One of the great things about the Steam Deck, especially with Heroic set up so it can seamlessly work with my GOG, Epic and Amazon game libraries, is the huge number of free games I manage to accrue and actually play. Super Adventure Hand was a recent one, free on Amazon Gaming, which I’d stumbled over on the Switch eShop as “eeeer, dunno”. Can’t argue with free though, can you. And, I’m glad I didn’t pay full whack for it. …
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 …
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, …
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, …
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 …
This game is sort of one of those escape room games. It’s a lot like Rooms, which I played a while back, but each “room” is like a small scene built around a door that you need to get open in order to access the portal behind it. Each one is themed, and features a lot of smaller puzzles leading up to the main one of unlocking the door. There’s the usual things for this sort of game – pattern …
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.
Jeff Minter tooted about this free game on Steam so I thought I’d have a look. It’s a very simple cow herding arcade game (so probably right up Jeff’s street) with about 20 levels. Some levels have bulls that interfere with your rounding up, some have aliens that try to abduct your cows, as aliens are wont to do, and some have snipers with tranquilisers that put your cows to sleep. It’s not very hard, although getting 3 stars (i.e. …
