Art Sqool appears to be the sort of intentionally-grating graphics-and-music sort of game. I will never know if there's anything good there.
I'm probably going to wait for a specific recommendation for any game where my experience starts with having to reconfigure the controls from right-handed WASD-and-mouse to play turn the coffee mug around.
Midboss seems like a pretty good pick-up-and-go roguelike. The gimmick is that you possess the bodies of monsters you kill and learn their abilities, then mix-and-match like a Final Fantasy job system.
itch.io tast.io
Re: itch.io tast.io
GNOG is like if the popular The Room series of mobile games was charming and whimsical instead of foreboding and Lovecraftian. Or like someone digitized the popular toddler noisemaker box toy. You’re given a lunchbox sort of contraption floating in the middle of the screen which will have various things to poke and prod at, and you’ll then poke and prod at it until things happen, until things happen enough for you to win the box. It’s charming! Good touch screen game.
Hidden Folks is interactive Where’s Waldo. If you take pleasure in methodically scanning the page to find the specific thing you’re looking for, this replicated that perfectly while also having some minor interactivity (like opening tents or moving bridges to look inside or move the little people around so you can find what you’re looking for). Low key and relaxing in small doses, eye straining to marathon. Good touch screen game.
You Died But a Necromancer Revived You earns an A for naming but is not any fun to play. You just run through a top down single screen obstacle course trying not to get hit by things or step on spikes. Might be entertaining as couch co op depending on how the multiplayer works and if you can sabotage or help the other players, but very bad single player game. Very bad touch screen game.
Hidden Folks is interactive Where’s Waldo. If you take pleasure in methodically scanning the page to find the specific thing you’re looking for, this replicated that perfectly while also having some minor interactivity (like opening tents or moving bridges to look inside or move the little people around so you can find what you’re looking for). Low key and relaxing in small doses, eye straining to marathon. Good touch screen game.
You Died But a Necromancer Revived You earns an A for naming but is not any fun to play. You just run through a top down single screen obstacle course trying not to get hit by things or step on spikes. Might be entertaining as couch co op depending on how the multiplayer works and if you can sabotage or help the other players, but very bad single player game. Very bad touch screen game.
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beatbandito
- Posts: 4305
- Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 8:04 am
Re: itch.io tast.io
Niku wrote:GNOG is like if the popular The Room series of mobile games was charming and whimsical instead of foreboding and Lovecraftian. Or like someone digitized the popular toddler noisemaker box toy. You’re given a lunchbox sort of contraption floating in the middle of the screen which will have various things to poke and prod at, and you’ll then poke and prod at it until things happen, until things happen enough for you to win the box. It’s charming! Good touch screen game.
Sounds like the "Grow" series of flash games. Or really just like half the single-screen point'n'clicks from Newgrounds I guess. Something we desperately need a return to for mobile instead of what mobile games have become.
Re: itch.io tast.io
yeah farewell is goddamn ROUGH. i never finished the c-sides either.
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nosimpleway
- Posts: 4624
- Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 7:31 pm
Re: itch.io tast.io
Arcade Spirits is apparently some sort of visual novel thing but the second text box that appears says:
New profile #237771. Economic bracket: Lower-Middle. Employment Category: Bleak. Current Emotional Health Rating: Low...
and I feel seen.
New profile #237771. Economic bracket: Lower-Middle. Employment Category: Bleak. Current Emotional Health Rating: Low...
and I feel seen.
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nosimpleway
- Posts: 4624
- Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 7:31 pm
Re: itch.io tast.io
Midboss is a solid idea for a roguelike but there just aren't enough different monsters in the game to make it really interesting lategame. Either you keep using the biggest and strongest monsters you can possess, or you get twoshotted as soon as the minotaurs show up.
There's a game I've seen LPed that I don't remember the name of. You wake up in an abandoned house, there are zombies, you heal from walking across broken glass by drinking beer and fight by chucking the empty beer bottles at enemies. No Delivery really wants to be that game. Or Five Nights at Freddy's, since it's all about a haunted pizza place. It's very trial-and-error. For instance, you find yourself fishing around in a toilet Silent Hill 2 style early on. Do you pull on the soft thing you feel clogging the pipes, or the hard thing? If it's the soft thing you get into unwinnable combat and die. If it's the hard thing you can continue the game.
