#cinicross

Day 0/Day 1+2/Day 3/Day 4/Day 5

Pushed myself today. I could feel my notes get less eloquent as it went on and I'm not sure how much editing I have in me.

The Cave Diver

Horror Caving Qwop. Bennet Foddy's The Descent.

Every once in a while, the internet rediscovers how horrible caving is and gawk and the terrible deaths people voluntarily go through while squeezing themselves through Gaia's ass crack. Now we have a game about it.

You play as a series of nameless cave divers who all feel a Amigara Fault esque compulsion to explore a long exhausted and abandoned silver mine. The deeper they go, and the more bodies of previous divers they find, the more apparent it becomes that getting stuck and starving to death, or getting crushed by falling debris, isn't the only thing to worry about. There's something hiding down there with you.

I say "A series of cave divers" because of how the game handles respawning. If your character gets stuck and you have to give up a run, the next character is a new diver coming in, with the death count ticked up. This is interesting because any changes made to the environment in a previous run stays, like breaking a bridge or pushing a boulder. It's also frustrating in that there's a couple points where losing a run is mandatory to set up the next diver's route.

All of our divers are apparently paraplegic, so their only mode of locomotion is dragging themselves via their arms. You use the mouse/stick to move your arms, and you use the mouse buttons/triggers to grip with your left and right hands. When you get into tight squeezes and have to fight for every inch, it feels right. But when you're in wider spaces, it just feels awkward. I wish we had some ability to at least shimmy with our legs.

The game kinda poorly communicates how one of its mechanics works. They give you a sign system, where you can leave a sign for future divers. Arrows, skulls, a question mark, etc. I thought this was solely for making the repeat trip easier with directions. But no those are checkpoints. I kind of ignored them for my first half playing, and kept having to make annoyingly long treks.

As for the horror… if you are easily claustrophobic I can see the main meat of the game being unnerving. But the abstracted 2d kinda dulls that for me. It only really got a mild chill at the very end, when you got a small glimpse of whatever is going on here.

Petal Crash 2

Chain Reaction Versus Puzzler

I really enjoyed the original Petal Crash, but I was kinda blindsided by the sequel existing at all. Need to keep a closer eye on things.

Like a lot of block puzzle games, this one is about arranging sets of colored blocks and setting up combos to fill the opponents board with garbage blocks, a la Panel De Pon/Puzzle League or Puyo Puyo. Petal Crash's system is unique in that you're not dealing with a single direction of gravity. You slide blocks orthogonally across the board, launching other blocks in multiple directions. It's a bit of a learning curve, but once you have it down you have a lot more strategic freedom.

Petal Crash 2 exists for three reasons. First, it's a graphical upgrade. Petal Crash 1 was emulating the style of a game boy color game, while this one is trying to mimic an arcade game, including having a fake ROM load at startup.

Second, it's a rule revision. This game restructures how garbage, incoming color blocks, and corner cases work. It's not an immediately exciting shift, but all their decisions make the game much more consistent and fair.

Third, it adds native online. I don't think the demo had this though, or at least, if it did I did not notice it.

Also looking at the trailer, it seems there will be more gimmicky versus modes, but the demo didn't have any so I can't really comment.

We still have the wonderful character designs and dialogue from Paranatural's Zack Morrison. It wasn't in the demo, but it seems they're expanding the story mode, so I'm looking forward to it.

Call of the Golden Valley

An outback mystery exploration game.

The year is 2009. Your old Friend Marisa is doing a work study for her veterinarian degree in Australia. She's invited you for a trip. The night before, she claimed to have found something, and wanted to talk to you about it face to face at the local pub. She never arrived. Investigating deeper, you find that she's the latest in a string of disappearances in this town.

This is an interesting game, but the demo isn't putting its best foot forward.

It has a roughness to it. The environment in the demo feels sparse and low detail, and the characters are stiff, with no mouth movements while they talk. The voice acting and dialogue is functional. It's a small team, so I'm willing to give slack, but the presentation IS a weak point.

The demo only takes place in one location, the house of the farmer that she was staying with, and he only really lets you search the room she was staying in. There's some intrigue, like learning she had been dismissed from her university and the vet work study story was a lie, but it feels limited. The low detail environment means there's less of a sense of sifting through things.

The two most interesting aspects of the game are the conspiracy board and having to explore the australian outback using compass, clues, and stationary maps. But these weren't in the demo, so I can't comment.

