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chuckroFirst, the games I’d actually recommend / I actually enjoyed:
The Dweller - This is a delightful little puzzle game in which you play an unspeakable horror inhabiting ancient ruins, and you need to sneak through walls and move boulders to devour or crush the various tomb-defiling scientists in each area. The plot is a little rough around the edges but it’s something a little different and I had fun with it.
Samantha Swift and the Hidden Roses of Athena - A point-and-click hidden object game, with a cartoony style and goofy plot about finding mysterious magical artifacts in ancient ruins. But nothing seems unfair, the puzzles are generally fun, and it doesn’t outstay its welcome. A perfectly good example of the genre.
Duke of Alpha Centauri - A relatively straightforward bullet-hell shoot-em-up that nonetheless attracted my attention. You can upgrade your ship with experience, which means eventually being able to grind past problems. On easy mode, I found it downright playable! I was able to complete every level in a few tries and generally enjoyed the experience.
Zzzz-Zzzz-Zzzz – A looped-together series of dreamy worlds with hidden exits and challenges. Frustrating at first when you don’t know what you’re doing, but it gets interesting trying to find all the secrets. (I ended up needing a guide.) A few of the platforming challenges are tricky, but the real challenge comes from finding the weird tricks that let you progress to new areas (and unlock them in the main map) so that you can find the branches off of those areas.
Luxor Evolved - The Luxor series are casual crosses between Centipede and a Snood-style match-3 game. This is the techno / neon version of the game. It has the repetitiveness problem of other games in the series, but it’s entertaining and I made it through a full play-through of this one.
Luxor: Quest for the Afterlife – This version of Luxor adds a plot and a map screen; you’re traveling between areas to find lost artifacts and stolen canoptic jars so that long-dead Egyptian royalty can move on to the afterlife. It’s otherwise the same gameplay as the rest of the series, so worth it if you explicitly enjoy that. (Luxor: Amun Rising HD was also in this bundle, but it’s more bare-bones than either of these.)
Then, the rest of the choices:
AuroraRL - Badly translated from Russian, this is a space sim / resource management game where you explore planets, gather data and fight the local wildlife. The graphics are 80s-level and much of the game is dependent on text, which as noted, will tell you that “The humanity needs these recourses to the survival.”
Timberman - An extremely simple tapper / casual game in which you press left or right to cut a tree from that side, trying to chop as fast as you can without dropping a branch on your head. It has a bunch of achievements and a zillion characters to unlock by playing a lot.
Crystal City - A visual novel for people who don’t care about coherent plot or likable characters, but who appreciate looking at anime-style boobs. That’s really all it has going, as I barely made it five minutes in before I wanted to murder the main character. Mild credit for having an escape-the-room (i.e. actual gameplay) sequence after the prologue, but that’s the only actual gameplay in this wank-fantasy story.
The Braves & Bows - A heavily pixelated metroidvania with limited, weak weapons and strong foes. You’re a hobbit archer in a haunted castle and everything can easily kill you, and killing it first isn’t often an option. No levels or XP, as far as I can tell, which means you can’t grind past that problem, either. Not interested.
Reptilians Must Die! - A horribly-translated Putin-parody must defend Earth from invading aliens. The actual gameplay is lousy tapper/shooter nonsense; and I can only hope that the joke makes more sense in Russian.
Spin Rush - Spin the cube to match the falling colors, complicated by the fact that the cube sometimes turns into a hexagon, sometimes the colored dot will be red but say “blue” on it, sometimes the dot will change colors mid-fall, and you don’t seem to be able to rotate the cube fast enough to actually make a full rotation if the necessary color is on the opposite side, so you just randomly lose.
Hungry Flame - A side-scrolling game that’s a little bit shooting, a lot dodging, and at least somewhat a physics simulation. As a little blue light, you try to dodge past lasers and black holes and shoot the red balls in order to reach the end of each of the 50 stages. It’s somewhat a puzzle game, but very much a reflex-dependent one.
Iron Impact - Arcade-style top-down tank shooter. Moderately fun, very derivative. Amusing in that the tank shells from enemies move so slowly that dodging them (in your tank) is a perfectly reasonable tactic.
Overcast - Walden and the Werewolf - A horror exploration game that transitions to being a first-person shooter in the later chapters (when, amongst other things, you need to fight the titular werewolf). I found it rather obtuse (the mechanics for interacting with objects are rough) and the plot was rather one dimensional—the cast-out loner finds the town in flames, gets revenge on werewolves.
