Justice Playthrough

O_o

Jesus, Bundle. I just got done playing Pong. I’m not sure my brain can process this.

Page 42, Game 26: Combed Clap of Thunder by emosludge

This is a collection of three graphic short stories that are seriously challenging AF for a basic bitch like me. The art is highly stylized and abstracted, and doesn’t make it easy to tell just what the hell is going on in any given frame.

The stories cover themes of isolation and suicide, with the third going into gonzo bugfuck-crazy science fiction territory, with religion adapting to the grim realization that humanity was not created in the image of God, but God’s dog. That one, “The Real Jesuses,” was definitely my fave; it felt like the best fit for the WTF-ness of the art. I can’t help but respect a plot to save the world by sneaking into heaven and jerking-off God.

I don’t understand most of this well enough to provide a meaningful review of it, and I don’t want to be the kind of jackass who defaults to mockery of that which I don’t understand. (I much prefer to mock that which I understand perfectly well, thank you.) So, I’mma just speculate that if you dig darkly challenging comics, this one may well be worth your time. The curious should definitely give it a look.

Will I be able to understand what’s coming up next?

Page 3, Game 21: Death and Taxes by Placeholder Gameworks

“You are the Grim Reaper on an office job. Save the world.. or condemn it to damnation?”

All about working that day job, huh? Yeah, I think I’m gonna know what’s going on a little better in this one.

Fuck me, it’s Pong.

Page 54, Game 8: Dual Pong by randomess_dj_p

In Pong you … play fucking Pong. Come on. It’s Pong.

But Dual Pong re-imagines Pong as a serious competitive e-sport. How serious?

You can just let the ball bounce off of your paddle — if you’re a punk. Hit the right button at the right time, and you can hit it HARD, and/or hit it straight across or reverse the direction of the ball.

Depending on where your opponent is, this can result in a ball they literally CANNOT reach. Particularly if they’re chasing down the other ball.

Did I mention that the “Dual” part of Dual Pong is a reference to the two balls bouncing around the screen?

But that’s not all! DOUBLES Pong, motherfucker!

An insano-pants FOUR-WAY CLUSTERFUCK of PONG ACTION!

And STORY MODE! Compete for the PONG CHAMPIONSHIP YO!!!

So, how is it?

Well … it’s fun. It’s not perfect. But it’s way more fun that I would expect Pong to be.

The collision detection seems to get a little sketchy at high speed, particularly with how the balls interact; I want the balls to bounce off of each other a bit more than they do, or at the very least not occupy the same space so easily. I wouldn’t mind a little more variability in the angle of the ball as it comes off the paddles; it’ll either come out at a 45-degree angle one way or the other or straight out. The AI is not bright; in the four-way Pong Brawl, when I started reversing the angle on my return shots, the AI was fucking BAFFLED.

But the goal here is to turn Pong — fuckin’ PONG — into a game of depth and skill, and … yeah. I think it does. Make the right return shot, and your opponent is BONED. The permanent multi-ball play does add a fun twist. I got bored with the AI kinda quickly, but this feels like the kinda think I woulda had a BLAST playing back in the day with the other guys living in my dorm.

There’s room for improvement. But you can seriously get into this motherfucker.

If you’re looking for a fun retro same-screen multi-player experience, I definitely recommend giving this one a look.

So, how far back into video gaming’s history are we going for this next one?

Page 42, Game 26: Combed Clap of Thunder by emosludge

“Comic collection exploring human emotion and isolation.”

Ah, jumping “games” entirely and hitting up the comics. So we’re going WAY the hell back.

“OMG is that game based on Carly Rae Jepsen?!” — My wife

Page 42, Game 19: LA Hallucination by Rosie 🌹

I’m not really a Carly Rae fan. My wife, however, is. So this game — produced as part of the Carly Rae Jepcember game jam — MUST be played.

And I kinda wanted to bang-out a game or two tonight.

So, this entry is an IOU. This is the rare tabletop game I’m actually gonna play.

In the meanwhile, what sexiness awaits me next?

Page 54, Game 8: Dual Pong by randomess_dj_p

No description.

You know I got no problem going retro. Doesn’t get much more retro than Pong.

Oh, look, someone turned the Sunk Cost Fallacy into a video game.

Page 56, Game 9: Potion Commotion: Heart Edition by JENNY_

You have a small farmstead and alchemy lab. Grow plants, then harvest them either for seeds or for alchemical components. Turn those components into potions, which you can either use or sell for cash, which you can use to purchase BETTER seeds and brew even COOLER potions!

In theory.

In practice, the game’s pacing is so completely janked that I gave up on it after about an hour and a half, the final hour of which was spent in an increasingly resentful state of “This is going to start getting interesting soon, right?”

The game starts promisingly enough. Your plot of farmland is a dried-out shithole, with only a few places where the soil is moist enough to take seeds. Luckily, your starting seeds (of which you have a thankfully infinite supply) grow a kind of hydrating flower. Harvest five of those, and you can create a hydration potion which you can use to make MORE of your farmland usable.

So, the early stages of the game are a straightforward but satisfying exercise in force multiplication; grow more hydrating plants to open up more farmland to grow more hydrating plants, etc. It wasn’t long before shit was ready to harvest faster than I could click on everything.

