You are Barris the Bear. It is time for you to gorge yourself in preparation for next winter’s hibernation. Unfortunately, you are also an abject failure of evolution, and are not well-suited to this or any other task.
Do not let this stop you.
Taking on the world
Go get ’em!
Bear-ly There is a spiritual successor to QWOP or CLOP, only not as infuriating. You can make Barris “jump” (actually a kind of fitful spasm) in the direction you have the camera pointed, and you can also have him bite whatever happens to be near his mouth.
As a method of locomotion, this is neither dignified nor all that effective. But a bear’s gotta do what a bear’s gotta do.
The berries … so close….
My first play, Barris starved.
But then I discovered … the river.
BEHOLD THE PROMISED LAND
Aw, yeah.
But gorging yourself on salmon is only half the battle. Then you have to … return to your cave.
Homeward bound
Also, you might find some sunglasses. Just roll with it.
This is yet another entry in the “More A Joke Than A Game” canon that redeems itself by honestly being a good joke. Making this bear spastically ragdoll his way across the landscape while frantically biting in the hopes that food will wind up in his mouth does get old … after a few playthroughs. Until then, it’s pretty goddamn funny.
Just don’t poop.
DO. NOT. POOP.
Does this game have a “poop” button?
Page 21, Game 24: A Guide To Casting Phantoms In The Revolution by World Champ Game Co.
“A Story Game of Magic Lanterns, Political Revolution, and Pentagrams.”
Peppino Impastato was a Sicilian political activist who opposed the Mafia in the 60’s and 70’s; the game places you in his shoes, making you the protagonist at various key moments in his life.
This is barely a game — but it IS effective. Sometimes you can make some choices. Sometimes your choices don’t matter. Sometimes they’re not really choices at all.
I’ve encountered a decent amount of interactive fiction in this playthrough, and Radio Aut stands out for its discipline and simplicity. It doesn’t fuck around. It doesn’t get lost in the weeds. It is stripped down to its own essentials and tells the story it’s here to tell — nothing more, nothing less.
Honestly, it’s not as much a game or a story as it is a tribute. The author clearly has immense respect for the brave motherfucker at the center of this game, and sought to share that respect with others.
He succeeded.
The game will take about five minutes of your time, and is playable via browser at the link above.
Rest in power, Peppino.
Up next:
Page 45, Game 15: Bear-ly There by Pale Moon Games
“Help Barris bulk up for Winter, we are going to need a lot of food!”
I anticipate a hungry bear and a fuckton of bear puns.
Normally, my speculation about the next game based on its title and stub description tends to be wildly off mark. But when I saw the description of “Be a cat,” my response was “So, knock shit down, nap in sunlight, and lick myself?”
Catlandia went three for three.
My hopes went up as soon as I got to the character creation screen, which allows you to build your own cat:
Set all options to MAXIMUM CHONK
So you’re a cat, serving in Fort Pawprint. But oh, noes! The commander’s beloved teapot has gone missing! Whatever shall you do?
Well, duh.
Me, I napped.
But once I could be arsed to get out of bed, I immediately set forth on an adventure, featuring dogs and dog factions and angry raccoons and such.
The core gameplay is, believe it or not, a Final-Fantasy-esque turned-based fighter. Your turn comes, you decide what you’re gonna do to the fearsome opponents arrayed against you.
Fuck! Corgiswarm!
Beat ’em down with the various items and abilities at your disposal, move on.
Fighting is the core of the game part of the game. And it kinda breaks my heart to say this, but … it isn’t good.
Where to begin … fighting does a terrible job of scaling with your increasing abilities. Early wandering monster fights were reasonably tough, and the first mini-boss encounter kicked my ass (after totally exhausting my resources) and forced me to gain a level before I could come back and plausibly win it. But the fights get easier and grindier as the game moves on, even in newly unlocked areas. It very soon got to the point where I was doing everything I could to avoid fights, not because I was concerned about getting worn down, but because I found them boring and didn’t want to bother.
Once you get access to healing magic, that’s when you know you’ve entered grindtown. My largely invincible fight strategy was to just spam-out area attacks, pause to use the basic attack that replenished my mana pool (biting — which has a certain vampiric overtone, come to think of it), and occasionally lay-down a good heal as necessary. Most fights I left stronger than I entered.
