By the way, there’s a new massive bundle out there, this one for Palestinian aid. Wherever you come down on that part of the world, there’s never been an armed conflict in history that didn’t hurt a bunch of people who didn’t deserve it, so if you’re so inclined and all. It has a lot of overlap with the previous huge bundle, but there’s some new stuff in there too.
- For the Honor – PnP RPG involving princesses.
- Hello Charlotte, Metamorphabet – No Linux Ports
- Super Rad Raygun – A Mega Man-inspired platformer with a Gameboy visual flavor and an over-the-top Reagan-era backdrop (You play a Chibi B-MO-ish robot-human hybrid built to fight communists despite being the product of massive OSHA violations). It ran well, but the config tools don’t have a linux port, so I played through the first level with key mappings that are completely unusable for a southpaw (WASD to move, VGBY for buttons) and only worked out how to remap them by trial and error.
- Fortune 499 – No Linux port. Looks like neat retro-style RPG.
- Heroic Asset Series: Overworld – A 16×16 sprite pack for making Zelda-likes
- This Discord Has Ghosts in it – Seems to be a collaborative game played via Discord? Not really ready for something like that today.
- 10S – A retro-styled action game whose gameplay is modeled on tennis. No Linux port.
- My Friend Took Me To A Feline Therapy Place For My Anxiety And I’m Starting To Wonder Where The Cats Are? – This is a book. A novel about… Well, it’s all there on the tin, really. It’s very sweet and wholesome.
- Quadrilateral Cowboy – This one is really neat and I can play it to boot. It’s a cyberpunk heist game set in a world that seems to mix Christie-time and Cyberpunk motifs, with a medium-low poly look where characters all look strange and blocky – at first I thought it was Minecraft style, but it’s not really. My only complaint is that it’s one of those games that lean in on the “awkward controls” thing. You know, where you interact with the world mostly by clumsily batting things around like your hands are made of rock.
- Blind Men – Um. Gay anime supervillain romance visual novel? I clicked through about ten minutes of dialogue before I lost interest. It had pretty much lost me when the beautiful bishie boy with the sexy eyepatch laments his hideous disfiguration.
- Sewer Rave – I… Um… I have no idea. It’s a raycasting low-rez-style game set in a surrealist dance party held by rats in a sewer? I don’t think there’s anything coherent to it, just a bit of a synesthesia thing? I don’t know. I’m uncomfortable.
- HPS Cartography Kit – A tileset for a hex maps. Is this the first RPG asset pack for tabletop gaming we’ve had so far? I can’t remember.
- SAI – An action game about deforestation? Windows-only, but it’s also been made free so you can try this one even if you didn’t snag the bundle. The screenshots look lovely.
- OneShot – Big winner here. Sort of JRPG-flavored game with a heavy meta-element reminiscent of Undertale. You play as… Well, no; the player character is a sort of catboy trying to save a dying world of robots, but you don’t play “as” him; you play as you; the game addresses you by name (It didn’t ask me my name. It just knew. Which means that, despite, again, me using an operating system that The Man disapproves of, it looked up profile information. It didn’t even call my by my linux username; it actually looked up the “Real Name” I put in when I installed the OS. Which is not a very normal Linux thing to do. Also, I prefer to play games in windowed mode rather than fullscreen (I know I’m weird), and this is the first game that’s actively agreed with me about that – its intro text says that it’s better to play it in a window. And it used this to great effect, sometimes interjecting comments to the player not via the game’s UI, but via an OS dialog box (The dialog boxes are not quite perfect; there’s some broken icons that I think stem from it using a deprecated API).
- GNOG – Very disappointed that this has no Linux port as it bills itself as a collection of puzzle boxes, and that’s right up my alley. TBH, I think an android port would be even more apropos.
- Drum Brain – This is an interface for rhythm game instrument controllers, which would make it a miss for me even if it ran in Linux.
- The Fall of Lazarus – A science-fiction mystery game that looks pretty interesting and which, again, I can’t play because it’s Windows-only.
- Multi-Platformer Tileset – What it says on the tin. Retro-styled assets for platformers, looks to have taken some inspiration from Ghost’n’Goblins maybe? It’s a little bit Castlevania, but with a softer edge. Actually reminds me a lot of Faxanadu, but that’s not a game I imagine inspiring a lot of artists directly.
- Bleed 2 – This is a stylish arcade-style action game. It looks great and plays well, and is just not my kind of thing. Gameplay is like a 2-D platformer, except that you use the mouse to aim and shoot while doing platforming via the keyboard and it is all too damn much. Also, the Linux release comes as a binary installer. An executable program you run which asks you where to install it, and then it does. This is not a linux thing and it made me uncomfortable.
