Bullet hell, no controller support. Arrow keys move your ship, Z shoots to the right, Esc pauses, and the mouse is used to navigate the menus. That’s it; no bombs, no power-ups, nothing fancy that you might be used to from other SHMUPs. The game saves your progress after each level, and there’s an option to replace the eyesore white grid background with actual images, but that’s as fancy as it gets.

Still, the level design is pretty fun. There’s a decent variety of ships and shot patterns, and while there are a few cheap hits every now and then, it never felt like I died too much. Plus, the game gives you the option to give yourself infinite lives, which I recommend regardless because the levels are kinda too long to have to redo the whole thing just because you lost your last life at the boss. The levels promise alternate/harder versions of themselves if you complete certain optional objectives in previous levels, but when I replayed the game to do just that, I didn’t notice much–if any–differences, so I wouldn’t call this game replayable.

That said, it was fun to play through the first time, and its base price is only one dollar, so I can recommend it. You can buy the game here: https://happy-frog-games.itch.io/flashover-megasector

Finally got my Steam backlog back down after that one user mentioned the up-to-date paid-now-free games thread in that one Steam group, so I’ve been tackling my itch.io backlog recently. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much noteworthy there so far. Explobers has an interesting premise, but the execution is lackluster, with the puzzle elements being not hard and the action elements just being you replaying the level up to the point you need to blow yourself up or turn into another platform.

Though I did have to go back to Steam for a bit since I happened to win another game on SG:

• Soda Crisis
  

  4 hours playtime

  29 of 49 achievements

Platformer. Left/right move, A jumps, X shoots, and Y uses your grapple. You can also push B to use a subweapon and LT to dodge, but I found myself not needing to do those very much. The game showers you with equippable upgrades and even a few different guns, but not only does a lot of that equipment have specific activation qualities, you also have very limited equipment slots (with the game being much more stingy handing out increases for that), so you’ll find yourself sticking to the same build for most of the game. The game has many rooms where you have to kill all the enemies to progress, which I’ve never been a fan of, but on the plus side, it rarely sends out more waves after the initial ones are defeated, and the differing level designs/enemy placements helps prevent things from becoming too stale. That said, there were a few mandatory enemy killings that didn’t have the HUD icon letting you know about them, which did bother me.

First thing I noticed is that progress in the demo doesn’t transfer to the full game, so not only did I have to replay the desert level where enemy bullets are hard to see, but I also had to go through the early test chambers where the game regresses your build and you’re stuck with that slow-firing pistol. Thankfully, it doesn’t take too long for the game to give you a rapid-fire upgrade to bring your weapon closer to what was promised in the first level, but it’s always a pet peeve when a game starts you out with stuff and then takes them away, more so when it’s like this game where they don’t even have the excuse of it maybe being too overwhelming for new players to get used to.

Second thing I noticed is that the full game is much easier than the demo, maybe even a bit too easy. The sword enemies don’t attack as quickly, which effectively means you can always kill them before they finish running up to you, and the first boss went down super quick with my default loadout (I had to change my equipment to beat the demo’s version of the boss). The rest of the game also struggles to maintain a difficulty curve: you think things are picking up in the desert level when the purple portals send you to the grassy area with the chasing fireball and the orbiting purple balls, but then those hazards never show up again after that level. Even the final boss didn’t put up much of a fight, effectively letting me stand between its hazards and drain its health bar in 10 seconds or so (for both phases). What makes the final boss extra disappointing is that the level prior actually did pick things up a bit.

However, the level before the last one was hard for the wrong reasons. First, it takes away your guns and forces you to use a short-range sword. Second, it introduces shielded enemies, so the sword doesn’t even kill them in one hit unless you try to run past them to destroy the enemy generating the shields (and you also have to notice that this is what’s happening because the game is kinda subtle about it), and even then it can still sometimes take 2+ attacks to kill an unshielded enemy. Then, after making you go through nearly a whole level of that (complete with several kill-all-enemies rooms), the last few rooms add a visual effect where the platforms won’t form until you get close, and then it introduces fake dark-grey platforms that do the exact opposite, fragmenting and disappearing when you get close! You’re also forced to fight a three-phase boss with the sword while also doing timed platforming between the phases. It doesn’t help that this level comes shortly after the two-hour refund window, as if the devs knew it’d be a turn-off for lots of people who enjoyed the game up to this point (the demo also has zero indication that there’d be anything like this in the full game).

