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. …
A short game about an old lady waiting to see if her son will be home for Christmas, Grand Story involves you doing some daily chores – getting firewood, watering plants – while slowly getting more depressed that your son hasn’t written. Disappointingly, the house doesn’t appear to have a toilet which, I’ll be honest, was the main reason I decided to play it as it looked like it would. Still, it was a charming little game despite the bleakness …
It’s Where’s Wally? on hard mode! Level after level with minute characters and things hidden behind other things and the occasional puzzle, where you have to find stuff from a list with sometime cryptic clues as to where they might be. Click on everything just in case! It might sound easy, because Where’s Wally? is easy (and the Mega Drive game based on it is probably the easiest game I’ve ever played), but this is not. Things aren’t static like …
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, …
I have no idea why I decided to play this. I have very little interest in the Apogee same-game-slightly-different-graphics PC games of the early 90s (see also Commander Keen and Duke Nukem) and I know from experience they’ve aged badly. And yet here we are. It’s pretty boring. There’s a lot of backtracking as you often have to get to the other side of the level to get the key to open the exit which is right near the start. …
A lot of people have written a lot about this game already, and aside from the general sentiment that You Must Play It and the knowledge that Something Dark Happens And Then It All Goes Sideways, I’ve managed to avoid all spoilers and plot points. So I won’t be sharing them here. All I will say is the same as I knew going into the game: Doki Doki Literature Club is a visual novel about a literature appreciation club in …
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 …
Kids is another game from that Itch.io bundle, and is very surreal. You interact with figures – ostensibly children – in various ways, making them clap, swim, but mainly jump in a big hole. I’m not sure what the purpose of all this is. There’s bound to be some moral or deeper meaning behind what actually happens, but I’m not seeing it. Maybe there isn’t and it’s just a quirky clicky toy. Or maybe it’s all about how mindless children …
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 …
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 …
