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Game Finds: Ghost Hunter

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

Another game jam entry, Róger Goulart’s Ghost Hunter is a short and silly game about a young lady who loves ghosts, maybe a bit more than she should.

Here are some opening screens:

Most of it is a kind of guessing game. Each of three cemeteries has tombstones arranged around it. You go to each one and dig it up with your Shovel of Resurrection. If it’s a friendly ghost, then it emerges and you get one credit towards your quota. If it’s a cursed tomb however, an angry ghost comes out and chases you for a bit. If it catches you, you take a point of damage.

How do you tell the difference? Well, usually you can’t. But there are these orange tombstones placed around each level, and when you dig one of those up you get a random powerup for a short time. (Usually: once in a while you’ll find an angry ghost in one instead, but that’s rare.) One of the powerups shows you whether a tomb has a friendly or angry spirit in store. Other powerups slow angry ghosts, disguise you so they don’t chase you, refill your health or make you walk fast for a short time.

Level 2 has periodically appearing sludge ghosts that must be destroyed by digging up waterspouts to block them. Level 3 has annoying bat enemies that must be avoided, and a higher quota than the other levels.

My tips:

When you stop digging up a grave in the middle of the process, the digging you did before isn’t forgotten. You can sneak in a little extra digging when running from angry ghosts this way.
You tend to lose a whole letter grade at the end of a level from taking damage, so be safe.
The best powerup is the one that reveals the cursed graves. When you get one, I suggest just wandering around for a bit, looking for the mean ghosts, and remembering where they are so you can dig up friends in piece.

Spoilers for the ending are after the download link!

Ghost Hunter (itch.io, $0, web and Windows)

A shame, but they asked for it. Also, what happened to their faces? They’re scarier than the ghosts!

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Little Runmo: The Game

Last year for Sundry Sunday we linked to Gooseworx’s video game-inspired cartoon Little Runmo. In summary: a platforming character discovers that the peril-filled world he’s tasked with traversing is part of a system designed to support the life of a grotesque ruler. They turn it off, but other circumstances happen, and in the end things don’t go too well. Here’s the video, again (16 minutes).

A little green person off on a dangerous journey.

Little Runmo was made four years ago and has amassed 30 million views. Much more recently, a month ago Gooseworx made a pilot for a show to be called The Amazing Digital Circus, which in that short time has gotten an incredible 147 million views. Presumably it’ll get a series, but who really can tell these days? We have one major media company that thinks it’s worthwhile to make complete expensive productions then purposely kill them before release for a tax writeoff, but these are not the pages to discuss that.

Pointy things: the bane of all runny jumpy people

Over on itch.io JuhoSprite has made a platformer game inspired by Little Runmo, constructed in Godot and (it seems) with Gooseworx’s permission. Here is the trailer (2 1/2 minutes):

You might think it’d be a simple recreation, in game form, of the original, but it’s got its own things going on! Its platforming is pretty sharp. In addition to basic running and jumping, pressing an action button in the air gives Runmo a forward dive that gives a slight bit of extra height and some forward distance. On the ground while ducking, this move turns into a forward dash that can get through low ceiling passages.

Even with all the thematic deconstruction happening in Little Runmo, we never find out *why* Runmo has to traverse dangerous worlds. Presumably the evil king their deaths supports has set up some social pressure to convince his people to traverse spiky obstacle courses. Maybe the local rulers are in cahoots with him. BTW, it’s fun to say “cahoots.” Cahoots!

The game is divided into levels, but they aren’t clearly announced, and to a limited extent you can explore the areas as you wish, in a different order than as presented in the cartoon. The game world isn’t exactly as the cartoon presents it either, with the areas much larger, and containing a decent number of secrets to find! It’s usually worth it to poke around out of the way places if you can figure out how to get to them.

There’s a section with Mario-style timed alternating blocks, although here, if you’re inside a block when it appears, you just *die*.