Witchway is good stuff.
Anodyne is hard to describe. It's kind of like Link's Awakening if Link's Awakening tried to be (more overtly?) horror. Controls are a little wonky but it's fine.
There's a game I've seen LPed that I don't remember the name of. You wake up in an abandoned house, there are zombies, you heal from walking across broken glass by drinking beer and fight by chucking the empty beer bottles at enemies. No Delivery really wants to be that game. Or Five Nights at Freddy's, since it's all about a haunted pizza place. It's very trial-and-error. For instance, you find yourself fishing around in a toilet Silent Hill 2 style early on. Do you pull on the soft thing you feel clogging the pipes, or the hard thing? If it's the soft thing you get into unwinnable combat and die. If it's the hard thing you can continue the game.
Witchway is good stuff.
Anodyne is hard to describe. It's kind of like Link's Awakening if Link's Awakening tried to be (more overtly?) horror. Controls are a little wonky but it's fine.
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nosimpleway
- Posts: 4624
- Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 7:31 pm
Re: itch.io tast.io
Witchway was good stuff until the game crashed halfway through one of the laser puzzles later on. By the time I got the game to work I had forgotten how the maze fit together and the relationship between rooms, which it turns out is p important.
Loot Rascals is pretty breezy in the main game and the real brain-bending puzzle is inventory management. You get eight equipment slots in two rows of four slots. Items are either +defense or +attack. But this card gets a bonus if it's on the bottom row, and this one gets a bonus if it's in column four, this one gives a bonus to the cards on either side of it, this one gives a bonus to every other helmet you have equipped (idgi either), and this one gives +2 to the card above it but removes its own bonus unless you have another equip of the same name somewhere else on the board, and...
I got tired of starting that puzzle over every time I got a couple new pieces of equipment and lost interest, but it's a game for somebody out there.
Beglitched is a match-three-falling-icons puzzle, but somewhere on the board is an enemy. You have to drop a bomb so that it explodes the space he's in. Some pieces can help point the way, or tell you how far away he is, or whatever.
Masocore games aren't really for me, I'm not the kid who finished Battletoads anymore, but apparently Celeste is one of those games that you should really try even if it isn't your thing. It's pretty fun, and respawning when you die is fast enough that you can just pick right back up and try again.
Then I found a cassette tape that loaded a "B side" of the level and the game immediately assumed I am Friday or perhaps Niku. I'm not sure how much further I can go.
Loot Rascals is pretty breezy in the main game and the real brain-bending puzzle is inventory management. You get eight equipment slots in two rows of four slots. Items are either +defense or +attack. But this card gets a bonus if it's on the bottom row, and this one gets a bonus if it's in column four, this one gives a bonus to the cards on either side of it, this one gives a bonus to every other helmet you have equipped (idgi either), and this one gives +2 to the card above it but removes its own bonus unless you have another equip of the same name somewhere else on the board, and...
I got tired of starting that puzzle over every time I got a couple new pieces of equipment and lost interest, but it's a game for somebody out there.
Beglitched is a match-three-falling-icons puzzle, but somewhere on the board is an enemy. You have to drop a bomb so that it explodes the space he's in. Some pieces can help point the way, or tell you how far away he is, or whatever.
Masocore games aren't really for me, I'm not the kid who finished Battletoads anymore, but apparently Celeste is one of those games that you should really try even if it isn't your thing. It's pretty fun, and respawning when you die is fast enough that you can just pick right back up and try again.
Then I found a cassette tape that loaded a "B side" of the level and the game immediately assumed I am Friday or perhaps Niku. I'm not sure how much further I can go.
Re: itch.io tast.io
Exit out and continue the main game.
Celeste is entirely reasonable and fun outside of the B sides and chapters 8 and especially ESPECIALLY 9.
