Tag: gamefinds

Gamefinds: mumble mumble Dungeons of Infinity

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.

Writing about Nintendo fangames is fraught. Not that something might happen to me, the insidious grasp of their legal team doesn’t stretch that far yet, but for the games being written about. Remember AM2R, a fan remake of Metroid II that many believe was superior to Nintendo’s own revision? Then some big sites mentioned it, Nintendo heard about it, and they sent the creator a nastygram demanding they take it down. Set aside the fact that the game can still be readily obtained from numerous other sources; it still dumped a big bucket of freezing cold water on the hard work of its maker, which is hardly a way to treat fans, especially since the company’s prosperity depends on their good will. Nintendo must be really certain those enthusiasts won’t reject them.

About our own blog, I don’t think anyone at Nintendo personally reads Set Side B. I’m sure their well-paid legal staff has plenty better things to do than read an obscure little daily retro/niche/indie blog, even if it’s one that posts articles on their products really often. But it does seem possible that someone at Nintendo might run a spider, an automated program that scans the internet for derivative works related to their products.

Not romhacks, mind you. For some reason Nintendo doesn’t take a lot of interest in romhacks of their work in most cases. But fanwork that uses their IP in one way or other has been known to attract the attention of the legal Warios. That is why AM2R got stomped upon by the Kuribo’s Shoe of Civil Law, and it’s why Zelda Online had to retitle to Graal Online (a project that continues to this day under that name).

I tell you this so you’ll know why I don’t give the full name of the project I’m going to refer solely by the second half of its title: Dungeons of Infinity. Any person looking at the screenshots will be able to easily tell what game it’s referring to, and uses assets from, but web crawlers won’t, or at least I won’t make it any easier for them than the Youtube videos that contain footage of its play. If you figure you want to try it, which I hope you will, if you search for it you’ll probably find it. I’ll help you out by telling you it’s not the board game Dungeons of Infinity, which had a Kickstarter in 2024. Many of the top hits for that phrase will be about that, but not all of them. I trust you’ll be able to tell them apart.

(mumble) is gray here because he’s been cursed! Curses rarely and randomly spring from chests that are opened, and impose some restriction upon play, like making shops sell things for higher prices, or making hearts hurt you instead of heal. Each curse has a randomized lifting requirement.

Most of the things I like about (mumble mumble): Dungeons of Infinity are not related to the game from which it borrows. If they could find some helpful people to make similar graphics in the same style, and changed the name, they might be able to escape danger entirely, but that might require time and effort the creator doesn’t have. Whatever be its trappings, it’s a pretty cool random dungeon exploration game in its own right. It has a pretty active Discord. Its creator mentions there that they’ve recently lost interest in working on the game so its current version, 1.2.1, will probably be its last. It’s still pretty cool as it stands.

So the idea is, like in the other games in the series of, um, The Saga of Fitzgerald’s Wife, is to pilot a green-suited elf kid through dangerous and tricky dungeons and caverns full of monsters and traps, collecting items and uncovering secrets. What’s different is that the game is much more linear than those other games (much like the Four Swords Adventures titles), and the rooms and their arrangements are randomly determined. So… also like the Four Swords Adventures games, although this one is purely for solo play.

The Armos Knights, from The Saga of Fitzgerald’s Wife: A Connection to Previous Times, are much harder than in the original, without their former weaknesses. Arrows don’t seem to even harm them. (EDIT: DoI’s creator reached out and said they are vulnerable to arrows, it’s just the last phase of the fight, when there’s just one left,that it becomes immune.)

If you explore throughly enough you’ll always find a way forward, the game isn’t designed to give you unsolvable situations. But what can change, and quite a lot at that, is the items that you find. Weapons like the Bow, the Hookshot or the Boomerang have to be found, or sometimes bought, if you want to use them. None of these items are required to win, but without certain items, like Sword and Tunic upgrades, or extra Heart Containers, you’ll find the going much more difficult.

There are some pretty tricky secrets in this game. Try to remember all the different ways things could be hidden in the previous game.

