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chuckroBrave Hero Yuusha EX (PC, Classic RPG) – A Dragon Quest pastiche/homage where the story gets jumbled by a mysterious puppetmaster and the hero ends up joining with the demon lord and the princess to try to piece their world back together. Also a story-within-a-story, as there are interquel chapters featuring a young boy reading a book about Yuusha and wanting to be like him. This ended up as the big winner of this batch; the full game runs about 6 hours and it’s a well-done RPGMaker creation.
Minit (PC, Zelda-like) – Made to be played in small increments, you’ve picked up a cursed sword that kills you every 60 seconds, so you need to find and solve puzzles very quickly. Items you collect and events you trigger stay when you die, and you can change your respawn point, so dying mostly serves to break your momentum over and over.
Hellenica (PC, Tactical RPG) – Ancient Greek steampunk starring a werebear blessed by Artemis and a goofy steampunk inventor, out to stop whatever darkness threatens Olympus. There’s a branching-path story and, and each battle has a puzzle element, because XP only comes from in-battle tasks and can only be spent unlocking new skills.
Vision Soft Reset (PC, Metroidvania) – As an Oracle, you can briefly rewind time and you can see bosses’ attacks in shadow before they happen. (Otherwise, it plays basically like Metroid.) This is an extraordinarily clever game, but I’m not actually very good at it. (The ability to rewind is the excuse to make it unforgiving, but my reflexes aren’t sufficient to make good use of the limited rewinding.)
WitchWay (PC, Puzzle Platformer) – Side-scrolling block-puzzle action featuring a witch who has fallen into a pit, and can use her wand to control blocks to navigate out. (The gimmick being that you can REALLY control the blocks—they can jump!)
Visual Out (PC, Metroidvania) – Trippy inside-a-computer experience with weird abstracted obstacles and little useful guidance on what to do. (Apparently a lot of the puzzles involve tethering and pulling things.) I found it clunky and pretentious.
VIDEOGOAME (PC, Action/Puzzle) – A ¾ view bare-bones game in which your Game Boy pixel-style protagonist must gather keys, avoid lava and dodge monsters to rescue his true love. I wouldn’t call it a “Zelda-like” because you can’t attack, have no inventory besides keys, and you’re a one-hit wonder who might die hundreds of times in a run. (I died 200+ times getting two heart pieces in “Journey” mode, couldn’t open any remaining doors, and called it a day.)
Wave Crash (PC, Casual/Fighting) – A mash-up of a match-3 game and a fighting game, you make matches and send them flying at your enemies. Each hit moves the “line”, which decreases the playing space for the person who got hit and creates momentum in the fight. It’s a very clever setup. Unfortunately, that’s all there really is at the moment. Now, if they built an rpg where the battles were games of this, we might be on to something big.
Spacebeef (PC, Arena Shooter) – A frenetic game of four-player bouncing around shooting at each other while asteroids wander by. No tutorial, no instructions of what keys do, and it’s too frenetic to actually tell what’s going on. Nope!
Social Justice Warriors (PC, Simulation) – A turn-based simulation about arguing with assholes on the internet, trying to balance your attacks to keep your patience and reputation up while wearing down your opponent. I applaud their ingenuity creating this, but it’s missing a vital aspect that makes video games fun: Escapism. I can’t imagine anyone having fun pretending to do one of the most frustrating activities humanity has ever invented, which they could also do for real, for free, on the very same device.
A Short Hike (PC, Adventure/Exploration) - The adventures of Professor Sidequest McSidequest, though that’s not a bad thing. You’re a small penguin-like bird who is convinced to take “a short hike” up the local mountain. Taking said hike is only mildly complicated (climbing, jumping and flapping are involved), but there are lots of folks along the way who could use your help, and plenty of hidden tools, tricks and passages to find. Relatively short, even if you’re thorough, but very cute.
Honor Cry: Aftermath (PC, Classic RPG) - An RPGMaker game which, despite the graphics being very pretty, feels badly thrown-together and unplaytested. Enemies of wildly varying power levels drop large assortments of random weapons as you crawl along small screens full of random encounters. I successfully completed the first “quest”, allowing me to navigate to the fourth screen, at which point the obvious quest-giver wouldn’t talk to me and there was nowhere else to go. The dialogue was giant blocks of text, accompanied by stiff animation in the best of circumstances, and not terribly well written. Not worth any more of my time!
Long Gone Days (PC, Classic RPG) – Speaking of pretty RPGMaker games: This one also has very nice graphics, but also opens with a decent cinematic prologue and a sniping minigame before you even try the regular combat system. It’s in Early Access (v0.6, apparently something like 2/3rds of the game), but has potential. If I remember, whenever they release the final version of the game I might go back to try it in earnest.
