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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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) …
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 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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
As a fan of the SteamWorld games, I’ve no idea why it took me more than three years to get round to buying this, let alone actually playing it. Maybe because it’s an RPG I though I’d need a run up? Anyway, here we are, late to the party. My first impression was “Oh no, what have I bought”. You see, I knew SteamWorld Quest was an RPG but I didn’t know it was a card-based RPG. And I don’t …
Before I Forget is a narrative discovery game about a scientist who is dealing with the onset of Alzheimer’s. You play as her, in her house, as she gets confused, forgets events, and tries to put together fractured memories of her past, her job and her husband. You can probably guess from the premise that it’s not all happy and light, so it isn’t what I’d describe as “fun”, but does fit into the sort of bracket games like A …
You know what the perfect game for a super-powered handheld console that costs £350 and I had to wait for months for is? A free fruit machine game, obviously. I’d played and completed Luck Be A Landlord a while back on the Mac, but I never really stopped playing it. There are later modes with harder goals that unlock and it’s just a fun thing to play for five minutes every so often. And by five minutes I mean an …
A while back I played A Building Full of Cats, to which this is a follow-up. For the most part, it’s more of the same – find hidden cats in a number of cluttered rooms – only here there’s some curse or something which means that the cats are often bat-cats, mummy-cats, vampire-cats, skeleton-cats, or Cthulu-cats. There’s also a plot, items besides cats (like keys) that you need to find to open up other areas, secret rooms, and even a …
