itch.io tast.io

Niku
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itch.io tast.io

Postby Niku » Sun Jun 14, 2020 4:04 pm

mongrel just linked to this PICK ME A RANDOM GAME OUT OF THE 1,700 GAME BUNDLE page: https://randombundlegame.com/

but still there's so much shit in here that i figured we can curate our own good stuff.

Here's what I've checked out so far (including some inclusions I've played elsewhere):

A Short Hike is like a delightful mini-Breath of the Wild in an Animal Crossing/Night In The Woods style animal vibin' island. You basically run little quests for folks you run across and pick up feathers to increase your stamina on your overall goal of reaching the peak of the mountain. A couple of hours of fun, really really nice.

Night of the Consumers has some hilarious style but the controls basically did not work at all on my surface keyboard / trackpad. I played long enough to get fired though.

WitchWay is a very cute block pushing puzzle MetroidVania where you traverse sewers and ruins to rescue bunnies. Clever mechanics when it comes to block manipulation so far, though I've only dug into it a little bit.

Overland is a game I checked out when Apple Arcade hit and did not personally care for much because it is GODDAMN BRUTAL. It's somewhere between X-Com and Death Road to Canada, giving you tactical isometric screens where you need to scavenge with your survivors and get your car to the next screen before you're overwhelmed with mutants and monsters. I don't think I ever got more than a few screens in when playing on iOS, but your mileage may vary.

Night in the Woods is an incredible mood piece, and how much you like it will entirely depend on how much you gel with that mood. If you've ever been a shiftless loser millennial returning home in failure you might just like it!! It's very much a "run around and talk to a bunch of people, then progress to the next day, then run around and talk to a bunch of people" kind of game but I absolutely love it and the characters who inhabit it.

Minit is a really clever top down not-really-Zelda-like where you only have 60 seconds from the time you load in until the time you die. You uncover new items and checkpoints that let you make progress, with the overall puzzle always being "what can I do next with 60 seconds this time". Can finish it in a couple of hours, recommended.

Celeste is masocore platforming at its finest. Incredibly goddamn tight controls, with unique physics and interactions you'll be learning all the way up until the end, and tons of secret/bonus content for when your ass isn't sufficiently kicked by the main levels.

Nuclear Throne is a twin stick shooter roguelike. Nice graphics, pretty goddamn hard, not bad.

Puzzle Puppers is all about stretching out good long bois so they can eat meat and reach their doggy bowl and it quickly becomes infuriatingly difficult as more and more doggos need to be stretched and twisted around each other in each puzzle. Similar to Snakebird in some ways.

Cook Serve Delicious 2 is the second game in the absolute best restaurant management series. The secret to CSD's addictive framework is that each recipe is almost like learning a fighting game move; you'll have specific keys for specific ingredients (like say, N M C S for noodle-meat-cheese-sauce if you're making a lasagna) and as people request dishes with variations you'll learn to perform those specific key combos with muscle memory to keep slinging out the food. I admittedly haven't played much if any of CSD2, but I lost a ridiculous amount of time to the original CSD.

And Yet It Moves is a cool-but-sometimes-infuriating platformer with a neat aesthetic where you play a paper cutout dude running around a world that you can spin around independently to create new ledges and pathways. I'd recommend at least checking it out if you want some interesting platforming.

Desktop Goose unleashes the obnoxious goose from goose game on your desktop to drag icons around and honk at you 10/10

I think that's everything I've played so far/prior at the moment, though I've already got a bunch downloaded that I want to check out as well. From this post my highest recommendations are Celeste, Night in the Woods, and A Short Hike.
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zaratustra
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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby zaratustra » Sun Jun 14, 2020 4:52 pm

Glittermitten Grove is probably the most important game in there.

Oxenfree is a kind of a counterpart to Night in the Woods in its gameplay - also kind of the game version of an indie horror movie.

OneShot is a rpgmaker-style "puzzle-adventure" that's pretty close in quality to the powerhouses of the genre - Ib, Yume Nikki, OFF. It's almost an Undertale sometimes.

Vignettes and GNOG follows Windosill and Metamorphabet in cute pseudo-puzzles - both of those are in the bundle as well

Mortician's Tale I haven't played but comes incredibly recommended.

