It’s another Rusty Lake joint, like Samsara Room from the other day. It’s very similar in style, only the setting this time is, as the title might suggest, a hotel. But not an ordinary hotel, oh no. This is one where a number of distinguished animal guests have been invited to attend several consecutive evenings of exquisite meals. Meals where one of the guests is the main course each night. Your job is to kill each in turn, using standard …
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 …
It’s a clicker game! With cute fluffy things and you have to make all the fluff coins! You know how clickers work – click and collect coins, use them to buy things which collect them faster, and so on. There’s not much more to it than that… until… well, that’d be spoilers, yes?
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 …
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 …
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 …
It’s been a while since I last played this, but when playing around in the itch.io client on my Steam Deck I noticed it was there, so thought I’d give it another go. And, like before it wasn’t very long or complicated, but it was very cute.
This is a very simple platformer concept: explore, collect icons that allow you one additional air jump, then reach the area you can only get to once you’ve collected them all. But, it’s the way it is presented that is absolutely beautiful. The area you explore is blank, but as you move around you sort of slosh watercolour paint everywhere to colour it in. Like, if de Blob and The Unfinished Swan had a 2D platformer baby. You can wall …
This game is a bit like a cross between a clicker and a fruit machine. You spin the reels, and get items appear, and then get money depending on what items and how many of each. But you also unlock more items that could appear, and there are buffs to certain items which increase their worth or a multiplier or both. So, for example, if you get a Witch, then you get more for each Cat it is next to. …
Yes, I’m still periodically working through the impossible task of playing the zeleventy spillion itch.io games from that bundle a while back. A Normal Lost Phone gave me a bit of deja-vu, in that the plot is virtually the same as Secret Little Haven that I played recently, and where that plays out via a faux AOL chat client on a computer, this plays out via a faux messaging system on a mobile phone. So yeah, they’re very similar. I …
I’ve been scrolling through that ridiculous itch.io bundle a lot recently. As I expected, I’ve never heard of 99% of the games there, but sometimes something catches my eye and a quick play of Rex: Another Island drew me in. It’s a pretty plain platformer in the open-world style common in the 8bit days. There are shades of Jet Set Willy and Chuckie Egg 2 here, and it’s really very good. Of course, there are modern additions like restart points, …
Secret Little Haven is a visual novel type game that plays out in the form of an AOL Messenger style chat application, a little like Emily Is Away. You’re Alex, a fan of a Japanese Sailor Moon type anime and you take part in his interactions with friends in real life, from a fan forum, and his dad. Alex isn’t happy for a number of reasons, but centrally he doesn’t identify as male, and part of the game how he, …
This is an animal squashing game. You find animals around the town, then squash them everywhichway until they’re happy and then they move in with you. Or something? It’s utterly bizarre. Anyway, I squashed all the animals and then it was the end of the game. I felt unfulfilled. Maybe I need squashing now?
The White Door (yet another itch.io bundle game) is a point and click adventure game, where reality and dreams blur together as you appear to be recovering from a traumatic event. You’re staying in a sort of hospital, and each day you’re required to follow a schedule of eating, washing, using a computer, and so on. At night you relive what may or may not have happened to you and why you ended up in here in the first place. …
This game is another itch.io bundle game, and is a short narrative discovery title where you, a pizza delivery guy, finds something going on with one of your regulars. There’s not a great deal to it, but if you explore a bit during each delivery you make, you see a little bit of the story you’d normally miss. There’s a twist at the end which is obviously coming, except it isn’t quite obvious after all. I won’t say more because …