I had the main boss fight well before I think the game wanted me to — I had at least two major subquests unfinished and one area completely unexplored. It was no more than moderately challenging.
There are other problems. The fights feature tons of status effects, but no way to mitigate them; I was surprised that there didn’t seem to be any items that cured “Bleeding” or “Poisoned.” Nor was there anything that would wake up your companion cat if they were “Snoozin” — though lemon wedges fulfill the roll of Phoenix Downs, and will revive your partner with a decent number of hit points. It is thus easier to revive a cat after it has been beaten half to death than it is to wake the same cat from a nap. Which … okay, that actually sounds thematically accurate, never mind.
Other status buffs and debuffs were largely opaque; I had no idea what they were supposed to be doing to me or if any particular thing a dog did that didn’t involve direct damage was cause for worry.
Leveling-up is remarkably unsatisfying. You don’t get to make any choices, your numbers just go up. Next time you get in a fight, you’ll notice it’s incrementally easier.
Wearable equipment is flat-out broken. You literally cannot equip gear (such as hats, or costumes, or collars) from the equipment page; you have to sneak up on it sideways through the character page. More annoying, however, is that the game drops only vague hints as to what any given piece of gear actually DOES. You have to equip and unequip while paying attention to your stats and peeking in on your abilities in order to figure it out. This is a huge and completely unnecessary nuisance — particularly given the importance of using the right equipment to give you the right spells. (Not that the game MENTIONS that your spells are based on what you’re wearing — you have to figure that shit out for yourself.)
BEHOLD MY FINAL FORM
It’s repetitive, it’s clunky, it’s at least twice as long as it needs to be … and yet. The cat-based silliness never completely lost its charm for me. I actually did have fun exploring this world and interacting with its loopy inhabitants. I wish there had been more of that — or at least it had been more densely packed and made up a larger percentage of the gameplay.
This really is an ambitious game when you get down to it. Even when you’re poaching broad ideas from the classics, making and refining a combat system like this is no small thing. This game’s devs largely failed at it; fights get very samey very quickly, there’s not much reason to switch-up tactics once you find something that works, and the balance is completely wrong. And yet, I respect the effort. They’re really trying to craft something with some depth here.
It’s definitely not as good a game as it could, and perhaps should be. But if the top-level description of “Final Fantasy but with cats” triggers the happy centers of your brain, by all means, go for it.
I had fun. Wish I’d wrapped up a few hours ago. But I had fun.
However, will this prove to be as much fun as:
Page 57, Game 4: 1977: Radio Aut by Alex Camilleri
All right, first off: press “F” to enter windowed mode if you play this game. Took me a little digging to figure that out, but the game defaults to fullscreen — and on my laptop, the wrong resolution, with major portions of the window appearing above and below my screen.
So. You are a rectangle-man.
Hello!
You need to talk to the Triangle Princess in the Triangle Palace. Problem: you are a lowly rectangle, and scum like you won’t be allowed anywhere near her. So you’re gonna have to get some shape reassignment surgery, courtesy of your local mad scientist.
Graphically, the game is charming. It’s black and white, and feels like an old-timey adventure game.
Your humble home
And there’s a world to explore!
Hey, there’s your buddy, the hexagon! He’s kind of a douche.
This is less a “game” and more an elaborate joke. Which I largely don’t mind, because it’s a pretty funny joke. I’m honestly impressed at the sense of humor demonstrated by the snarky narrator as your boy Rector the Rectangle does adventure game shit, because I’m pretty sure the game’s developer speaks French as their primary language. Getting laughs in a second language? Well done.
I’m less enamored of the actual gameplay. As you wander through the world, you need to rub yourself up against and interact with anything and everything you can, because you never know when you’re going to stumble across the items that will be the keys to unlock the game’s various puzzles. Make sure you remember that shit, and make sure it’s selected when you interact with the whatsit that wants it.
Rub yourself against the world, rub things against the world, rub things against each other. That’s the game.
Still, it wasn’t awful. I would have appreciated a few more hints about where to find the next whatever I needed, but it gave me a few laughs. It’s a playful, silly little trifle, and not the worst way to spend half an hour. If you remember playing games like this, probably worth a look.
Need another game. Hit me!