In fact, probably the game’s biggest drawback is that it falls prey, a bit, to fangame difficuly malaise. Bosses that in the original game aren’t hugely difficult here are tenacious damage sponges. Everything in the game has been tuned to be that little bit more difficult: you have less health, sources of healing are less common, and enemies take more damage. Due to the nature of difficulty, all of these individual sources of peril multiply together and become much harder than the sum of its parts. And (mumble mumble): Dungeons of Infinity is a permadeath game: if you take too much damage and run out of hearts, the adventure ends, so to keep going you have to start over from the beginning, fighting all the early enemies once again, and building a whole new collection of random items. If you’re not up for a challenge, well, you probably shouldn’t bother downloading it.

Here’s some details that it might be useful to know:

To be frank, the many dark rooms in (mumble mumble) Dungeons of Infinity are probably my least favorite part of it. You don’t get the helpful cone of vision in dark areas here, and lit torches only light up a small area around them. There is an item that can give you a bit more visibility.
  • You have a very limited inventory space. You can only hold five items by default. The bow & its arrows count as separate items too, as do your bombs and any healing items you find. You can find, or (more likely) buy inventory expansions, and there are items that help keep other items from taking up inventory spaces, but you’ll frequently have to make difficult choices for what to keep.
  • On the other hand, items you drop, or don’t have room to collect, don’t disappear. They’ll remain on the ground in the room they were dropped or found in until you come back for them, or else take the downstairs (you don’t get to backtrack to previous floors). If you hold off on collecting hearts when you’re at full health, then when you do take damage, you can come back to pick them up later.
  • Aiding in this, enemies that you defeat never return. It’s possible to clear whole dungeon floors of monsters, making them much safer to explore.
  • In the bottom-right corner of the HUD, there’s a vertical map of all the dungeon levels, which gives you the low-down on where the bosses are. It also marks the location of save points. In the true spirit of permadeath these points are only for taking breaks, not for continually restoring from, but seeing as how the game is fairly long it’s good to take advantage of them, and refresh the mental batteries for a bit before tackling the next leg of the quest.
  • It’s a shame that it’s pretty far into the game, but in the rebel village area on the 6th floor there’s an arcade with a pretty decent remake of arcade classic Berzerk in it, as well as an endless runner version of Pitfall with a recreation of the music from Pitfall II: Lost Caverns! If you get a few rooms into the Berzerk remake, you’ll find another mini-game, within that mini-game. I don’t know how deep this recursive ouroboros of gaming goes, but it’s a very nice touch.
This is a screenshot of the Berzerk remake in the village arcade. I wish this and the Pitfall-inspired endless runner could be played stand-alone!

Gamefinds: Primesweeper

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.

Primesweeper is a recreation of Minesweeper, but with two changes:

  • You can’t mark squares where you think there are mines. This isn’t as bad as you’d think it would be, partly because…
  • All the spaces have three digit numbers on them, and the mines are hidden by the spaces with prime numbers.

Don’t let the math terms scare you, it’s not as hard as you’d think it would be, at least if you know a trick to determining divisibility by 3: the sums of the digits of all numbers that add up to 3 are themselves divisible by 3.

Primesweeper is from vole.wtf, created and filled with things made by Metafilter member malevolent, who has made many a free wonderment and entertainthing to enjoy. If you enjoy Primesweeper (or even if you don’t), I’m sure you’ll find something else fun on their website.

Gamefinds: Labyracer

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.

Coming in on the heels of his previous game Blasnake, which he unveiled less than a month ago, Kenta Cho, a.k.a. ABAgames, releases another absolute banger in the form of Labyracer. Like Blasnake and most of Cho’s games, it’s absolutely free!

Check out that high score I set! You’ll find it difficult to surpass it, but I won’t say it’s impossible!

Labyracer plays like a mix of Namco’s two games Rally-X and Pac-Man Championship Edition, but unlike either game its mazes are all randomized, and only visible for a short space around your car (an arrow thingy).

Think of the board as having a left and a right half. Each side has a number of flags (letter ‘F’s) on it. When you get all the flags on one side, a Special Flag (an S) appears on the other side of the maze. When you collect it, the first side, the one you got the flags from, is regenerated, with a new random layout and some more flags.

The problem is the suicidal enemy cars that are trying to crash into you. (Presumably that have an insurance company that doesn’t ask questions.) Every time you collect a normal flag, one or more red enemy cars appear close to your location. They start out stunned and blinking, and during that time you pass through them, which I recommend you do.