From there, it becomes a balancing act to decide what to keep and what to sell — because sell enough hydrating potions and you can buy some more different seeds, which you can plant and then, as mentioned, either harvest them for seeds or for components. (Though the game does a poor job of teaching this concept, and forces you to notice the difference between right- and left-clicking your non-starter plants. Grr.) However, your soil will sometimes dry out, so it always pays to have some hydrating potions on hand.

This is where the wheels start to come off.

As one might expect, the more advanced seeds grow more slowly than the basic boys. This is tolerable at first; the second-tier seeds still grow reasonably quickly. (There’s a day/night mechanic in play where some things only grow during the day and others only grow during the night, but this is a largely inconsequential nuisance.) The second tier seeds only grow freezing and burning potions; already the game is getting away from its core-level concept of “Do you sell it, or do you keep it on hand to use it?”, because I really don’t have a need to either burn or freeze anything. Those potions are strictly cash crops; I guess I’m supplying chemical weapons to local adventurers.

The third tier seeds allow you to create quick-grow potions, which flips that dynamic on its head; the key ingredients for those are MUCH too slow-growing to make them worth bothering with as sellables, so they are ONLY for personal use. They exist to mitigate the tedium of the rest of the game, because from here on out everything grows so. Fucking. Slowly.

Maybe the game wants me to just let it run in the background and come back to it? Nope. Weeds show up. They’re easy enough to get rid of, but you have to notice that a weed has arrested a plant’s growth and click it to get rid of it. So the game forces you to keep an eye on it, even as it relentlessly wastes your time.

Buying fourth-tier seeds with second-tier potions was, as you might expect, expensive as balls, but I did it, because I wanted to see where the game was going to go. I meticulously turned that one fourth-tier seed into a whole shitload of fourth-tier seeds, using growth potions to accelerate the game’s pace from “Utterly unacceptable” to “Extremely annoying.” From there, I was able to harvest a whole shitload of fourth-tier components, which I could then use for….

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

There are some crows bouncing around your field as harmless screen noise; every once in a while, one of them will fly off and bring back a page telling you how to play the game. (You might be Odin.) I kept waiting for them to tell me how to DO SOMETHING with the four-leaf clovers I’d so carefully cultivated, but nah.

Maybe the game wants me to experiment?

Given what a HUGE pain in the ass it is go get some of these components, chucking five of them in a vat and hoping for the best is a seriously bold request. But, what the hell, I tossed five of my precious four-leaf clovers and produced….

A hydration potion.

Apparently, the only way to move forward is to purchase the fuckmothering FIFTH-tier seeds with SECOND-tier potions, because the third-tier potions are less efficient time-wise and the fourth-tier potions DON’T. FUCKING. EXIST.

To get the fifth-tier seeds, I’m going to need to sell ONE HUNDRED TWENTY FUCKING FIVE second-tier potions, each of which is going to have FIVE components in it. That is SIX GODDAMN HUNDRED TWENTY COCK-GOBBLING FIVE plants I’m going to need to harvest, which is TWENTY complete plant-and-harvest cycles on my farmstead — assuming I don’t have to interrupt that to plant hydration crops, which I’m going to.

If I pull this off, my reward will be seeds which, I have no doubt, will take EVEN FUCKING LONGER to become a harvestable plant. And then once I harvest them, MAYBE. The game might POSSIBLY. Tell me how to proceed. IF IT FUCKING FEELS LIKE IT.

No.

No.

No.

No.

No.

I resent that the game suckered me into playing it for as long as it did. This is the most grind-tastic time waster I’ve yet encountered in this excursion, and I’m including the overly verbose click-n-read “interactive” novels I’ve encountered. At least those things are trying to tell a story. Most of them fail. But by Dread Cthulhu they’re at least TRYING to give you some sort of narrative progression.

Potion Commotion is just the same goddamn thing over and over and over. The early stages make it clear there’s a halfway compelling game under this crap trying and failing to break through, but if anything, those early stages just make it worse. The early stages fooled me into thinking that things might get interesting again, and they emphatically did not. If the game had been wall-to-wall tedium, I would have bailed on it much sooner than I actually did.

This is awful. Even if your goal is just to deliberately waste your own time as we all continue our long slow march to the grave, surely you have better ways to waste it than this.

How much existential despair is THIS game gonna fill me with?

Page 42, Game 19: LA Hallucination by Rosie 🌹

“a dream-like TTRPG for 2 players based on the album E•MO•TION by Carly Rae Jepsen”

A TTRPG based on an album? The despair potential here ranges between “None whatsoever” and “All of it.” Let’s find out where it pegs the ol’ dread-o-meter.

Ah, it’s a zine! And a game! And it’s pretty darn good at being each.

Page 36, Game 16: Lost in Dark Halls (Forking Paths #2) by Orbis Tertius Press

This issue is all about the Labyrinth. Like, THE Labyrinth, the one from ancient Greek legend, not the Bowie one. (Though if you want some Goblin King and his attendant Bulge, fuck it, it’s your game, mate.) What does the Labyrinth represent symbolically? What are the various versions of the myth? What are some theories about where that myth came from?

All of that is presented in a style that’s academic without being dry. The overall vibe is like a really GOOD college class, one where the prof still genuinely digs the material and is enjoying the chance to share it with you lot. It’s honestly pretty cool.

