It’s time to talk about my favorite games that made me ponder while I was pointing (and clicking).
Honorable Mention Sucker For Love
I’m pretty sure everyone forgot that this game even came out this year. What started as a project for a Dread X Collection, transformed into its own visual/novel meets adventure game. The premise alone is enough to turn heads — as you try to romance three very eligible women who just so happen to be elder gods who can tear apart the fabric of reality.
This is a game that fully commits to its premise, and while it’s not the hardest game in the genre, the complete package stands out as one of the most strangely charming games I’ve played. I don’t know if we’ll get a sequel to it, but it’s an overall great title.
#3 Lucy Dreaming
Lucy Dreaming harkens back to the golden age of Lucasarts-styled adventure games, with its own verb list and wacky logic. Combining the waking and dream world sections did lead to some interesting puzzles. While it can be on the harder side due to its structure and logic, it is definitely a must-play for any fan of old-school adventure games.
#2: The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow
Adventure games oftentimes either land on the side of challenging puzzles or focus more on the story and mood. With the Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, we have one that does both — a gothic horror point and click adventure with some very striking cutscenes. The game, at times, feels like an episode to one of the many anthology horror shows in the past, as the player explores a mysterious village, has creepy visions and dreams, all leading up to the surprising ending. The puzzle difficulty stays on the easier side until the very end, with the final chapter being the most puzzle-filled out of anything else.
I really like the charm and the story of this one, with the world feeling both familiar and alien at the same time. If you slept on this one, and in the mood for a mysterious adventure, then don’t miss this game.
#1: Brok the Investigator
Brok the Investigator manages to combine beat-em-up gameplay with point and click adventuring and puzzle solving to deliver one of the most original takes on the adventure genre. You are free to approach your problems by using your brain or your fists, with the story and ending changing based on your process.
The story itself is also very well done, and despite featuring a goofy talking alligator, there is a lot of heart to this game. Brok is trying to do right by his adoptive son, earn a living, and the push and pull between doing the right thing, and to keep going is an interesting one. This is one of those games I know a lot of people slept on, but this one gets my recommendation as a game worth playing.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
For this Perceptive Podcast, I spoke with Dan Bernado of Dreamnaut Studios to talk about the release of the game Grid Force Mask of the Goddess, creating the story and art, and more.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
The indie showcases highlight all the indie games we play here on stream, if you would like to submit a game for a future piece, please reach out. All games shown are either demos or press key submissions.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
An interview with Brian Lynch who developed the game Redshot. We spoke about making his first metroidvania, the challenges of using bullet time and building it for speedrunning, and more.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Blogfriend Phil Nelson pointed me to this absurd little homebrew Gameboy game. You don’t have to play it on a Gameboy though, its itch.io page has an embedded emulator. It’s got fun music, and its text is digitized typewriter writing.
It’s a simple choose-your-own-adventure kind of thing, made in a week, with a good number of suitably silly branches. You’ll die often, so you’ll restart a lot if you want to see everything that can happen. If you remember what you did it doesn’t take long to get back where you were (so long as you don’t scream at the beginning). While it’s a silly trifle, a certain word at the beginning filling the screen probably makes it unsuitable for kids.
You made it past the snarky cat picture! You must really be into this. You might find more of interest at the submissions page of the Bad Game Jam.
We’re continuing with our weekly presentation of talks I found interesting from Roguelike Celebration 2022! They regularly have one or two talks that go some ways outside the roguelike remit, and this year one of them was an interesting talk by Cara Hurtle about using both Telnet and Hypercard, an old multimedia system created for classic Macintosh computers, to discuss queer and trans experience. The talk itself is SWF, although following content outside the video might lead somewhere NSFW.
It’s a short talk, only about 15 minutes, and covers some interesting topics!
The indie showcases highlight the many indie games we play on the channel, all games shown are either press keys or demos. If you would like to submit a game for a future stream and video please reach out.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Dwarf Fortress has arrived on Steam, and me and blogmate Phil Nelson are so enthused! I bought it at full price nearly immediately, even though it’s $30 (there is no game in the world that’s a better value proposition for the money!) and played through the tutorial, and was pleasantly surprised that the interface learning curve is much better! The gameplay curve is just as high as it ever was, but that is all part of the game whose tagline is “Losing is fun!”
Longtime Urists will have a little adjusting to do, as some of the keypresses have been changed, some options moved around, there are no Kennels now, and it’s not obvious how to de-designate areas like tunnels to be dug. But compared to how it was before it’s an unquestionable improvement!
There’s also excellent pixel-art graphics, zoom support (hold Ctrl down while rolling the mouse wheel) and even a lot of new music! I wish there was an option to return to the ASCII-ish graphics, but with Steam support for mods I’m sure if they don’t provide it themselves, a fan will make it before long. And if you don’t have $30 rolling around in your pocket or purse, the game is still free on the official website, just as it ever was.
Polygon has not rested on this release, and immediately posted several useful articles for enthusiasts and prospective fortress chiefs, most of them written by Jeffery Parkin!
Somehow though, he keeps making interesting new things! Most recently there’s Babataire, a variant of Spider Solitaire that uses Baba characters for cards (it’s fun!), Babataire Ex, a variant of the variant that also uses Baba Is You’s rule-modification mechanic (and that, honestly, I can’t make much sense of), and Cavern Sweeper.
Cavern Sweeper is really good! It’s a generalization of Minesweeper where the mines not only have different values, casting varying amounts of danger into the adjacent squares, but where, on harder difficulties, different kinds of mines can even have differently-shaped danger zones.