You have but one defense against the killer kars: pressing Space, or Z, or X, will cause your car to emit a smokescreen directly behind it. If you’ve played Rally-X you’ll know how it works. Enemy cars that run into the smokescreen are stunned again for a few seconds, and can be passed through. An essential skill to learn is, when you encounter an enemy in the way of the passage you need to take to reach a flag, to reverse for a half-second, laying down some smoke, then luring the enemy car into it so you can then get through it.

But the real key to the game is in destroying the enemy, which you can only do by regenerating a section of maze with a Special Flag while they’re in it. This awards points, potentially lots and lots of points; each successive car in a regenerating maze earns double the points of the last: 100, 200, 400, 800, 1,600 and so on! As you play, more and more cars get spawned by collected flags, so if you can get through them and to a Special Flag on the other side of the board before they follow you out of the danger zone, you can earn huge scores pretty quickly! But it’s pretty hard to do, since the enemy cars are devoted pursuers, and you have to find your way through the dark corridors to get to the Special Flag.

You’ll notice that I have a high score of over 70,000. That’s really hard to reach! I was helped a bit by some lucky clears. You earn extra lives according to the Fibonacci plan: first at 1,000 points, then at increasing amounts by the familiar pattern: 2,000, 3,000, 5,000, 8,000, and on and on. A good clear or two can get you multiple extra lives, which can last you a good while.

There is a timer, in the form of a fuel gauge that counts down from 100. It counts faster when you’re emitting smoke. Running out of fuel does not kill you, but it does cut your speed in half, which usually spells doom anyway. Your tank is refilled when you collect an ‘S’ flag.

Like all the best difficult action games, it doesn’t actually feel that hard while you’re playing it! Despite the dark maze and the swarm of pursuers, Labyracer plays fair. While the maze is dark, the crash cars are still shown to you from any distance. Appearing enemies take a little time to activate, and smoke stuns them for a good several seconds. The corridors don’t cause you to crash when you hit a corner or dead end, but instead your car automatically takes corners for you. There do eventually appear red “rocks” in the maze, that can make you crash.

Please give Labyracer a try! It’ll probably be the first play of many!

Gamefinds: Blasnake

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.

ABA has returned! The brilliant creator of dozens and dozens of short but incredibly catchy gamethings, like PAKU PAKU (the one-dimensional Pac-Man variant, we’ve linked it previously) has made a new one, and you really should try it. It’s free and playable in your browser! (EDIT: Oh dear, I forgot to link the game! Here it is! Follow the link, you won’t be disappointed!)

Don’t be fooled by the pseudo-terminal graphics, this game is nearly perfect.

It’s a variant of the classic game Snake, where you control a long serpent as it gobbles up food, growing a segment longer each time. You don’t need me to explain Snake to you!

But, Blasnake has enemies too. They don’t attack you, but instead move around you and try to get you to collide with them. But the brilliant part is how you fight back, by surrounding them. It’s hard to see at the default game size (you might want to zoom in on the page), but there’s a line of dots projected in front of your snake. If your body and those dots enclose an area of the board, it vaporizes all the enemies inside the region, and you get points based on how many things you destroyed at once.

Every 30 food you eat (dollar-signs represent the food) you get an extra life, and your snake shrinks back down. That makes it harder to run into yourself, it’s true, but it also makes it harder to destroy enemies. You also get longer every time you score 1,000 points.

It’s really fun to play and try to beat your high score, and beyond all this there’s really good music to accompany the gameplay. Honestly you should try it just to hear it.

ABA always bats it out of the park, but this one is really nice even by their standards. The enemies are just the right balance of annoying and defeatable, and it always feels like you could do better if you played just one more time. Give it a shot, and see if you agree.

Gamefinds: Wor Games

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.

This one’s another of Paul Hammond’s series of classic arcade games recreated in Pico-something. Most of these have been in Pico-8, but today’s find uses its more-powerful successor, Picotron. To us end users though, the result isn’t that different.

