The Flipside of Gaming
For this double indie game review, I’m taking a look at Dread Templar and HROT, both played with press keys provided by the developers.
0:00 Intro
00:17 Dread Templar
4:38 HROT
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”
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.
Found by Varyag on kitsunes.club, this may be the ultimate version of the Pico-8 version of other game phenomenon, not a remake of a classic arcade game but of id Software’s DOOM itself. And it has a great name: POOM. It’s made by freds72 on itch.io, and it’s free to download and play. Its levels are not ports of the original room, unless my memory is faulty, but smaller versions, but the general sense is still there. It even has a good remix of the first level music.
Here is the whole video in case you missed it:
Here is the list, with personal hype level expressed in stars, none to five:
00:30 – Grounded. Your characters are “shruken at the hands of an evil corporation.” First, corporations don’t have hands, their employees do. Second, it’s interesting to see how corporations have joined mad scientists, sorcerers and alien emperors as “the evil.” Anyway, this looks mostly like Generic Action-Adventure Game. “Work your way through the campaign to uncover the mysteries of the back yard.” Like, where they buried the water pipe? Good luck with that. Two stars.
01:37 – ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the mist. Big contrast to the previous trailer. It’s a “return to the Ender Lily’s world,” just assuming you know what that is. From the trailer I assume the “Ender Lily” must be a really bad flower, because everything is dark and grim, but especially dark. “This once flourishing country sits atop a wealth of buried magic,” yet somehow it looks like Blade Runner. Points for using the word homunculi (16 points if you have the tiles for it) and not inventing another bullshit video game word like “the Aeinsward,” or “the Valarath” or some crap like that. Your character is told early on that “your eyes says[sic] that you long for death.” Sometimes the winning move is not to play. I feel bad about talking down the work of so many hard-working developers, but I don’t think it’s possible to make a game less appealing to me, personally. One star.
03:04 – Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure. “Role-puzzling” is not a thing. Looks like it might be okay, but I’m rating my enthusiasm as generated by the trailers, and they give me flashbacks to the PULL word in Baba Is You, so: Two stars.
03:45 – Unicorn Overlord. Oh, I want to play the fantasy title game too! Gargoyle Emperor! Chimera General! Minotaur President! Looks to me like a Vanillaware joint. Checking: I was right. Reading the transcript, I’m struck by the word unleash, one of those overused videogame words. It literally means to let go, but because it sounds good it gets used for all kinds of things. But really, if it ain’t a dog, it doesn’t fit. Vanillaware’s cool though, so I’ve talked myself into looking forward to it. Three stars.
04:23 – Monster Hunter Stories. “Monster Hunter” brings to mind fighting dragons and behemoths. “Stories” suggests Scenes From A Marriage. Combined, I’m imaging getting hitched to Smaug. (This is probably the backstory to the classic anime Dragon Half, come to think of it.) Anyway, it’s Monster Hunter. You hunt monsters. It’s a remake of a 3DS game, discarding the (mostly) realistic look of other Monster Hunter games for cartoony human characters. I have a previous Monster Hunter on my shelf but I’ve never played it, so I can only rate this One star.
05:00 – Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed. I remember when Epic Mickey games filled the discount bins at Walmart, but I always liked the idea, and the internet-viral concept art that inspired them, and they were “directed” by Warren Spector. One thing that always confused me about Epic Mickey, of which the trailer reminds me, is the opening positions Mickey as an innocent interloper, but the content of the Epic Mickey games clearly indicate that these worlds are about him, as a character. He’s not a plucky underdog, he’s the center of the Disney-pocalypse. And yet, that’s interesting. Three stars.
06:07 – Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance. The title logo makes it look like it’s called Shin Megami Tensei V: Engeance. This being a remake, I’m just glad they didn’t call it something like Revengance, hah wouldn’t that be stupid. I don’t remember at this point whether a mainline Shin Megami Tensei game has ever appeared in English before. Maybe on the Playstation or Playstation 2? Sounds about right. (Checking: it was recent! 2021! Huh.) I think it defies belief that this isn’t yet another Persona game. Two stars.