SharpShooter3D - A first-person beat-em-up apparently made with the Doom engine, it has loosely-textured cartoony graphics and giant splashes of blood everywhere. It opens with you in a truck stop bathroom, having just beaten someone to death with a toilet seat. You can then steal a motorcycle to drive into the city and get into a gang fight. Where you’ll die very quickly, even on Easy. I think that’s everything you need to know, here.
Cube Runner - A runner game starring a cube (...yeah) with controls so unresponsive that the tutorial levels were uncompleteable. On the plus side, I unlocked a host of achievements for dying 20 times while attempting to jump twice in a row. Cybercube appears to be a slightly better version of Cube Runner--still janky, but with more variety in the puzzles and the ability to get through the first level. Nothing exciting, but it’s playable.
Neon Prism - Maneuver a ball through mazes, avoiding enemies and using short teleport jumps. Only with bad controls that were clearly inspired by Asteroids for the Atari 2600.
Neon Space - Very similar, still very simple, slightly less psychedelic, and with a much better “home in on the mouse pointer” control scheme for getting the ball through the maze. Does the sequel improve on this?
Neon Space 2 - Only slightly—the control scheme is manageable and the graphics are better, but it’s still ultimately the same “dodge through the maze” gameplay.
Slash It - About as simple as a game can be; you need to press the button when the moving shapes line up, and you gain levels from doing it which unlock achievements and more game modes. Slash It 2 is a mildly prettier version of the same. Neither is particularly engrossing.
Upside Down - A half-decent puzzle-platformer where the gimmick is that you can’t jump, you can only reverse gravity (and you can only do that while standing on a solid surface—you can’t juggle yourself across things). They do some clever things with it, including a lot of “hit the switch to disable the barrier,” but it gets repetitive and increasingly dependent on pixel-perfect movement, which the game isn’t quite sensitive enough for. Also, the hitbox of most things is bigger than you expect, and one hit is always death.
Fly and Destroy - You’re a random little energy ball, trying to collect some other energy balls while avoiding yet a different set of energy balls and also giant rocks. I think, perhaps, this is a little too abstracted for its own good.
ShipLord disappointed me because I thought it was going to be a shooter, but it turns out to be a less-abstracted version of Fly and Destroy; as now you’re in a ship gathering “quasar” energy and dodging asteroids. It’s much more playable, if you like the side-scrolling dodge-em-up gameplay to begin with.
Survive in Space – A side-scrolling space shooter with an elaborately animated and voiced plot about a guy who gets really angry that the universe was conquered, so he accepts help from a dark spirit that makes him angrier. (I’m sure that’ll go well.) It’s only mediocre as a shooter game; the controls are middling and the enemies are dumb but have a lot of health.
Charlie's Adventure - A side-scrolling platformer in which you shoot, dash and ground-pound zombies and collect stars. It’s actually not that bad as a game (though the “enraged” mode makes little sense, gameplay-wise), but the story is amazingly stupid to the point that it actually hurts the rest of the experience.
Dispatcher - First-person horror exploration / survival. Dark, janky, badly-documented and full of things that will kill you. Nope!
Mr. Dubstep - Clunky, neon-colored runner with memorization puzzle stages (that is, you need to know the obstacles are coming because the controls aren’t responsive enough for you to see things and also avoid them). I unlocked a quarter of the achievements in less than ten minutes because many of them involve dying frequently.
Surfingers - Simple runner where you move waves up and down to surf. Tougher than you’d think it should be, though it feels fair. Briefly fun.
Goodbye My King - First-person…puzzle? Stealth? It’s unclear. A king is dethroned by a scheming chancellor and you need to wander around doing things, except if you run into said chancellor, he’ll slap you and send you back outside. Just for good measure, the controls and instructions are lousy.
Cubium Dreams - Pretentious, surrealist, poorly-explained and poorly-executed first-person “puzzle” nonsense.
Asteroid Bounty Hunter – Exactly what it says, you’re a hunter who shoots asteroids and collects bounties. I’m going to guess that they made up the plot to go with the game they could make, and honestly, it’s not great. It’s a side-scrolling shooter that feels like a more primitive version of some of the others in this bundle.