In the easiest version, all monsters have a diamond-shaped peril region around them with a value from one to three. The number in a space is the sum of all the danger spread into them. Harder versions also add slimes, which have the traditional square-shaped Minesweeper danger zone, ghosts with plus-shaped areas, and optionally serpents with X-shaped zonas de peligro.
To make up for the added uncertainty, you’re granted two additional helps. First, as you mark spaces (you must select the proper kind of monster in the space for it to count), the numbers are subtracted from the nearby regions, decreasing the chaos around it, and any impossible situations are marked for you. And you’re allowed two extra misses before you’re actually in danger of losing the game.
Cavern Sweeper is a fine addition to the genre of Minesweeper variants, and I rather think I prefer it to the original.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Most of the things we post here are game hacks. That is, something that has been modified from a published game. Hacking games is not illegal, but the process that some people usually use to obtain the roms themselves may be somewhat questionable. Well not for the subject of this week’s article: it’s 100% homebrew, created from scratch and unencumbered by such considerations! It runs on NES hardware (or an NES emulator), but technically speaking what we have here is more of an indie game on classic console hardware more than a hack.
It’s also an unusual subject for a 2022 indie game. You’ll find all kinds of hacks to, say, put silly characters into Super Mario Bros., but a remake of an Intellivision game, and one with an Atari port that is very much its equal, and porting those games to the NES-that’s unusual enough to merit discussion, even if the game itself is very simple.
Astrosmash! (with the exclamation point) was a very popular game for the Intellivision. I heard it was originally intended to be an Asteroids-style game, with rocks that split into pieces when shot, but turned out to be interesting translated to a Space Invaders-style missile base game, where your ship is stuck to the bottom of the screen shooting at targets falling from above. Astroblast! was released by M-Network (Mattel’s label for publishing games for competing systems), and was a very similar game for the Atari VCS/2600, but actually improved on the original in two ways: it can be played with either the joystick or paddle controller. It’s the only game for the VCS like that! Both control schemes are fun, although experts can probably play much better with the paddle, due to both its faster and more precise movement. And, it’s extremely fast! The sheer pace of the VCS Astroblast is so much greater than the Intellivision Astrosmash that it kind of demonstrates why VCS games tend to be more engaging than Intellivision games: it wastes no time with an easy ramp up in difficulty, but starts faster than almost any other game, and only gets harder from there. It’s simply exhilarating!
The way it works is like this. Rocks, Pulsars and Spinners fall from the sky, and your ship tries to shoot them before they hit the ground. You get points for shooting things, but lose points for things that get past you. Rocks come in two sizes (smaller ones have higher point values), but only kill you if they hit you. Big rocks break apart into small rocks when stuck. Pulsars home in on you as they fall, which makes it more likely they’ll hit you, but also means they’re easier to shoot. The most dangerous items plummeting towards you though, by far, are the Spinners. You must shoot Spinners, you don’t just lose points if one lands but a life. Small Spinners are your greatest enemy, since they’re also hard to hit. There’s also UFOs that harass you, which pass by horizontally and drop bombs on you.
Here is a short game of Astroblast, to give you a sense of how it works. Notice how fast it is. Know that this is nowhere near as fast as it gets. It is my kind of game:
As you score gets higher, the background color changes, and the game gets faster. You get extra lives every 1,000 points, and you start with ten, far more generous than most arcade-style skill tests from that time, but you need all those lives because you’re constantly dying. Difficulty is determined by score, the more points you have the faster it gets. Because you lose points as well as gain them, and because the speed is balanced right at the edge of human reaction time, players tend to play until they reach a difficulty score boundary, where only nearly-inhuman focus, and lots of practice, can push you beyond it. Astroblast will push your playing skills to the very limits.
Astro Smash ‘N’ Blast is an homage to these two games. It takes the same form, your ship at the bottom shoots upwards at an endless wave of plummeting targets, Rocks, Pulsars and Spinners. (There are no UFOs in this version.) There’s fewer things falling, but the game is a bit more precise about hitting small targets. Pressing the Select button turns on autofire, which you’ll probably want to use, to avoid compressing your thumb tissue into a singularity with rapid frantic tapping.
Rocks don’t split in two in this version, but otherwise it plays a lot like VCS Astroblast. Small Spinners are particularly difficult targets to hit, and must be aimed at precisely.
This version takes on a bit of inspiration from Pac-Man CE, in that in addition to having limited lives, you have a time limit. You can earn extra time by hitting +30 second targets that pass by horizontally, and you can regain hits on your ship by hitting passing 1UPs. These are the only bonuses; unlike the originals, you don’t get extra ships from points at all. Although the game ends if you run out of time, chances are great that you’re going to lose all five of your lives before then.
As in Astrosmash/blast, as you ascend to tougher difficulties, the screen’s background color changes. You probably won’t see the later levels though without a lot of practice. Astro Smash ‘N’ Blast offers a level of challenge rarely seen in most games. I prefer games like this, with a strong element of chaos, to more typical modern examples of high challenge, like bullet hell shooters and rhythm games. I think the essence of the super fast video game is in randomness, not memorizing levels and playing them almost by rote but in reacting instantly to dynamic situations, and that’s why I like all the Astro-style games.
I am left wondering what inspired Double Z to look to old Intellivision and Atari games for inspiration. They were released when I was a small child; had Double Z even been born yet when the Astro games were on store shelves? For whatever reason they made it, I am glad they did. Games like this don’t come around often any more, and I intend to put in some solid practice on it.
