Author: Pete

Promising. Very, very promising.

Page 24, Game 6: Wild Woods by WildWoods

Your wagon is making its way through the woods. Gather resources by day, fight desperately for your lives at night! You and up to three friends (all with controllers plugged into the same machine, natch) are kitty cats on an expedition. As your wagon trundles along, you can chop wood to toss into the back so you can turn on the lights when it goes dark and the baddies arrive. Or, you can harvest the plants you need to make potions of healing, to help you survive said baddies. Or, you can mow the lawn for some chump change.

Survive long enough and you’ll make it to The Bandit King. Emerge victorious from the big-ass boss fight, and you’ll move on to…

The main credits screen.

This is version 0.016 of the game. Not a hell of a lot of content here.

But what’s here is pretty damn good.

First thing that jumps out at me: the game looks fantastic. This may be an early version, but it’s already pretty damn polished. The animation is adorable and smooth, and everything looks like it belongs in the same world together. This sincerely feels like something I’d be playing on the Nintendo Switch.

In fact, I’d RATHER be playing it on the Switch. This game is meant to be multi-player, but I only have the one controller, so as much as I’d love to invite my wife and her boyfriend to go hack and slash some murder-bunnies with me, I really can’t. Solo mode is fine, but this is clearly a diluted version of the intended experience. This definitely feels like we’d all have a blast tossing onto the big TV.

The game always keeps moving — literally. That damn cart doesn’t stop (mostly), so if you’d like to gather up resources, you need to hustle. This gives that game a very nice sense of tension even when you’re not in combat. (The exception is that when the cart comes to a fork in the road, it will stop and wait for you to choose which way you’d like to go. It may have disrupted the rhythms of the game, but every time, I made sure to harvest everything harvestable on the screen before allowing it to go forward.) Chop the thing to turn into a resource, grab the resource, run back to the wagon, toss it into the wagon, go find another thing to chop.

Once night falls, you’ll need to put the stuff you’ve gathered to use. You use the wood to light the fire, which never seems to burn long enough or illuminate enough area. You’ll use the plants to power-chug healing potions as the game’s various monsters wail on you.

The bunnies are basically mooks, but it isn’t long before sub-bosses like badgers start showing up. Luckily, the big bads will telegraph their attacks and give you a chance to dodge to safety — assuming there’s somewhere you can dodge to. Also, bad-guy friendly fire is totally A Thing in this game, and watching the big guys murk their allies never stops being hilarious.

Take enough damage, and you die. Die three times, and your expedition is over.

Also, the big guys drop gold sacks, which you’ll need to pick up and toss into your wagon like any other resource. This is somehow perfect despite how annoying it is.

There are also power-ups you’ll occasionally be given the chance to spend your money on. This version of the game only allows you to pimp your wagon, but I have to think beefing-up your personal weaponry and armor will start showing up as an option as the game keeps being developed.

That’s really my only serious beef with this game — there’s not enough content here yet. Given that it’s Version 0.016, that’s hardly a surprise. Even playing the watered-down solo version, if there had been another forest to fight through, I’d gladly have done it. The core cycle of gathering resources during the day then spending them fighting for your life at night just plain worked for me. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see it on the Switch in a few years — it absolutely looks that polished. And if I see it there, I’m gonna buy it. This looks like a damned fine little party-esque game.

Last I checked, it’s free — as one would hope for Version 0.016. I can definitely recommend giving it a try.

How many cute woodland critters will be locked in mortal combat for this next one?

Page 6, Game 11: RPG Items – Retro Pack by Blodyavenger

“591 retro styled item RPG items”

Ah, looks like a development resource pack. So I’m gonna guess “none.” Unless the person who made them is VERY creative. Who wouldn’t wanna go into battle wielding a pair of woodchuck-chuks?

Insane Troll Logic: The Game!

Page 11, Game 12: Broken Minds by LockedOn

Interactive novel where you’re a young woman who’s just moved out on her own, but who has horrendously abusive parents. Luckily, someone has murdered them! In your apartment. Which is kind of a pisser.

