You Know What Else is Dangerous? BundleStars – Part Thirty-Seven: Spotlight Bundle 2

The Inner Darkness - A perfectly respectable little puzzle-platformer, with elements of Eversion and Schein, most notably dimension-switching (between the nice world and the horrible one) to avoid obstacles and solve puzzles. The only enemies are spiky things and pits, and the whole game takes about 45 minutes to get through.

One Night Stand - A visual novel in which you wake up in a mysterious woman's apartment naked in her bed, with no recollection of how you got there, and try to bluff your way out. It's as awkward as you'd think. There's something like a dozen endings, each requiring a different approach to the morning, but I didn't find the game compelling enough to get more than two of them.

Spheroids - A puzzle platformer where you can only attack upwards (or downwards, if you’re careful) and need to teleport to various areas and kill the “spheroids” that are invading your nice, square world. I wasn’t enthralled by the action elements—buying the two-shot powerup was necessary to make the combat tolerable.

Pastry Lovers - An orphan discovers her skills as a pastry chef and finds love in this visual novel / pseudo raising sim. Not interested.

KickBeat Steam Edition - This is a rhythm fighting game, which is a cool concept and seems like a half-decent execution, it just doesn’t really interest me. There’s even a feature to input your own music and make custom stages, but that doesn’t unlock unless your beat a few stages first, and it was beyond my interest (and capabilities).

Bullshot - A mouse and keyboard side-scrolling shoot-em-up, starring an alien badass minotaur. Run around shooting all the things with a variety of weapons, presumably with secrets to find in the incredibly repetitive huge-ass alien buildings.

TIMEframe - More of an art exploration than much of a game—in first-person view, wander the vast landscape of a domed, desolate region that is frozen in time, waiting to be hit by a comet. There are artifacts to find, each accompanied by a text box full of pretentiousness. It’s pretty, but there’s too little material and it’s too disjointed to justify the sprawling landscape.

Masky - Though it's dressed up with a wacky dance-and-masks theme and various weird backgrounds and status effects, this is really just a super-simple balancing game. Shift left and right to attach dancers to your line without everyone falling over. Do that for as long as you can and you can unlock new skins and do the exact same thing some more.

UTOPIA 9 - A Volatile Vacation Top-down, run-and-gun touristing (and mutating) on an alien world. Roguelike elements—there’s definitely some randomization, you’re guessing how to do things, and death is permanent. Cute concept, but a recipe for a game I don’t enjoy playing.

1931: Scheherazade at the Library of Pergamum - A jazz age visual novel of world travel and skill challenges. The plot doesn’t particularly interest me and the mechanics are overly-convoluted.

Overall: The Inner Darkness was perfectly respectable; most of the others were cute concepts but not game styles I had a strong interest in playing a lot of.

You Know What Else is Dangerous? BundleStars – Part Thirty-Eight: Indie Heroes 2 Bundle

The Silent Age - A surprisingly delightful sci-fi puzzle adventure game, set during the cold war and starring a hapless janitor named Joe. You end up with a time machine, but it’s set to two specific time periods, so in practice all the puzzles are bouncing between the two, gathering items (like a good kleptomaniac hero) and using them to progress. You never have to combine objects, and there aren’t any fish-broom-rope moon logic puzzles. The ending twist is very well-foreshadowed (I think I figured it out around the halfway point), but it was still fun to see how we got there.

Super Motherload - Obviously intended for co-op multiplayer, this is a digging/collecting game in which you’re constantly carefully maneuvering back to the surface (because hitting tunnel walls at speed will blow up your ship) to drop off minerals, refuel and repair. It seems like there’s a plot and things to discover, but I found the basic gameplay rather repetitive. Maybe it’s better with a team?

TransPlan - A clever little puzzle game with a “sketches on drafting paper” aesthetic. You need to get a block into a specific space, within the rules of dropping and pinning existing materials. It’s nothing amazing, but there’s some clever stuff and the difficulty curve / tutorial levels are very well done.

Velocibox - An unpleasantly fast runner game without any real learning curve—i.e., I played a dozen games that lasted less than ten second each because this starts at full speed and a single touch of anything kills you. I am not here for that nonsense.

QbQbQb - A relatively simple puzzle game: Rotate the planet to catch the falling blocks, and match the colors to make them disappear. Simple and elegant concept, but not enough to hold my interest.

Retro/Grade - A rhythm game disguised as a space shooter. You’ve just defeated the alien armada, but now you need to do it all in reverse to keep the space/time continuum intact. So you need to fly backwards, dodging enemy fire that comes up behind you, and “catching” the lasers you shot in the first place. Your health meter is instead the health of the space/time continuum.

Megabyte Punch - A side-scrolling platformer with some Metroidvania elements, but broken up into distinct levels. The graphical scheme reminds me a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog, though it’s hard to articulate exactly how. I’m not sure why, but it just didn’t grab me.

Heroes of Legionwood - An RPGMaker game currently in three “chapters”. In a world slowly dying as the “darkness” spreads across it, the island with humankind's last stragglers finds a source of hope. A group of adventures sets out to retrieve the shards of lore and try to restore the Weave that sustains life in their world. Passable class and skill system. Speed really matters in terms of which skills you upgrade, because taking two turns to an enemy's one can break a battle. They tried to implement a lot of things: A day/night cycle (with fatigue concerns), varied responses in conversations that slightly alter the story, and a lot of variety in story/system interaction options. Three difficulty levels, which I always approve of. I got distracted by other RPGMaker games, but may revisit this at some point.

Overall: There were a couple of gems in here. The Silent Age was a lot of fun. TransPlan and Retro/Grade were decent concepts for an hour or two. Heroes of Legionwood may get revisited.