Page 56, Game 25: Catlandia: Crisis at Fort Pawprint by catlandia
“Be A Cat”
So, knock shit down, nap in sunlight, and lick myself? I’m in.
I think they call this a “visual novel?” It’s not really a game; there are only a handful of decision points, and they honestly seem pretty inconsequential. Stills of two people appear on-screen, gesturing a bit and changing facial expressions as their dialog prints out below them. Behind them is a static setting — pretty obviously a canned resource of some variety, given that the “bail bondsman’s office” is less “Max Cherry” and more “Tastefully decorated living room.”
This particular story follows a waitress whose scumbag boyfriend is in jail, yet again. She’d dump him, but she’s scared to, because criminal n’at. But, the bail bondsman has a magic knife that makes people forget about other people.
Would you like your jailbird boyfriend to forget about you?
Yes. Of course. That’s the plot.
The “game” is just click-n-read, click-n-read, click-n-read. Not my bag, really, but I don’t want to get hung up on that. If this is honestly mostly just a piece of fiction, I can at least do it the courtesy of evaluating it on those terms.
This does not work for me as a piece of fiction. In a previous life I had aspirations as a fiction writer, so I’ve read my share of stories made with more passion and ambition than actual skill. This gave me flashbacks to the days of telling people “Sorry, I don’t think this works” and trying to find constructive explanations for why and how they could possibly make the next story better.
“That Which Binds Us” suffers from two common rookie mistakes: bad pacing, and underwhelming characters. The story is clearly a romance between the waitress and the magic bail bondsman, but the story is hopelessly mired in the minutiae of their conversations. The writer clearly finds these characters and their interactions fascinating, but has neglected to give the reader any particular reason to care.
There are, of course, hints of a larger story, that our adorable magic bailboy is in way over his head with some sort of organized crime element. In theory, that’s the sort of thing that could generate tension, but in execution, it just put a spotlight on how little was actually happening.
After a good fifteen minutes or so, I gave up. The grinding pace had worn me down so thoroughly that even if the story did start to get good, I didn’t know if I’d be able to acknowledge it. And I wasn’t seeing indications that it was going to get good.
I wasn’t skeeved or pissed-off, I was just kinda bored. Can’t really recommend this one. But I certainly wish the author well, and if someone gave one of their later works a glowing recommendation, I’d be glad to give it a look.
Let’s see what’s on deck:
Page 20, Game 10: I want to be a Triangle by LeCroissantCyclope
“The little adventure of a Rectangle in Geoshape Prime.”
I have been known, on occasion, to exhibit some self-destructive and addictive behavior when presented with something fun. So when I say this is the first game that’s presented a genuine Problem, that’s definitely an endorsement.
The world has been overrun by bugmonsters. You’re fleeing, like you do. You have a car, and you’ll likely have a companion soon. You’re heading west — gotta go somewhere. Given that the road seems to be getting more bizarre and dangerous the further west you go, I’m not convinced this is solid plan.
Along the way, you may rescue other stranded people and invite them along your journey into the heart of darkness. Two fundamental types of people will join you: doggos, and people who have some skills but are unlikely to be as good as doggos.
Meet Tiny. He is a hard-core warrior, and pure goodboi. He likes ear scritchies and murdering the piss out of all who threaten the pack.
You’re given some choice over the next stop in your itinerary, but moving forward always costs precious, precious fuel, so prepare to enter a desperate-for-guzzoline mindset worthy of a Mad Max movie. (You can escape a given level on foot, but you’re gonna need to find a replacement ride before you can make any progress in the game. Better hope it has enough room for everybody you’ve gathered.) You’ll also find weapons and equipment and upgrades for your car and maybe even a BETTER car, but your gear only matters so much. The bugs aren’t terribly dangerous — at least, not at first — but slugging it out is a losing proposition. Kill one, and its death scream will summon one more — at a minimum. And even if you feel like you’ve found a position you can defend all day, eventually, a massive rumbling is going to inform you that it is TIME TO GO NOW. I’m not sure what happens if you ignore that rumbling, but I’m assuming it’s very, very bad.
For any given level, you need to harvest what you can, and then get the fuck outta there.
OMFG does that goodboi have a backpack?! WELCOME TO THE TEAM, DIBLEY!