(the game has it's normal ending at the end of chapter 7.)
Celeste is entirely reasonable and fun outside of the B sides and chapters 8 and especially ESPECIALLY 9.
(the game has it's normal ending at the end of chapter 7.)
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zaratustra
- Posts: 1665
- Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:45 pm
Re: itch.io tast.io
nosimpleway wrote:There's a game I've seen LPed that I don't remember the name of. You wake up in an abandoned house, there are zombies, you heal from walking across broken glass by drinking beer and fight by chucking the empty beer bottles at enemies. No Delivery really wants to be that game. Or Five Nights at Freddy's, since it's all about a haunted pizza place.
No Delivery's gameplay mechanic is pretty unique. You have a central area that never changes; from there you can do runs into "wrong turns" that are basically 4 to 12 randomly generated events in a row. The first couple can be pretty hard-hitting, but once you get the leg up on usable items you're pretty safe for the rest of the game. Also, your class is randomized every time you die, and some usable items you collect are unusable by your current class, which is a good way to get you a leg up when you die.
The endings are ... okay? you don't really get any mind-blowing twist at the last minute that makes everything fit together perfectly forever. It starts weird and ends weird.
Re: itch.io tast.io
A dude on my other forum just wrote at length about Vision Soft Reset , which might be one of the most conceptually ambitious Metroid-ish games I've ever seen. I'm just gonna excerpt him here:
⇳ Click to Expand Summary
"If Vision Soft Reset is the best game I discover via this bundle it would not be a disappointment."
⇳ Click to Expand Summary
"...The protagonist here is psychic, which manifests itself in a few ways but the main one can be in how time is handled.
"The planet you land on is gonna explode twenty minutes after you land, which is a bad thing. It is simply not possible to accomplish everything that needs to be done in only twenty minutes. However, since when you are playing the game you are in essence just exploring various potential timelines as a psychic you have all the time in the world to explore the world.
"[...T]here are typical save points/rooms throughout the world, but when you save at one what you are saving is that exact moment in that timeline. Every health or meter pick-up you’ve found, any changes you’ve made to the world, and the exact time you make the save are all stored at this point. As you play through that first twenty minute period all those saves are put on an individual timeline, and if you die or reload from only the most recent one then it stays on it and everything works like it does typically. Still at some point you are gonna start to run short on time and will have to go back to an earlier save point, either the initial starting “twenty minutes left” one or a more recent one. When you continue from one of those you create a different timeline that branches off from that point, and anything you previously accomplished after that point is undone. You had four hearts? Now you’re back to two. That thing you spent so long trying to activate? It is shut down again.
"How is it possible to make any lasting progress this way? There is one exception: the suit you are in has all kinds of abilities you never figured out how to unlock, and surprise surprise you find data on the planet that reveals how to unlock them. Since they are in essence just data and as a psychic you have complete knowledge of what happens on all these timelines you don’t forget this when you return to an earlier point. You may be back at the starting point but hey, now you have a charged shot and will always have one. Certain bits of terrain can be destroyed by those, opening up paths to new places, etc.
[Interesting and novel game mechanics omitted]
"Now this doesn’t make VSR the best Metrovania I’ve played. The pixel graphics are fine but can’t match some of the heavy hitters, I don’t recall any of the music, it controls well enough but other games have more interesting movesets and combat to play around with, the world it creates doesn’t quite match others (although the variety of routes through it is rather strong), there’s only a few boss fights, and it’s only about five hours long. I think an argument can be made that it is the cleverest one I’ve come across though. It had an idea of what it could bring to the genre, which is basically a speedrunner mindset (in a less demanding form, a couple asks are tricky but for example on the final run I had about five minutes left over) wed to a unique-for-the-genre time system that is fully thought out and realized in a way that is sadly uncommon.
"…And no one played it. No one even really knew it existed. I usually write these things some days after the fact but after playing through this over the last few days I had to come here and struggle to try and explain how Vision Soft Reset is special, a true hidden gem because letting it be unknown any longer than it has to be just feels like such a damn shame.