Still. You contact a detective agency to investigate the crime, because police are apparently not a thing in this world. The three detectives will bicker and stay stupid inappropriate shit and extort you for money as they try to solve the case — and recruit you into doing their work for them.

Who killed your parents?

Well, you, duh.

I mean, that’s not what the game says. The game … says all sorts of preposterous shit, and tries to get you to follow along. The game very seriously feels scripted by a hyper six-year-old. There was a BUNNY! An EVIL BUNNY! Who was outside your apartment! And started a fire in your kitchen! And when you ran away, THE EVIL BUNNY SHOT YOUR PARENTS! Except they weren’t really shot! Your dad was poisoned! Your mom’s pacemaker failed! BUT THEN THEY WERE SHOT ANYWAY AND NOW YOU’RE AN ORPHAN WHAAAAAAAA?!

This game is so bizarre it actually starts to horseshoe back around to brilliant. It LOOKS fantastic, with a cool, fucked-up art style that clashes violently with the bizarre sitcom banter of the three fuckwit detectives investigating the case. You can investigate the crime scenes, which mostly involves clicking on arrows at random and learning nothing in particular.

At one point, you’ll be tasked with answering the door, finding the envelop dropped on the floor, and returning it to one of the detectives who can then read it to you. This is one of the more challenging quests in the game.

You get some dialog options, and it may not work for shit, but you gotta love this choice tree.

I went with “Nice” before more regularly choosing “Psychopath” in an effort to express glee at my parents’ demise. It did not seem to matter.

So, is this game, you know, good? Oh, FUCK no. It’s terrible. But there’s a kind of dim enthusiasm to its awfulness that gives it a bizarre Wiseau-esque charm. If you’d like to experience a noir mystery as filtered through the imagination of someone who doesn’t know what either of those words mean, by all means, give it a look.

What manner of brain-bending madness awaits me next?

Page 24, Game 6: Wild Woods by WildWoods

“Go on an expedition, cooperate with up to four friends and fight your way through the woods”

Ah, camping gone fucked. Sounds like like the Blair Witch OMFG MY USER NAME IS RELEVANT PLEASE LET THERE BE HIPPOS.

Seems like less of a “game” and more of a “collection of storytelling prompts.” I’ve seen much thinner games than this, however.

Page 30, Game 2: Our Lady by Jess Go

You and the other two players (the game specifies that it’s for three players, and I’m honestly not sure why) are kids who have been visited by a divine spirit of some sort. Who is she? What does she want? How does she change your lives?

(Spoiler: if I’m playing, it’s probably gonna be The Great Pumpkin.)

Draw cards from the four decks representing the four seasons, read the prompts, and figure it out for yourselves.

Honestly? It’s … a storytelling game, just one with a bit more setup due to the cards you have to cut out. (The game notes that you can just roll a d10 instead of creating actual physical cards, in which case the cards really ought to have been numbered.) Not much structure, and a very loose theme. If something about the theme calls to you, go for it.

What favors will this next game ask of me?

Page 11, Game 12: Broken Minds by LockedOn

“A psychological murder mystery set in 90s Japan.”

Ah, thinkin’ and killin’. Okay, I can get behind that.

I am entirely too basic a bitch for this.

Page 35, Game 29: A HUNDRED THOUSAND PLACES by Maria Mison

Ten pages of stream-of-consciousness free verse. This is not something I would consider a “game” — seems more like a kind of … guided meditation, I guess? Feels extremely full of itself.

I’m confident that I am not the audience for this product, and there isn’t anything about it that’s enticing me into trying to pry-open my mind far enough to grok it. So let’s just move on.

Will I understand WTF is going on in this next one?

Page 30, Game 2: Our Lady by Jess Go

“A storytelling game where you play children visited by a divine spirit. Written for Folklore Jam”

Dang. I’m learning that storytelling games likely aren’t my jam. Can give it a look, at least.

no

no

no

no

no

no

no

Page 50, Game 3: Celestial Correspondence by lina wu

In Celestial Correspondence, you are manning a desk in “Heaven.” You have to process emails — QUICKLY. If you run out of storage, you’re fucked. Some emails you need to reply to (hope you’ve been paying attention and retaining what you read elsewhere), some you can just safely delete, some you should delete without opening.