Overland is a roguelike, with all the good and bad that entails. Everything is randomized every playthrough. This makes every game a new experience — but it also means there’s no guarantee it will be remotely fair. In the few (nearly solid) days I’ve been playing this game, I’ve definitely encountered what felt like no-win situations.
In a lot of ways, that’s just part of the deal; if you’re out of resources, shame on you for putting yourself in that position. But it can be a weirdly frustrating, fussy game.
For instance, if there’s something large-but-movable sitting on one of the “Escape” spaces, you can’t just ram it out of the way with your car; the map borders function as an impenetrable wall. You’ll need to send someone out of the car to drag it to the side. Better hope there’s enough room for someone to do that. Most of the cars you can find are VERY tightly constrained as to WHERE they can move; you can’t even try to hop up on the sidewalk even if a horde of neon bugmonsters is about to tear you to pieces. On levels with a four-lane highway, you cannot take your car through any gaps in the jersey barrier, even if the other side is clear(-ish) and the lane you’re in is hopelessly congested with death.
The inventory system in particular is merciless to the point of absurdity. You can carry ONE item — unless you have a backpack, then you can handle TWO. So you’re gonna have to choose between being able to defend yourself and being able to haul back any crucial guzzoline you find hanging out in a dumpster.
This hits its apex with the suffocatingly constrained vehicle restrictions. Each car carries X people and Y items — with NO flexibility. For vans, the numbers are 5 people and 0 items. The fact that you cannot carry junk in a van will likely come as a shock to anyone who’s ever used one.
And why are there no rules for the interaction of dogs and pick-up trucks? If you have two people, a dog, and a two-seat pick-up, you do not have a space problem; what you have is room for at least three more dogs. (When I encountered this exact scenario, I made the only sensible choice: abandon the truck, run for it on foot.)
To mitigate some of its own mercilessness, the game has an “Undo” button (crucial for preventing a misclick from trashing a lengthy run) and — shockingly for a roguelike — a “Restart Level” button. It took me several plays before I even noticed it was there.
It’s honestly kind of a mixed blessing. I wish the game had called more attention to this feature; given that you can only learn what the monsters are capable of by trial and error, I would have appreciated knowing I can be a bit more adventurous and don’t have to sacrifice hours of gameplay if I discover the answer to “What happens when I whack that thing with an axe?” is “LOL.” But on the other hand, my current runthrough is stuck in what feels suspiciously like a no-win scenario. The van is out of gas (dog farts are apparently not harvestable as a source of energy), and the level is so infested with monsters that it might not be possible to get the gas AND leave a path capable of getting the van through. Hell, it’s so infested that I’m not even sure I can get everybody out on foot. The smart move might be to just write off the run and start again, but I don’t wanna leave these guys to their fate.
Left to right: Tiny, Bubblegum, Buster, Abby, and Dibley. And, yes, Tiny is wearing a hat. Because he’s awesome.
But that’s the thing: I AM invested. I seriously want these guys to punch through, and get to wherever the hell it is they’re going. I want to know what happens next, and I want it to be something other than “Everybody gets eaten by monsters.”
There are other, lesser frustrations. I sometimes desperately want to zoom in on the map, or have a better idea of what I can interact with and how. The monsters are drawn to sound, in theory, but I’ve found it very difficult to use that to my advantage and manipulate their movement with it. Unless you have sources of light with you, nighttime levels tend to made of pure MOTHERFUCK This, and I will scamper the hell out of there at the first sign of trouble.
But this game does so, so much right. It has a sense of mystery, of threat, of progression. I’d like to have more problem-solving tools at my disposal, but I still feel like I have a very real degree of control over my own fate.
There are elements that I can, and do, quibble with. But on the balance, this is an outstanding gaming experience, and I suspect I’m going to dump a lot more hours into playing it. Whoever assembled the bundle made this the first game for a reason. Highly, highly recommended.
Good thing it’s so much fun to run the random game picker; otherwise, I might have stayed with this game any longer. And the next game shall be:
Page 49, Game 18: That Which Binds Us by Crystal Game Works
“What if you could make someone forget all about you?”
A bit more cerebral than burrowing bugmonsters. A change of pace feels like a good thing.
