#bombun

I started 27 new games this month, which is very nearly one a day. I beat 11 of them, and some of the ones I didn’t beat are roguelikes or time-trial games where the definition of “end” is ambiguous. I also read all of book one of The Lord of the Rings (aka 200 pages of the entire 1000 in this omnibus), which is a media property I have somehow gone over 30 years of being a nerd without reading or watching. Suffice to say I got precious little done this month materially, but if all I’m going to do with myself is sit on my duff and play games I’m at least schmooving.

Angeline Era - I do not suffer under the delusion of having cultivated a refined palate. I drink Mountain Dew on the daily. I am an ardent fan of The Fast and The Furious. I once wore the same pair of sweatpants so many days in a row that I eroded a dinner-plate sized hole in the ass. So when I say this game after 10 hours struck me as stupefyingly well-crafted but I think it’s unmitigated ass, I’m willing to call that a “me” problem. My understanding is Analgesic Productions has been on their bullshit for well over a decade and perhaps a greater familiarity with their body of work would better align me with their motifs and methodologies, but for a newcomer this game was as catastrophically discordant and grotesque as Drakengard but without a sultry lady dragon telling me to kill people. Let me tell you, I put up with a lot of Avowed’s horseshit because I entered a soul pact with a would-be goddess who had some enthusiastic suggestions about the amount of murder going on, and that’s a way worse game than Angeline Era. Take notes people.

Minishoot' Adventures – I don’t like twin-stick shooters. I’m leery of isometric metroidvanias because their abilities tend to be very explicit lock/key design with no larger structure or interweaving of navigation and combat tools (compare the flexibility of air dash in Hollow Knight to the dash in Hyper Light Drifter, and also the material difference between a grounded dash and an air dash in general). This failed to convince me from either stance. The map was fairly rote, the combat was in a sourspot of too omnipresent for someone bad at shmups but too easy to provide interesting challenges, and the gameplay failed to meaningfully evolve over its runtime. Unlike something like Yoku’s Island Express the novelty of the form-factor doesn’t make up for the friction it creates, and the result is inoffensive but bland. I have no idea why that apostrophe is in the title.

Wild Bastards – I liked Void Bastards well enough, though it was very easy to hit critical mass and essentially ignore the roguelike mechanics. The writing was also distractingly callous and nihilistic, which is an impressive bar to clear for a game that’s 90% mechanics. That being said, I enjoyed doing train heists on randomly-generated ships, and that’s something I’ve unsuccessfully tried to find in other games since then. The search is also unsuccessful here. Instead of ships, you navigate around a map screen with small groups, routing your moves through various waypoints and teleporters to get the right people to the right places before your pursuers show up. Split up and you can cover more ground, but stay together and you have more firepower in the inevitable fights. The trouble is the fights suck. Small skirmishes in samey maps with guns that feel terrible to shoot, and right when you start hitting a groove you’ve killed the half-dozen enemies for that skirmish and it’s back to the map. I think the character interactions and barks are supposed to be a lot of the appeal, but none of them interested me in the slightest. More and more I’ve felt like modern roguelites are just a pile of mechanics that couldn’t be combined into a coherent game and the player is left to find their own fun.

Vampire Hunters – It’s genuinely impressive how many Vampire Survivors clones have seemingly never played Vampire Survivors or internalized what made it compelling. Item combinations and niche synergies are what keep things fresh, and if I just wanted to run around in a circle with a dozen pistols Mothergunship came out almost a decade ago. All I really wanted was to throw a few hours in the woodchipper and it did do that, but I wish there’d been any spice whatsoever. It didn’t help that one of the stronger items doubled your XP gain but removed your ability to pick your reward, so it’d be 10+ minutes of firing and strafing with no breaks or intercessions of thought.

Lil Gator Game – I think Minishoot’ Adventures stole this game’s apostrophe. I’m glad there’s a game for people who played A Short Hike and said “Yeah I could go for just a normal hike after that”. The recent DLC doubles the length of the game and adds a bunch of cool weapons/items/mechanics, and feels almost more like a sequel than anything else. Technically you can use them on the surface island but many of them only function in the DLC area or are so egregiously powerful with their movement that they destroy any semblance of the game’s already limited challenge. The game’s fun, the story is good, the characters are endearing. I can’t wait for A Long Hike.