It’s also just a lead-in to the game at the heart of the endeavor, which is all about printing out a deck of 52 maze tiles onto some cardstock and playing a game with them. The game is all about creating your own version of the Labyrinth myth — and you can go as realistic or as wild with that shit as you like. You can ground your story firmly in historical events, or you can have monsters running around, or you can even Bowie that shit up. The game is more than flexible enough to accommodate whatever you’re feeling.

Also, by the time the story comes to it’s conclusion, you’ll actually have created a physical card-based Labyrinth on your table. So that’s pretty dope.

Not sure what else to say, other than this looks really cool. It’s a well thought-out guided storytelling game with a very clear central theme. If that’s the kind of game you and your buddies are into, this looks like one you’d have fun with. Definitely makes me curious to see what other issues of the zine are like, that’s for sure.

Is this next one gonna be a zine, too?

Page 56, Game 9: Potion Commotion: Heart Edition by JENNY_

“Grow plants, brew potions, maybe even solve a mystery”

Interesting. If it lets me show-up Snape for the punk-ass incel he is, I’m SUPER into it.

Huh. Not sure what I was expecting, but I feel like I was expecting … more?

Page 21, Game 26: Dogs Throwing Swords II: Three Barks To The Wind by Rook

What’s this? Something BAD has come to the Dogwoods!

Assemble your three-dog team of heroes!

Now get out there and kick some side-scrolling ass! Launch flurries of weapons! Blast through level after level of–

Wait, it’s over?

Yeah … it’s over. You won.

Good dog!!!

It’s a cute enough little game, but it suffers from two problems. The first is the challenge: there isn’t much. I banged-out a complete playthrough in … I wanna say, 15 minutes or so? Made it all the way through to the end on one go. One of my doggos fell during the final boss fight, but the other two were able to bring him down. There’s really not much to the game; avoid the stuff that hurts, blast the stuff that’s trying to kill you.

You can even turn on the “Repeat” option, which just blasts away over and over and spares you the bother of holding down the “Fire” button. I’m of mixed minds about that. On the one hand, yeah, the game clearly benefits from that addition, but at the same time, I kinda wish it didn’t. I wish there was some strategy involved in there somehow.

But, nah, just blast away. Cycle your dogs’ positions so that the ones with the most health are most likely to take hits, I suppose.

When I went through the “Harvest the Screenshots” run, I could step away from the game for a remarkably long time, and my three goodbois were doing just fine with no input from me whatsoever. They got pretty chewed-on during the boss fight, though. That’s when I decided to see what the “You lose!” screen looks like, and … there isn’t one. If all your dogs drop, then two of them get back up and on you go.

You basically have to give the hell up entirely to lose this game.

Okay, fine, it’s not a hard-core gaming experience, it’s more of a cute little trifle. But … is it all that cute?

Here’s what the main gameplay looks like:

And here’s a boss fight:

Notice anything?

The dogs are the ONLY dog-themed element on the screen at any given time. On of the enemies spits bones at you, but that’s pretty much it. Heck, even the doggos’ attacks aren’t thematic at all; I don’t typically associate dogs with knives, or spell blasts, or battle-axes.

Everything other than the dogs is generic video-game enemy stuff. You could replace the dogs with traditional fantasy hero sprites and it wouldn’t impact the feel in the slightest.

What kinds of weapons should dogs be launching? Kong balls? Tug-of-war ropes? And what kinds of enemies should dogs be doing battle against? Mailmen, obviously, but what else? Squirrels? Cats?

If I’m going to lead a band of adorable doggos to glory, I’d like their world to be much, much doggier. Even if the gameplay does make it just a silly trifle, I still want it to have more personality than this.

Though those ARE some totes adorable heroes. They are, indeed, very good dogs. Just wish they had more of a chance to shine.

Will this next game give me even more doggy funtimes?

Page 36, Game 16: Lost in Dark Halls (Forking Paths #2) by Orbis Tertius Press

“featuring rules for Labyrinthine, a storytelling game of branching myths, for solo or group play”

I’m willing to bet a fella could shoehorn dogs in there. If he made the effort.

Ever feel like the big issue with Candyland was its lack of narrative cohesion?

Page 43, Game 12: Tabletop Archaeology 101 by avarisclari

You and up to 99(!!!) friends are competitively digging for artifacts! See who can court the most exciting danger and get the best artifacts!

Or, if you’re strapped for time, everybody roll a die, high roll wins. Same destination, shorter path.

This is a decision-free game. You’re rolling on a series of three charts, which may force to re-roll on various charts, which makes it feel like a press-your-luck game except those allow you to make choices. You are encouraged to make up stories fleshing out your dice rolls — and if you don’t, there’s literally no reason to play this game, so you may as well.

Good rolls get you points, most points/first to 45 points wins.

Also, the game closes-out with six pages of real-world archaeological artifacts. So that’s nice.

There’s nothing here, so let’s just move on.

… save to take a parting shot at the designer’s assertion that it seats from 3-100 players.

No.

No, it does not.

How many players does this game take?

Page 21, Game 26: Dogs Throwing Swords II: Three Barks To The Wind by Rook

“A sidescrolling bark-em-up where you create and guide a team of very good dogs to save their home!”