07:41 – STAR WARS: Battlefront Classic Collection. Okay I was wrong, it’s not possible for me to be less interested in this. It’s exciting to some people or else they wouldn’t have made this, but I’m writing this, and I say, One star.
08:24 – SOUTH PARK: SNOW DAY! When your franchise stars a character who was once grounded by his mother for “trying to exterminate the Jews,” I submit that there is something deeply wrong with it. No stars.
There’s so many games here that I’m going to skip around a bit from here on.
10:23 – Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble. It’s an article of faith now that there have been no good Monkey Ball games since Super Monkey Ball Deluxe, and the recent Banana Mania, which was primarily content recycled from the old games. I just picked up Banana Mania a couple of days ago and was reminded why I like the Gamecube-era titles so much, so what the hell, Three stars.
11:40 – World of Goo 2. World of Goo was beloved of many people, myself included, and I’ve also liked everything Tomorrow Corporation has done, so I’m really looking forward to this, even if World of Goo is a very hard act to follow. Five stars.
14:03 – Another Crab’s Treasure.That’s a great title. The trailer, itself, actually calls this game a soulslike, which I guess is just the word we use now when a game is meant to be hard. The game does fix my main issue with Souls games, their relentless dourness. It’s whimsical and charming! Three stars.
15:32 – Penny’s Big Breakaway. From some of the people who made Sonic Mania, which itself makes it worthy of examination. A 3D platformer in 2024 that isn’t Mario, who’d have thought it possible. Three stars.
16:13 – Suika Game Multi-Player Mode Expansion Pack. I’ve been a bit outspoken that I don’t really like this version of the concept, prefering Cosmic Collapse on itch.io. Paid DLC that lets you play against others does nothing to improve the concept for me. One star.
16:57 – Pepper Grinder. It looks a bit interesting, but it feels a bit like a cheat that the tunnels you dig close up behind you. Two stars.
17:26 – Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! Originally a F2P mobile game by Game Freak as one of their occasional non-Pokemon titles, like Drill Dozer and Part-Time UFO, which always seem to be terrific. They released a 3DS port that was one of those games that critics (including myself) couldn’t stop gushing over. I’m so hyped for this that I’ve already bought it, as of this writing it’s on my Switch back at home waiting for me to get back and play it. Five stars.
18:16 – Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley. A Moomintroll game! One where you play as his enigmatic, vaguely Link-like friend Snufkin! I’m in! Sadly its trailer is really brief. Four stars.
19:26 – Rare Games Added to Nintendo Switch Online. Five games are added: RC Pro-Am (NES), a classic; Snake Rattle & Roll (NES), challenging and a bit underrated; Killer Instinct (N64), which I never cared for but some people will like; Battletoads in Battlemaniacs (SNES), likewise; and Blast Corps (N64), which is very underrated, a launch game that helped define its system. All of these games except Battletoads in Battlemaniacs were previously collected in Rare Replay for Xbox One, but there is a feeling of coming home here. Overall: Four stars.
These releases are notable all because of Hiroshi Yamauchi’s decision not to buy Rare from the Stamper brothers at the dawning of the Gamecube era, which lost Nintendo Rare’s then-formidable reputation and coding prowess. Nintendo sold its 49% stake to Rare, and Microsoft bought controlling interest. The Gamecube took a substantial hit to its library, and Rare has never been the same. Despite a few distinctive hits (Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, Viva Pinata and Sea of Thieves) I think Microsoft has never really used them well. For a time they were basically devoted to making Kinect games! (Checking: in fact, Rare’s Kinect Sports was at that time their best-selling game since Microsoft acquired them! Shame that its being tied to an abandoned peripheral means it has had practically no lasting legacy.) I would suppose the return of these titles to a Nintendo system is part of the deal that enabled Goldeneye 007 to come to both Xbox and Switch, but that is only speculation.