There's also a slight…tonal problem. The trailer makes it look like it's going to be serious, maybe dipping very slightly into horror. But the dialogue delivery makes it feel a bit Nancy Drew, especially since, when hearing about the disappearance, the farmer goes "Aw man, you have a REAL mystery, just like in my shows."

Sir someone may be dead.

I'm still interested, but the quality will probably be determined by how much the game actually opens up later, actually letting me investigate versus guiding me through linear set scenes.

CiniCross

Nonogram Roguelite. Balatro for Picross.

Go through a slay the spire map where each stop is a nonogram puzzle. Fight both the clock and your life bar, each mistake another wound. Each boss adds a special rule. Some simply make mistakes more damaging. Other erase blocks over time, or refuse to let you cross out empty spaces. Winning gives you more time, items, and passive buffs, such as damage reduction or the chance for squares to auto-solve themselves.

Now, a game all about speed clearing nonograms sounds fun. And there is a lot to enjoy here. But the ronguelite element is not doing this any favors. The activity is too limited for any builds to arise. And considering these are random gen puzzles, not handmade pictures… you can only solve so many in a single run before it feels like your head is going numb. I went on an endless run and stopped not because it got too hard but because I was just sick of it

Aim to Capture

Memory Hopping Disco-Esque Horror Mystery visual novel.

Bint is living a difficult life. Following the death of his parents, he's working himself to the bone as a delivery driver to make ends meet for his sister. His depression, constant nightmares, and gaps in his memory aren't helping either. But those problems become backround noise as he comes across a much more pressing issue.

In the wrong place, at the wrong time, he witnesses a murder, committed by a monster that shouldn't exist. One that resembles the thing he sees in his nightmares. Even after escaping, he can't get it out of his mind, and his obsession drives him into a grand conspiracy.

But of course, that isn't you. You're something else. You're running the system that lets you reconstruct his memories. Whatever happened to him, there's secrets you need to find.

Now, I didn't finish this demo. I was three hours in and still had a ways to go. I may come back with a second opinion on finish, once I get a better sense of this narrative's shape.

It's surprisingly complex on a mechanical level. Instead of choosing individual actions, you choose trait cards, such as empathy, anxiety, or apathy, which determine Bint's mindset when making a decision. You unlock trait cards by combining thought keywords, and those keywords are gained by making specific choices beforehand. I can see some complex flowcharting depending on how the game pans out.

Bint's narration is so far going well. I haven't done an extensive side by side comparison of all the options, but the writers seem to be pulling off the tightrope walk of giving him a lot of different possible reactions while staying in character.

The tone so far is mostly a sense of consistent unease, punctuated by moments of levity or occasional horror. The latter is where they feel more confident playing with style and presentation, the monster and the nightmares shifting around the visual style. There's a building sense of intrigue that I'm excited to see pay off.

My complaints are a few. First, the consideration minigame to get new trait cards takes too long. Although part of that is just my compulsion to try every single combination every time. Second is that the trait system, for as much as I find it interesting, also leads to moments of "I did not want to say that." So moreso than usual, keep saves at decision points. Third, the framing narrative of the memory reading machine will sometimes grind the narrative to a halt and force you to do a number puzzle. It seems to be a convenient way to diagetically cut forward, our POV character having to solve a computer access problem, but still kind of annoying. Lastly...

"The Cake is a Lie" joke in the year of our lord 2025.

Ambrosia Sky

Metroid Powerwasher

It's the 2200's. Humanity has fled a dying earth and spread through the cosmos. Despite the earth's death, humanity still has an endless desire to live on. This brings us to The Scarabs, a mystic and scientific group that wishes to study death, and find the secrets to immortality via the Ambrosia Project. Whenever there is catastrophe, a scarab will soon be there to pick through the ruins.

Dahlia once lived on a farming colony near the rings of Saturn, and became a Scarab to escape her overbearing mother and find her way in the world. 15 years later, she's been called back. An alien exofungus overran the station. Anyone who hasn't evacuated is dead.

It's up to Dahlia to clean the outbreak, collect samples, discover what went wrong, and perform the last rites for the dead.

It's scifi powerwash simulator, where the grime can fight back. Aside from the occasional space critters who shoot gunk at you, the main threat is the fungus. While some is just an obstacle, others are environmental hazards, like creating lightning or exploding when close.

