To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will be a very clinical critique. Let the chills commence!

October 30th

• Game: Forever Lost: Episode 2
• Developer: Glitch Games
• Release Year: 2013
• Available: Itch, Steam, iOS

Welcome back, Forever Lost. We last encountered this escape room adventure game series in Indie Game of the Week (IGotW 183) and after that blog went up I got a nice tweet from the developers, and you better believe it takes the smallest amount of positive encouragement for me to go all-in on your video game franchise. Forever Lost Episode 1 took place in a subterranean insane asylum, creating an elaborate breadcrumb trail of puzzles and items that eventually saw you ascend to the surface above. Forever Lost Episode 2 is here to tell you that the bean-scrambling torture has only just begun: the surface has even more puzzles waiting for you.

There is an overarching story to Forever Lost, sorta, as this episode reveals more about your possible identity and even more implicitly towards why this is happening to you. These snippets are spread across the game's much larger map, which starts at a large estate and progresses into another unlikely subterranean location: a highschool, complete with laboratory and gym, which is hinted as the place where you were educated and presumably transported brick by brick to its present location. In addition to the general sinister atmosphere of being trapped in some insane genius's mindgame, Forever Lost Episode 2 also tries its hand at a few legit if incongruous jumpscares, which I appreciate because the playthrough was starting to feel malapropos to this whole Halloween theme I've got going on here.

As before, your chief ally in this confusing mess is a handy camera and photo album: you can take pictures of anything that looks like a hint, be it a hieroglyph or a set of color bars or a code in Roman numerals; the album then allows you to scribble notes on top of the images you've saved if you need a little more thinking time to put their usage together. It's more important in this game, since the map is so large and you're likely to find clues to puzzles you won't solve until an hour later. Forever Lost continues its bizarre flights of fancy, including an interactive DVD menu and two games-within-a-game that - somehow - allow you to carry items out. The chief collectible here are puzzle pieces: there's a door on the second floor of the house that needs sixteen of them, and many of the puzzle chains eventually culminate in one or two of these pieces. I found myself revisiting that door many times just to keep my inventory from over-cluttering.

Forever Lost Episode 2 is still a touch on the buggy side, unfortunately. There's many glitches (the developer's name may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy in retrospect) and I managed to crash the game a few times trying to mash some proverbial square pegs into round holes. Other issues include odd formatting for photos in the album - any pictures taken while the UV light was active, for instance, resulted in a larger image size that broke the album slot's frame - and I accidentally cloned a few key items which just sat around in my inventory unneeded. It's also pretty slow to move around, which becomes a bit more of a problem when you've expanded the size of the world and have no fast travel options, and the lag between when you clicked an exit and when it made the transition led to the whole thing feeling clunky. Not that lag is usually all that important in an adventure game like this, except the developers did decide to include at least one timed puzzle this time around.

Overall though, while it's less polished than the throng of identi-kit hidden object puzzle adventure games on Steam, it has a certain lo-fi early-00s charm to its presentation, it's a fan of the occasional dumb joke or overly literal clue, and I can't help but get swept up in a multi-stage dopamine kick when I solve something to find an item that lets me solve another puzzle, which then gets me an item that leads to the solution of a third puzzle that I'd been confused about for a while. Half the time you're gliding through this game - if you've already located the draughts board, it's obvious where the draught pieces you just found will go - but the other half of the puzzles require some experimentation or lateral thinking before they click, and it's rewarding when they do. It even has a comprehensive hint system if you're truly and forever lost: almost 180 of them, in fact, each of which gets ticked off as complete once you hit the right trigger so you're not left reading through a whole walkthrough to find just one tidbit that can re-establish your puzzle-smashing momentum.

Besides wishing it was more stable, had more necessary quality-of-life touches (it does at least auto-save after every screen transition), and maybe had a bit more going on in the looks department, I can't find myself disliking this slightly ramshackle adventure series or the way it regularly respects your intelligence (or, more often, your capacity for remembering odd little details). Even though I'm a bit mentally enervated right now, I'll probably check out Forever Lost Episode 3 before too much longer.

• Quality: 3 Stars.
• Spookosity: 2 S.T.A.R.S.