Mable and the Wood (PC, Puzzle Platformer) – Strange monks summon “the bringer of the dawn”, who appears in the form of a small girl with a sword too large to lift. But she can transform into a fairy, and using that power, she can defeat monsters of the wood and take their powers to use as well. Innovative control scheme and a lot of hookshot-like action.
OneShot (PC, Puzzle Adventure) – For the list of “neat things you can do with RPGMaker,” this involves a cat named Niko waking up in a strange dark world and being tasked to restore their sun. Among the gimmicks are a set of direct references to you, the player; puzzles that you need to find additional files the game created on your computer to solve; and a “permanent” choice of ending, as the game doesn’t allow you to replay it. I give them a lot of credit for creative use of the medium, but on the other hand, it’s an obtuse “moon logic” sort of game, and it’s very dark, which can mean a lot of wandering around trying to figure out what you’re supposed to interact with.
Thou Shalt Be Brave (PC, Casual RPG) – A so-call “mini-rpg” with a 64x64 resolution (which is very hard to read the words on) as an apparently selling point. Bare-bones event-based exploration and one-on-one battles without many combat options. I kinda see what they were going for, but it’s not actually fun.
MiniFlake (PC, Roguelike) – Along the same lines, this is a “1bit rpg”, featuring procedurally generated corridors done in black-and-white, with random rooms full of monsters and assorted treasures (and a single NPC who only says one thing). I give them credit for making everything up-front and easily mod-able, but that seems to be an attempt to compensate for the fact there’s virtually nothing in the actual game. (My starting character could one-hit every enemy and never seemed to take damage; there’s nothing to do with the various items and there are no goals.)
The Guilt and the Shadow wouldn’t run.
Polymute (PC, Puzzle Adventure) – A monochrome (amusingly) adventure of a wizard who can transform into anything he encounters and must use those new forms to solve puzzles. Like many games of this genre, I found it a bit obtuse. Also, while the idea was solid, the need to pick a form and then transform as a separate action got old very quickly.
Parallax (PC, Action/Puzzle) – A 3D, first-person, monochrome puzzle game mildly reminiscent of Portal, as there are round portals that swap you from the white-on-black world to the black-on-white world where the platforms are different; and the puzzles build on that. It’s simple, it’s decent, it’s not my thing.
Overall: For me, Brave Hero Yuusha EX and A Short Hike stand out in this set.
Minit (PC, Zelda-like) – Made to be played in small increments, you’ve picked up a cursed sword that kills you every 60 seconds, so you need to find and solve puzzles very quickly. Items you collect and events you trigger stay when you die, and you can change your respawn point, so dying mostly serves to break your momentum over and over.
Hellenica (PC, Tactical RPG) – Ancient Greek steampunk starring a werebear blessed by Artemis and a goofy steampunk inventor, out to stop whatever darkness threatens Olympus. There’s a branching-path story and, and each battle has a puzzle element, because XP only comes from in-battle tasks and can only be spent unlocking new skills.
Vision Soft Reset (PC, Metroidvania) – As an Oracle, you can briefly rewind time and you can see bosses’ attacks in shadow before they happen. (Otherwise, it plays basically like Metroid.) This is an extraordinarily clever game, but I’m not actually very good at it. (The ability to rewind is the excuse to make it unforgiving, but my reflexes aren’t sufficient to make good use of the limited rewinding.)
WitchWay (PC, Puzzle Platformer) – Side-scrolling block-puzzle action featuring a witch who has fallen into a pit, and can use her wand to control blocks to navigate out. (The gimmick being that you can REALLY control the blocks—they can jump!)
Visual Out (PC, Metroidvania) – Trippy inside-a-computer experience with weird abstracted obstacles and little useful guidance on what to do. (Apparently a lot of the puzzles involve tethering and pulling things.) I found it clunky and pretentious.
VIDEOGOAME (PC, Action/Puzzle) – A ¾ view bare-bones game in which your Game Boy pixel-style protagonist must gather keys, avoid lava and dodge monsters to rescue his true love. I wouldn’t call it a “Zelda-like” because you can’t attack, have no inventory besides keys, and you’re a one-hit wonder who might die hundreds of times in a run. (I died 200+ times getting two heart pieces in “Journey” mode, couldn’t open any remaining doors, and called it a day.)