RC Pro-Am and Snake Rattle & Roll, are extra notable for their copyright notice by Rare Coin-It, a Miami-based subsidiary of Rare, that seemed to be devoted to games that had arcade pretensions. I don’t know that, but a lot of their games released with that copyright have strange arcade affectations: attract modes, high score lists, and arcade structure. In particular: Slalom (which did get an arcade release, as Vs. Slalom for Nintendo’s Unisystem arcade platform), Wizards & Warriors, RC Pro-Am and Cobra Triangle. But these weren’t the only games that bore the Rare Coin-It copyright. I really don’t know why; maybe they were assign games that Rare thought might have potential as arcade games.
Back to the Switch Online collection, this move gives me hope that the Wizards & Warriors games, especially the first, and its sequel Ironsword, will make it there someday.
The latest of Josh Bycer‘s showcases studying and showing off a variety of indie games.
0:00 Intro
00:14 Gunlocked
2:28 Necrobouncer
4:16 Recon Control
6:29 Spidersaurs
9:55 Gloomgrave
11:17 Neon Blight
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”
This is a double review of the Creepy Syndrome and Harmony: The Fall of Reverie, played with a retail key and press key respectively.
0:00: Intro
00:13: The Creepy Syndrome
2:39: Harmony the Fall of Reverie
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”
I never finished my recap of 2023’s highest-ranked 7DRL entries, and 2024 is rolling around already, set to begin on March 1st! Here is it’s itch.io page, and Cogmind creator Kyzrati’s Mastodon mention.
7DRL, the 7-Day RogueLike challenge, is one of the oldest still-going gamejams out there, and still among the most interesting. Every year a number of surprisingly interesting games come out of it. One year, back when @Play was on GameSetWatch, I took it upon myself to look at every game that succeeded at the challenge that year. I think it was 2011? Even though it took weeks, enough time that I vowed I’d never review every game again, even some of the lesser ones had some interesting aspect to them.
This year will undoubtedly add yet more game to that backlog, hooray! That was a sarcastic hooray, I won’t deny it. But it was also, in a sense, an honest one too. More interesting and unique games mean more fun for everyone, fun that doesn’t cost $60 + DLC prices. And making them means more experienced gamedevs making things they like, things that don’t rely on multi-hundred dollar triple-A outlays of cash to realize, and that helps us, very slightly yet perceptibly, reclaim gaming culture from the wash of monotonous big-money content with which we’re all inundated.
It all starts March 2nd, so if you’re interested in participating, get ready to make! And it all ends, mostly, on March 11th, so get ready to play! (I say mostly because technically the challenge isn’t absolutely time-locked. But it’s a good period to aim for and build hype around.)
I think, when you find a blog that’s been around since 2009, and is still being updated somewhat in 2024, that itself is worthy of celebration, and that is the case with brainscraps.net. It’s maintained by May Kasahara, a member of the venerable community webblog Metafilter (where I can also be found posting and commenting as JHarris).
Blogs come and go. Bloggers come and go too; sometimes they lose interest, but sometimes they pass away, such might be the case with oneswellfoop, a.k.a. Craig Wittier. There was a recent Talk post there about the many members who have passed away.
This is not a Metafilter focused blog. I mention all this to say that people’s blogs, and being around to blog, that’s precious, people’s writing is important, it’s a part of them, and I’m happy whenever I encounter it, whether the blog gets 10 readers or a million of them. But it’s nice when people go by there and read them, and I hope that you’ll be inspired to read Brainscripts, and other blogs, and if you don’t already, that you’ll learn to cherish that they exist. They won’t always, their bloggers won’t exist always either. Neither will I, and neither will you. So let’s all enjoy what time we have here left!
But let’s not be too maudlin. May Kasahara also has an itch.io page, with a variety of fun projects on it, like Mary Sue’s Character Casino, and Daisy Doom, and Senpai Simulator, and Legend of Cascadia! I am more than happy to spread the word.
For this perspective podcast, I spoke with Adriaan Jansen from Abbey Games to catch up about how the studio is doing since our last conversation. We spoke about the challenges of creating Godhood, Renowned Explorers International Society, and more. For our main topic, we talked about recreating Reus with its sequel, and how the studio is changing things up compared to the first.
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”
A few days we linked to Cosmic Collapse, a Pico-8 Suika Game clone that, I claim, is better than the original, or its many many other clones. Its graphics are less cloying, its music is much better, its physics are livelier which adds a greater element of skill, and it has missiles awarded at different score levels that can be used to destroy individual planets.