Wor Games is a remake of Bally’s classic arcade game Wizard of Wor, probably the most popular game made for its Astrocade-based hardware, interesting for being an early framebuffer-based game when memory was very expensive, instead of tile-based, and as a consequence only having four colors: black, blue, yellow and red. Wor Games largely holds true to that, but adds a couple of extra colors.

Both Wizard of Wor and Wor Games are shoot-or-be-shot maze games. Wizard of War could be played either by one player or by two co-op (although players could easily blast each other). Wor Games played in one-player mode adds a computer-played helper. The helper does a good job of killing the monsters. It doesn’t try to kill the human player, but neither does it make an effort to avoid shooting them, so be wary of accidental shots.

Each maze has a number of monsters, and more spawn in over time. Blue monsters are relatively slow, yellow ones faster, and red ones faster still. All three kinds can shoot at you, but the higher-difficulty monsters have much faster reactions to your presence. Monsters move randomly in large part, but usually make an effort to stay out of your line of fire. This forces you to move in closer, and they’re never more dangerous than when they’re just around a corner from you, and randomly decide to pounce on you from the side.

The game simulates line-of-sight for yellow and red monsters, who have the extra property of only being visible to you if you’re nearby, or else visible down corridors. Even if they aren’t visible on the main screen, their locations can be deduced by occasional particle effects, or by letting your gaze stray to the radar display at the bottom of the screen. Taking your eyes off the main arena gives them the perfect chance to walk into your corridor and shoot you. Be wary.

After a number of monsters are blasted that the game decides to be enough, the level may end. Or, alternatively, you may be blessed (cursed) by a visit by the Worluk. The Worluck’s a fast-moving critter that doesn’t shoot at you, but rushes around so quickly that shooting it is a big hassle. It moves randomly too, but is kind of trying to reach one of the exit doors at the sides of the arena. If it makes it to one, it escapes, too bad. But if you can shoot it, you and your partner both earn an extra life, and the next level will be proclaimed, to dramatic music, to be a DOUBLE SCORE DUNGEON! Blam!

What’s more sometimes, if you dispatch the Worluk, you’ll be in for a visit from the Wizard of Wor himself, a purple-robed freak who’s fast, sneaky, and can shoot you too. He’s worth a bucket of points if you can kill him, and even more if the DUNGEON is DOUBLE SCORE. Blam, again!

In addition to the basic “Arcade” mode, Wor Games has two alternate difficulty levels, and a special mode that makes the base game into something resembling Pac-Man. It fills the screen with dots, and until you or your partner have collected every one of them, the monsters will keep respawning. Some of the dots are large, and act like Pac-Man’s Energizers, affording you invulnerability (can’t be harmed) and invincibility. (Kills enemies on contact. Why do I have to explain these things?) If you don’t get to an Energizer-dot fast enough though it hatches, resulting in a tiny new monster that you have to kill. The best plan seems to be to dash and collect all the big dots you can at the start of the board, since if you leave them be they’ll just make more problems for you.

Both games, the original Wizard of Wor and Wor Games, are interesting for feeling easy enough to convince you to play time and time again, and yet each game is over so fast that you wonder why you keep dying. One reason is that the controls are a bit weird. Your Worrior’s movement is locked to a grid, and you can only shoot in four directions. If you’re partway into an intersection and decide to go back, sometimes your clumsy fightyperson will decide to step forward instead and get blasted. It’s sort of how Link in the original Legend of Zelda tended to get a bit slippery if you tried to go diagonally, but here the grid is even coarser, and all shots are fatal.

The original arcade game was a throwback, even at the time. I note that it, a four-color arcade game with coarse pixels, was released the year after Pac-Man’s US release, by the same company no less! Wizard of Wor used its weird CGA-like color scheme and menacing audio to effective advantage ago. Its world felt strange and oppressive because of it, and so it doesn’t seem like it’d be nearly the same game with more powerful graphics and sound hardware, and so it is with Wor Games. While Picotron is a purposely-limited fantasy console/workstation, Wor Games restricts its visuals even further, not to the limits of the arcade game, but not too far from them either. It’s an entertaining play, and while your games will probably end very quickly, you can always try again.

Wor Games (by Paul Hammond on itch.io, $0)

Gamefinds: ioBaseball Demo, Fusion of Balatro and Blaseball

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.