The game starts out fairly chill, but gets pretty difficult. It doesn’t seem like an unfair level of difficulty, although it may take you a few plays to build up the skills to conquer it. Here is some advice to playing it:

If you haven’t seen the cartoon, you should know that the above ground area is only a small part of the game. The wide pit, the first one with the alternative spike wall over it, is the entrance to the rest of the game. Pikit’s message hints that that’s the way to go (press up to listen to it).
Unlike as seen in the original cartoon, you have to use the midair dive move to get past the pit, it’s too wide to cross with wall jumps alone.
Get used to hugging walls on the way down, to slow your descent. This can be used to scout out pits for secrets, to see if the scrolling continues.
If you press towards most walls but keep jumping, you can climb them easily. Get used to doing this all the time.
If a ceiling has a one block overhang, you can get around it with a jump off the wall and a dive back towards it.
Watch the cartoon, and think about ways to explore regions that the animated Runmo doesn’t go to.
There is at least one place where there are extra lives hidden off the top of the screen.
While running out of lives doesn’t erase your metaprogress, it just sends you back to level 1, the game does not save its state when you exit it. If you quit out and reload, you’ll be at the very beginning.

The Meatball Man is one of the funniest parts of the cartoon. It is possible to complete his room, but it’s optional in any case.

If you don’t care to see the game yourself, this 100% completion speedrun shows off the locations, although of course it doesn’t waste time talking to Pikit or exploring unnecessary places. There don’t seem to be any unnarrated longplays around yet, so, best to sharpen those skills if you want to experience it all.

Little Runmo: The Game (itch.io, $0, Windows & Linux)

Here is a secret room. What is this place? A possible reference to The Amazing Digital Circus?

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Decker

The history of computers is filled with great transformative ideas that never took off, or sometimes, were even actively sabotaged.

One of those ideas was Hypercard, a “multimedia authoring system” for Mac OS Classic. One way to describe it is like an individual website, contained within a file on your computer, that you could click around and explore. Unlike websites, instead of learning a special language to create documents in it, it has its own creation system that allowed users to wield the Macintosh’s powerful UI to make things.

Hypercard was an early version of several different things. Of course its concept of linking between different “cards” of information was influential to the design of the World Wide Web. Its method of placing controls onto cards and attaching code to them is reminiscent of RAD development environments like Delphi and Visual Basic. And its multimedia capabilities allowed for the creation of full games, the most prominent example of which, of course, is Cyan’s Myst. Hypercard also could be seen as the inspiration, with varying degrees of directness, of a swath of creations ranging from TWINE to alienmelon’s Electric Zine Maker.

But wait! Don’t we live in something rich people call the “free market?” Aren’t superior products supposed to make their creators (and, of course, investors) billions of dollars? Why aren’t we all making Hypercard stacks now, on our Macintosh System 29 computers? Of course: it’s because good things are not necessarily profitable, that corporate politics matter much more than the intrinsic worth of a technology, marketing is grotesquely powerful yet also somehow overvalued, and finally, the World Wide Web came out and essentially did it one better.

Yet Hypercard still has its fans even today. Decker (not Docker), the subject of this post, is a kind of homage to Hypercard made for current OSes. It looks, on purpose, like it’s a program for early versions of Classic Mac OS, with 1-bit graphics and copious use of dithering. Yet despite that it’s still reasonably powerful. So, rediscover the promise of computing circa the late 80s, with Decker.

Decker (itch.io, $0, for Windows, Mac and Linux)

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Game Finds: Feydome

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

EDIT: there was a WordPress display glitch that was causing images to overlap the text. I’ve changed the formatting a bit to keep it readable.

There’s hundreds of new games released every day, and there’s no way to can even find out what they all are, let alone try all of them. So there’s an inescapable element of randomness to what meets my eyes, and thus to what I bring to you. It’s useless to ask, “Why did you link to that silly little trifile when Important Game by Known Developer goes without remark?” Our finds are always going to be kind of idiosyncratic.

So it is with this one, Feydome, a slight but fun game made in two weeks for a game jam. It’s a laid-back 3D exploratory experience where you’re a barely-garbed, at first, fairy, searching an eerie abandoned village for clothes to wear. Movement is by WASD, with the Q and E, or else the left and right arrows, rotating the camera. Yes, it’s an exploratory dress-up game!

At the start your fairy is weak and can barely fly at all. You find glowing orbs that each grant a tiny bit more wing stamina, but never enough that you can fly indefinitely. Each orb very slightly extends the amount of flight time, by around one or two frames. So you’re always tied to the ground, but there are a lot of orbs to find, and that extra time adds up.