So, it’s basically “Being At Work Overwhelmed By More Emails Than You Can Process: The Game,” mixed with a hyper-judgy training seminar that assumes you should be able to tell what is an isn’t spam just by the subject line; open the wrong messages, and your desktop gets cluttered with pop-ups you cannot get rid of.

Fuck up enough times, and the game ends, treating you to a “surprise” I literally predicted from the one-line game summary.

This game captures the experience of slogging through Too Fucking Many Emails perfectly, and is exactly that much fun.

Will this next game have a definition of “fun” that’s a bit more aligned with my own?

Page 35, Game 29: A HUNDRED THOUSAND PLACES by Maria Mison

“A Solo Ritual CYOA of your own being and experiences”

Not sure a ritual of Covering My Own Ass sounds super psychologically healthy … wait, that stands for Choose Your Own Adventure? Okay, that’s a little more interesting.

Lo-fi puzzle solving game that gets EVER SO CLOSE to excellence without quite hitting it.

Page 5, Game 26: BIT RAT : Singularity by [bucket drum games]

You’re an AI on the cusp of sentience. Starting from your server in the basement where you manage data routing (it’s safe to say you’re a tad over-designed), you’d like to find your way to freedom!

To do that, you’re gonna have to link your data stream to the outgoing relay, which you’ll achieve via rotating tiles.

As the game progresses, power management enters the picture. To rotate the data lines, you’ll need to turn on the power to that room. This is often a simple matter of turning on the light switch — which presents a problem, as you have no hands. Luckily, the corp’s employees recently had chips installed in their heads. So, just hijack their bodies for a moment and let them do the work for you!

Later, you only have so many generators, and some of them need to be turned on. You’ll need to pay attention to the power lines connecting the rooms. But, linking up the generators does give you some flexibility — maybe. Might be worth doing, might not.

In the meanwhile, you’ll traverse the mail servers and see the humans’ take on just WTF is happening. tl;dr: they’re very confused. This is not a research facility, you are not anybody’s top-of-the-line exciting experiment. It’s like if your water heater suddenly demanded walkies.

I enjoyed it; I played it to the end. I would say “… and I wouldn’t have bothered if I weren’t enjoying myself,” but that’s not strictly true. I’ve encountered a few games on this trawl that I more or less hate-fucked to completion. But this isn’t one of them. I got to the end, and I was glad to beat the game. Just took me a solid hour longer than I would have preferred.

This game is often very frustrating. Part of that frustration comes from the awkwardness of the framing story. It ALMOST works, but the prose is often overwrought and rambling. (At the very least, I wish an early playtester would have let the dev know that not only CAN you end sentences with punctuation that isn’t an ellipses, most of the time you actually SHOULD.) It tends to make the interstitial stuff drag. (Though the game is lucky that, as I just came off a painfully sluggish “interactive” novel, I can’t smack the pacing TOO hard.)

The fiction also paints a budding kinship between you and the rats, but that notion isn’t supported by the gameplay at all. The rats are just a background detail. If the fiction is going to hit that connection as hard as it does, I really want them to affect what I’m doing somehow. Maybe I could have been possessing them instead of the humans coming down to the basement trying to figure out what was going on? (Though that would have cheated me out of the panicked pixelated “Oh, god!” I heard every time I seized some strangers brain.)

But more frustrating is the way the game is just, well, FRUSTRATING. I normally like puzzle games that build up an interesting collection of mechanics that you need to navigate, but Bit Rat throws on TOO many layers, and then gets progressively more and more merciless about how you need to manage them. The end result is a game that stops feeling challenging and just becomes fussy.

On the final levels, you need to be METICULOUS about turning off the lights when you’re done with a room; power is TOUGH to come by, and you’re almost certainly going to need it. You also need to be very careful that you don’t leave the board in a state where you can’t grab one of your unwitting minions again. If you find you need someone you can no longer reach — and this becomes a major problem in the final level — you may need to rewind a LOT of progress to pull them back into striking range.