There’s also a similar level you unlock after beating the game, where you’re forced to use a super-short-range knife to reflect bullets and you die in one hit, but I gave up on that level after a few deaths.

Overall, the game’s kinda mediocre. I did have some fun with the game, but only some fun in the rest of the game makes it hard to justify the lack of fun in the mandatory sword level. If you’re interested, wait for a really good sale.

P.S. If you play games for the story, then you really won’t like this game since its plot twist just kinda happens and the game ends with a lot of unanswered questions. Maybe it’s funnier in the original Chinese; I dunno.

I tried the Next Fest demo for this one a while back and wasn’t too impressed with it, but after it went free and I saw that one of the updates included level design and gameplay tweaks, I decided to give it another chance.

• Wonder Ball
  

  12 hours playtime

  15 of 33 achievements

3D platformer. Left stick moves, A double-jumps, RB dashes, X does a ground pound, holding RT electrocutes things nearby (like switches or enemies), LB and LT use healing/temporary-shield items, and when you reach the final world 1 level, you gain the ability to shrink by pushing B (which disables all your other abilities except moving and double-jumping, but lets you go through small areas).

There are five worlds, each with their own overworld containing four levels, four arenas, one “final” level for when you beat all the other levels/arenas, and some scattered optional items. The overworlds themselves are overly massive and bland, to the point where I’m pretty sure they’re all just store-bought assets with minimal changes; the only real way you can find anything is by using the compass markers at the top of the screen since you’re bound to get lost otherwise. There are some scattered drones you can spend healing items to fix that’ll let you fast-travel straight to any of the world’s levels/arenas, but 1) you also have to reach the drones just the same as you’d have to reach the levels/arenas, and 2) fast-traveling everywhere means you’re skipping over the scattered computer chips that you’ll need to buy upgrades, so you’ll rarely use fast travel anyway.

Then there are the arenas. All of them take place in what is effectively the same large, flat arena (just with some cosmetic differences between worlds) where you have to fight waves of tank-robots that all attack you asynchronously, and when you combine that with how close you need to be to electrocute them, you realize it’s impossible to avoid all of their attacks and you can’t win unless you use the healing items and shields that you’re showered with during the rest of the game. Even if you buy attack/max hp/range upgrades, you won’t be able to keep tabs on all of them and can get cheap-shot by an attack from off-camera. The bots get a few different weapons as the game progresses, but it doesn’t really change anything when you can just keep healing/shielding yourself. Also, the arenas are all mandatory to unlock the worlds’ final levels and to progress to the next world despite being such an obvious diversion from the core platformer gameplay (a diversion that won’t appeal to all platformer fans).

The levels themselves are okay, but they’re all hamstrung by one crucial decision: all the enemies are in the arenas, so none are in the levels. This means the only hazards in the levels are either instakill stuff (like falling in the water) or stuff like the exploding ! crates that stay gone even if they kill you. As a result, a significant portion of all the levels’ challenges involve waiting on moving platforms (boring) and/or dashing across long distances without a platform, and since dashing is always a fixed-length, it’s not easy to aim yourself accurately even if you save your double-jump for the end (and it doesn’t help that your jumps themselves are very fast and heavy). This means that if you fail a jump, the stuff you have to redo is waiting on moving platforms instead of actually engaging with the game, and it starts to get kinda tedious after a while (especially since checkpoints can be a bit too far apart sometimes). To make matters worse, your dashes refill on a cooldown instead of instantly refreshing when you land like other platformers do (even dying doesn’t speed up the cooldown), so that’s just more waiting you’ll need to do. It takes until world 3 for the game to finally start using moving (instakill) hazards that don’t permanently disappear if they touch you, but even then, they mostly just patrol sections of large platforms, and the bulk of the levels still revolve around moving platforms and long-distance multi-dashing. It gets extra annoying when you reach world 4 and realize the only way to beat those levels is to buy max-dash upgrades because you can’t reach the next platform with your default three dashes.

Oh, and the death walls are the same color as regular glass (or at least a very similar color). They’re supposed to have this electricity effect to differentiate themselves, but that effect doesn’t always show up, so it’s easy to get the two confused.

Overall, the game can be frustrating sometimes, but it’s okay for a free game, so I can recommend it.

This was made by the same people who made Khimera: Destroy All Monster Girls, but I didn’t think to check their back catalogue until I saw someone here post about another of their games recently.

