You Will Hate Buffalo: Super Amazing Wagon Adventure Turbo

Someone took Oregon Trail nostalgia and asked, "How over the top absurd can I make this?" "Very," this person said in reply, and was correct. Super Amazing Wagon Time Adventure Game Turbo is a retro-graphics side-scrolling shooter starring a covered wagon heading west, three people you can name after your best friends, worst enemies, pets, or politicians, and a mixture of random and scripted events that will have you laughing.

Unless you're in one of the handful of on-foot sequences, you're shooting wildlife and bandits as you race your wagon across plains, mountain passes, and deserts. You'll pick up limited-ammo weapon powerups such as shotguns, airstrikes, and magic wands and possibly trade your trusty pistol for a magic sword or a trained falcon you find in an underwater treasure chest. You'll choose between fording a river and leaping it, in a decision that could lead you to fighting a satellite in low earth orbit or fighting off angry bears.

And you will kill buffalo. You will slaughter your way through a horde of buffalo so thick you will never want to see another. You will fight buffalo en masse. You will fight them in the sky. You will fight them on fire. You will hate these lumbering, flaming beasts that mercilessly ram your wagon to shreds and innocently traipse through your entrails. Even more than the bandits who choose to shoot at you, you will hate buffalo.

Play unlocks survival modes that let you dodge snakes, murder piranha, and fight off zombies. You can play an infinite travel mode. You can unlock unique wagons, each with their own special weapons (offering great and interesting choices for gameplay). But there is no mode that lets you get your vengeance on the hateful buffalo that now haunt my dreams.

Thanks, Super Amazing Double Wagon Time Adventure Game Turbo Ultra. I am a broken man.

Super Amazing Buffalo Murder Wagon Adventure is available for $2.99 on Steam, from Desura, or from solo developer sparsevector directly.

Find a Stick, Build a Nest: Bird Song

Bird Song is a charming, simple game. You are a bird, a squat, pixellated bird, and your goal is to find sticks and use them to build nests, while jumping over pits and dodging spiky barriers. You pick up powerups that let you jump higher or jump off walls or I'm not sure what else, because I only got so far in the game. Whatever nest you built or passed last is your save point, and you can use that to try again whenever you die.

The simple graphics are charming, but perhaps the most intriguing thing about the game's appearance is the way it shows you the world map. Imagine the entire game map fit onto a single screen, as if shown from very far away. Naturally, you can't see your character or your surroundings to play. So the game distorts the map around your little bird, like blowing up a giant bubble on the surface of the screen, so your immediate surrounds are clearly visible, and it flows into the rest of the world map in a distorted way. Even as you play, dodging spikes and pits, you can see roughly where other things are on the map.

In the end, it's a bit too repetitive for me to want to finish. After finding a few powerups and expanding my exploration range with them, the amount of backtracking I'd have to do to check out new spaces exceeded my threshold. It's possible that adding some smaller victories might have kept me engaged. Respawning enemies for me to bop on the head as I crisscrossed the map, providing the opportunity for small wins while I was doing something less engaging, might've kept me engaged longer.

Bird Song, by the same creator as Roguelight, is available for download on itch.io.

Unbound: The Binding of Isaac

The Binding of Isaac is thematic as all hell and a solid game, and I don't want to play it. If forced to squeeze it into a genre, I'd call it an unforgiving Rogue-like shooter, which I didn't really know was a thing before playing this game. It's right up my alley, and I still don't want to play it. The opening story is that of a child who has been abused by his mother because she is suffering delusions of commands from God. The game begins as she hears a final command to kill her son and goes to do so, and only the discovery of a trapdoor to the basement in his room allows the son to escape. The entire thing feels like the self-protective hallucination of a boy about to die, and it's rather depressing. Not to mention the elements that fill the hallucination-slash-gameplay that suggest just how terrible the boy's life has been.

Gameplay is good. The difficulty curve is moderate but surmountable. The knowledge curve is far steeper, with a broad range of powerups that often aren't clear about what they do for you. Part of this is the legacy of the Rogue-like, items that you have to test and experiment with to figure out what they do. Part of it is just obfuscation.