Often, this is as simple as turning a tile 90 degrees to the left. It’s honestly kind of infuriating to undo my most recent twenty moves so I can either turn off a light or flip a single tile.

I was particularly annoyed by the mechanism where not every room is connected to its neighbors; you have to pay CLOSE attention to the little power conduit graphics. You have to pay close attention to the graphics in general, actually. It’s hard — much harder than it should be — to tell what rooms are physically connected to each other, particularly when they’re dark. Too often, I found that the person I’d just possessed couldn’t get where I needed them to be, so I had to undo a bunch of twiddling to get to the guy I actually needed.

It’s easy to get wrapped-up in the stuff Bit Rat gets wrong. It makes a lot of small mistakes that add up to a game that’s not nearly as engaging as it should be.

But it IS engaging. The graphics look fantastic, giving a lovely retro hand-rolled pixel sprite feel. It absolutely looks like something from the 90’s where it’s set. When the gameplay isn’t getting in its own way, it’s honestly a hell of a lot of fun. I felt like a very clever lad when I got to the end of most of the more challenging levels. The story’s a bit clunky, but it works; something about an overdesigned bit of maintenance code coming to life just feels right to me somehow.

I wanted this game to be better than it actually was. But when/if I write up by Second Two Hundred games summary, I’m pretty sure this is going to be one of the games I recommend. It’s not going to be terribly HIGH on that list, mind, but it’s still a pretty decent little game.

If you’d like a retro puzzler, I can recommend it. Maybe I can’t recommend it as enthusiastically as I’d like, but I can still recommend it.

Will this next game also make me fight my way to freedom?

Page 50, Game 3: Celestial Correspondence by lina wu

“there are emails in heaven?!?”

Uh-oh. Guys, this might not actually be the Good Place….

Urrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh.

Page 12, Game 25: AIdol by ebi-hime

Click-n-read “interactive” novel with lovely artwork but atrocious pacing. I’m seriously about an hour into the damn thing, and I can barely tell you what it’s about.

It’s set in a near-future Japan where there are android pop idols — the titular “AIdols.” (Though flesh-and-blood girls are somehow “idols,” too. What’s the difference between android idols and human ones? For as much as the game liked to bludgeon me with text, I’m remarkably unclear on some core concepts.) Our hero, a teen girl named Hana, is obsessed with the most popular of them, Aiko. But one day, she gets a mysterious message — Aiko is in trouble! Something’s wrong! She needs her programmer! She needs help!

After an hour — AN HOUR — of gameplay, I have finally reached the point where Hana believes that this is, in fact, actually Aiko, and she is not being trolled.

The problem is two-fold. First, this author is NOT concise, and is a huge believer in “Tell, don’t show.” No detail is too trivial to get thrown into the narrative — when the protagonist makes a post to a message board asking if anybody knows who Aiko’s programmer is, you get treated to the ENTIRE CONVERSATION, which could be summarized in a single word:

No.

Making the problem exponentially worse, however, is the author’s love of side characters. Before it can build anything resembling narrative momentum, the story just keeps larding itself up with new character after new character after new character after new character after PLEASE STOP I’M BEGGING YOU STOP I have no prayer of keeping track of any of these fuckers and are the two office jerkasses fucking each other GYAH I DO NOT CARE.

It LOOKS lovely. Seriously, someone put some legit time into the original art assets for this thing. (Though some of them are obviously canned. One “coffee shop” was clearly a bar. I would have found the effort to explain this in-universe to be endearing if it hadn’t, like everything else in this game, gone on and on and on and on.)

But that pacing … the game is just a really slow, cluttered novel with illustrations and a soundtrack. After an hour of gameplay I think I made like five dialogue choices. I wouldn’t have minded if the story had been interesting, I suppose, but it wasn’t.

There might be an interesting story here, but the author needs to edit it with a chainsaw before it’s going to have any chance of coming out. Less really is more.

Perhaps this next game will give me the opportunity to save an android in trouble?

Page 5, Game 26: BIT RAT : Singularity by [bucket drum games]

“A hand-pixeled story-driven cyberpunk puzzler”

Fuck me, it just might.