While you have to clear the exofungus to proceed, the levels aren't built around clearing everything, In fact it discourages mindless spraying. Each cluster of fungus has a central "fruit" that you need to cut away at the base, and if you shoot it directly it breaks. Said fruits become your crafting material for upgrades. The missions instead tend to be "get to this point on the map" or "collect X number of things"

And what this game has taught me is, despite all this...I don't think I actually like the cleaning game genre.

THe world was interesting, but I always had a flinch "can we get this over with?" response after spraying halfway through a level. So my impression is "I'm probably not the person to get impressions for this game"

This is Fine: Maximum Cope

Meme Pseudo-Metroidvania

Game starring the This Is Fine Dog going through his internal mind palace and finally contronting his inner brain problems via platforming.

I call it a pseudo metrodvania because it's a series of mini-metroidvania maps connected by a central hub. The core design is pulling from Hollow Knight. 4-way melee strike with a hat attack that can pogo you with the downswing. A resource limited heal. He drinks coffee like in the meme.

I just...what are we doing here?

I do like it as an animation showcase. There's a lot of expressiveness in things like the This Is Fine Dog's walk cycles and hit impacts. The enemy designs are cute, even if a bit unchallenging. But everything else feels tiring.

The maps don't have a great flow to them. Our hero has a slow walkspeed and you need to buy an upgrade to get it functional. The boss was nice but the other enemies felt kind of braindead to deal with

I dunno. I like KC Green's work. The original This Is Fine comic was both funny and resonant for a reason. I hope he gets support from this. But this feels underbaked.

At least Jerma is here.

Constance

Painterly Metroidvania.

You play as the titular Constance, a young artist in the midst of a crisis and going through her internal mind palace to finally confront her inner brain problems via platformi-wait, wasn't I here already?

All jokes aside, this is a good game, but it's kind of difficult to talk about why. Not out of spoilers, just that it's a bunch of small decisions and rock solid fundamentals. If I had to point to a single thing that got my interest when I started...

It's that there was no Pogo.

Hollow Knight has become to go-to source for indie metroidvania design, so a lot of them include 4 way swings and pogos just on impulse. The thing is, these can be an overly simplistic and dominating mechanic in both combat and platforming. You need to design around it, which Team Cherry does well. Constance forces more dynamic combat by shrugging that influence off. Your main slash only goes horizontally, so you need to spend more time maneuvering with the enemy in your face. When you DO get an attack that goes straight down, it doesn't pop you back up, so you can't use it to bypass platforming or attack from safe angles. It's a small shift that gives the game it's own feel.

Of course. I typed all that out. And then looked at the trailer. And saw a later section. With an unlocked pogo mechanic. So we'll see how that goes.

Still, there's a thoughtfulness that permeates its design. It copies Hollow Knight's charm system, now called inspirations, but turns it into a tetris puzzle, fitting upgrade shapes on a grid. The game gives you a dash/airdash mechanic from the word go, so you always feel like you have access to good movement. On death, you can choose between respawning at your last save point, or respawning in the same room, but you'll be "cursed" and enemies will now be buffed until you reach a new save. It's establishing its own mechanical identity in a way I really appreciate.

If there is one thing to know about me it's that I am quite the connoisseur of Picross. Picross, or Nonagrams as they're alternatively known by, is a simple puzzle requiring the player to fill out certain cells and blocking out cells that shouldn't be using the number clues found on the side and top of the grid. The grids themselves can be as small as a 2x2, a 5x5, and can be as big as a 15x15. They're fun little brain teasers that make me think mathematically, and I get a cute picture at the end when I complete it. I first got introduced to these puzzles back in 5th grade from a school friend who brought his classic Gameboy to play with me. He let me play Pokémon Picross and it took a short while for me to understand the rules and I became a lifelong fan ever since be with Pokémon Picross on the Gameboy, Mario Picross on the SNES, or even as an app game on my phone. It's just a nice game to play when I just want to pass some time with a puzzle.

Another thing to know about me is that I'm a huge fan of roguelikes. I know some people are tired of the genre and they're cowards, but going through random rooms with random abilities is the most fun I've ever had with a game ever in experimenting with a certain set of abilities that can make the levels be easier or challenging if a certain set makes everything difficult. And if you die, you go back to the start, upgrade yourself to make things easier, and go back out there. A near endless cycle that just makes you think, "I wanna do it again!" Fell in love with Enter the Gungeon, and I've never looked back by playing other games in the genre: Dead Estate, Star of Providence, Hades I and II, Balatro, Vampire Survivors, and my favorite Roguelike on a story and atmosphere standpoint, Inscryption. I just love spending hours on them just seeing how far I'm willing to go with certain abilities all the way to the end!