I might be able to ascend this knowledge curve with another handful of hours of play, but I don't want to. The game just doesn't suck me in enough to make that time commitment worthwhile.

The Binding of Isaac is available for $4.99 on Steam, or at the Humble Bundle storefront for $7.99 (bundled with an expansion).

Euclid Who?: HyperRogue

You are lost in a non-Euclidean space, constructed of tessellating patterns of shapes that recede into the distance in a way that simply doesn't make any sense. There are treasures here, from ice diamonds to rubies to spice, scattered through a double-handful of impossibly-constructed worlds. There are also monsters who can kill you with a touch, if you don't get them first. The more treasure you collect, the more monsters seek you out, but you need lots of treasure to find an Orb of Yendor before the monsters overwhelm you. Good luck. HyperRogue is a brilliant, dead-simple game that is not quite a Rogue-like and not quite anything else. Please keep in mind, when I say dead-simple, I mean that the art is cheap and the music... well, the music is quite nice, if not complex. In contrast, modeling a non-Euclidean space on my computer... I have no idea how simple that is.

You move through up to ten different worlds (plus one crossroads between them) that procedurally generate as you go, each with unique properties: In the ice world, your body heat will melt the walls; in the living cavern, walls move; in the running world, the ground falls away behind you. Enemies have unique properties as well. Though many have an AI that only charges you, the desert's indestructible sandworm moves once every two turns, and the jungle's murderous vines grow outward from a root one vine at a time, rotating around the center.

That's not all. Because one attack kills anything (with some exceptions), including you, the game plays on a checkmate principle: you can't make move anywhere a monster would kill you, and if you are being threatened, you must eliminate or escape that threat. And if there's no way out, you're dead. Checkmate.

A friend suggested that makes it a puzzle game, but it doesn't feel like a puzzle, it feels like you're running around a bizarre world trying not to die.

There's a lot of creativity in the variation of rules for the different worlds and and different monsters. That creativity is what takes a simple game with a non-Euclidean gimmick and makes it a smart game that's kept me playing for almost two hours, trying to find the key to unlock one of the Orbs of Yendor that I can find in Hell.

If you manage it, please tell me what's inside.

HyperRogue is available for $0.99 on Steam, or to play for free on the web.

Game Review: bit Dungeon II

I'm not sure what to make of bit Dungeon II. It's an action RPG that reminds me of the Secret of Mana more than anything else, with freedom to walk all over the world and use a variety of quick and charged attacks that vary by weapon. But it's not clear-cut in the way the old console games were. It helps when enemies react to attacks, such as in the Zelda games that bit Dungeon II claims as one of its inspirations. Here, monsters make no reactions except for the status effects you occasionally place on them, so they crowd you and make the fracas a confused jumble. You can pound the action key or hold it down to charge, and each has an advantage at different times, if you can figure out what that is.

What little story there is—deliberately thin in the common Rogue-like style—seems to be that you are a ghost, returned from who-knows-what and who-knows-where, out to gain strength and defeat the grand evil, unlocking the portal to face it by first destroying several boss monsters.

The art style reminds me of Zelda in its level design and a mix between Giger and Miyazaki in its monster design. Sometimes you fight skeletons or yetis, but more often you'll encounter floating, bloated snowmen or emaciated, canted bipeds firing lasers at you if you don't cut them down fast enough. Whatever its faults, I love looking at it.

 

Gameplay seems to spike between non-threatening and immediately deadly, all while fighting monsters of various stripes. It just doesn't provide me enough feedback to know whether there's something about the situation I'm in, or I'm messing up my combat timing, and if so, what I did wrong.

The game seems to be most dangerous when you re-enter a screen you've already cleared. It repopulates the enemies, usually with a collection of smaller, weaker enemies, but those mobs are what take me down half the time. Or those tough knights. They have lots of hit points.