Lost and Found Co. – I almost missed this one in my writeup and that would’ve been a shame because it’s one of my favorites this month. My partner and I enjoy hidden object games as something to do together, and this one is endlessly charming with cute characters and a light sense of humor. The fact the pink dragon companion reminds me of Midna certainly doesn’t hurt, but what actually got me to pull the trigger on buying it was the fact that the player character is a duck turned into a human. What can I say, Princess Tutu has its hooks deep in my heart.

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure – I’m godawful at these sorts of spatial reasoning puzzles. Rubix Cubes, tile sliding puzzles, the works. I’m not any better at it now. The boss fights were cool if a little janky, could’ve done without the twee little cutscenes about self-expression and how all the puzzles are a metaphor for being a better person. I thought indie games got that out of their system around the Braid era but here we are. Still a cute little thing and some very clever ideas. Makes me want to go back and beat Crown Trick.

Peaks of Yore – I watched a buddy play this on a call once and it gave me such immediate vertigo to the point that I needed to close the video. Playing it myself is slightly better. Slightly. I’d enjoyed the hand-over-hand climbing of Grow Up and I really like the more grounded version here, though at times it’s a little close to QWOP for my taste and the difference between limply humping a wall and rocketing over several handholds seems random. Compared to something like Jusant it’s far more realistic in some respects, though it’s also very willing to let you launch yourself with no rope and no room for failure. Overall it’s a very compelling game, and I mean to get back to the harder stages soon. I’m just hoping the palm sweat doesn’t break my mouse.

Skin Deep – Going back to me being a basic bitch, I need to admit to myself that studios like Blendo don’t make games I enjoy. I would like to be the sort of person that enjoys Annapurna’s catalogue. I would like to enjoy tone-based humor and genre pieces. I do not. I came into this game hoping for something between Void Bastards and Heat Signature, and instead I got Prey by way of Austin Powers. Movement was stiff, physics interactions were inconsistent and buggy, the humor didn’t land, and when the levels did deign to provide puzzles more advanced than ‘use code from room A on box in room B’ it was only by adding interstitial boxes and codes. The levels aren’t dense or complex enough to make up for the game’s linearity, with the game feeling like the off-kilter shallowness of a roguelike but with static scenarios. At least they didn’t go whole-hog on that concept like Chasm.

OUTBUDDIES DX – I have a sickness that makes me try dogshit metroidvanias because some of them are really inventive and cool despite their technical problems. This one isn’t inventive or cool. I’m not sure why they thought Super Metroid needed blown out sprites with colors that offer no contrast, a swimming animation that causes the hitbox to change shape wildly, or a drone you need to awkwardly swap to in order to scout and do physics puzzles. I get there’s some co-op concepts at play here that I ignored but I’m going to continue to ignore them. They also managed to make the controls even more fiddly than Super Metroid which deserves an award.

Magenta Horizon – Neverending Harvest – This one’s not even a metroidvania, it’s a 2D spectacle fighter that gives you 10+ pages of combos from the word go and expects you to juggle things to your heart’s content. I’ve yet to see a 2D spectacle fighter solve the fact that positioning and spacing are less interesting and mechanically deep in 2D than 3D, and you end up with a clusterfuck of hitboxes and particle effects without any features to differentiate them. Also, as much as I hate the drip feed and currency bottlenecks of Devil May Cry, it at least stops you from drowning in options and having no clue what tools are situational and which are your bread and butter. The aesthetics of this game deserve praise though, it’s incredibly visually striking. Just not for me in the second-to-second hitting buttons.

Frogun – I’m not sure what cruel pallor has caused so many indie collectathons to be level-based speedrun games rather than cohesive worlds but I want it to stop. The grappling hook in this game is neat but it’s very fiddly in how it targets and what it prioritizes, and many mechanics like how items are thrown and the level geometry seem optimized around zipping through the levels rather than playing the game. It’s possible that it needs an hour or two to get into the groove, and I hear the sequel is smoother.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – The Sands of Time trilogy were some of my favorite games as a kid, and I’ve played each of them a half-dozen times at least on the Xbox. I hadn’t done so in a decade, and so I decided to give them a replay. Foolishly I coveted the convenience of save states and modern controllers, so I used a PS2 emulator. I didn’t realize the PS2 versions were buggier and uglier until I was already halfway through Two Thrones, chalking it up to rose-colored glasses. For the games themselves, this is still far and away the best one despite the combat being tedious and a few rough patches. The platforming is crisp and well conveyed, the Prince and Farah’s dialogue is charming, and the game is structured to play to its strengths. Time reversal is such an elegant way to solve the inherent trial-and-error of complex platforming, and it’s odd we haven’t seen that mechanic copied.