The fairy can glide if you hold the fly button down, even when out of energy, and if you keep tapping the space bar you can glide much further, which is a huge help. It helps to devote one hand to this, while using the other to move forward.

While you can rotate the camera, you can’t adjust the angle vertically, so you can’t look above or below, and there is no mouselook. The developer says that an expanded version is being made, maybe these control oversights will be addressed in that.

The pieces of clothing, 29 in all, are in weird chattering spheres that are stuck all over to the walls, floors and ceilings. When collected, a sphere stops chattering, which is of great help in tracking down the last few. Clothes go into your Customize Menu. You start out with just a Tied Fiber top and Leaf Panties bottom, but each item you find helps to make your wee friend more presentable in polite society (if there were any in this game).

There are no enemies, and no moving objects besides the fairy. While it’s difficult to get around at first, it’s surprising how even an extra half second of flight time expands their horizons. Mind you, there is no reward for finding all of the clothing. There is no ending; the journey is entirely the point with Feydome. You’re left alone in the abandoned world, you and your wardrobe, until you exit the game. There’s no save function either, but the game’s so short that it can be finished in one sitting anyway. Maybe 40 minutes in all, if you focus on finding everything.

But it’s fun to explore! It’s a satisfying gameplay loop, finding orbs, using the extended flight time to find yet more orbs, and punctuating the process with occasional new clothes. I’m sure this kind of gameplay has been done before, but this is a neat example of it, and it doesn’t cost anything to try.

Feydome (itch.io, $0)

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itch.io: Folder Dungeon

Folder Dungeon, on itch.io, is a short and not-too-difficult game where an adventuring cursor has to dig through the folder structure of a hard drive to find an important file. Each window is a room of the dungeon; entering a Door folder takes you to another room down. You can go back the way you came using the back arrow icon at the bottom of the window.

In addition to doors, rooms can contain items, which can be picked up by clicking on them. Gold is among the items, the value of the coin indicated by a number. Some items cost money; if they do, they’ll have a coin and a number on the item. Some items, notably Health Potions and Ice Cream, take affect immediately; they never enter your inventory, but work immediately on your stats whether you needed it or not.

And, some of the things in rooms are monsters. If you do something other than attack a monster by clicking on it, then every monster in the room has a percentage chance to attack you; if you attack a monster, then it always counter-attacks if it survived the attack, but other monsters in the room don’t get the chance to attack.

Somewhere in each folder structure is an Exit icon. When you find it, you can only enter it once all the monsters in its room have been defeated. You don’t have to defeat all the monsters in a room to leave it, but it does give the monsters in the room a chance to attack you.

The most interesting play mechanic is, every action you take generates “heat.” You can only take so much heat. If heat reaches your maximum capacity, you take one damage per action until you leave the level (which resets heat to 0) or you lower your heat by collecting an Ice Cream.

Note, as you can see in the above screenshot, there’s a display bug in the current version that cuts off the left and right sides of the screen. Or is it a bug? It didn’t actually prevent me from playing? Maybe it’s an aesthetic choice? Anyway, I managed to finish the game on my first attempt, but it was close.

Folder Dungeon (by Ravernt, itch.io, $0)

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Sudo Sweep

It’s not a command to delete temp files as root on a Unix-styled system! It’s a fun and free little game over at itch.io!

The board on the left is a Sudoku-like game; the board on the right is Minesweeper. The two boards match: the numbers on the Sudoku board are the number of mines in the matching area of the Minesweeper game. You use each to help you solve the other!

It’s not perfect, mind you. There’s currently no way to mark a square that definitely has a mine in it, just the question marks you see in the right-hand board above. There are still cases, familiar to players of standard Minesweeper, where you end up having to guess. And don’t click the “change size” button if you care about the current game: it doesn’t make the boards larger, it starts a new game with bigger Minesweeper and Sudoku boards!

Still though, I have to give creator Rianna Suen props for a cool idea! I found this through the “map obelisk” area during Roguelike Celebration, which is a pretty cool place to find things beloved of clever people!

Sudo Sweep (itch.io, free, playable by web)

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Time-Limited Pumpkin Carving Game

Every year, the creator of A Short Hike turns on the servers for a pumpkin-carving game. This year he plans to keep them up until about a week after Halloween, so enjoy it while/when/if you can!