Smallish RPG-ish games with one strong, unique mechanic replacing combat: Fortune-499, Beglitched, Palace of Woe, Last Word

Dusk Child is a lil' metroidvania in PICO-8

Legend of Hand is an... unique point and clicker

Akurra demo has the promise to be a new gameboy zelda

Platform-jumper-stabbers: Mable & the Wood, They Bleed Pixels

Obligatory friend linking: Meatpunks, Spooky Station, EatGirl

Niku
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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby Niku » Tue Jun 16, 2020 7:43 pm

I spent Sunday finally playing through Glittermitten Grove, or as you savvy smart gaming types might better know it as .....

DOGSHIT DITCH

that's right, hidden behind a banal but somewhat engaging fairy based building sim is the long awaited complete piece of fucksweat, dogshit ditch. have you ever wished ZZT was even more obnoxious to control and full of obtuse half-directions? do you wish the only thing interrupting hours and hours of ZZT where you have to rotate your goddamn sword around to fit through narrow caverns were five minute long minigames that barely even count as jokes -- which then lead to more ZZT only now everything is dark and it's also a stealth game!!?

DOGSHIT DITCH IS THE BAD GAME FOR YOU!!

like okay some of the korn stuff is funny

that is as charitable as i am willing to be

just go play frog factions 1 again
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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby KingRoyal » Tue Jun 16, 2020 8:10 pm

I actually kind of wish more had been put into the fairy game, honestly. Like, thinking about building a little village that literally grows and how that growth affects previously built stuff is much more interesting than a single joke stretched out over several hours.
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JD
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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby JD » Tue Jun 16, 2020 10:07 pm

I'm currently enjoying Lenna's Inception. It's a Legend of Zelda style game about a teacher and former adventurer who fills in for the Hero after a memory corruption glitch erases her school. The gameplay and story are somewhat rudimentary to begin with, but toward the end you unlock the ability to exploit glitches, allowing you to clip through obstacles and even sequence-break the game.

Youtube channel Errant Signal often reviews small indy games, and has reviews of some games which appear in this pack. His reviews include Tamashii, Art Sqool, Football Drama, Dujanah, Secret Little Haven, and Oxenfree. There's also this video which briefly includes Vignettes, Celestial Hacker Girl Jessica, Tamashii, Night in the Woods, and Secret Little Haven.

The itch.io bundle organizers appear to have added a few more items since sales closed. It's now at 1,741 items, up from 1,704.

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mharr
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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby mharr » Tue Jun 16, 2020 11:10 pm

Oh hey, it's the Campster's channel! I never did get a clear sense of what broke up the old Twenty Sided Podcast gang, some sort of falling out over denouncing obvious evil vs. staying politically neutral?

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zaratustra
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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby zaratustra » Wed Jun 17, 2020 4:07 pm

JD wrote:I'm currently enjoying Lenna's Inception. It's a Legend of Zelda style game about a teacher and former adventurer who fills in for the Hero after a memory corruption glitch erases her school. The gameplay and story are somewhat rudimentary to begin with, but toward the end you unlock the ability to exploit glitches, allowing you to clip through obstacles and even sequence-break the game.


The "hook" of Lenna's Inception, by the way, is that a lot of the game is generated procedurally. This is very obvious most of the time, but it sort of works.

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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby Niku » Sat Jun 20, 2020 1:56 pm

LOVE by Fred Wood is a new one to me, but it's good; there's a sequel out and about and on the Switch as well apparently. It's pretty much a completely no-nonsense platformer, just running and jumping around levels that feel very Lemmings-esque thanks to the way the boundaries are drawn. Sometimes there are spikes or hazards, sometimes just platforms to jump on, but it's a simple no-inertia platform game where you go from the beginning of the stage to the end. There are 16 stages, you have 100 lives to get through them, and you can make a checkpoint literally whenever you feel like it if you're having trouble. And if you want to challenge yourself, you don't ever need to make a checkpoint. It's not masocore level hard, and won't take long to complete.