"The planet you land on is gonna explode twenty minutes after you land, which is a bad thing. It is simply not possible to accomplish everything that needs to be done in only twenty minutes. However, since when you are playing the game you are in essence just exploring various potential timelines as a psychic you have all the time in the world to explore the world.
"[...T]here are typical save points/rooms throughout the world, but when you save at one what you are saving is that exact moment in that timeline. Every health or meter pick-up you’ve found, any changes you’ve made to the world, and the exact time you make the save are all stored at this point. As you play through that first twenty minute period all those saves are put on an individual timeline, and if you die or reload from only the most recent one then it stays on it and everything works like it does typically. Still at some point you are gonna start to run short on time and will have to go back to an earlier save point, either the initial starting “twenty minutes left” one or a more recent one. When you continue from one of those you create a different timeline that branches off from that point, and anything you previously accomplished after that point is undone. You had four hearts? Now you’re back to two. That thing you spent so long trying to activate? It is shut down again.
"How is it possible to make any lasting progress this way? There is one exception: the suit you are in has all kinds of abilities you never figured out how to unlock, and surprise surprise you find data on the planet that reveals how to unlock them. Since they are in essence just data and as a psychic you have complete knowledge of what happens on all these timelines you don’t forget this when you return to an earlier point. You may be back at the starting point but hey, now you have a charged shot and will always have one. Certain bits of terrain can be destroyed by those, opening up paths to new places, etc.
[Interesting and novel game mechanics omitted]
"Now this doesn’t make VSR the best Metrovania I’ve played. The pixel graphics are fine but can’t match some of the heavy hitters, I don’t recall any of the music, it controls well enough but other games have more interesting movesets and combat to play around with, the world it creates doesn’t quite match others (although the variety of routes through it is rather strong), there’s only a few boss fights, and it’s only about five hours long. I think an argument can be made that it is the cleverest one I’ve come across though. It had an idea of what it could bring to the genre, which is basically a speedrunner mindset (in a less demanding form, a couple asks are tricky but for example on the final run I had about five minutes left over) wed to a unique-for-the-genre time system that is fully thought out and realized in a way that is sadly uncommon.
"…And no one played it. No one even really knew it existed. I usually write these things some days after the fact but after playing through this over the last few days I had to come here and struggle to try and explain how Vision Soft Reset is special, a true hidden gem because letting it be unknown any longer than it has to be just feels like such a damn shame.
"If Vision Soft Reset is the best game I discover via this bundle it would not be a disappointment."
tiny text
Re: itch.io tast.io
I got a new desktop (nothing fancy for these days; much fancier than the one from before) to replace the one that’s been kaput for months and celebrated by finally playing Octodad: Dadliest Catch. It’s 3D Qwop, basically. As a game it’s not great, but as a slapstick comedy generator it’s pretty fantastic. A complete play through is less than two hours, though depending on how flaily you are and how many collectibles you feel like hunting down it could stretch a bit further than that.
Re: itch.io tast.io
The creator of Super Ledgehop: Double Laser speedran it at AGDQ 2021.
Re: itch.io tast.io
Signs of the Sojourner is really neat. It's visual novel esque; have conversations at one point on the map, spend days on the calendar to move to the next map point and have more conversations, eventually return home to refresh the growing fatigue you get from going further and further out on the map. The actual gameplay is the conversations themselves. Instead of choosing dialogue options, you've got a horizontal row that can fit like four to six cards -- each card has a symbol on the right and the left. So if your starting card is []O, you can put down a O[] to continue the conversation into a [][], into a []O, and so on. Cards can have different conditions and abilities (i.e. putting down this card will let you immediately play another one, or putting down this card will let you draw a specific card from your deck), and each time you finish a conversation by either reaching the end of the board 1 to 3 times without fucking up a card placement or by fucking up a card placement 1 to 3 times, you can then add one of your conversationalist's cards to your own deck, replacing something you had before.