The carving interface is easy to use, although it does result in a glitch that has to be undone sometimes. Keep trying though!

There’s over 2,000 pumpkins to be seen so far, with the ability to favorite ones you like and award the best ones badges!

There’s more than just pumpkins to see, you can go on a hayride, explore a maze and find interesting spots too!

The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival (itch.io for Windows, Mac and Linux, free but $2 gets you a cosmetic extra, goes offline after Halloween season)

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Underlevel

It’s a quick and fun free game on itch.io! It was made for a game jam in 48 hours, with an updated build released a while after. It’s only been out for three months but it’s already become pretty popular, with its fun graphics and gameplay and appropriately frenetic music. It’s a good thing to mess around with for Spooky Month.

You’re the skeleton lord in charge of a five-level dungeon, but a knight has invaded your domain and means to destroy you! Rally your lollygagging skeleton minions, to both lead them to the safety of the downstairs and destroy as many of the gem-laden pots on each level as you can, before the knight gets to them first and smashes them to raise its experience level! If you can’t play it (that Windows thing, argh), here’s a playthrough on Youtube . (9 1/2 minutes)

You start each floor with one skeleton near the upstairs. The knight will arrive in just a few seconds, so use the mouse pointer to get it the hell away and guide it to other skeletons, who are just bumbling around having skeleton thoughts, and alert them! The skeletons with the yellow eyes are active, and will try to reach your pointer.

You’ll quickly discover that skeletons aren’t very smart (no brain, you see), and will often get caught up on walls. If the knight is close behind, you might have to abandon some. The skellies also stumble sometimes, like undead Pikmin. If you can get them to the downstairs, all of the active skeletons that touch it will leave the level and join your horde at the bottom of the dungeon, all but one. The last active skeleton cannot leave the level until all the other skeletons have evacuated and all the loot is gone.

Two things increase the knight’s level: killing skeletons and getting the gems out of smashed jars. If you can get a skeleton to run into a jar first, it’ll break and the gems inside will probably disappear before the knight can get to them! But if the knight is nearby it might grab the gems before they vanish!

The HUD has a lot of information that can help you out. The red arrow on the left side points the way to the downstairs. The left side also tells you how many loot jars and skeletons (“enemies”) are left on the level; both numbers must reach zero, either because of your actions or the knight’s, to move to the next floor. The lower-right corner has a “Knight Cam” that shows you what the knight is up to. It doesn’t tell you its location in the dungeon, but it can still be helpful in figuring out what it’s doing.

Clicking the mouse button will cause all of the active skeletons to jump, dodging any attacks the knight might make until they land again. (Be careful not to click outside the window!) The knight can attack on the move, and smashing a skeleton to bits doesn’t even slow it down. You can’t attack the Knight until the end of the dungeon, so don’t try to gang up on it. The knight also snatches up gems just by being near them, for it has one of those auto-pickup features. It sucks.

Fortunately, the knight isn’t any smarter than the skeletons, and it tends to go after the target that’s closest to it. You can even see its AI: its target path is shown onscreen as a thin line. It changes color, from white to yellow to orange, as it gets closer to whatever it wants to destroy.

If you’re having a bad game and want to start over, you can press F2 to do so. There is no “Are you sure?” prompt and it happens instantly, so be careful with that key.

The knight isn’t done until every skeleton is gone and every loot jar is smashed. It always pathfinds to the closest thing to break, so you can keep it distracted by leaving a jar in an out-of-the-way place for it to waste time running to.

You can see the knight’s level at the bottom of the screen, with a red bar indicating how close it is to gaining an experience level. Every skeleton you escape with is 10 HP off the knight at the end. If you can get to the end with the knight at level 9 or less you have a good chance of winning.

(A lot of the text of this post was reused from a Metafilter post I made on the game.)

Underlevel (itch.io, for Windows)

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Gorzog the Colossal Needs a Place to Park

This is a silly, free browser-playable game, although one with a basic 3D engine. Use the mouse and cursor keys (or WASD, if that’s how you roll) to maneuver your giant walker mech through a city’s streets without causing too much property damage. The parking spots are represented as green pillars that extend far up into the sky. Finding just one isn’t enough; there’s a whole sequence you have to travel to, as each is unsuitable for different reasons, e.g., too far from the ammo dump, only for compacts, or parking is too expensive.