So when I heard about an indie game that is a roguelike picross that also includes elements of old computer fantasy RPGs, I had to at least try it.

Cini Cross, developed by independent studio Hydrobates, has you completing picross puzzles throughout each level, with the puzzles themselves ranging from difficulty 0 to IV, with the size of each puzzle based on said difficulty from 5x5 to 15x15. All the while, you are on a time limit to complete the puzzle, and when you go past the limit, you start to lose health. So you have to think quick on solving the puzzle while also not making a mistake as that will also damage you if you make one.

Every time you complete a puzzle, you get gold, added time, and a set of roulette wheels that spin to reveal an ability you can get, with them stacking when you get the same ability again when the wheel lands on that ability, and the number of wheels increase based on the difficulty of the puzzle. The abilities themselves can range from after completing a puzzle like giving you more health, more time to complete the puzzles, and more gold to earn, or during the puzzles like the chance to not get damaged when you make a mistake if you continue doing said mistakes or filling in random cells after a certain number of cells. Like I said, these abilities can level up if you pick the same ability again which results in getting more gold or time, or a decrease in the number of mistakes or cells filled in to make things easier. There are also the chance that weapons can landed like staffs that fill in a row or an area surrounding a cell that's been filled in.

You can also gain a consumable item after completing a puzzle based on the difficulty, like Goblin Eyes that fill in 10 random cells, bombs that fill in spaces

Other than puzzles, you can stop at places like a bonfire to heal you or give you a potion if you're already at full health, shops that let you buy a consumable item that you can use in those spots if you have the money for them, and alters where you sacrifice an item for an ability or weapon.

At the end of each floor, you fight a boss that are a series of puzzles with a special rule in place, like double damage if you fail, not being able to put out an x on a cell, a row being reset if you make a mistake, or cells being undone after five seconds. The battle ends when you depleted the boss' health to zero by filling in the right cells and completing the puzzles. There is an item, the stick, that lets you deal more damage to the boss and that damage will increase if you stack them by collecting more sticks.

It sounds like a lot when I explain it, but it's really simple when you play it. And if you fail and die due to your health reaching zero, the character you play as will gain exp and level up to get an increase in health, time, and gold, so the next times will be much easier for you.

I said in my last post I would talk more about Cinicross, because it is an indie game that is utterly mad in the way indie games sometimes tend to be when developers really decide to experiment. The game is a dungeon crawler roguelite that uses picross for its battle mechanics.

That’s right! It uses the act of solving a grid puzzle, as the mechanics to fight monsters and move through the different rooms of a dungeon. Along with the pixel 80s/90s graphic and sound design, the game is a trip to play if you’ve played picross.

If you’ve not done a picross game, you can find sites like this one where you can play it for free. If you’ve not played a video game based on picross, you’ll need a bit of context to understand why Cinicross is so weird and unique.

Most picross games like Squeakross and Murder by Numbers, design their puzzle grids in such a way that when the user solves it, it’s supposed to roughly look like an object or a scene. That object or scene can then be collected by the player to do a variety of things depending on the game. In the case of Squeakross it’s all furniture to decorate a rat’s home, and Murder by Numbers, the objects are pieces of evidence to help solve a crime.

The other thing to understand is that these games, like the original picross, emphasises deduction. By using the clues provided in the grid, you’re making a deduction on which squares to fill and which to mark with an X. Squeakross especially does this well by providing the player with tools to make it easier to count the squares and mark potential points of interest. 

Cinicross is less about deduction and more about pattern recognition, with a mild dose of risk taking. Instead of a chill time trying to deduce the squares, it is a race against the clock to solve the puzzle, while trying to not make too many errors less the hit to your health points ends your run. However, like any good roguelite, the further you progress the more upgrades you earn, which in turn change your gameplay as the run progresses.

It’s certainly an odd game that rewards early accuracy and deduction to allow far, far more reckless problem solving further on in the run. Depending on how good you are on these type of puzzles if the run goes on far too long you may find it too easy.

On the other hand, the fun of seeing all the upgrades get set off may just keep you playing.

It’s a fun game to play, probably not a great game, and I’m still not sure if it’s worth buying at full price, but it is a fun game to play.

CiniCross (Demo) | Steam Next Fest