- Voyageur – A bit of an Oregon Trail in space, but a more forgiving one. You wander the galaxy on a forward-only journey (for technobabble reasons, you can only ever travel in the general direction of the galactic center), pick up crew, refit your ship, trade resources, foment revolution. It’s a thoughtful, slow-paced game that I found myself idling away a pleasant hour on. It feels like one of those games based around hidden mechanics, where you’re supposed to spend a lot of effort figuring out exactly what sorts of planets are optimal for what sorts of activities, and buying low and selling high, and that usually gets tedious for me, but the game is very forgiving so far, and with a cargo capacity of 4 and no ability to backtrack, it pretty much has to be, and you can’t really afford to hold out for an arid planet to sell your moist foodstuffs. Also, the best profits are on art objects, and those are unpredictable. Some graphical glitches in linux. Nothing show-stopping; the game is menu-driven so you’re not going to screw up due to some flickering, but it’s visually unpleasant when it gets bad. Annoyingly, the visual glitches seem to go away if I run it in windowed mode, but you’re limited to two specific window sizes neither of which is a good fit for my actual physical screen.
- A Normal Lost Phone – It’s getting to be a trend with these indie games where about three minutes in, you realize that you’re reading a coming out story and the only real question is which flavor. This is a “You found someone’s lost phone and work out their story by reading their text messages” game. Not nearly so dark as Sam is Missing. Huh. Another lost phone game about a character named Sam. Weird. Also the barest hints of The Missing, and Secret Little Haven (If you understand these references, you know the answer to what kind of coming out story this is). Anyway, it’s fairly good. The main method for gating gameplay is via passwords, so there’s a lot of “Now go back through hundreds of messages to figure out which birthday/zip code Sam associates with this account (Though there’s one puzzle where they change it up and that’s pretty great). Fortunately, the game is fairly short, though it’s heavily frontloaded with “Read hundreds of texts before you get a sense of what you should be doing.” The bigger problem is that Sam’s narrative voice doesn’t come through all that strongly until the very end, so I didn’t feel connected to the feelings of oppression and alienation that motivates the plot. The ending is more uplifting than I expected; I spent a long time bracing myself for the reveal that Sam had died in a motorcycle crash.
- Speed Dating for Ghosts – Another game I’m sorry to miss out on because of the lack of Linux or Android ports. Sort of a cute visual novel/CYOA thing with art that’s somewhere between Edward Gorey and Maurice Sendak.
- Underhero – A fun Metroidvania with a bunch of twists. First things first, you start out as an invincible hero near the end of his journey… But then a low-level minion drops a chandelier on you. This is the second game so far that’s started off with the chosen hero of destiny getting trivially murdered in the opening scene. It blends in elements of Skyward Sword in the form of the hero’s chatty magic weapon which conscripts the minion into completing the hero’s quest, though they’ll need to re-empower the magic weapon while carrying out the evil overlord’s assignments. The battle system is more similar to Paper Mario than any Metroidvania, though, switching to a strategic ATB-like system where the player and the enemy exchange blows based on timing and a stamina meter.
- Throw Cubes into Brick Towers to Collapse Them – With a name like this, I really wish I had played it and come back to tell you that this is a misleading title and it’s actually a philosophical deconstruction of identity and capitalism. But it’s Windows-only, so I can’t.
- Pixel Art Medieval Fantasy Characters Pack – Asset pack in the retro-modern style that’s a little smoother and cleaner than a legit retro-style. Reminds me a little of Shovel Knight, maybe.
- Imperishable Memories – A Gradius-style shooter with hand-drawn graphics and a storyline I… didn’t really pay enough attention to. Not my thing. I had to install a bunch of 32-bit dependencies for this to work, and unhelpfully, the game will start but not work if they’re missing.
- The Floor is Jelly – A platformer whose gimmick is that the platforms are non-Newtonian fluids. I don’t find the art compelling, but the concept is. But, again, no linux port.
- Ech0 – A tabletop RPG based around map-drawing with the broad concept of “Kids playing in the wreckage of a giant robot”.
- Brassica: A Marry Tale – We end page 4 on another of the bundle’s favorite genres: gay romance visual novel. The setup reminds me a bit of The Royal Trap – looks like it’s setting up a dating sim in a fantasy-medieval kingdom, only queer. The first few minutes of text did not catch me, and there’s a languidness to the transitions that made it feel slower than it was.