Particula - A weird and unfinished-feeling tower defense game where you need to put out elemental crystals to stop bad thoughts from reaching a floating head. The controls are lousy, you can’t speed up the waves, it’s unclear if you can actually upgrade the gems and there doesn’t seem to be a penalty to letting things get through (at least in the first round, before I figured out what kind of game it was). This is pretty terrible. The same people apparently made Red Risk, an arena-based zombie fighting game with a terrible control scheme and limited ability to attack. Apparently they also made Overcast, so they’re three for three with lousy games with bad controls.
OutDrive - Your girlfriend’s heart is hooked to the car’s engine! You need to keep driving (and not overheat the car) to keep her alive! There’s no other end point or goal! And it looks hella 80s!
Detective Noir is a puzzle adventure game with terrible art, bad design, unpleasant interface and lousy writing. I didn’t even bother booting up Casino Noir afterwards.
Marco Polo is an “educational” CD-ROM game that I’m sure some people have nostalgia value for, but this was the first I’ve ever seen it.
Zombillie - A snakes/millipede style of game where you need to collect all the foods without running into yourself in the maze. Except you’re a zombie millipede eating bloody hearts, of course. Nothing wrong with it, just didn’t grab me.
Crazy Oafish Ultra Blocks: Big Sale - This is an action shopping game with an amusing concept (you need to get everything on your shopping list in a busy mall, which will inevitably lead to bloodshed), but the play control is lousy, the camera angles are weird, and the visuals, while distinct, make it hard to tell what you’re looking at in most stores.
Bloody Boobs is a 3D stealth horror game in which you play a bikini-clad buxom woman who’s trying to escape a labyrinth full of monsters that want to dismember her. I just skipped this one outright. I also skipped Watch This!, a first-person single player platformer with horror elements, which promises to be slightly less exploitative but still isn’t my thing.
LUXOR: Mah Jong is a mahjong game. I don’t want to play mahjong.
I already had Sparkle 3 Genesis, Cat on a Diet, Stigmat and Invasion from previous bundles.
Overall: This was amazingly good value for a dollar, despite much of it being crap. I spent more than a dozen hours on the games I actually enjoyed and there was some amusement value from the particularly terrible ones.
The Dweller - This is a delightful little puzzle game in which you play an unspeakable horror inhabiting ancient ruins, and you need to sneak through walls and move boulders to devour or crush the various tomb-defiling scientists in each area. The plot is a little rough around the edges but it’s something a little different and I had fun with it.
Samantha Swift and the Hidden Roses of Athena - A point-and-click hidden object game, with a cartoony style and goofy plot about finding mysterious magical artifacts in ancient ruins. But nothing seems unfair, the puzzles are generally fun, and it doesn’t outstay its welcome. A perfectly good example of the genre.
Duke of Alpha Centauri - A relatively straightforward bullet-hell shoot-em-up that nonetheless attracted my attention. You can upgrade your ship with experience, which means eventually being able to grind past problems. On easy mode, I found it downright playable! I was able to complete every level in a few tries and generally enjoyed the experience.
Zzzz-Zzzz-Zzzz – A looped-together series of dreamy worlds with hidden exits and challenges. Frustrating at first when you don’t know what you’re doing, but it gets interesting trying to find all the secrets. (I ended up needing a guide.) A few of the platforming challenges are tricky, but the real challenge comes from finding the weird tricks that let you progress to new areas (and unlock them in the main map) so that you can find the branches off of those areas.
Luxor Evolved - The Luxor series are casual crosses between Centipede and a Snood-style match-3 game. This is the techno / neon version of the game. It has the repetitiveness problem of other games in the series, but it’s entertaining and I made it through a full play-through of this one.
Luxor: Quest for the Afterlife – This version of Luxor adds a plot and a map screen; you’re traveling between areas to find lost artifacts and stolen canoptic jars so that long-dead Egyptian royalty can move on to the afterlife. It’s otherwise the same gameplay as the rest of the series, so worth it if you explicitly enjoy that. (Luxor: Amun Rising HD was also in this bundle, but it’s more bare-bones than either of these.)
Then, the rest of the choices:
AuroraRL - Badly translated from Russian, this is a space sim / resource management game where you explore planets, gather data and fight the local wildlife. The graphics are 80s-level and much of the game is dependent on text, which as noted, will tell you that “The humanity needs these recourses to the survival.”