Cosmic Collapse’s bin is slightly smaller than Suika Game’s, and to compensate a bit for that its “winning” “planet,” The Sun, is only the 10th item in the game, unlike of Suika Game’s Watermelon, which is the 11th of its orbular objects. Nether game really ends at that point, it’s the kind of game that continues until you lose, but it serves as a thematic success point.
But as it turns out, as revealed by a comment by creator Johan Peltz on its itch.io page, Cosmic Collapse has two levels beyond sun. The first is a rather striking animated Black Hole object! After a lot of playing I finally managed to get to it. Here is a screenshot:
Pretty neat! The comment from the game’s creator mentions that there is a level past it, but that they don’t think it’s possible to reach. I don’t think it is either: to get to the Black Hole you have to have two Suns, and to get to that you have to have one Sun plus one Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Earth, Mars, Mercury and Pluto. (I think it’s Pluto. What would it be if it wasn’t Pluto? Ceres?)
So, to get to the last object, you’d have to have a Black Hole plus a Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Earth, Mars, Mercury and assumed-Pluto, which probably won’t all fit in one bin. My guess is it’s a guest appearance by some galaxy or something. Maybe someone can look at the game’s resources and find out what.
In addition to playing to get to Sun/Black Hole/Whatever Follows, it’s also possible to play Cosmic Collapse for score. The best way I’ve found to do that is to use missiles to destroy the largest objects when it becomes evident that you can’t do anything more with them. My highest score is nearly 15K. Indefinite play doesn’t seem quite possible, as missile awards come less frequently at higher scores, but it’s still fun to see how high one can get. (That’s not meant as a drug-inspired euphemism. Or a Donkey Kong-inspired one, either.)
Addendum: After writing this, I managed to get to Black Hole again, and got video of what it looks like in motion, which is pretty cool:
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)
Stephen’s Sausage Roll (homepage, Steam $30, Humble $30 – Increpare gets the most money if you buy it here, plus you get a Steam key)
This is the beginning of a series of reviews of sublime games. The sublime is, as described on Wikipedia, the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation. That’s a lot to live up to for a videogaem!
I’m using that term to describe games that feel like they stretch out your brain just by playing them. Usually this doesn’t mean by difficulty, although Stephen’s Sausage Roll has plenty of that, but by there being some special aspect of it. I think what I mean by that will become more evident as this series continues, but Stephen’s Sausage Roll is rather foundational. Both Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) and Arvi Teikari (Baba Is You) have claimed it as inspirational. Sublime things tend to inspire people a lot.
It’s easy to miss the quality of Stephen’s Sausage Roll if you play it casually, because it’s not a game that really lends itself to casual play. SSR doesn’t ease you into its puzzles, right from the very start the game demands thorough knowledge of the consequences of its movement scheme, knowledge that can only come from failing at its puzzles many times. Stephen’s movement is reminiscent of the porter from Sokoban, but he’s got this dang fork sticking out of him, and every movement must take it into account. Steven can only move forward and backward without turning to the side, which rotates the fork around him.
Understanding how to move that fork around is essential to shoving around the sausages in each level. To solve a level, all of its two-tile-long sausages must be moved over grills exactly once in four locations: once on each tile of one side, and once on each tile of the other. Leaving a sausage on a space doesn’t overcook it, but you can’t move it so a cooked spot touches a grill again. One move for each sausage on each tile of each side! Burning a sausage, or dumping one in the water, immediately fails the level.
This playthrough of one early level demonstrates how it works:
This description is not all of Stephen’s Sausage Roll’s tricks, not by a metric mile, but it’ll stump most players for a good while. It starts out hard and gets harder.
There are no tutorials, not even instructions other than an early sign that tells to use the arrow keys to move, Z to Undo, and R to Restart a puzzle. (These hotkeys have become a bit traditional, and work in other games.) You can’t even read the sign until you realize you have to swing your fork around and walk alongside it. Stephen does have other moves, I have come to learn from reading pages about the game, but it’s impossible to activate them in early levels.