Pocket Square is the finest hand-held video game console that 1978 never actually produced. It comes with twelve games and, had it been a thing that actually existed, would likely have taken eight D-cell batteries and weighed four pounds.
It would, in short, have been the most awesome thing five-year-old me had ever heard of.
BEHOLD THE PROMISED LAND
Pocket Square reproduces the feel of ancient home video gaming with eerie precision. The graphics in that menu screen are the only real incongruity; the actual games themselves are squares and lines of various shades of green.
Best of all, you have one control mechanism: the button. Push the button, release the button. That’s what you have. That’s all you have. That’s all you DESERVE, kid.
Are the games repetitive? Oh, you bet your ass. But a lot of them are actually kinda fun.
The best of the bunch is probably mini-golf. Hold the button, and your golfer starts swaying side to side. Release it, and thwack! Hope you got the angle right! Because on this course, either you get a hole in one or you DIE.
No pressure
But my personal favorite is the unauthorized port of Flappy Bird. It’s just too perfect. This is what home video game ports were like back in the day, people: sad, wretched parodies of the beloved games they claimed to represent. And we had to just roll with it, because it was this or nothing. NOTHING.
Flap, you little bastard
There are some problems here, unfortunately — beyond just the obvious ones imposed by the hilariously grim self-imposed limitations. Some of the games are such simple exercises in obvious timing that they never manage to really be interesting — Baseball and Platformer are the worst offenders. Shooter is just plain broken; pushing the button is supposed to shoot a bullet and make your ship move the opposite direction across the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, pushing the button unleashes such a terrifying bulletstorm flood that it’s seriously 50/50 as to whether you’ll keep going the same direction as before (presumably because you shot an even number of bullets) or reverse (presumably because you shot odd), which makes the game much too random.
The worst bug, unfortunately, is the menu that’s supposed to allow you to quit the game and select a new one. It flat out doesn’t work. However, after much button mashing, I discovered “Shift” will actually allow you to do something other than resume the game you’re on.
Also, I will note that the music and sound effects in general are MUCH too nice for a machine of the era. Given that the era-appropriate soundscape would be a jagged and horrifying journey through electronic hell, I respect the decision to fudge it.
Is it fun? It is … amusing. And I note that the developer just did a mobile port. Turning my iPhone into THIS might actually be the ideal environment.
It’s honestly more of a joke than a game … but it’s a pretty good joke. And I did have fun playing some of the games.
What the hell. Recommended. It’s a silly little thing, but I found it endearing.
Will the next game use more than one color?
Page 1, Game 1: Overland by Finji
“A squad-based survival strategy game with procedurally generated levels set in post-apocalyptic North America.”
Ooh.
No joke, I have NOT been fudging the random numbers; I’ve been using them exclusively and faithfully since the second game. I seriously just randomly rolled-up Page 1, Game 1.
The description sounds great, and this is the bundle’s lead-off hitter. Somebody certainly though it was worth putting front and center.
DREADFUL is three adventures for the horror RPG Dread. Dread’s big mechanical shtick is that conflict is resolved with Jenga. Make the tower fall? Then ya FUCKED. Pretty dope conceit, if you like a sense of escalating danger and tension — and if you’re playing a horror RPG, seems safe to assume you do.
The first scenario in this bundle puts the PCs in a slasher movie, the second a haunted house, and the third a monster movie. In all three cases, the author put a lot of work into resources allowing the PCs to define their characters. I don’t know if that’s just standard issue for Dread, but it seems like the sort of thing that would really get the players to invest in the over-pressurized blood blisters they’ll be portraying.
I’m less convinced by some of the details in the scenarios. The first one, the slasher pic, has a lot of guidelines for escalating the tension as the PCs investigate just what the hell is going on, hopefully before they get killed. What IS going on? What is the killer? What’s his deal? How does he/she/it operate? Cool questions, bro. Come up with something awesome and just slot it on in there, eh?
The haunted house does a lot more work laying down the backstory, which seems like it would give the GM a lot more to work with by allowing the PCs to be chasing something concrete. A lot of the recommended tension is supposed to come from the fact that the house is basically an ever-shifting TARDIS, and the PCs will be unable to escape — despite recommending that the GM steer them towards making that their goal. So, how do you execute that without feeling like you’re just fucking with them (which you very obviously are)? How do you keep them invested in trying to escape when you’re just going to respond to everything they try with a sadistic “Nope!” even if you have to ignore rudimentary physics to do it? How do you keep your horror game from feeling like a horror movie with a lazy screenwriter? That’s a YOU problem, bro.