I realize I'm doing a whole Halloween-themed daily series of late, but nothing stops the Indie Game of the Week. Nor does anything stop Ruth, the heroine of this storybook sci-fi tale about a Norwegian milkmaid who is forced to intervene when an alien spaceship attempts to make off with her beloved bovine one cold morn. This leads to a Space Quest-esque adventure of ingenuity and courage in the face of certain death, as she attempts to rescue the elderly and frail populace of the ship from their greedy queen, who has used the ship's "age machine" technology to sap all their vigor away and keep herself alive indefinitely. Ruth, also, finds herself victim to this intergalactic Elizabeth Báthory, and must figure out how to restore her own youth on top of everything else.

Milkmaid of the Milky Way is a deliberately lo-fi affair, but it finds the beauty in that aesthetic with its impressive, sweeping MS Paint vistas (seriously, they look pretty good in-context) and a soundtrack which is very soothing and melodic. The game does have its moments of tension, and more than a few tricky puzzles (including a handful of timed ones), but there's no concerns about death states and it has a very measured tempo throughout as you take in these wonders through the eyes of a sheltered farmgirl. A big part of the game's storybook cadence involves the decision to deliver every piece of dialogue, inner monologue, and narrator exposition as a rhyming couplet. Between the pixel graphics and its musical and rhythmical flourishes, it has the vibe of an early Sierra point-and-click mixed with that Sword and Sworcery EP action-adventure game from a few years back.

That said, while the game is charming and nails the particular aesthetic it's going for, I had a few issues with it. The first has us circle back around to those rhyming couplets; I find bad rhymes excruciating in ways I can't entirely express, and more than once they've ruined a song by sticking out like a sore thumb. Like the game's "dairy queen" heroine, the developers of the game are natively Norwegian and so there's a few tricks to the English language that caught them out. Said tricks include words that look like they should rhyme but don't: I've included one in the screenshot below, and another example tries to rhyme "year" with "pear". Other rhyming couplets have wildly different numbers of syllables, which throws off the rhythm they're trying to create. The game doesn't have voiced dialogue, which might be a blessing given how awkward a lot of these lines would've sounded but it might also have served the developers in showing them where they messed up. Some part of me respects the hell out of an author for choosing to write an entire adventure game script in rhyming pairs in their second language, but it's still overall a net negative to the game's quality.

The presence of some minor glitches were probably inherent to Unity and the adventure game engine the developers were using; one such instance had me stuck in a walking loop unable to continue. However, since the game appears to autosave after passing through every area transition, it wasn't much of an issue to roll it back. My other complaints are those relating to the evolution of modern adventure games: usability tools like a "reveal hotspots" button or a faster way to move around the world (either via a map of scenes, or an instant area transition function after, say, double-clicking an exit) should be standard to this genre by now. In fairness, the game's not really pixel-hunty enough for the former or large enough to need the latter; my only gripe here is that the two in-game maps are laid out in a mostly linear fashion, requiring you to pass through many screens to get from one end to the other.

It's a little unpolished as a result, but it gave its director a confident voice that they appear to have carried on into Embracelet: a much more ambitious polygonal adventure game with a magical realism theme that released just last month and seems to be garnering a small but vociferous amount of praise. Milkmaid, meanwhile, is a short and sweet tone piece with just enough of that old "moon logic" adventure game puzzle spice to evoke its genre antecedents, and ultimately worth the one or two hours it asks of your time. (Except if you really hate rhyming, I guess; it's not that invasive, I feel I must stress.)

Rating: 3 out of 5.

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will be a very clinical critique. Let the chills commence!

October 29th

• Game: Spooky Ghosts Dot Com
• Developer: Grizzly Wizard Games, Lone Wolf Technology
• Release Year: 2018
• Available: Itch, Steam, Switch

I realize a lot of the games I've covered so far in the Spooktathlon haven't been all that, well, spooky. But today's entry is different; it has Spooky right in the name! Spooky Ghosts Dot Com can be graciously described as a "mini-explormer": the usual map system, upgrades that get you to new places, dead-ends with collectibles, and boss fights that demand you summon every scrap of skill and pattern recognition to defeat. Just, way smaller.