Goodbois on an adventure together?!?!

I’m trying to keep my expectations reasonable. This is difficult.

When I randomly select my next game, I like to close out with a knee-jerk reaction to the game’s short description. Here’s both from last week:

“Dehumanize kids and make money.”

“Oy. What have we said about “cheap adolescent nihilism,” bundle? Am I gonna need to put my rantin’ pants on for this one too?”

The answer to my question is “No.” No, I shall not be getting my rant on. I remain unmoved by cheap adolescent nihilism. But hard-won cynicism? I can still get behind that. As long as the game does it right.

Page 17, Game 20: No Pineapple Left Behind by Seth Alter

No Pineapple Left Behind did it right.

You are the administrator of a school, and you have a goal. This goal varies from scenario to scenario; maybe you’re trying to earn some money, maybe you’re just trying not to bankrupt the school, whatever.

The most annoying part of running a school is, of course, the children who go there. They’re high-strung little balls of hormones who make friendships and get pissed at each other and hit on each other and form bands together and just do all sorts of annoying bullshit that isn’t SCHOOLWORK. Because at your school, your funding DEPENDS on how well your students are doing. Lower grades, less money. And time those little shits spend on interpersonal nonsense is NOT MAKING YOU MONEY.

However, pineapples are way less trouble.

Pineapples are just there. They neither find nor make trouble, they go where they’re supposed to without any fucking about, they tend to pull perfectly acceptable grades. Pineapples simply exist.

Taken at face value, this game is exactly the type of unadulterated nihilism that so severely turned me off in Headliner. The difference is that I’m quite certain this game doesn’t want me taking it at face value.

This game lives and dies by the tension between what it encourages me to do and what I, as a human being with some modicum of empathy, actually want to do. The game advises you to suppress the children’s Humanity scores; push that Humanity all the way to 0, and they become nice pliable pineapples. Conversely, if you let your pineapples’ Humanity creep all the way back up to 100, you’re asking for all sorts of messy complications.

I, naturally, would PREFER not to suppress my students’ humanity. The game lets me go either way.

Similarly, how should you treat your faculty? Obviously, you want them to be as cheap as possible. Dealing with students costs energy, as does teaching classes. (Unless you let them just run a TV for the entire class, the “I don’t give a fuck but at least nothing bad is likely to happen” option.) Sooner or later, they run out of energy, at which point, you can just fire them and hire some fresh-faced youngster to vampirically drain instead.

… or, you can notice that their energy replenishes more quickly between days if you pay them more money. This may lead to you noticing that as they gain more experience, they get access to more effective teaching techniques, thus raising the students’ grades and earning back MORE money than what you’re paying out to them.

That’s the difference between this game and Headliner. Headliner presents a system that’s so inherently corrupt that there’s nothing you can do about it, even if you want to. Pineapple gives you the option of fighting the system — and even of scoring victories against it.

Kinda. Sorta.

The game progresses. Teachers’ workloads start exceeding what any amount of salary can compensate for, so even if you care, you’re going to need to let them slack-off and let the TV do the teaching on occasion. (Assuming you do, in fact, care. Burn-n-churn remains an option.) There are so many students that it becomes difficult to keep an eye on them, and try to encourage them to stuff that maximizes their Humanity.

Your resources for doing that are limited. Each teacher has a laser they can use to mess with their students:

Make them feel better, or push them towards becoming nice, pliant pineapples. Break up fights before they start, or discourage friendships so they have more time to spend on their schoolwork.

Each time you use a laser, it costs that teacher a bit of energy. Use them wisely.

No Pineapple Left Behind doesn’t start to sing until it starts adding on layers like this, when it makes it clear that caring, although still an option, is difficult. There’s only ever so much you can do. How much do you want to exhaust your teachers policing these little shits?

(You don’t have to police the pineapples, you know. They are neither bullies nor bullied. Sure you want to discourage your students from pineapple-hood? They might honestly be happier that way.)

The playthrough when I discovered that good pay for your teachers leads to good results for the kids ended with me sacking all the teachers. I had a goal of making a net $1000 by the end of the scenario, and avoiding those pesky salaries was what I needed to get over that hump. Sometimes you just have to make the tough decisions, you know?

Or the scenario with the bus drivers’ strike, when fully a third of the school was showing up late to their first-period classes and thus getting F’s. My only goal was to keep from bankrupting the school. First period was, across the board, TV Time. It just wasn’t worth it to spend the teachers’ precious energy on partially full classes.

Oh, and then the parents start calling. They’re complaining about grades, or want you to prevent their gay son from hitting on any boys. Do you ignore the calls, or indulge them? There’s a cost to each.

The final scenario I played focused on a single student, Davis Jefferson, a pudgy boy who likes to wear makeup. Davis catches a lot of shit from the other kids, because he wears makeup. Goal for the week: send Davis home each day without the “Teased” condition.

This means ending the day with Davis’s teachers bathing him in soothing “No Teasing” lasers, at great cost to their own personal energy. It is a pain in the ass — and if the little fucker gets out the door before I can strip him of all that teasing, I lose. He sincerely might be happier if I started intentionally trying to pineapple him, he’d catch a lot less shit. At the very least, he’d make things a lot easier for everybody if he’d stop wearing make– OH MY FUCKING GOD I’M PART OF THE PROBLEM NOW HOW DID THIS HAPPEN.