Also the music rips.
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zaratustra
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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby zaratustra » Sat Jun 20, 2020 3:33 pm

i have to try playing Tamashii again. it's basically a horror platformer by a brazilian, and who ever heard of that being popular

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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby JD » Sun Jun 21, 2020 3:45 am

Spring Falls is a comfy minimalist puzzle game about pushing rocks to move water flow in order to hydrate flowers growing on a clifftop.

Micron is a somewhat musical puzzle game about placing angled reflectors in front of particle streams to deflect into targets. May be difficult to play if colour-blind.

Cecconoid is a challenging retro-style twin-stick shooter. Cool music. Do not play if you suffer from photosensitive epilepsy.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is a puzzle game about hacking your way into buildings by typing command-line instructions to control doors, security cameras and the like. The Best Friends did an introductory playthrough of the first few missions if you want to see how that plays.

DROID7 is a very simple platforming game about jumping upward while pursued by a rising energy beam.

The soundtracks to Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy are in here too.

I forgot to mention it earlier, but Errant Signal also has a reviews of Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor and Night in the Woods (major spoilers after 8 minutes). They're in the pack, but I haven't played either.

My opinion of Lenna's Inception has further improved now that I've completed the game. I knew the dungeons were procedurally generated, but it wasn't until my second playthrough to get the other ending that I noticed that the entire world map is procedurally generated. This makes multiple playthroughs much more interesting. Item locations are randomized, sometimes requiring you to seek alternate solutions and use items you previously ignored.

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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby JD » Sun Jun 21, 2020 11:44 pm

The Away Team is a heavily text-based game where you play an AI directing the crew of a ship manned by the last known group of survivors from Earth, who are exploring space to find other human civilizations and/or a new home. It's sort of like if the multiple-choice random encounters in FTL were expanded to form an entire game.

Shn!p is a simple puzzle game. Clicking any dot which is adjacent to another of the same colour causes it to explode, pushing all adjacent dots away one square. The goal is to clear the board this way.

Pichon is a platformer where you automatically bounce all the time. The only controls are left and right.

Hex Kit is a tool for building hex grid maps for your D&D game or similar. A convenient feature is that you can select a category of tiles, or multiple tiles, and it will select randomly from them as you place a tile. A limitation is that things like river and coastline tiles don't automatically tesselate correctly, though you can right-click a tile to rotate it. The pack also adds some additional graphics sets: HPS Cartography Set, and Hex Kit: Spaceland Part One; Space.

The Desktop Dungeons OST is probably a good accompaniment to your D&D game. If you aren't running a D&D game, then what the hell is wrong with you?

Salvage Solitude 8140 is an interesting idea, but incredibly tedious. You explore a space station and repair one by one, a job made more challenging because many rooms have no life support until you find and repair another section. There's a constant danger of getting lost while trying to find your way back out of an airless section. Unfortunately, the primary game mechanic is constant backtracking to refill your air supply or repair tool multiple times per room, and there's not much in the way of puzzle solving. The map design is full of samey square rooms so the whole station lacks a sense of place, the top-down map is difficult to read, and it's difficult to tell which rooms are completed and which aren't.

I was unimpressed by Perspectrum and Penance.

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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby JD » Tue Jun 23, 2020 4:48 am

Playing through a bunch more of these.

Lyne and Adjacency are more minimalist puzzle games. Bit Rat: Singularity looks good, but I couldn't get it to run on my machine.

Ball Buster is Arkanoid but the bricks fall downward.

Gumgem is a rogulike Celeste-style platformer with precise movement controls. I'm not good enough at video games to play this. In case you missed it earlier in the thread, Celeste is also in the pack.

Golem Creation Kit is a simple but well-presented game where you're a wizard who keeps being pestered by mobs of angry villagers. You have one minute to fetch random items from the village to craft a golem to scare the villagers away.

On Rusty Trails is a platformer where your feet are magnetic and you can run easily on walls and ceilings.

Pyre is probably one the most major games in the pack, and it's made by the creators of Bastion. You manage a sports team of prisoners, but the twist is that the team's leader is freed whenever you win a match. Game Maker's Toolkit has a video on it. Another well-presented game is Long Gone Days, a visual novel/RPG about a sniper who deserts from the military. I haven't played either yet.

DragonRuby Game Toolkit is a game engine using Ruby. It runs on a 60fps fixed framerate and can export to HTML5. Between this and the various asset packs in the set (use the drop-down boxes in the main bundle page to select by category), you could readily make a whole game with just the contents of this pack.