• Mandew vs the Colorless Curse
  

  58 minutes playtime

  5 of 21 achievements

Platformer. Left/right move, A jumps, holding X runs, and if you have a power-up, pushing the run button attacks like in Mario. Getting hit once causes you to lose your power-up (also like in Mario), and getting hit with no power-up kills you. Normal movement is painfully slow, so you’ll be running for basically the whole game, and although running does cause a bit of awkward momentum when you have to stop/turn around, it’s not too big a deal.

The first level is kinda bland since it’s a direct reference to Super Mario Land’s first levels, but the game starts to pick up afterward. It has some pretty tricky jumps in world 3, and world 4 might even go a bit overboard in a couple spots. Boss patterns are fairly simple, though sometimes their attacks/pattern changes will catch you by surprise for a cheap hit.

Although I never got game over, I should mention that the game has a lives system that probably forces you to restart the level with three lives if you lose them all, which would be pretty messed up given how hard the last level can be (with individual segments killing me four times before I got to the next checkpoint); I’m glad they decided against that when they made Khimera. Oh well; at least this game does save your progress (which I was worried it didn’t for a while). There’s also a secret level I didn’t find, so I can’t comment on its design or how intuitively it’s hidden.

Overall, the game is fairly well designed and I did have fun, even if that was partly to do with never having to experience running out of lives, so I can recommend it. Oh, and it’s free, which is always nice.

• ImageStriker
  

  76 minutes playtime

  7 of 8 achievements

Vertical SHMUP. Besides your standard moving and shooting, all you can really do is push a button to change which direction your side-guns aim (front, side, and back). There are six different shot powerups that are kinda hard to tell apart since they’re all white, but that’s it; you don’t even get an upgraded version of that gun if you collect the same one you’re using. Although the game has a lives system, you can retry from the last level you reached instead of being sent back to the beginning, which is always nice. There’s also a “Caravan” mode, which seems to be its own level (though it does reuse the stage 1 boss).

Level design is well made, with a decent variety of enemies and fair shot patterns. My only real issues are that a few of the enemies/bosses can be damage sponges if you don’t have the right weapon (and sometimes even if you do have the right weapon) and that the final level makes you re-fight almost every boss and miniboss. Plus, Normal mode started getting kinda boring around level 3, so I recommend playing on Hard mode (though even on Devil mode, I never got game over). This is one of those games that doesn’t explain what’s different between difficulties, which is always disappointing, so I’ll say what I noticed: level design and enemy HP seem about the same, but bullets are faster and more frequent (though it never gets to bullet hell levels).

Also, the game is free, so I can recommend it for both SHMUP fans and those of you unfamiliar with the genre and want to try it out.

• Reroute
  

  2 hours playtime

  no achievements

Puzzle game. Mechanics are based on Sokoban (tile-based, push blocks, goal is to get certain blocks on certain spaces), but this game sets itself apart by having pink-sided blocks. You may be wondering: what do they do? How are they different from normal blocks? Well, guess what: the game never tells you, and none of the levels are built to lead you into discovering it naturally, so you’ll have to do trial-and-error as early as the second level before you finally stumble across the fact that moving into a pink wall will teleport you to the opposite side of that block’s twin.

Although that’s some pretty bad game design, if you can get past that, the rest of the game has some pretty good puzzles that are all built around this teleportation mechanic; no gimmicks are thrown in later on to make up for lack of substance or challenge, and no further trial-and-error is necessary once you know how the teleportation works. Plus, the game is free, so I can easily recommend it.

Normally, I don’t consider “forgettable” to be a bad thing since I’d rather play a good game I don’t remember that well instead of a bad game I remember for the wrong reasons, but Starfox Adventures had to come along and be the first exception by having a mandatory segment where you have to match items to the locations you found/used them in. See, the game has two different horn instruments, and both are treated like your typical fetch-quest “go here and push the button” item. And sure, they both look very different and are used in distinctly different locations, but the overall gameplay is just so bland and bare-bones that I had genuinely forgotten about the entirety of the Cloudrunner Fortress by this point.