In contrast, bosses seem to stand around for the half the fight soaking up damage before they unleash something that usually misses. I just can't feel the game's rhythm, and I can't start learning the game's patterns when I can't sense them.

bit Dungeon II is available for $4.99 on Steam, and apparently also for mobile devices. That makes a lot of sense, actually; the play feels like it was designed with touchscreens in mind.

Game Review: Instant Dungeon!

Instant Dungeon! is a game with a simple concept and a clean, polished execution. It drops you into a procedurally-generated dungeon populated with items, monsters, and treasure, and your job is to navigate the dungeon, use the items to avoid or kill the monsters, get the treasure, find the key to the next level, and get through the door. It's even simpler than it sounds: the dungeon halls are only wide enough for one, and one touch from a monster kills you, so you need to find ways to circumnavigate the creature or kill it. You carry one item at a time, use it with one key, and every item is single use. In the end, you have three functions: move (one of four directions), use item, and pause. Simple. Not necessarily easy.

As you play, the game scales up complexity. Dungeons become larger, more intricate mazes, with a greater number of monsters. The items scale up in complexity too, and require increasing tactical awareness to use well: the dagger kills the first monster it hits. The axe kills every monster in a straight line until it hits a wall. The fireball is like the axe, but fires in two directions. The shield protects you from one hit, but you have to use it deliberately. The helmet you can put on, and it will protect you without action. And so on.

Complexity doesn't always mean difficulty, and it wouldn't here except for one additional factor: the darkness. As you go deeper, the darkness becomes more oppressive, until you can't see any more than what's in nearby line-of-sight from your character. This ramps up the difficulty more than the size of the mazes or the monsters, because you become far more likely to turn a corner into an enemy, or to get boxed in by two monsters you can't see.

Speaking of complexity, I'm not sure the procedural generation adds much to the game. The levels are rather similar anyway. It feels rather like the gameplay/decision-making loop is too small for the fact that the level is different than it was last time--or even than the last level--to make much of a difference.

Every fifth level is a boss level, with a unique monster whose attack pattern you must figure out to get the treasure. The boss levels are authored and break up the routine of mazes and monsters.

Multiple game modes don't add much to the game. As simple as the game is, it's hard to see how they could. Instead of getting the most treasure, the other modes require you to kill a certain number of specific monsters, or to rescue people from the dungeon. This last is the only mode I've seen where you backtrack through dungeon levels you've already been through, and also the only time I've seen a bug in the game. (The third captive was displace to be off-map, so I could see the "Help" speech bubble but not reach the captive, making the game unwinnable.)

Instant Dungeon! has a nice collection of character sprites for you to choose from, of all genders and types, and it defaults to a random selection. The captives are likewise drawn from this pool of sprites, and not always any particular gender. I thought that was nice, from a feminist point of view.

Instant Dungeon! is a fun diversion. Simple gameplay executed very well, and good for an hour or two of play. Instant Dungeon! is available for $1.99 from steam, desura, and others.

Game Review: Lyne

Many games claim to be simple to learn and difficult to master. Lyne achieves that elusive goal of elegance in design and applies it to the game entire. The game's art and music are simple: clean shapes, colors, and lines; simple tones and rhythms timed to your choices. All make the game stand out visually and musically. Taken together, they make the game beautiful and meditative. That feeling meshes perfectly with the gameplay. The goal is to draw an unbroken line between two endpoints of like color and shape, hitting all the similar markers in between without crossing any previously-drawn lines. Lyne escalates this simple premise by introducing multiple shapes, and then color-neutral waypoints that serve as intersections for lines that otherwise can't cross. Add in the requirement that each intersection must be used a specific number of times, no more and no less, and you have all the ingredients for a puzzle game of scalable complexity.

Lyne is pleasant to play as a break from an otherwise-busy day. It's easy to play for two minutes or twenty, and if you reach the limit of your ingenuity working on the puzzles that come with the game, Lyne also produces a set of new puzzles each day for your puzzling pleasure.

Lyne is available for $2.99 on Steam and can also be purchased for your phone, I guess.