When I read writing about puzzle games, the writer often talks about how smart the game made them feel, sometimes in a paragraph that also mentions dopamine hits, like they were Skinner boxes that give players treats. I dislike game criticism that tries to reduce them to pop neurochemistry. Besides, these days dopamine is not in short supply. It’s available on every Steam corner, plus you could get it just as well from food, an interesting novel, a movie, or pornography for that matter. Difficult puzzle games make you work for it, and where is the fun in that?
The fact is, puzzle games are not interesting for being a dopamine administration mechanism. They are about improvement, about learning to overcome challenges on your own. Once you learn how to do Sokoban puzzles they lose their appeal, because solving puzzles isn’t as much fun as learning to solve them.
Stephen’s Sausage Roll does not make the player feel smart. It makes them feel perfectly stupid at first, but by the end of it they may feel smart. They may, because by completing it they may have become a little smarter. The improving aspects of playing video games is not often mentioned these days, but it is one of the main reasons that I enjoy them. Thinking through a difficult puzzle can help one learn to think a little better, and because of that these sausages are no mere empty calories.
But the difficulty, and the novel take on Sokoban rules, aren’t the only reasons I’m writing about this in a series about sublime games. Each of the game’s little puzzles is a small portion of a larger world. When you enter a level, most of the world sinks beneath the sea, leaving you with a tiny portion of it remaining. When you properly cook all of that level’s sausages, the world returns, but pink walls, where the sausages were, will be gone, allowing you progress. This means the very terrain of the overworld is made of the puzzles you’re solving, which is an unexpected elegance in a game about cooking sausages. And mirroring that fact, there is a deeper meaning to the sausages you’re cooking and eliminating from the world, one that is revealed slowly, as you solve each excruciating puzzle.
SSR is a game that makes a mockery of the very concept of review scores, as most sublime games do. The graphics are purposely done in a PS1 style, intentionally ugly by current standards, and the sounds are simple steps, swishes, and the occasional “ugh” that may have come from the game or the player. And it’s gameplay, while great, shows that play can be about subtracting, taking away all extraneous elements, rather than adding unnecessary new things. In what world does taking away things add points to a review score?
Stephen’s Sausage Roll is not an extremely popular game. While it inspired big hits like The Witness and Baba Is You, and is rated Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam, it hasn’t sold as well. But it hangs on, quietly enlightening new generations of players and designers. It may inspire you too, if you were to let it.
It has now been over seven months since the end of Blaseball, that shining star of lockdown that burned brightly but ended suddenly. Stories will be told of its brief reign, and memories zealously hoarded. I’m amazed that no one else has definitively moved in to take its place with their own take on splorts, it seems to be an opportunity waiting to be filled, but until such time as it happens, the concept, along with the game itself, continues to Rest in Violence.
The planets orbiting Blaseball’s many suns continue to orbit, their surfaces unwarmed but still hosting faint signs of life. The Blaseball Wiki remains online, explaining the absurdly twisty intricacies of a game that no longer exists, and The Society for Internet Blaseball Research still hosts statistics and information related to that dearly missed pastime.
One of those planets is Blaseball Blexplained, a Youtube series that doggedly and diligently presented season recaps of Blaseball’s many crazy seasons. Since Blaseball’s ending, they’ve slowly continued their recaps, and have now finally finished their last Expansion Era summary, of the Hellmouth Sunbeams. It is around 16 minutes long. It present the final recantation of the nearly un-understandable events that marked the final seasons as did all the others, throwing out references to Black Holes, Feedback and Fax Machines, counting on you to know what the hell all those things mean. You do, don’t you? ‘Course you do.
So, one last broadcast from Blaseball Explained, favorite fake sport summary channel, now broadcasting exclusively to the Hall of Flame.
Farewell, Blaseball. In your memory, I proclaim: hail Namerifeht.
P.S. The Society for Internet Blaseball Research (SIBR) has a page of information on how the fates of Blaseball, early on, intersected with that of the Pacific Salmon Treaty of 1985, and of a mysterious face named by fans Salmon Steve. Here is that page.