Oh, but there’s a bunch of stuff about the game I do remember. The beat-‘em-up combat is little more than “tap the A button and you win,” and if an enemy blocks your melee attacks too much, just pull out your magic staff and shoot them. When you’re not auto-locked onto an enemy during combat, aiming your magic staff is finicky and irritating since you have to keep the C-stick held in position or the reticle will recenter itself back in the middle of the screen. The game’s attempt at an overworld is very linear with lots of tedious backtracking (no fast travel), and many of these pointlessly-time-consuming rooms are just blatant attempts at disguising load times (which wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t have to keep going back and forth through them throughout the game). The game’s excuses for puzzles are just there as gimmicks, being very easy (except for when they don’t work right, so you look up a walkthrough just to be told to do the same thing you’ve been doing) and abandoned shortly afterward. The actual Starfox-esque space-shooter sections are limited to just five 1-minute-long levels, and even they aren’t immune to the backtracking! You might think the beat-‘em-up combat would get more involved with the bosses, but no, the bosses are secretly just more puzzles (except the two that are shooter segments), and the bad guy who’s built up for most of the game is never fought. I beat this game and can confidently say it’s unfinished at best.

So yeah, I’ve been having another string of busts recently, hence my lack of posts, but I did beat this game just now, and it’s not too bad:

• Linxy The Lynx
  

  31 minutes playtime

  6 of 9 achievements

Platformer. Forward movement starts a bit slow, but it speeds up after a second or so, which is kinda awkward. You can still stop and turn around on a dime, though. Besides movement and jumping, you have a “crouch” which barely brings down your height at all and is only useful once to avoid a ceiling saw (twice if you count its duplicate in the remix levels), and you have an awkward slide that only activates if you’re running at top speed (and which you only ever need to use to attack the final (only) boss).

Level design is okay. The first couple ones are a bit too easy, and there’s one enemy type that takes two hits to kill for no reason, but it does start to pick up around level 5. Unfortunately, there are only five levels, and the boss is one of those that makes you wait a while for it to be vulnerable (and the waiting is a bit much until you’ve hit it a couple times and its attacks have picked up). You can unlock “remix” levels by finding computer-chip items in the levels, and if you miss one, you can exit the level from the menu right after getting it so you don’t have to replay the whole level, which is nice…but that still only brings the total number of levels up to 11, and as you can tell by my playtime, they’re all rather short. Honestly, between this, the cliffhanger ending, and the fact the game has an episode-selection that only ever has one episode available, this game might also very well be unfinished.

Still, as far as free games go, this one’s okay, so I can recommend it.

Well, it’s time again for my regular reminder to you all to check out the Next Fests if you aren’t already. Not only do they have dozens of free demos for games in whatever niche genre you think isn’t getting enough attention, but also, some of those demos are even good! The downside is their manufactured FOMO with some demos being removed when that specific Next Fest is over, so as usual, there were a couple I was interested in but didn’t get to play. Oh well; I still have plenty of recommendations, in no particular order:

One of the games on my wishlist was suddenly 90% off, so I used some of my Christmas gift card money to buy it:

• Crash Puzzle Hammer-San
  

  23 hours playtime

  26 of 26 achievements

Puzzle. You can move left/right, swing your hammer in the four cardinal directions to attack enemies and break certain blocks, and you can climb up single-tile-high blocks. If you walk off a ledge, you fall straight down, unable to move or attack until you land. You can’t jump.

The game has a lot of really challenging puzzles, and I also like how the difficulty is entirely because of level design; no new gimmicks are introduced after Area 3. Plus, because the mechanics are all reliable and consistent, you don’t need to be actively playing the game to figure out the solutions to its levels (which is extra good because levels can get a bit long and there’s no undo or mid-level quicksave). The difficulty does take a while to pick up, though, as pretty much all of the challenging puzzles within the first 100 stages were also in the free demo (and your save doesn’t transfer so you’ll have to beat them again).

The only major problem is that the game also tries to include action elements, but they’re very underdeveloped and don’t blend with the core puzzle gameplay at all. Enemies frequently serve no purpose other than to distract you from solving the puzzle by constantly respawning and forcing you to break your concentration to kill them, and levels based entirely on the action elements are mediocre at best and irritatingly unpredictable at worst. For example, level 155 makes you drop blocks on enemies to kill them, but the blocks fall slowly because other levels require you to ride them down; meanwhile, the enemies move briskly and turn around abruptly upon hitting a wall or each other or even the blocks you tried to drop on them, so trying to aim is a crapshoot and you’re better off just dropping all the blocks as quickly as possible.

Still, those levels aren’t too common, and the puzzles themselves are really good, so I can recommend this game. Even if the problems I mentioned give you pause, it’s absolutely worth getting on sale.