And of course, as you get further from home, folks start talking differently and use different symbols, so you'll probably fail the conversation but can pick up a bit of how they talk from having made the attempt. And soon you're a pro at talking to the weird android farmers out in the boonies, sure, but in learning how to talk to them it becomes much harder to relate by the time you get back to your childhood friend who's still going over the same experiences and culture that the both of you grew up to begin with.
It's incredibly clever and well done. I'm up to trip four of seemingly five and it keeps layering on little complexities with each new area. The push and pull between trying to keep your deck broad enough to have different types of conversations and specializing so you can have a positive outcome with specific types of people very much forces you to abandon being a jack of all trades and trying to please everybody. It seems pretty replayable too, given that the calendar system will expect you to be in certain areas on certain days, but other folks will want you to be where they are on other days, and it's impossible to "win" every conversation on any given go-round.
And of course, as you get further from home, folks start talking differently and use different symbols, so you'll probably fail the conversation but can pick up a bit of how they talk from having made the attempt. And soon you're a pro at talking to the weird android farmers out in the boonies, sure, but in learning how to talk to them it becomes much harder to relate by the time you get back to your childhood friend who's still going over the same experiences and culture that the both of you grew up to begin with.
It's incredibly clever and well done. I'm up to trip four of seemingly five and it keeps layering on little complexities with each new area. The push and pull between trying to keep your deck broad enough to have different types of conversations and specializing so you can have a positive outcome with specific types of people very much forces you to abandon being a jack of all trades and trying to please everybody. It seems pretty replayable too, given that the calendar system will expect you to be in certain areas on certain days, but other folks will want you to be where they are on other days, and it's impossible to "win" every conversation on any given go-round.
Re: itch.io tast.io
Niku wrote:mongrel just linked to this PICK ME A RANDOM GAME OUT OF THE 1,700 GAME BUNDLE page: https://randombundlegame.com/
FYI, this has been updated to also include the Palestinian Aid bundle and the (still currently going) Ukraine and TTRPGs for Trans Rights in Texas bundles.
but still there's so much shit in here that i figured we can curate our own good stuff.
May as well bump the thread to see if anybody has any updates for the games in the current bundles. Superhot's supposed to be good, right? And maybe I should give CrossCode another shot.
Re: itch.io tast.io
Skatebird is cute, and has a really awesome soundtrack.
Re: itch.io tast.io
Thad wrote:Superhot's supposed to be good, right?
SUPERHOT is the most innovative shooter I've played in years!
Re: itch.io tast.io
I hear the itch.io version is way behind the Steam version, but eh, no reason I shouldn't check it out anyway.
Re: itch.io tast.io
nosimpleway wrote:Anodyne is hard to describe. It's kind of like Link's Awakening if Link's Awakening tried to be (more overtly?) horror. Controls are a little wonky but it's fine.
Way late to the party on this one, but I decided to fire it up. A handheld seemed like the appropriate thing to play it on. Controls are a little wonky; running it on my Deck I had to set the D-pad to emulate a joystick before Anodyne would recognize it. And even if you're playing with a controller, all the button prompts still use the keyboard commands.
I'm enjoying it. It lacks the scope of Link's Awakening but it feels pretty polished for a scrappy indie game. (I did glitch myself into a wall once, but what could be more Link's Awakening than that?) I like the mood, I like the music, the physics are satisfying. The dungeons are small but the gimmicks and puzzles are well-conceived. It's less gated than Link's Awakening; after the first dungeon it gives you a decently-sized world to play in and not a lot of guidance about where you're supposed to go and what you're supposed to do. Whether that's praise or criticism will depend on how much you like wandering around blindly not knowing where you're supposed to go next; I feel like it's just right, the world's small enough that I can remember "hey, I don't think I finished exploring X area yet," and then there are enough fast travel locations that it's not a slog to get back there.
I wrote a Lutris script to install the itch.io version of the game on Linux. (The Windows version, to run in WINE, because the Linux version is unsupported and relies on the Linux version of Adobe AIR, which is also no longer supported.) It's waiting in a moderation queue, but just in case anybody wants it, LMK.
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