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 …
Another of the SEGA Ages releases, and so it’s pretty much perfect. Except, of course, Tails is in it. But I suppose they couldn’t take him out so I had to manage with him there, getting in the way. Nicking rings on the Special Stages only to lose them because he’s stupid. Getting a hit in on a boss just before Sonic does so Sonic falls through him and dies. Tails is a bloody liability. Thankfully, the game is great …
Now this is an unusual game. Unusual in graphical style, setting, and gameplay. Sure, it might look a bit like Minecraft but it’s much more granular, cleaner and with much better environmental effects. Yes, there are gameplay elements similar to the old Tomb Raider games and Titan Souls. But it feels very different to any of these things. You’re a tourist, who travels between small islands taking photos of the strange towers present on most of them. You solve puzzles …
Now, this is a tricky one to categorise as completed, but hear me out. Crush Crush is a clicker game, albeit wrapped up in a waifu dating guise, but still a clicker. Girls become available, you spend hearts on them and money on gifts and dates, and the more you get them to like you the more you have to spend. Then more girls unlock and so on. It’s free to play, but after 400+ hours of play (well, probably …