This is the genius of No Pineapple Left Behind. It does not FORCE you to become a part of the problem, it entices you into it. It seduces you. It shows you how much easier everything would be if you simply stopped caring.

Caring becomes an act of defiance, of revolution. Nurturing the kids, encouraging their humanity, is an eternal battle, and the system wants you to lose. Which makes those times you can win that much sweeter.

Whoever wrote this game has serious beef with the American educational system. Depending on your own experiences within that system, this game may make you laugh, or trigger a full-on PTSD episode, or do both simultaneously.

It is two-fisted blunt-force satire wrapped in a genuinely compelling game experience. It’s honestly kinda fucking brilliant. I very much recommend it.

So the second hundred games is starting off with a bang. Is the next game gonna keep this momentum going?

Page 43, Game 12: Tabletop Archaeology 101 by avarisclari

“Are You Ready to Join the Dig?”

Damn right I am. There’s awesome shit underground. Gimme a shovel.

I seriously figured I’d lose interest somewhere in the mid 20’s.

A few months back, Itch.io dropped its Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. For a minimum donation of $5, you got access to 1700+ games and game-adjacent materials. According the the page, “all proceeds will be donated to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Community Bail Fund split 50/50.” Groovy. #blacklivesmatter

So, I got it. Which led to the very obvious question:

WTF am I going to play?

This bundle represents the most perfect example of “choice overload” I’ve ever seen. There’s literally just too much here. I could aimlessly poke around, but surely I’d be missing some good games, right? I could look for a good “Best Of” list, but I figured it’d just be the games that already have a bit of a following. Didn’t seem fair to the other stuff that got roped in. So much was going to get lost in the shuffle.

So, there was only one way around it: roll some dice. Pick shit at random. The bundle has 59 pages, with 30 games on each page (I counted). Tell a random number generator to pick a number between 1 and 59, then pick a second number between 1 and 30, and boom. There’s my new game. And I’m going to go play it.

(I’ve since upgraded my random number generator; I used to use Random.org, but I’m now using a Perl script, which keeps track of what I’ve covered, and also scrapes the page to feed me the basic information for my copy-pasting pleasure.)

I reported my random-number-generated adventures on Facebook at first, but my wife recommended that if I was gonna do it, I should put it somewhere both more visible and less likely to spam my friends. So I resurrected my vanity URL as a blog, and here we are.

I seriously figured I’d lose interest before long, but this is FUN. I genuinely get a little excited to see what the random number generator is going to drop on me next. Even though a lot of these games are … not good. 1700 games, and David Pumpkins rules apply; they’re not all gonna be winners.

But a lot of them ARE good. A few of them are even great. It’s such a delight when I get handed something from the darkened depths of this bundle and it turns out to be a gem, something I absolutely WOULD NOT have played otherwise.

And I’ve really enjoyed blogging about the experience, even though I don’t think anyone other than my wife is actually reading these. (I COULD turn on the comments in these posts, I suppose, but that would mean monitoring my comments, and MOTHERFUCK that.) Are you reading this? Feel free to say hi if you are; I’m at pete at blairhippo.com.

Even if nobody is reading these, they’re fun to write. I like having this little record of cool new shit I was discovering. Once upon a time, I had dreams of making my living as a writer. That didn’t pan out for a variety of reasons, but one of the reasons I stopped writing even semi-professionally was the realization that the part I was most looking forward to was hearing my friends tell me I’d written a good story. Once I realized that, it grossed me out. I felt shitty about myself for chasing that external validation high, so I stopped.

I do not anticipate this will ever honestly result in feedback. And yet here I am, writing it anyway, and enjoying it, taking pride in what I’m producing. It feels good.

It’s still fun. I think I’m going to keep doing this a while longer.

But in the meanwhile, 100 entries deep seems like a good place to pause and take stock of what I’ve found.

Some simple stats: of the first hundred bundle entries I’ve explored, 65 of them were actual video games. I initially thought that’s what all 1700+ entries were, but if that 65% ratio keeps holding, it’s hard to complain.

I wasn’t expecting tabletop games to be as heavily represented as they are, and I wasn’t sure what to do about them. It’s not like I’m going to stop what I’m doing, organize a group (in the middle of a pandemic, no less), and play them. But ignoring them feels wrong. So I’ve just been going through the rulebooks, and trying to gauge how interested I would be in playing the game. Not as fair as actually playing them, I realize, but still seems better than just skipping them. Hopefully if any of their creators have stumbled upon this blog, they won’t think I’m a truly gigantic bag of cocks. Regardless, 24 of the first hundred entries have been TTRPGs, with two more LARPs.

Of the remaining nine, one was a print-n-play supplement that made me work entirely too hard to find any rules for it, so I kinda dismissed that one as “Eh, it exists.” The remaining eight entries aren’t so much “games” as “game adjacent”. Three were desktop tools of some sort (though in the case of Desktop Goose, that’s stretching the definition a bit), two were comic books, two were graphics resources, and one was a game soundtrack.

Let’s take a look back at the standouts.