It’s been over a year now since Blaseball, beloved highlight of the pandemic lockdown, set its multiple suns for the last time. Its malevolent spinning peanut god ceased its ranting, and its guardian angel squid put away its concessions. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the blaseball tag here might fill you in. (We love tags! Explore them a bit and you’ll find strange and unusual things.)

In summary: for nearly three years, from June 2020 to June 2023, a small plucky company called The Game Band simulated games of a strange, horror-themed variation of baseball, and allowed users to bet fake money on the outcomes. The synthetic players pitched, batted, fielded, were incinerated, became reincarnated, went undercover, escaped via secret passages and fought gods like that huge spinning peanut and the concept of money itself. It wasn’t bad for a simulation that players could never directly influence: the closest they could come was by spending their hoarded fake wealth on votes to change the rules and edit the players and teams.

In its time it inspired a vast wiki (unaffiliated with Fandom, thank the Squid), an official podcast, a stats reference site, a news network, both official and unofficial explainer videos, a huge pile of fan art, pretend trading cards, and a terrific band. It was probably impossible to keep going indefinitely, but it was nice while it lasted. I’m not the only one who fondly remembers it: the site Just Baseball published a ringing remembrance last year. Here’s that squid again, one more time, for I never get tired of seeing this animation.

Blaseball had its horrors, but how could you not love a world where heaven is overseen by this happy creature?

So now there’s a big superfluous-L-shaped hole in our hearts. There have been attempts by others to fill the Infinite Siesta, but none of them have nearly the panache or popularity of the original. This concludes this explanation, but no doubt I’ll be doing it all again in a year or two. Moving on.

So, what is this new thing that might fill the void left by Blaseball? ioBaseball is a very new project that combines Blaseball’s play sim with Balatro’s deck building. It sounds like a cooked-up Buzzword Stew, but even in its very early prototype form there are some interesting ideas there.

ioBaseball is so early-on that the site proclaims that it’s only a demo, and I believe them. Currently the whole game runs in your browser, and log-ins aren’t supported yet. It only saves the play state at the beginning of each game day, so be wary of browsing away from the page accidentally. It doesn’t look like it was made to provide indefinite play as it stands, but it’s worth exploring for a little while.

The game begins with a collection of teams and their players. As with Blaseball before it, none of these teams or players are “yours,” and you have no control over any of them. In Blaseball you could adopt a team as your “favorite,” and a player as your “idol,” and get rewards according to how well they did. That is replaced here with a system of trading cards.

The main types are Slugger cards and Pitcher cards, each representing a specific player in the league, and Team cards. Each card gives you a number of one of three colors of “magic points” whenever its depicted character/team does something positive. This means that buying trading cards is making an investment, like buying stock for dividends.

Slugger cards give you “blue” magic points, shown as water drops, when its player gets a hit that puts them on base. Pitcher cards give you “red” magic points, with a fire icon, on its player striking out a batter. And, Team cards earn “green” magic points, little cacti, upon that team scoring a run. You’re free to buy any cards you want, up to your hand size limit, so you aren’t limited to just players on the teams you have cards for, but the different kinds of cards cost different amounts of gamecash (not real money, but instead fake gold pieces), and pay out different amounts of MP. Pitcher cards are by far the most expensive, at 10 gold each, but a good pitcher can be a reliable earner of red MP throughout a whole game.

You need all three kinds of MP. Despite their name, in the current version of the game you can’t cast magical, baseball-related spells with them (presumably with names like Arms of Ruth, Berra’s Wisdom, Curse of Casey, or Tinker to Evers to Chance). Instead they are what get you your experience, or as called here Victory Points. The game multiplies together the three colors of MP you have, and that’s your VP total. Then it goes like Balatro: at the end of each day of games, you have a target score to meet. If you succeed, you lose all your magic points of every color, gain a “Level,” and start the next day with a higher goal. If you don’t quite make the objective you lose one of the five lives you begin with, but you get to keep the MP you had, so the next day you just have to make up the difference.