Tower of Kalemonvo – It’s been a while since I’d played a diablo-style ARPG and this one piqued my interest as well as being part of the same sale as Magenta Horizon. I also saw a clip that in addition to standard barrel and chest mimics there were door mimics that would tear off entire sections of wall to attack you. Unfortunately the game is very old school; six potion slots, no currency, no classes, just you and your stat sticks going deeper and deeper into a hole. Your inventory is just for holding equipment you can’t use yet, and the classless system means you just allocate stats to pursue whatever your best upgrade is. It seemed like the game wanted permadeath from its structure, but it was happy to let you savescum. Because accuracy was extremely unreliable and the difference between wiping a floor and getting mulched while every attack whiffed was pure RNG, after a while it’s hard to imagine how you’d progress if you didn’t savescum. It was a nice experiment, but definitely made me reconsider trying out Diablo 2 itself.

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within – For years I’d assumed that this game was a knee-jerk tone shift to trendchase God of War, but it was actually a year prior. The writing and setting take a nosedive compared to the first game, really luxuriating in the M rating with metal bikinis and random swearing. Despite the emphasis on combat and adding pages and pages of combos, basic mooks are a chore and the boss designs are atrocious; parry fishing or exploiting sand powers trivializes them but no other strategies work. You can really see how they got from this to Assassin’s Creed. The platforming and room layouts also regress, and the game’s “open world” structure with four wings of one building has you going through the same rooms over and over with very little signposting as to what entails progress. I spent a non-trivial amount of the game playing at x2 speed and it was interesting how much that helped the flow of the platforming. All problems aside, the Dahaka remains one of the coolest concepts for an enemy I’ve ever seen and I’m sad he goes out like a buster.

Briar Flame – I’m accustomed to your standard Hollow Knight ripoffs that have germinated the past decade; your Voidwroughts, your Deviators, your Crownsworns. This is perhaps the most gleefully brazen, stealing the protagonist’s design, several enemy designs, and the entire UI. What’s baffling is the bosses and areas in this game that aren’t Hollow Knight ripoffs are very clever and diverse, they just decided to go whole hog on plagiarism and hide their light under a bushel. Normally I have zero patience for that sort of malarkey but for a solo dev so I’m mostly just rolling my eyes. The game itself is extremely short and pretty rote, but for its length it was jam-packed with bosses and I had fun taking a high-damage axe and going on DPS races against many of them.

BABBDI – It’s free and an hour long, honestly just play this yourself. Explore a concrete city with a variety of strange movement tools, submerge yourself in the jank, be unsettled by the NPCs and the contents of the nooks and crannies. I’m glad games like this exist.

Ancient Mind – I keep trying Zelda clones and they keep disappointing me. For every Pipistrello or Master Key there’s a dozen like this one, taking the wrong lessons and making laborious dungeons that are just checklists. Movement is slow, combat is stiff, and while some puzzles were interesting they were frequently undermined by the inconsistent contextual button prompts or deliberate tedium. The real death knell was that the game was structured as a level-based series of dungeons, but that means that if you left a dungeon through a secondary exit, your progress was reset. You only get the gem that you need to advance past checkpoints for finding every chest in a level, so you end up needing to go through the same sluggish puzzles again and again if you miss something or use a key incorrectly. Also who the fuck says “un-alived” when saying how many times the player died?

Metal Garden – Similar to BABBDI this is about exploring a concrete megacity, but this one is a tight Half-Life-inspired FPS with a few hours of clever level design and solid gunplay. It’s always fascinating how some games can introduce an entire story arc, all their worldbuilding, escalating and evolving mechanics, and several design motifs in the space of a few hours, and others languish with 5+ hours of tutorials and basic introductions. Also this is the first time I’ve sniped a man while riding on the blades of a windmill and that ruled.

Bargalian Regicide – This is exactly the flavor of dogshit I’m in love with. This game is cacophonous, abrasive, barely solvent, full of snags and deliberate friction, and I adore it. It reminds me of Zeno Clash in all the best ways and has the same rusty magitech as Vexx. The sheer variety of level structures and aesthetics is staggering, and the music is unlike anything else I’ve heard. I can’t say the game is good, but I can say it’s $2 and I’m going to think about it for a long time.