Note that if you go through my reviews, there’s like a 50/50 chance I felt like a game had at least SOME merit to it — maybe it was lightweight, or more of a funny joke than a game, or I simply felt like it just wasn’t for me. The first draft of this summary acknowledged them, which turned it into a gigantic hellbeast. Let’s let the summary summarize, eh?

Recommended Video Games

This is what I came for, and I found some good ones. These were the best.

1. NOISE1

(Original review, game page.)

Yes, these are in order. And yes, of all the games I played, this crazy-ass little ASCII adventure was the one I enjoyed the most.

There are, very obviously, games on here that are much more polished. There are games I’m liable to come back to, and this isn’t really one of them. But that’s one of the things I like about it; it told its story, and it finished. I don’t NEED to play it again.

Part of this #1 ranking may be the fact that this is the first game I found in this randomized trawl that really EXCITED me. That gave me that slowly dawning realization of “Holy shit, I think I might have found something great here.” But even without that near-term nostalgia, I still admire the hell out of what this game did. With a minimalist palate, it tells a complete and engrossing story, with tense, engaging gameplay. I’ve been working with computers a long goddamn time, and typing commands into a prompt has never had me at the edge of my seat like this.

I still think the best comp for this game is Portal, but without the dark sense of humor. The puzzles are clever, and it rolls out both new obstacles and new tools for dealing with them at a pace that just feels right. The pacing kills it in general; it neither finished too soon nor wore out its welcome.

When your goofy little ASCII game has me comparing it favorably to one of the all-time greats, you’ve done something very, very right.

And the final command I typed in … look, I’m misting up over here about the fate of a couple of LETTERS ON MY SCREEN. I hope those two letters are okay. They’ve been through a hell of a lot.

Just a superb game, and one I highly recommend for anybody looking for a unique indie experience.

2. Overland

(Original review, game page.)

The most conventionally excellent game I’ve yet encountered in the bundle, and likely the one I’d be coming back to most if rolling the dice and trying something new just weren’t so. Damn. Cool. This is the one that inspired the most days where I was groggy from staying up too late playing a goddamn game.

The most obvious comp is likely FTL; it’s an adventure roguelike where you’re not so much exploring as you are looking for new resources to add. It’s challenging, and at times a bit too merciless for its own good. But there’s just a gorgeous ton of game here to explore, and I’m looking forward to making some time to get back to it.

Also, dogs are the best companions. Truly this is a game that understands some fundamental truths about the world.

3. Adjacency

(Original review, game page.)

A simple but beautiful and chill game, and another one that I’d have circled back to were it not for the preposterous to-do list I’ve placed in front of myself. The puzzles are challenging but fair, and I felt pretty damn pleased with myself when I solved them. Click the shapes, make them change colors. Are they the right colors now? Very nice. Good job, you. Care for another?

4. Cycle 28

(Original review, game page.)

Cranking the “chill” dial all the other way to “NONE WHATSOEVER MOTHERFUCKER,” Cycle 28 was the best pure fast-twitch actioner I’ve yet encountered in the trawl. If I’m in the mood for some dope-ass space gunfights, this is going to be one I come back to. Has some definite room for improvement, as my review notes, and I wish I knew how to advance the plot, but this one had me playing it over and over. Sweet game.

5. A New Life

(Original review, game page.)

Visual novel that takes the award for “Most emphatically kicked my feels in their feel-nuts.” Simple and beautiful, and more than a little topical. Take care of each other, you guys.

6. David

(Original review, game page.)

Minimalist boss-fighting game where you’re basically a big-ass pixel doing battle with other big-ass pixels. Gameplay is kinetic and exciting, forcing me to think as well as move fast. You gotta have a plan, man. You’re not defeating those sins without a plan. I defeated all the levels on basic mode; looks like there’s nothing more I can do until I defeat all of them on hard, and I don’t know if I’m that hard-core. But that’s okay. Still got plenty of game out of this one.

7. 1977: Radio Aut

(Original review, game page.)

Playable in-browser at the above link, and will take less than 15 minutes of your time. This is less of a game than it is interactive art. It’s a tribute to one seriously brave dude who, prior to this excursion, I’d never even heard of. Rest in power, Peppino.

8. Sagebrush

(Original review, game page.)

Not so much “horror” as “low-key creepfest,” Sagebrush is indeed a wonderfully creepy, moody game about coming to terms with the past as you explore a cult compound where very bad things once happened. The voice acting requires you to be a touch forgiving, unfortunately, but there’s a really solid experience here if you’re willing to look past it.

9. One Night Stand

(Original review, game page.)

The first game I played in the bundle, and the only one I didn’t choose at random. This is a combo of visual novel and point-and-click adventure game. There’s a lot of warmth here as you attempt to piece together and work your way through an incredibly awkward situation. This is another one I’ve been meaning to come back to in an effort to get other endings. Though at least I made my walk of shame clothed and with a bit of aspirin in me; that’s gotta count for something.

10. Kids

(Original review, game page.)

Less game, more artsy interactive animation. Kids is weird, perplexing, and often a bit unsettling, but it never lost my attention, and I damn sure still remember playing it. I still don’t think I have a handle on just what the hell this game really is, but whatever it’s trying to do, it went and did the piss out of it. Now go jump in that hole. All of yinz.

11. BasketBelle

(Original review, game page.)