The monster one has an interesting twist, in that the PCs are supposed to be able to make peaceful contact with the obvious monster, and that it’s the monster’s MOTHER you really gotta watch out for. Even though the monster horrifically kills people, too. We’re kinda grading on a curve here.
I dunno. I’m not sold on these, but a lot of care clearly went into producing them. It’s entirely possible that a veteran Dread-head would read this book and be all “Dude, STFU, these are fabulous! These are gonna make my players literally shit themselves in terror!”
So if that’s something you aspire to yourself, what the hell. If you play Dread, these might be worth a look. Or they might not. It’ll only cost you $3 to find out one way or the other.
Are we gonna do three Jenga games in a row? Perl script, hit me!
Page 58, Game 27: Pocket Square by CodyMace
No description.
I have literally no idea what to expect, but I’m going to guess the answer to my question is “No.”
You have created an AI. Your AI is about to do something apocalyptically stupid, and you would rather it not. So, you’re going to talk it down — possibly while figuring out how to pull the plug on the thing.
What’s it going to do? How are you going to convince it to not do it? And how is all that working out? Figuring out that shit is what the game is all about.
At a glance, this “game” sounds like a glorified writing prompt. However, digging into it a bit reveals that no, for real, this is a game, no scare-quotes needed. There’s a hell of a lot of structure here, even actual mechanics.
To play it, you’re going to need a deck of playing cards and a Jenga tower. I only have the former. If had both, I might seriously consider sitting down and giving this a try. (The rules claim you don’t TECHNICALLY need it, but come on, if I’m gonna do this thing, let’s DO this thing.) This thing is well thought-out and looks damned interesting.
If you have cards, Jenga, and would enjoy a very highly structured sci-fi writing exercise, this is absolutely worth a closer look.
What’s up next?
Page 34, Game 18: DREADFUL by LostDutchman
“3 Campaign Dread Supplemental”
Okay, another tabletop game that uses Jenga as a mechanic. Super unlikely to play, but let’s see if it makes me want to.
You’re a young fella living in Paris. You love playing basketball with your dad — and your little sister, Belle. One day, when you’re retrieving an errant shot, little Belle wanders off. Naturally, you go after her … but ominously, you keep running into strange, shadowy monsters.
Better find her soon.
Though a quick game with this blobby fella should be fine
Actual gameplay quickly turns into a series of platformer puzzles where the goal is to put the ball in the hoop. Purely from a gameplay perspective, it’s … fine. Played better, played worse. It doesn’t always do a good job of laying out its fundamental mechanics. For instance, your movement is severely restricted when you have a ball in your hands; if you jump, you HAVE to shoot the ball, which seems like a weird choice for a jumping game. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to keep a hold of the goddamn thing after I landed so I could jump up somewhere and put myself in a position to get it in the basket.
Some puzzles rely on you shooting the ball from a particular spot or trying the same thing that didn’t work several times in a row. Solving those levels never felt satisfying; I didn’t feel clever, I felt lucky. I felt like I’d accidentally stumbled into the solution just by pure flailling.
And yet.
This game just feels complete, in a way that a lot of the games I’ve tried simply don’t. It feels and sounds warm and whimsical. The intro where your father teaches you the basic moves had me hooked, and just playing around with my little sister gave me a stake in the story.
It just works, dammit.
It took me a half hour or so to play the story to completion, and that felt about right. Even if I got a tad annoyed here and there, BasketBelle never wore out its welcome.
And that swoosh payoff at the end of each level when I finally made it past the monster (or monster’s digestive tract) to bang home that shot satisfied me from the beginning of the game to the end.
If BasketBelle sounds at all interesting to you, I can definitely recommend giving it a look.
Code, code, in my machine What is the next game we shall see?
Page 22, Game 18: A Mother’s Love by Jake Bhattacharyya
“A solo journaling game about humanity, sacrifice, and artificial intelligence.”
Ah, another game where I’m probably going to be willing to look but not actually play. Some of those have looked pretty cool.
