A little Pico-8 game which I picked up from itch a while back, Explorers has you boating about a randomly generated archipelago, finding treasure, meeting other people who you can try to convince to trade with you or help you, and sometimes stealing their boats. The aim is to complete your map, which you can do by visiting everywhere, but you can also fill it in more quickly by asking the people you meet about where they’re from or have …
Obviously the reason I started playing this is because of the absurd name. How I came to own it in the first place, however, is a mystery. Was it free on Amazon? Did I get it in one of those itch.io charity bundles? Ghosts? Who knows. CCFWTBT is a platformer where you, as an acrobat called Belle (along with her pet bell called Chime) have to rescue her boyfriend who is kidnapped by an ex-friend. It plays out like a …
What if Vampire Survivors was a chop-chop, dig-dig game? As in, as well as auto-attacking swarms of enemies with increasingly more powerful weaponry, you also plant crops, mine ore and catch fish? Well, Pesticide Not Required answers that question. As with other Survivors-type/Bullet Heaven games, there’s the usual kill things, get XP, go up levels, spend points on mostly random updates, and repeat. Only here, in order to progress, you have to buy seeds at the end of each day …
Un Pas Fragile is a short narrative game about a frog who wants to do ballet. As all frogs do, I expect. It plays out over a few days, where you leave your house, get the bus, go to ballet school, and do some ballet. Of course, other people (er, animals) are not as accepting of your life choices as you’d like, so you get laughed at and bullied to begin with, meaning that you have to do some simple …
This was a quick play after Thank Goodness You’re Here!, and it’s sort of a prototype for what that game ended up being. It’s more abstract, but still very silly. This time, you’re a sort of naked onionman thing who has to find food for a creature in order to progress. There’s not a lot to it, but it was enjoyable enough – and free on Steam! Bargain.
Sometimes, a game comes along which is properly hilarious. Sure, there are funny games, and games with funny events or “player made” hilarity, but it’s rare for a funny game to be this funny. Thank Goodness You’re Here! is what we used to call an arcade adventure game. I suppose, in some ways, it’s the spiritual successor to such British 8-bit computer games as Everyone’s A Wally and Jack the Nipper. You, as a little (although his size randomly changes …
A game with toilets in it? Surely not. And me, here, with enough spare change in my Steam account from selling trading cards to afford to buy it? Serendipity! I went in knowing almost nothing about the game, except that it has toilets in it and you’re trapped in the toilets. And that is pretty much all there is to know. You’ve gone into the toilets of a party and then the door to the gents seems to have vanished …
Presumably to tie in with, or advertise, the Invincible series on Amazon Prime, this part turn based strategy, part visual novel was released for free by Amazon. And it’s pretty good! It tells a similar story to the show, but mainly from the point of view of Atom Eve, with her run-ins with useless foe Killcannon as well as family drama and love life trauma. The visual novel bits allow you to choose various responses in conversations, some of which …
Since I enjoyed the first game, and also had a free copy of the second, of course I was going to play that too. It isn’t actually vastly different to the first one, although you now have two characters you can swap between (you’ll never guess that the other one is a dog), and as well as a largely-similar map to Cat Quest OG there’s a whole dog-populated area north of it. Gameplay is mostly as before, although upgrades to …
I can’t tell you about this game too much because it will spoil it for you. What I can say, it’s a sort of simplified Trials game (you know, that motorbike on a 2D track thing) but also that it isn’t. It’s also not very long, is very free (on Steam), and it’s by Nifflas who you might know from such games as Knytt and Affordable Space Adventure.
My daughter picked this up on the Switch some time ago and loved it (and the sequel) so much she actually preordered Cat Quest III the day it was announced. She had never preordered a game before! I’ve always liked the look of it – 2D sprites on a map in a way that sort of feels a bit like Paper Mario but the game is more like Zelda and the camera angle is like those 2D-HD remakes of old …
I maintain that I am not really a fan of sokoban type puzzle games, and yet somehow, I seem to enjoy them. Perhaps it’s just when there are crate-pushing puzzles in otherwise crate-push-free games that I don’t like? In any case, A Monster’s Expedition was one of the ones I did enjoy. You are a monster, who navigates islands which seem to make up a sort of Museum of Humans, as there are many artefacts (sometimes amusingly mislabelled as to …
Someone recommended this game over on Mastodon and it looked interesting. Then it turned out I already owned it and could play it on my Steam Deck. Result, eh? It’s a match-3 puzzle game, but one that messes with the rules a bit. The idea isn’t just to match-3 (or more), as it matter which icons you match. For example, you only have so many moves, but matching certain symbols gives you more moves. Additionally, there’s a digital creature on …
Rental is (or at least, was at time of writing, who knows what the Terrifying Future holds) a free game on Steam and nothing is more important in gaming than low, low prices. So why the hell not, eh? Perhaps the best way to describe the game, assuming you can’t see the screenshots here, is What if Animal Crossing was Resident Evil on the PS1? Or maybe, Silent Hill: Sylvanian Families. It has the cute animals and the quaint little …
Another game off that SNK 40th Anniversary Collection thing I found Prehistoric Isle on. The game title really doesn’t match anything in the game itself, which is a platform shooter starring Athena (the SNK girl who is in a few of their games) and there aren’t any soldiers, psycho or otherwise. And you know what? I really enjoyed it! It’s quirky, very different to other superficially similar titles from the same era, and Athena sings her theme tune as you …