Timberman - An extremely simple tapper / casual game in which you press left or right to cut a tree from that side, trying to chop as fast as you can without dropping a branch on your head. It has a bunch of achievements and a zillion characters to unlock by playing a lot.
Crystal City - A visual novel for people who don’t care about coherent plot or likable characters, but who appreciate looking at anime-style boobs. That’s really all it has going, as I barely made it five minutes in before I wanted to murder the main character. Mild credit for having an escape-the-room (i.e. actual gameplay) sequence after the prologue, but that’s the only actual gameplay in this wank-fantasy story.
The Braves & Bows - A heavily pixelated metroidvania with limited, weak weapons and strong foes. You’re a hobbit archer in a haunted castle and everything can easily kill you, and killing it first isn’t often an option. No levels or XP, as far as I can tell, which means you can’t grind past that problem, either. Not interested.
Reptilians Must Die! - A horribly-translated Putin-parody must defend Earth from invading aliens. The actual gameplay is lousy tapper/shooter nonsense; and I can only hope that the joke makes more sense in Russian.
Spin Rush - Spin the cube to match the falling colors, complicated by the fact that the cube sometimes turns into a hexagon, sometimes the colored dot will be red but say “blue” on it, sometimes the dot will change colors mid-fall, and you don’t seem to be able to rotate the cube fast enough to actually make a full rotation if the necessary color is on the opposite side, so you just randomly lose.
Hungry Flame - A side-scrolling game that’s a little bit shooting, a lot dodging, and at least somewhat a physics simulation. As a little blue light, you try to dodge past lasers and black holes and shoot the red balls in order to reach the end of each of the 50 stages. It’s somewhat a puzzle game, but very much a reflex-dependent one.
Iron Impact - Arcade-style top-down tank shooter. Moderately fun, very derivative. Amusing in that the tank shells from enemies move so slowly that dodging them (in your tank) is a perfectly reasonable tactic.
Overcast - Walden and the Werewolf - A horror exploration game that transitions to being a first-person shooter in the later chapters (when, amongst other things, you need to fight the titular werewolf). I found it rather obtuse (the mechanics for interacting with objects are rough) and the plot was rather one dimensional—the cast-out loner finds the town in flames, gets revenge on werewolves.
SharpShooter3D - A first-person beat-em-up apparently made with the Doom engine, it has loosely-textured cartoony graphics and giant splashes of blood everywhere. It opens with you in a truck stop bathroom, having just beaten someone to death with a toilet seat. You can then steal a motorcycle to drive into the city and get into a gang fight. Where you’ll die very quickly, even on Easy. I think that’s everything you need to know, here.
Cube Runner - A runner game starring a cube (...yeah) with controls so unresponsive that the tutorial levels were uncompleteable. On the plus side, I unlocked a host of achievements for dying 20 times while attempting to jump twice in a row. Cybercube appears to be a slightly better version of Cube Runner--still janky, but with more variety in the puzzles and the ability to get through the first level. Nothing exciting, but it’s playable.
Neon Prism - Maneuver a ball through mazes, avoiding enemies and using short teleport jumps. Only with bad controls that were clearly inspired by Asteroids for the Atari 2600.
Neon Space - Very similar, still very simple, slightly less psychedelic, and with a much better “home in on the mouse pointer” control scheme for getting the ball through the maze. Does the sequel improve on this?
Neon Space 2 - Only slightly—the control scheme is manageable and the graphics are better, but it’s still ultimately the same “dodge through the maze” gameplay.
Slash It - About as simple as a game can be; you need to press the button when the moving shapes line up, and you gain levels from doing it which unlock achievements and more game modes. Slash It 2 is a mildly prettier version of the same. Neither is particularly engrossing.
Upside Down - A half-decent puzzle-platformer where the gimmick is that you can’t jump, you can only reverse gravity (and you can only do that while standing on a solid surface—you can’t juggle yourself across things). They do some clever things with it, including a lot of “hit the switch to disable the barrier,” but it gets repetitive and increasingly dependent on pixel-perfect movement, which the game isn’t quite sensitive enough for. Also, the hitbox of most things is bigger than you expect, and one hit is always death.
Fly and Destroy - You’re a random little energy ball, trying to collect some other energy balls while avoiding yet a different set of energy balls and also giant rocks. I think, perhaps, this is a little too abstracted for its own good.