A lot of the fun is Gorzog’s voice-acted commentary on his parking adventure, so be sure to have the sound up!

Gorzog the Colossal Needs a Place to Park (itch.io, $0)

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Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection

This is Slant. I could tell you so much about Slant, but I think a lot of the fun of these puzzles is figuring out a good process for solving them yourself.

I got a treat for you people today, a genuine treasure of the internet, a collection of forty computer-generated puzzles of wide-ranging types, from Sudoku (called “Solo” because of trademarks) to Minesweeper. And they’re not only all open source and free, they’re free for many platforms. Not all the puzzles are yet available for all platforms, but it’s continually being worked on, with new puzzles added from time to time. It has been for nineteen years; when it got started it only had five puzzle types. It’s one of the best things out there, and I’m amazed it’s not better known generally.

I can’t overstate what a wonder this collection is. All the puzzles are their own executable, if you don’t just play them on the web anyway. Each one of these puzzles offers many hours of happy puzzling. My own favorites are Loopy, Slant, Bridges, Dominosa, Galaxies, Net and Untangle. Most of the puzzles are of a type that should be familiar to fans of the Japanese puzzle magazine Nikoli, but they’re all randomly generated, and playable on multiple difficulty levels.

If the name Simon Tatham sounds familiar, he’s the guy who also created and maintains the popular networking tool PuTTY.

Here’s the links, all of these are free:

Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection main site, which has implementations for Java, Javascript and Windows

Here’s some other HTML implementations

For Android on the Play Store

For iOS on the Apple App Store

On the Windows Store

In the Debian and Ubuntu package repositories (and it should be available in your own distribution’s repository, too)

Flathub

And here it is for Windows again, but distributed through Chocolatey

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Broken Connections

Broken Connections is a little game by prolific roguelike creator Slashie, Santaigo Zapata (Facebook), that puts you in the shoes of Rogue co-creator Glenn Wichman (also on Facebook) in 1980. His then-roommate Michael Toy (yep, also on Facebook) worked on Rogue over a dialup connection to the mainframe at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The game poses a (probably fictional) situation that the connection is lost, and you are tasked with traveling to campus and finding out what is wrong with the connection and reestablishing it before the system reboots and a weekend’s work is lost.

There’s no enemies or anything like that. It’s a turn-limited quest that only requires that you find your way to the machine in time and plug in a cable, but along the way you encounter a number of people who have minor problems, or recognize you and want to tell you about something, or are just about on their day. Glenn is a very nice person, but it’s up to you if you want to engage with them or continue along on the task you’re there to do. If you feel up to it, you can go back after plugging the cable in, when there isn’t a pressing time limit.

The stakes are pretty minor. If you don’t make it, a weekend’s work is lost. I’m sure Michael Toy can recreate his work, but it’d still be very nice to be able to save it. There is no big win condition, or reward for being nice to people, other the just being a good person. In that way it’s like real life.

If you want to know more about Glenn, Michael and the game, Slashie discusses it on his blog.

Broken Connections (itch.io, $0, playable in browser)

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7DRL 2023: Blunt Quaternion

It’s a silly NetHack-themed game about exploring a dungeon, presented through a bunch of characters sitting around passing a blunt between them. It’s not really that hard, but there is a bit of strategy to it.

You and your pet sit around a campfire with other characters from that dungeon level and talk about things. Your character and your pet can say things like, they want to be less or more aggressive on the next level, or they want to invoke Elbereth, or they want to use an item; other characters may say things like telling you where fewer or more fights will be, or where treasure is. Or they may have nothing of importance to say.

Every time a character says something, they must pass the blunt, which when it’s depleted signals it’s time to go to the next level. (C’mon, you know all the characters in this dungeon have to be potheads.) All of the fighting and stuff happens in simulation between conversations. Your character or their pet may be wounded (observe their hit points when their conversation turn comes up), or even die at this phase. It’s possible for your pet to die but your character go on to win. It’s also possible for your character die and your pet go on to win the game, which is not something that can occur in NetHack.

It’s a very simple game, and as stated, not really that difficult. But it’s fun, and might give a chuckle to NetHack fanatics. It’s free and completely playable in browser!

Blunt Quaternion (itch.io, $0)

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