one of the best Mario games, if not, actually, the best and this is the first 2D outing for Nintendo’s pipeman since that came out, so I was hyped. All the new “wonder” effects shown in the trailer and Nintendo Direct, with crawling pipes and turning into a Goomba …

Pear Quest (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

If you look at the screenshot, you’ll see that everything is very small. This is not, as I discovered having spent a long time trying to change it, a bug, a zoomed out setting, or a screen resolution issue. It is, in fact, intentional. The entire “map” is visible for the duration of the game, and everything is supposed to be tiny. And, on a Steam Deck, almost impossible to discern what is going on. But I managed it. It’s …

Dino Game (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

It’s another Sokpop game! I love all of these so far. Dino Game is probably the least fun one so far, but it’s still good enough to be worth a play, especially since it’s so cheap and short. You’re on an island with big brontosaurus-type dinosaurs. You need to escape via your UFO, but you can’t reach it as it’s up in the sky. If you can befriend the dinos, by feeding them what they want, however… Yes, pretty simple, …

Garden Story (Switch): COMPLETED!

This isn’t quite the game I was expecting. I thought it was a Stardew Valley sort of game, only with a bit more story and all the characters are fruit and veg, but it wasn’t exactly that. Graphically, it’s similar, and yes – you can plant crops – but actually, it’s the story which is the thing. Some bad goop stuff has been taking over the water supply of the world all the flora (and some frogs and fish things) …

HoloCure – Save the Fans! (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

In a sea of coattail riding Vampire Survivors clones, it takes something for one to stand out. HoloCure did this by being free. As in, completely free. No cost, no IAPs, no paid DLC. Free. That, and it came to my attention via a recommendation from Gaming on Linux, who I follow because apparently I’m a Linux gamer now what with the Steam Deck and all. Anyway, the game. it’s Vampire Survivors only with anime girls and cute baddies. Apparently, …

Frog’s Adventure (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

Frog’s Adventure is a hop-and-click adventure game that first came to my attention via John Walker’s Buried Treasure site. As a result, it’s how I found out about Sokpop and after someone Very Kind in the ugvm collective sent me a copy of it, I bought the rest of the Chill Adventure bundle because they all looked great. For some reason, it wasn’t the first one I played though. John explains the game much better than I can so I …

Kraken’s Curse (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

Yes! Another little Sokpop game! This one has you boating between tiny islands, upgrading your little boat, defeating skeletons, and following treasure maps to get items which will help you destroy a huge sea monster. The controls are a little fiddly, and it was only by accident I realised you could swap which side of your boat you could fire a cannon from (which until then had meant sea encounters were unnecessarily difficult), but like the other Sokpop titles it’s …

Bobo Robot (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

Another Sokpop game! This one is a tiny Metroidvania where you’re a robot and you have to, well, explore and collect nuts and bolts and fly a little spaceship. Upgrades include a body (you start as just a head!), a gun, the ability to go in water, and so on. It’s all quite cute and has frogs in it. It’s got chunky graphics which remind me a bit of Atari 2600 games aside from a few bits where they have …

Fishy 3D (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

I bought a bundle of cute looking games on Steam from a group called Sokpop. They seem to have hundreds on there, but the “Chill Adventure” bundle looked right up my street. Turns out it was. It’s here if you want it too. After a brief go of some of them, once my daughter graciously allowed me to have my Steam Deck back once she’d played them, I settled on Fishy 3D. You’re a fish who has to grow bigger, …