One aspect of this system some of you may already realize… if you have zero of even one of the colors of Magic Points, it means you have zero Victory Points. You must have a source of income of all three colors. Not just that, but baseball, even simulated baseball, is a very random game, prone to unexpected upsets and blowouts. If the winds of fate mean that one of your types of cards produces nothing on a day, then you earn nothing, at all, on that day! The days of the seasons have randomly-assigned games, sometimes a team doesn’t play on a day, and if that team is the only one you have pitchers or sluggers for you’re going to lose a life that day.

To overcome this, it’s essential to diversify, buying multiple cards of all three types. You start out only able to have five cards, but you can use your excess gold to buy expanded slots from a system of upgrades. These work like a mixture of Balatro’s hand levels and vouchers. Each provides a benefit that gets more expensive the more you buy it. At the start of Day One you only have the upgrade that increases your hand size, but each time you lose a life, you get the chance to enable one of three new kinds of upgrades. Some of them are obviously good, but a few, the Fountain, the Boar and the Illusionist, don’t tell up front what you’re buying, and leave you to figure them out. Some upgrades unlock new kinds of cards, that pay off in a variety of ways. One upgrade reduces your Level by 2, which is nowhere near as bad as that might sound. It might be the most important upgrade, and it’s the one that rises in price the fastest.

It’s really difficult to do well, especially at the beginning when your only clues to how well a player will perform are unexplained Blaseball-style stats with names like “thwackability.” After a few days the Stats pages on each card will start to give you a good idea of how valuable each player is. In this demo version the player and team stats are not randomized, and you get the same choices of what player cards to buy every day, so your intuitions of which players and teams are worth the gold and hand slots can build over multiple tries. (Note: since I wrote this the game has been updated, and now now only can you select a season scenario, but the world’s stats are re-rolled every real-world month.)

The interface, while bearing some polish, has its glitches. Important game functions are buried, in the style fashionable at the moment, behind Mystery Icons at the top of the page, and I tended to get lost for my first couple of plays. During the game day, you’ll probably want to watch the action (which is all text, this is a Blaseball-inspired game, after all) by clicking on the icon of the little stadium with the three pennants. To see your Victory Points and current hand, and to declare game options, you’ll want to click the little line of numbers at the top-right of the page. It is here where, under the Settings tab, you can speed the simulation speed up from the excruciating NORMAL, up past Bison, Tiger, yes even Hedgehog, to FAST, and experience an entire day of simuball in a couple of breezy minutes. Oh, how rorm* it would be if real baseball had the FAST option, or even just Hedgehog!

It is obvious that ioBaseball is heavily inspired by its departed predecessor. The trading cards have pixelated images sort of in the style of Balatro, but without nearly the style or wit. But it’s a demo! I’m sure, if it takes off, that there’s a universe of baseball-and-otherwise memes they can slap on those little illustrated boxes. A lot of Blaseball’s dearly missed qlurky stlyle follows over. The completed Innings are called Outings, and there’s a brief story that’s presented within the game that explains the stadium has trouble getting insurance because of angry gods, incinerated players and floods of immateria.

Will ioBaseball catch on, and rise to the levels of its deceased forebear? No one can say. The original needed a cultural event like a pandemic to spark its brief ascent to the skies, and without it soon fell again to the cold wretched earth. But ioBaseball’s three hearts are in the right place, and that matters for a lot.

* rorm, adjective: nice, good, gratifying. From Carl Muckenhoupt’s interactive fiction, “The Gostak.”

ioBaseball (web, $0) – ioBaseball’s Discord invite

Gamefinds: GAR-TYPE

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.

It’s a new year, and probably going to be an exceedingly crappy one, so let’s at least start it out with something amazing and wonderful. For while it’s a world where millions of people make extremely stupid decisions, it’s also one where some people work diligently to make bafflingly detailed works of art like Lumpy Touch‘s GAR-TYPE, the R-Type/Saturday Morning cartoon crossover you didn’t know you’d love. CW: pixelated cartoon gore, but that sounds worse than it is.

To reuse my Metafilter description: Help ace fighter JON STARBUCKLE, stationed on the USS ACRES, pilot the GAR-TYPE D to destroy GORESTAR, a planet-eating threat, with your choice of three different weapons: Ravioli, Macaroni or Spaghetti.