Journey of the Garden Rose – I wish I understood why the jank in Bargalian Regicide had me waxing poetic and the jank here had me gritting my teeth while playing and eventually returning the game. Maybe it’s the movement being incredibly slow, maybe it’s combat feeling punishing and unfinished rather than frantic and raw, maybe it’s just the tone. I think this is from a solo dev or small team that has made several games in this milieu/universe so this could be a Colorgrave situation where I just don’t like their house style. Damn shame because the overall aesthetic looked neat but I think this is a situation where I was most aggressively chasing another Dread Delusion.

Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones – Remember when a video game trilogy would come out through yearly releases? It’s not necessarily a good thing, this game is clearly scraps and cobbled-together mechanics, but it’s better than coming out once per decade. Despite being the most polished in some ways I think this is the weakest of the trilogy. The new platforming elements are interesting but mostly used for one-way traversal and masked loading screens rather than puzzles to be navigated. Combat is a bit more streamlined and the boss designs are more elaborate but the Prince’s combat arenas are designed for chaining stealth kills and the Dark Prince’s combat arenas are just mindless hack-and-slash where every kill heals you to full. While the dialogue isn’t as abrasive as Warrior Within the quality of the delivery is worse, and this version of Farah has no chemistry with the Prince. This game did ignite my love of spiked chains if nothing else.

Rum & Gun – I was still feeling the ARPG kick after Tower of Kalemonvo didn’t quite do it for me, and while I’m so-so on pirates this had good reviews from the people who buy solo-dev projects. While this didn’t dislodge Chronicon from my top spot, it definitely earned its place in the rotation. You’ve got rum instead of healing potions, gunpowder instead of mana, a liver slot to help your drink speed, and play Drunken Sailor on an accordion to attract loot. Weapons and armor are all statsticks but runes are both attacks and different passive buffs based on whether they’re slotted in a weapon/armor/helmet/rum bottle/liver. The result is a very interesting juggling of passive and active abilities until you hit critical mass and find your alpha rotation. I wish there was a little more endgame and maybe some set bonuses or legendaries to give something to hunt for beyond bigger numbers, but I still had a fun 20 hours for $5.

Lorn’s Lure – I’ve had an eye on this game even before it released so I’m very happy that a friend gave me a copy. The game itself is halfway between Peaks of Yore and Hypogea, and I need to finish the former before I get too deep into it. You can climb anything concrete with your pickaxes, but stamina is limited and fall damage is brutal. The sheer scale of the levels is staggering, well beyond any other game of this type I’ve played. There’s a button that will tell you which way progress is through the maze of wires and pipes that fades into the dusty void, and while that’s for bitches sometimes I’m bitches.

Bombun – I am not immune to propaganda. Did I buy this primarily because the vivacity and frequency with which the dev mentioned that the titular bunny enters into carnal relations with human men? Yes. Is the game fun on its own merits? Also yes. As I mentioned with Frogun, I’m not a fan how most indie platformers and collectathons have devolved into these speedrun-centric levels but the movement is crisp and the shortcuts available always feel like you’re getting away with something even when they’re intended. I didn’t get too deep into it before getting distracted but I definitely want to see what horseshit the later levels get up to.

Frogsong – Another swing and a miss on a Zelda clone. I’m at the point that I need to just stop playing indie games with frogs in them because they’ve become a shibboleth for a certain style of “cozy” design that is anathema to actual structure or vision with mechanics. Everything here is both rote and executed poorly. The game is woefully short and exclusively fetch quests back and forth across barren hallways with enemies who beeline for you with no AI, but the sword is so mediocre that you’ll often get wombo’d to death anyways. There’s a bevy of options for making the combat easier like making yourself invincible or activating the AI companion bug that will stunlock and murder any enemy or boss within range, but none that make the combat feel fun or interesting. In a game like this if the exploring sucks, the combat sucks, and the story sucks (which it does, it’s insultingly twee and utterly devoid of texture) then there’s nothing at all. I was hoping for something comfortably mediocre like Garden Story but this couldn’t even reach that level.

Clicky click to give the complete game a try!

The graphics and music were thrown together at the last hour of the Ludum Dare, so they're not up to snuff with my usual work. That's alright though, since I was able to get most of everything I wanted in the game. And as always, the controls are explained in-game when needed.

As for this being my first Ludum Dare, I thought this was a pretty interesting experience. Only having two days to get a game finished and adhering to the theme was a tough one, but I was able to get it done after figuring out the concept and cutting down most of the unnecessary stuff I would have put in if I weren't under a time limit.