Stylish, beautiful basketball-themed puzzle-solving platformer. Loses some points for making some of its puzzle a tad arbitrary, but it’s a unified and damned satisfying gaming experience I can definitely recommend.

12. The Guilt and the Shadow

(Original review, game page.)

The starkest “feel-bad” entry on the list, this is a darkly lovely game of exploration and despair. I’d have liked it more if I didn’t feel like the underlying story was working so damn hard to keep me at arm’s length, but there’s enough here to satisfy. This is less of a game than a mood, and it maintains that mood perfectly.

13. Winterlore I

(Original review, game page.)

Another game I’d have enjoyed more if I’d felt more connected to the story, this point-and-click puzzle solver nevertheless kept me engaged enough to see it through to the end. I wanna see where it goes next, and hope I’ll get to find that out later.

14. Touhou Fan Game Jam Black Lives Matter Collection

(Original review, game page.)

If you missed out on the larger bundle but still want to turn a donation to charity into playable games, here ya go. I refer you to my original review for the game-by-game breakdown. Some of the games here are crap, others are interesting trifles, others are surprisingly damned good.

Recommended Physical Games

Note that in most cases these recommendations are untainted by actual game experience. Nevertheless, these are the games I’d most be interested in playing.

1. Costume Fairy Adventures

(Original review, game page.)

Thoroughly realized game of goofball fairy misadventures. It’s very easy to imagine a group that would have an absolute blast with this guy.

2. Hot Bro Gay Dragons

(Original review, game page.)

Hey, it’s the one I played! Fun, silly way to spend some time telling someone you love how awesome they are. Also, pretend to be enormous and gay.

3. Ironsworn: Delve

(Original review, game page.)

Game supplement for a game I don’t play about an aspect of fantasy RPGs that tends to bore me, yet somehow makes me want to check out the game and do the stuff I normally find boring. Neat trick.

4. Dragon And Warrior

(Original review, game page.)

A role-playing game where you’re collaboratively creating a board game that you could probably go back and base a video game on, which you could then sell on Itch.io. It’s the game nerd circle of life!

5. The Stars Whisper

(Original review, game page.)

LARP. One-shot. Could be deeply moving with the right crowd. If you’re interested, don’t read the rules, just try and strong-arm whoever normally does your LARPs into running it for you.

6. A Mother’s Love

(Original review, game page.)

Solo game/writing exercise that needs cards and a Jenga tower. Win or lose, you might get a pretty solid short story out of the deal.

Recommended Other Stuff

The best of the oddities I’ve encountered thus far.

Voles of the Dusk

(Original review, game page.)

Comic book piss take of the post-apocalypse, starring rodents.

Desktop Dungeons Original Soundtrack

(Original review, game page.)

Fine goblin-punchin’ music. Also available on Spotify.

Pixel Spaceships

(Original review, game page.)

Look, I have no use for art assets for a pew-pew space shooty game. But if you’re working on a project like that and are all “Damn, the gameplay is there, but my spaceships all look like ASS,” here’s your solution.

Desktop Goose

(Original review, game page.)

“What if my desktop were plagued by a simulated goose that occasionally wandered by to be an asshole to me?” said nobody, ever. And yet this exists.

Dishonorable Mention: Headliner: NoviNews

(Original review.)

I don’t want to rehash my negative reviews. I’ve thwacked those games once; handing them an encore beating just feels mean and shitty. But this one deserves some special recognition.

When I initially reviewed it, I came down hard on it for being on the wrong side of history, but honestly felt a little bad about it. It’s not like the game devs could have had any idea that pandemic denialism would be so grody two short years later. I ultimately backed down and gave the game a tentative recommendation; it really does look great, and it really does what it’s setting out to do.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that what it’s setting out to do is actually pretty awful. So I want to make it clear that when I left this game out of my recommendation list, it wasn’t an oversight, it was a deliberate snub.

The modern media landscape really is more than a bit fucked-up. Bias and agenda-pushing are both endemic, so much that one major “mainstream” news outlet is little more than a propaganda wing for one of the country’s two major political parties. That same party relentlessly attacks all sources of uncomplimentary news as illegitimate, creating an immensely toxic environment where nobody knows what to believe, and everybody is actively cultivating their own personal reality bubbles.

Headliner presents itself as an attempt to explore this dynamic, as a way of showing how the news is tempted to push an agenda. It does nothing of the sort; instead, it asserts that the news HAS NO CHOICE but to push an agenda. There is no objective truth, there is no way to balance the need to entertain against the responsibility to inform.

There is no point to demanding that a news outlet do better, because it literally cannot. It’s simply a matter of what “truth” it shall attempt to coax into reality, what flavor of propaganda it’s going to peddle. Expecting anything else is naive. Everything really is just “fake news,” and there’s nothing you can do about it.

To which I say: fuck off. Get the fuck out of here, and take your cheap adolescent nihilism with you.

Fuck this game.

What Comes Next?

Am I going to do ANOTHER hundred games?

Fuck if I know.

But I can, at least, do game #101:

Page 17, Game 20: No Pineapple Left Behind by Seth Alter

“Dehumanize kids and make money.”

Oy. What have we said about “cheap adolescent nihilism,” bundle? Am I gonna need to put my rantin’ pants on for this one too?

Why is it competitive?