There’s so many genius touches in this, like the signs for Italian restaurants in the first level, or the name of the Lasagna Base, or the unexpected boss of the second level. It vividly realizes the aesthetic of the anime-influenced Japanese shooter. Even if it’s too difficult for you (and it might be too difficult for me), you can enjoy the trailer and playthrough video below for a tour of its ridiculous action.

Here’s that trailer (1 minute):

And the playthrough video (19m):

GAR-TYPE — Newgrounds, itch.io ($0, Unity: HTML5, Windows & Mac)

Gamefinds: Alphabet Soup For Picky Eaters

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.

I found it through Metafilter (here), but it’s simple and fun enough that I felt I could extend its reach by a few more players. Alphabet Soup For Picky Eaters is a logic game, by Daniel Linssen, where you have to find some bit of text that satisfies six different hungry blobs.

In this example, four of the blobs accept the answer. The green one looks upset, but they’re just as satisfied as their friends, they just have Resting Angry Face. The who who aren’t satisfied with this example, are the Blue and Orange blobs.

It’s a very simple game. There’s no randomness; each blob is looking for a specific criteria, and most of the game is figuring out what those are. There is no penalty for wrong guesses, and you’ll have to make some to figure out what the rules are. While there are multiple possible solutions, there is one that is very apt. It’ll probably take you just a few minutes to deduce the requirements then fulfill them.

Alphabet Soup for Picky Eaters (Daniel Linssen, for browsers, $0)

Gamefinds: The Silly Knight Prologue

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.

Both Frogfall from the day before yesterday and this one were recent itch.io highlight honorees, and both are interesting enough to feature here too, although they’re very different kinds of games, and for very different reasons.

The Silly Knight is a classic-style point-and-click graphic adventure game. Click on things to interact with them. Some things can be picked up and put in your inventory. Half of the fun is clicking on things and seeing what your character has to say about them.

The Silly Knight is claimed to be a prologue. It has a simple puzzle, and some voice lines, and then things take a turn for the surreal. Then, the game claims it’s over, but actually you can go back in and “play” it “again,” and things will be slightly different, and again, and again. Even with all of that, it’s still extremely short, but what do you want for free?

The Silly Knight Prologue has a playthrough video on Youtube, embedded below. It’s 6 1/2 minutes long and spoils the whole story (what of it there is), and the game is free anyway. It doesn’t reveal all the jokes though. Presumably, if the full game gets made, the story will pick up from here, although who the heck even knows how that would be possible….

The Silly Knight: Prologue (by Alexander Preymak, on itch.i0, for Windows and Mac, $0)

Gamefinds: Nip For Speed

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.

From itch.io’s Youtube account, this barely qualifies as a game, but it’s funny. Surreal. Absurd. Bizarre. But mostly funny. It’s Nip For Speed, and it’s from knackelibang.

You’re riding in a car with an orange cat behind the wheel. Not a cartoony cat, a realistic cat, or at least its low-poly model is kind of realistic. It doesn’t act, or talk, much like a real cat though. There’s also a dog involved.

Content warning: the cat does meet its end, but in a much more cartoony way than the cat’s model. It probably shouldn’t have been behind the wheel anyway.

Nip For Speed (itch.io, Web and Windows, $0)

Game Finds: Cosmic Collapse

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.

A fair amount has been said about Suika Game, an inexpensive and addictive Switch game that has players dropping fruit into a physics-enabled bin. Two fruit of the same type that touch immediately merge into a larger fruit, and the goal is to join them together like this until you create a mighty Watermelon. You can keep going at that point, although with one of those majestic spheres in the bin it won’t be much longer before one or more fruits extends up out of the bin, which brings the game to an end.

The history of this unexpected Flappy Bird-like phenomenon is laid out in an article in the Japan Times. Until recently the game was exclusive to the Japanese eShop, although that needn’t actually a barrier. People from any territory can create eShop accounts for any other, and play all their purchases on the same Switch, but now I notice that Suika Game is even on the U.S. shop. And of course, as often happens when a simple and elegant game blows up out of nowhere, a horde of imitators has arisen, which a quick Googling will reveal. I count six free web versions just on a quick perusal of the search results.

But what might actually be better than Suika Game is the Pico-8 recreation of it, Cosmic Collapse.

