#bundle games

Cats Are Liquid: A Light in the Shadows

A puzzle platformer style game featuring you as a blob-shaped cat trapped in a strange world.  Like all cats, you can turn yourself into liquid to slide through small places and, later, turn yourself into a floating cloud ball.  Also, you glow in the dark and I assume you discover more talents later on.  Like Dere Evil, this eventually started to play up a more sinister tone but, unlike Dere Evil, this one features a smiling cat-blob and I never felt the same 2hard4u mechanics.  As far as the genre goes, I liked it.

Newfound Courage

RPG Maker fare about a boy who moves to a new village, meets another boy, presumably falls in love, there's some town-threatening supernatural stuff going on, yadda yadda.  Has an excruciatingly long introduction that played out like a slow Choose Your Own Adventure except then you start in the same place anyway.  I spent the first several minutes thinking it was a Visual Novel style game instead of a JRPG style thing.  Rest of the game is filler fetch quests and simple puzzles as the story unfolds.  It honestly isn't terrible but it lost a lot of points with that introduction and, by the time the story started to move, I was already over it.

Dere Evil.exe

Retro platformer that starts out just subverting tropes (touching coins will kill you) and then gets progressively creepier as you continue with an evil AI warping the game around you.  It also gets significantly more difficult as you continue which is an issue if you're not very good at platformers.  I suppose it does warn you in the beginning though.  I was enjoying the story but hit a wall on difficulty vs ability in the 3rd level and had to set it aside for now.  I'll probably try coming back to it though and recommend it.

Prince of Cats

A Princess Maker style game where you are a cat-woman who must leave the faerie realm and go to the land of mortals to find the missing Prince of Cats. From there, it's a lot of picking your job or schooling for the day so you can get smart & pay the bills.  Side mission type things about the people you meet along the way and attachments you form, heavily influenced by the works of Shakespeare.  It’s pretty good if you enjoy this style of game: I played through it twice and had very little overlap between my stories.  Sadly, both times I was denied access back into the faerie realm and had to live out my mortal days as a tutor and a socialite, respectively.

The Witches Tea Party

JRPG style game about the last six or seven witches in existence who gather for a tea party only to find mystery when spooky events transpire and one is found dead!  Or missing her soul, at least.  Which is like dead but reversible since she's left laying in a bed, presumably so her soul can be returned.  Anyway, this was pretty slow moving with some fetch quests and simple puzzles and mystery solving.  I didn't encounter any combat so I don't know if that exists in the game.  In fact, after an hour (!) in the game, I felt as though I had wandered a lot and accomplished frustratingly little.  JRPG style graphics and JRPG style noises and music.  Sort of cute but not exceptionally playable.

Rex: Another Island

Retro old-school platformer where you play as a tiny pink dinosaur.  Travel through forests and caves as you collect rings and perform some other tasks I wasn't 100% clear on but, you know, it's an 8-bit style jumping game so how complicated can it be?  Got pretty tough for me in a hurry but checkpoints were plentiful and the graphics and music combined to keep me fairly charmed.  I'm not much of a fan of the arcade platformer genre but I played this for far longer than I would have guessed and will file it away to continue playing later.

Has a timed mode for people who want to speedrun or challenge themselves and, improbably, a "low performance" mode which didn't seem to do much but then how much lower could you dial down the impact of this game?

Eat Girl

On the surface, this looks like a Pac Man clone but it's more of a puzzle arcade game inspired by Pac Man.  Guide the titular character through mazes, avoiding enemies that included ghosts who can dash at you, slow worms who just wander predetermined paths and jellyfish things that fire darts in all directions and emit an electric pulse if you get too close.  The longer you can move without stopping, the faster your speed which you'll need later to bash through barriers.  Not an easy thing in the twisty passages.  The music and sounds were a little disorienting -- for example, dying was a crashing glass noise -- but they worked with the maps for a surreal sort of experience.  Overall, I thought it pulled together well as a game.