I also suddenly won another game on SG (lucky me!):

• Super Magbot
  

  7 hours playtime

  11 of 32 achievements

Technically a Platformer, but this game also won’t let you jump. Instead, you aim a short-range magnet beam using the right stick and push L for blue polarity and R for red polarity; same-colors repel and opposing-colors attract. That might sound intuitive on paper, but it can be easy to lose track of which button attract and repel are on when they constantly switch in a split second. Even after beating the game, I can say I never quite got used to it; you’ll often have to take a moment to look ahead and simply memorize “L, L, R, R,” or “L, R, R, L,” or whatever pattern gets you past it. Left/right movement also has some obvious momentum.

Even if you think those are me problems, there are other issues with the controls. Notably, the magnet powers are physics-based, so aiming the right-stick just a few degrees differently can mean the difference between not jumping high enough to reach the platform and jumping too high into spikes. I gave up trying to get each level’s optional collectibles because I just couldn’t figure out how I was expected to manipulate the game’s physics to reach some of them, and whenever I started to think that I was learning the game better and could go back for the ones I skipped, I’d soon encounter another set that brought me back to my senses.

However, the worst input problem with the game is that your magnet powers don’t activate when you push the shoulder buttons; they activate when you release the shoulder buttons (or you hold the buttons for too long). I cannot stress how counterintuitive this is. When I was first looking at the game’s negative reviews, someone said that the magnet powers sometimes don’t work–even going so far as to link a youtube video–and while that criticism might not technically be true, that’s definitely what it feels like. You’ll push the button in time–you’ll KNOW you pushed the button in time and in range and aimed correctly and using the correct polarity–but none of that matters when you released the button on the exact frame your beam’s connection to the magnet block is broken, before the white outline has had a chance to start fading. It’s all so frustrating because indie games are supposed to be our refuge from purposely-bad game design, yet enshittification has been slowly infecting them as well.

Overall, I don’t know if I can recommend this game. It’s fun when it works, sure, but it’s often not your fault when you lose, even if you don’t count getting the polarities mixed up.

P.S. There are also quite a few levels that are overly long, but at least with these, the game gives you the option to add a checkpoint to most levels. I pretty much left that on for the whole game starting partway through world 2.

It’s been a while since I made a post, though it’s also been a while since I played a really good game worthy of publicity. Kurovadis is a platformer that came really close, with its tight controls, challenging level design, and even a fairly low base price of $8.50ish. However, it has a few issues: 1) the first boss is a bit of a damage sponge, even though I put ALL of my level-up points into increasing my attack, 2) for the first two bosses, you have to backtrack through their very linear levels after beating them–and sure, there are quite a few places where it’s a genuinely different challenge to go the other way, but other times, you’re just doing the same thing again in the other direction, and 3) the final boss tosses several projectiles in random directions that bounce off of the walls of the arena while also the boss shoots at you directly, which can result in scenarios where you can’t avoid damage. Still, I could look past those issues because of all the good the game does, but what really made me hesitant to recommend it is that the final boss’s final phase has it suddenly become invincible to all your attacks…except one: a downward-stomp that is weaker than all your other attacks and is actively detrimental if you try to use it in any other circumstance, so you’ll likely forget about it by the time you get there. It honestly soured the whole experience and stands as an example of why you should beat games before recommending them, no matter how good they start off. Wait for a sale, at least.

I recently beat a game that might be a bit more worthy of a post, though:

Puzzle. Left and right move your magnet by one tile while also rotating it in that direction, and up activates said magnet.

The game starts off with only a couple different types of blocks, but as you progress, the game introduces more and more things, such as opposing polarities, items that change your own polarity, and switches that toggle blocks on/off when you use your magnet at them. In fact, there are so many different mechanics (with each one making the game lower its difficulty to introduce) that the game ends up only having a few tricky puzzles by the halfway point, after 80 levels! Plus, although the number of tricky puzzles does go up afterward, the game keeps introducing stuff, so even those tricky puzzles end up sporadically placed among several easy levels.

That said, all the mechanics make sense and are reliable, and whenever I was stumped, I was always able to figure out the solution based on what I knew about the mechanics. Zero trial and error; at worst, you just realize you overlooked a crucial block somewhere.

The only other thing to mention is its price: $5 without a sale in 4 years. Although that might be a stretch given how many of the puzzles are easy and kinda boring, I think it might still barely be worth it. Plus, maybe you already got it in that massive itch.io bunde from a while back or one of the times it went free, in which case it’s definitely worth checking out.