Cosmic Collapse is more expensive than Suika Game, but that just means it’s $5 instead of $3. Instead of happy fruit, you merge together planets. They go up in size from Pluto (an honorary planet), through Mercury, Mars, Venus, Earth, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and then Sol herself. If you’re wondering, all planets are presented without rings. If joining two suns causes anything to happen I don’t know. (In the comments on the itch.io project, the developer says that there are objects beyond the Sun.)

Cosmic Collapse could be played just like the original, but it adds some extra features. Scoring is modified by a simple combo system: successive planets merged due to one drop have their points multiplied, encouraging the planning of sequences. And, at certain score awards, you’re granted a missile that can be used to destroy any one object in the bin. Used judiciously, it can allow your game lengths, and scores, to greatly increase. My highest so far is nearly 15,000.

The biggest advantages it has over Suika Game is in the polish and the physics. The many web clones tend to play like they were hacked together in an afternoon, but even the original is clearly a low-effort production, right down to its generic, non-looping music. The celestial orbs in Cosmic Collapse bounce around in a lively manner after merging in ways that take some practice to master, and even the smaller planets have their uses. The tiniest of space rocks, dropped at the right spot, can be just what you need to knock two other planets apart from each other, or separate one from the wall of the bin. You see? Pluto’s good for something after all!

Both Suika Game and Cosmic Collapse suffer from a certain unfairness. You don’t get to control the order in which fruit or planets get dropped into the bin. It’s been observed that even a lot of skill and practice can only get you so far if the orb-selection dice don’t roll favorably for you. The best advice I can offer, in the early game, is to try to sort the circles in size from one side of the bin to the other, which at least will make it easier to find a good place to drop things. Also in Cosmic Collapse, keeping the surface of the bin as low as you can helps a lot, since the propulsive force of the spheres, especially the smallest ones, is increased the further it falls, and that can be a marvelous prod to shaking up a static bin.

Cosmic Collapse (itch.io and Steam, $5)

Game Finds: Mobile Suit Baba

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.

Hempuli, the creator of the indie hit Baba Is You, certainly has been busy! He made a number of solitaire games, some with Baba characters; then a number of board games. Now he’s returned to the Baba Is Youniverse, with another charming game that uses some of the ideas and rules of Baba Is You, with a helping of Into The Breach mixed in! The result is Mobile Suit Baba:

Ha ha! You said it Baba!

The scenario goes something like this. Baba and his friends now pilot a number of giant mech robots that look like them. An invasion of Skulls threatens their laid-back society of agrarian animal creatures with fruit theft. Baba and company leap into action to protect their food stockpiles. This is communicated with dialogue from the various characters, which is all adorable.

A simple puzzle, that relies on Baba’s ability to throw other characters over blocking terrain.

Each character has slightly different abilities and movement ranges. The mind-bending, rule-changing aspect of the original game is back: levels have noun and property objects in them, as well as the keyword IS. A noun IS property sequence arranged in order from top-to-bottom or left-to-right makes that sentence instantly true, for better or worse. It’s back, but it is a bit diminished in importance. A couple of levels don’t even have words this time, which in Baba Is You would result in a completely broken level.

As in the original, the difficulty rises fast, although this one is easier than it looks.

In the original, the most important property is YOU, because it assigns agency to one or more of the characters in a level; without [something] IS YOU, you can’t affect the game world. Here though, that dire need to make sure someone IS YOU at all times is gone. Now, all of your characters are considered to be controllable. But you still have to manipulate rules sometimes, to affect the properties of the terrain.

Once you have some other characters unlocked, you can sometimes choose who you want to bring into a level.

Also, you usually have more than one character to control, in a turn-based sequence. And your characters have different movement ranges and abilities. And you have a strict time limit (although it can be made less onerous in the settings). It all feels, like its inspiration, Into The Breach, but derandomized, and turned into a puzzle game. There’s no real combat; instead you manipulate your enemies so their objectives are not met.

A Youtube trailer gets the mood across nicely:

Choose your teammates carefully!

It’s all extremely charming and worth a look. While its sale price will be a paltry $4, for a few days Hempuli is giving it away for free on itch.io! Even at full price it’s worth it.

Mobile Suit Baba (itch.io, $4 [$0 temporarily])