Page 32, Game 12: Purplest Prose by Pammu

You and your friends are all trashy romance writers, collaborating to produce some trashy romance. Everybody will roll-up the two leads and a basic premise based on the chart on the second (final) page of the rules, and pitch their “idea.” Players will decide as a group which one they want to run with. Then, writing!

The game will go through multiple rounds, covering various pieces of the story — character introductions, first meeting, when do they fall in love, when do they first bang, etc. Players have two minutes to write their version of this section on a notecard. All notecards are passed to the Editorial Assistant (a rotating position who must sit out of the fun part each round), who will then read all the submissions and choose which one to add to the story. Whoever wrote the winning entry gets a little token, a new player becomes the Editorial Assistant, and play proceeds until the novel is complete! Whoever gets the most tokens wins.

I have no doubt that the person who created this game played it and had a lot of fun with it. So when I say that it’s “insanely underdeveloped,” please know that I’m not trying to imply that they didn’t bother playtesting it at all. I’m sure they did, and I’m sure they and their friends had a lovely time. I’m sure they then said “Hey, we had a great time, let’s write down these rules and call it done!” and moved on.

No, the reason I’m calling this game insanely underdeveloped — and it is INSANELY underdeveloped — is I get the feeling they stopped trying to find the BEST version of this game very quickly. This feels like an extremely early iteration of the core idea. I see so many problems here, problems that could have — and should have — both come out and been fixed with more playtesting.

First, why is it competitive? Each round, only one person’s section will be added to the finished work. You’re basically simulating the experience of submitting fiction to a slushpile and waiting for a response. I used to be a semi-pro writer; that shit is NOT FUN. It’s frustrating. It sucks. This game very much depends on having a table full of players who are all of roughly equivalent writing skills. If there’s a really striking skill disparity present, I would expect some players to have a really shitty time as their work gets rejected over and over in favor of what their more polished friends produce.

I imagine the rules saying to develop a writer persona are meant to mitigate that; your friends aren’t rejecting YOUR writing, they’re rejecting the writing of Frank Wierzboski, a former construction worker who turned to writing cuz he’s been going a bit stir crazy collecting workman’s comp all day after he fucked-up his back on the job. (“He pounded her like a pneumatic hammer being operated by a teenager with insufficient training.”) It’s a good idea — and one that’s completely undeveloped, meriting only a couple of throwaway paragraphs. Why not flesh that out a bit more? Maybe even add a THIRD page to the rules?

But even then, why does only one player’s contribution get immortalized each round? And why does one player need to sit out of the fun bit each time? Instead, why not make it more like Writey Drawey?

For the uninitiated, Writey Drawey (also known as “Eat Poop You Cat”) is my wife’s favorite party game. All you need is a whole fuckton of index cards and some pens. You make a stack of seven cards for each player. At the start of the game, everybody writes a simple phrase on the top card, and passes the stack to the left. Then, each player looks at that phrase, puts the card on the bottom, draws a picture meant to represent that phrase, and passes the stack to the left. Then, each player looks at the picture, puts the card on the bottom, writes down the phrase they think that picture was supposed to represent, and passes the stack to the left. And thus the cycle continues. Once all the stacks are complete, players take turns revealing the full chains of madness that they as a group have just created.

The great thing about this game is that even though drawing is an integral part of it, the game levels the playing field. Skill is optional. Crude stick figures may struggle to convey as much meaning as better-drawn pics, but they can be just as funny — if not even funnier.

Also, Writey Drawey has no formally declared winner. It doesn’t need one. It’s effectively a co-op game where the goal is to make each other laugh. Spoiler: you’re probably all gonna win.

I feel like there’s a version of Purplest Prose that learns some lessons from Writey Drawey and, instead of creating ONE novel, creates SEVERAL, one for each player at the table. EVERYBODY’S initial pitch gets accepted. Then, everybody writes down the first section (“Introduce Character A”) on the first card. They they hand their stack to another writer, who reads what they’ve written and writes the next section themselves (“Introduce Character B”). Everybody’s contributions, no matter how wretched, are added to a finished product. Everybody gets to play, nobody has to sit the round out. At the end of the game, everybody reads the finished products to the table. I’m willing to be they’ll be disjointed, wretched, and hilarious.

So, during the game, who do you hand the cards to? Do you just give ’em to the player on your left, or is there some way to mix it up more than that? And how far back are players allowed to read? Surely they need to know the core characters and concept, but are they allowed to read EVERYTHING that’s come before? Or is that part of the game — you need to quickly skim what other people have written, because the clock is ticking and you need to get YOUR shit written down?

I honestly don’t know. That’s why you take ideas like this, and playtest them. You see what works best. You see what problems emerge, and come up with ways to solve them that keep everybody having a good time. You see what’s the MOST fun. This is how you develop a game.

This is what Purplest Prose needed to become more than a cool idea for a game. There’s a fun little writing exercise here, and I have no doubt that if you have the right circle of friends, you’d have a good time with it. But I have no confidence that this represents the best game that could be derived from this exercise.

But what the hell, the charts on the second page of the rules have some work behind them. They might be a solid starting point if you wanted to take a crack at making that game yourself.

All right, up next … is going to be something planned.

100 reviews. That merits a bit of a retrospective, not just another dice roll.