ShipLord disappointed me because I thought it was going to be a shooter, but it turns out to be a less-abstracted version of Fly and Destroy; as now you’re in a ship gathering “quasar” energy and dodging asteroids. It’s much more playable, if you like the side-scrolling dodge-em-up gameplay to begin with.
Survive in Space – A side-scrolling space shooter with an elaborately animated and voiced plot about a guy who gets really angry that the universe was conquered, so he accepts help from a dark spirit that makes him angrier. (I’m sure that’ll go well.) It’s only mediocre as a shooter game; the controls are middling and the enemies are dumb but have a lot of health.
Charlie's Adventure - A side-scrolling platformer in which you shoot, dash and ground-pound zombies and collect stars. It’s actually not that bad as a game (though the “enraged” mode makes little sense, gameplay-wise), but the story is amazingly stupid to the point that it actually hurts the rest of the experience.
Dispatcher - First-person horror exploration / survival. Dark, janky, badly-documented and full of things that will kill you. Nope!
Mr. Dubstep - Clunky, neon-colored runner with memorization puzzle stages (that is, you need to know the obstacles are coming because the controls aren’t responsive enough for you to see things and also avoid them). I unlocked a quarter of the achievements in less than ten minutes because many of them involve dying frequently.
Surfingers - Simple runner where you move waves up and down to surf. Tougher than you’d think it should be, though it feels fair. Briefly fun.
Goodbye My King - First-person…puzzle? Stealth? It’s unclear. A king is dethroned by a scheming chancellor and you need to wander around doing things, except if you run into said chancellor, he’ll slap you and send you back outside. Just for good measure, the controls and instructions are lousy.
Cubium Dreams - Pretentious, surrealist, poorly-explained and poorly-executed first-person “puzzle” nonsense.
Asteroid Bounty Hunter – Exactly what it says, you’re a hunter who shoots asteroids and collects bounties. I’m going to guess that they made up the plot to go with the game they could make, and honestly, it’s not great. It’s a side-scrolling shooter that feels like a more primitive version of some of the others in this bundle.
Particula - A weird and unfinished-feeling tower defense game where you need to put out elemental crystals to stop bad thoughts from reaching a floating head. The controls are lousy, you can’t speed up the waves, it’s unclear if you can actually upgrade the gems and there doesn’t seem to be a penalty to letting things get through (at least in the first round, before I figured out what kind of game it was). This is pretty terrible. The same people apparently made Red Risk, an arena-based zombie fighting game with a terrible control scheme and limited ability to attack. Apparently they also made Overcast, so they’re three for three with lousy games with bad controls.
OutDrive - Your girlfriend’s heart is hooked to the car’s engine! You need to keep driving (and not overheat the car) to keep her alive! There’s no other end point or goal! And it looks hella 80s!
Detective Noir is a puzzle adventure game with terrible art, bad design, unpleasant interface and lousy writing. I didn’t even bother booting up Casino Noir afterwards.
Marco Polo is an “educational” CD-ROM game that I’m sure some people have nostalgia value for, but this was the first I’ve ever seen it.
Zombillie - A snakes/millipede style of game where you need to collect all the foods without running into yourself in the maze. Except you’re a zombie millipede eating bloody hearts, of course. Nothing wrong with it, just didn’t grab me.
Crazy Oafish Ultra Blocks: Big Sale - This is an action shopping game with an amusing concept (you need to get everything on your shopping list in a busy mall, which will inevitably lead to bloodshed), but the play control is lousy, the camera angles are weird, and the visuals, while distinct, make it hard to tell what you’re looking at in most stores.
Bloody Boobs is a 3D stealth horror game in which you play a bikini-clad buxom woman who’s trying to escape a labyrinth full of monsters that want to dismember her. I just skipped this one outright. I also skipped Watch This!, a first-person single player platformer with horror elements, which promises to be slightly less exploitative but still isn’t my thing.
LUXOR: Mah Jong is a mahjong game. I don’t want to play mahjong.
I already had Sparkle 3 Genesis, Cat on a Diet, Stigmat and Invasion from previous bundles.
Overall: This was amazingly good value for a dollar, despite much of it being crap. I spent more than a dozen hours on the games I actually enjoyed and there was some amusement value from the particularly terrible ones.