Wave Crash (PC, Casual/Fighting) – A mash-up of a match-3 game and a fighting game, you make matches and send them flying at your enemies. Each hit moves the “line”, which decreases the playing space for the person who got hit and creates momentum in the fight. It’s a very clever setup. Unfortunately, that’s all there really is at the moment. Now, if they built an rpg where the battles were games of this, we might be on to something big.
Spacebeef (PC, Arena Shooter) – A frenetic game of four-player bouncing around shooting at each other while asteroids wander by. No tutorial, no instructions of what keys do, and it’s too frenetic to actually tell what’s going on. Nope!
Social Justice Warriors (PC, Simulation) – A turn-based simulation about arguing with assholes on the internet, trying to balance your attacks to keep your patience and reputation up while wearing down your opponent. I applaud their ingenuity creating this, but it’s missing a vital aspect that makes video games fun: Escapism. I can’t imagine anyone having fun pretending to do one of the most frustrating activities humanity has ever invented, which they could also do for real, for free, on the very same device.
A Short Hike (PC, Adventure/Exploration) - The adventures of Professor Sidequest McSidequest, though that’s not a bad thing. You’re a small penguin-like bird who is convinced to take “a short hike” up the local mountain. Taking said hike is only mildly complicated (climbing, jumping and flapping are involved), but there are lots of folks along the way who could use your help, and plenty of hidden tools, tricks and passages to find. Relatively short, even if you’re thorough, but very cute.
Honor Cry: Aftermath (PC, Classic RPG) - An RPGMaker game which, despite the graphics being very pretty, feels badly thrown-together and unplaytested. Enemies of wildly varying power levels drop large assortments of random weapons as you crawl along small screens full of random encounters. I successfully completed the first “quest”, allowing me to navigate to the fourth screen, at which point the obvious quest-giver wouldn’t talk to me and there was nowhere else to go. The dialogue was giant blocks of text, accompanied by stiff animation in the best of circumstances, and not terribly well written. Not worth any more of my time!
Long Gone Days (PC, Classic RPG) – Speaking of pretty RPGMaker games: This one also has very nice graphics, but also opens with a decent cinematic prologue and a sniping minigame before you even try the regular combat system. It’s in Early Access (v0.6, apparently something like 2/3rds of the game), but has potential. If I remember, whenever they release the final version of the game I might go back to try it in earnest.
Mable and the Wood (PC, Puzzle Platformer) – Strange monks summon “the bringer of the dawn”, who appears in the form of a small girl with a sword too large to lift. But she can transform into a fairy, and using that power, she can defeat monsters of the wood and take their powers to use as well. Innovative control scheme and a lot of hookshot-like action.
OneShot (PC, Puzzle Adventure) – For the list of “neat things you can do with RPGMaker,” this involves a cat named Niko waking up in a strange dark world and being tasked to restore their sun. Among the gimmicks are a set of direct references to you, the player; puzzles that you need to find additional files the game created on your computer to solve; and a “permanent” choice of ending, as the game doesn’t allow you to replay it. I give them a lot of credit for creative use of the medium, but on the other hand, it’s an obtuse “moon logic” sort of game, and it’s very dark, which can mean a lot of wandering around trying to figure out what you’re supposed to interact with.
Thou Shalt Be Brave (PC, Casual RPG) – A so-call “mini-rpg” with a 64x64 resolution (which is very hard to read the words on) as an apparently selling point. Bare-bones event-based exploration and one-on-one battles without many combat options. I kinda see what they were going for, but it’s not actually fun.
MiniFlake (PC, Roguelike) – Along the same lines, this is a “1bit rpg”, featuring procedurally generated corridors done in black-and-white, with random rooms full of monsters and assorted treasures (and a single NPC who only says one thing). I give them credit for making everything up-front and easily mod-able, but that seems to be an attempt to compensate for the fact there’s virtually nothing in the actual game. (My starting character could one-hit every enemy and never seemed to take damage; there’s nothing to do with the various items and there are no goals.)
The Guilt and the Shadow wouldn’t run.
Polymute (PC, Puzzle Adventure) – A monochrome (amusingly) adventure of a wizard who can transform into anything he encounters and must use those new forms to solve puzzles. Like many games of this genre, I found it a bit obtuse. Also, while the idea was solid, the need to pick a form and then transform as a separate action got old very quickly.
Parallax (PC, Action/Puzzle) – A 3D, first-person, monochrome puzzle game mildly reminiscent of Portal, as there are round portals that swap you from the white-on-black world to the black-on-white world where the platforms are different; and the puzzles build on that. It’s simple, it’s decent, it’s not my thing.
Overall: For me, Brave Hero Yuusha EX and A Short Hike stand out in this set.