Zara mentioned Dusk Child, a game made in Pico-8, which is a sort of 8-bit virtual console. Pico-8 is also in this bundle, in case you want to see what games you can make within the constraints of a 128x128 16-color screen. Code is written in Lua.

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nosimpleway
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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby nosimpleway » Wed Jun 24, 2020 5:02 pm

Night in the Woods started with "Huh, didn't realize this was part rhythm game."

Then immediately after "Huh, didn't realize this was poke-a-severed-arm-with-a-stick simulator."

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mharr
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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby mharr » Wed Jun 24, 2020 9:10 pm

It is, at the core, a game about stealing bagels for baby rats.

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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby Niku » Sat Jun 27, 2020 3:13 pm

I spent some time messing around with Gladiabots today; it's basically a Carnage Heart esque mech programming game, but you're creating programming and logic to tool around your battlebots in a four v. four team to try to pick up balls and score goals or play king of the hill. There's asynchronous multiplayer where you can pit your logic threads against others and a single player mode designed to teach you the ropes of how to suss out weaknesses in your programming and get ready for the big leagues.

I couldn't get past the second single player level until I went online and stole some code, and even then I had to tweak it around for like another thirty minutes before I managed to then run straight into the brick wall of the third single player level. I do not think I am smart enough for Gladiabots.
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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby Niku » Sun Jun 28, 2020 7:25 pm

zaratustra wrote:i have to try playing Tamashii again. it's basically a horror platformer by a brazilian, and who ever heard of that being popular


not sure if it was because i'm playing all these on a surface go 2 or it was something with the game itself, but this thing seemed to be sluggish as hell to the point of me not really wanting to keep at it, but then it sped up to what i would consider a normal speed. I thought maybe I had accidentally toggled the slo mo mode, but I'm not sure, because it would randomly go between slowed down and normal throughout the playtime.

which is a shame because otherwise it's pretty great. some good puzzles. pretty sure i finished it?? it is definitely a horror platformer by a brazilian.

JD wrote:Gumgem is a rogulike Celeste-style platformer with precise movement controls. I'm not good enough at video games to play this. In case you missed it earlier in the thread, Celeste is also in the pack.


In fact, I'd probably just stick with Celeste; it's tighter, faster, and bespoke. This has almost identical mechanics when it comes to the dashing and wall climbing, just none of it feels nearly as good in service of levels that are not nearly as good.
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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby nosimpleway » Tue Jun 30, 2020 11:29 am

Weird that Lenna's Inception has, like, medium-awareness glitching as a major plot point.

A nice touch that it happened because someone stored 255 items in a container, then removed one item above it on the inventory list. (That's the first step to ACE glitches in Pokemon GB games)

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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jun 30, 2020 11:47 am

nosimpleway wrote:Weird that Lenna's Inception has, like, medium-awareness glitching as a major plot point.

A nice touch that it happened because someone stored 255 items in a container, then removed one item above it on the inventory list. (That's the first step to ACE glitches in Pokemon GB games)

That's a really broad reference. TONS of games have a 255 limit for something. For example Skyrim can handle 255 plugins (technically 254 or even a few less because Skyrim is itself one of the files, as are each of the DLCs and the main official patch)
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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby nosimpleway » Tue Jun 30, 2020 12:33 pm

First-gen Pokemon gameshave a limit of 99 items in a slot. You have to glitch the game into there being 255 items in a slot, then remove all of the items in the inventory slot above it. The game starts confusing your inventory list with other spots in game RAM, allowing ACE. (Spoilered for relevance.)

In Lenna's Inception, a guy puts 255 pizzas into his refrigerator, then throws out the old milk above it in the list of the fridge's contents. Then the world starts exploding. I'm pretty sure it's a deliberate nod, like the Bicycle being priced one currency-unit above the maximum you can carry. It's that kind of game.

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Re: itch.io tast.io

Postby nosimpleway » Tue Jun 30, 2020 5:10 pm

A little later it's explicitly called Arbitrary Code Execution. The item you use to see through it is the Missinglasses.

So it's not as subtle a wink as I thought it was.

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