Spooky Ghosts Dot Com is the protagonist's website: a budget ghost hunter service that you can call when the usual guys are too busy or too NYC-based. Getting a job in the middle of the night, our pink-haired heroine (who sort of has a Ghost Sweeper Mikami vibe in that cover art above) enters a clearly haunted domicile, realizes that the client is a ghost himself who confused the site for a ghostly escort service, and decides to exorcise the entire manor grounds of its spectral infestation. If, along the way, she can pet some kitties and eat a whole bunch of Halloween candy, all the better. Because of the game's shorter than usual length, there isn't as much of the circuitous map design or progress-enabling power-ups: there's around 50-60 rooms total, which isn't as many as it sounds, and there's really only two power-ups in the form of a mid-air dash (needed for a few gaps) and a charge beam (which can also blow down barricades). The rest of the items either help you survive battles longer (the aforementioned Halloween candy pick-up also gives you extra HP) or are keys intended to access subsequent areas.

I will say to Spooky Ghosts Dot Com's laser focus, it can be a challenging game. Provided you're playing on the Normal difficulty - which the game defines as the "true Spooky Ghosts Dot Com experience" - you can't heal except at save points, and with a paltry 10 hit point starting total (19 once fully upgraded, though I couldn't help but feel I missed an upgrade until I saw the "100% Complete!" on the post-game results screen) they drain very quickly. Almost nothing in the game hits you for just one HP: it's usually at least two or three, and spikes even more so. The few boss fights are genuinely challenging as a result, as you struggle to avoid getting hit the two or three times it would take to finish you off, applying the pressure to these larger foes whenever there's a gap in their pattern and you have room to breathe. Your laser gun is relatively fast but even while charged does only chip damage, so these internecine battles can demand a reasonable amount of patience and evasive skill. Some boss fights are genuinely inventive also, like fighting a boss from inside its stomach where every part of the screen - including the floor, ceiling, and walls - count as the boss's hitbox.

Visually and audio-wise the game is fairly barebones, skeleton jokes aside, and clocks in at just over an hour on a blind run with a few deaths. I would say that the core is solid enough though, and works as a microcosm of an Indie explormer with a lot more resources and ambition without sacrificing too much about what makes these games tick. It's as paper-thin as Halloween decorations, but even with my brief time with it I felt challenged at every turn and enjoyed taking my time looking around for its handful of scattered items, conversing with an inexplicably buff shopkeeper spook or the genial teleporter cat (who never did reward me for finding all their smaller, muter brethren; I was surprised that particular side-quest never amounted to anything). It joins the likes of Xeodrifter, Mini Ghost, and Gato Roboto as these bite-sized variants of the sprawling Castlevanias and Metroids that define the genre: ideal if you're looking for a quick explormer fix over a lunch break and not hours of squinting at a map figuring out where the gaps are and where you should go next.

• Quality: 3 Stars.
• Spookosity: 2 S.T.A.R.S.

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will be a very clinical critique. Let the chills commence!

October 28th

• Game: Corinne Cross's Dead and Breakfast
• Developer: Bad Chalk
• Release Year: 2016
• Available: Itch, Steam

Well, this game was adorable, and ended up being fairly close to another game I covered recently for my Indie Game of the Week feature named The Lost Art of Innkeeping (IGotW 181). Both concern running a hostel, both were made in RPG Maker though eschews any combat turn-based or otherwise, and both tend to juggle daily responsibilities and financial bookkeeping with timed events and a game-wide deadline (Dead and Breakfast is but a week in length). I think most notably though, is that both games focus on compassion and empathy over the more conventional video game skills: to be a good host, you must attend to the physical and mental (and, in a literal sense here, spiritual) needs of the clients in your care.

Corinne Cross is a college student who is given a task by her mother to housesit for a mutual friend for a week. Julia Styron, the friend in question, recently lost her son Gale who was Corinne's age and has since been hospitalized for her grief. After the first few nights in the house, and meeting the odd old woman who used to run the cemetery and funeral parlor next door, Corinne realizes the ghosts of the recently deceased are occupying the house; what used to be a bed and breakfast for the living is now occupied by ghostly guests who demand a similar level of service. The game then alternates between the daytime, where Corinne can go shopping for supplies and visit Julia in the hospital, and the night-time, when she converses with the specters, attends to their needs, and eventually helps them move on to the afterlife.

The gameplay is relatively straightforward, though it does require a good memory (or a notepad open nearby) to keep track of the items you need to buy during the day and to remember to plant and water the flowers in the garden (Corinne's main source of income), and really exists as a framing device to tell a few simultaneous side-stories about the wayward spirits staying within and the lives they once led. Each spook has an ending to pursue, reached both by spending time with them and assisting with their unfinished business, and the game maintains an easy gameplay loop between what amounts to simple chores and conversing with its characters. It's very basic - which I mean less as a derogatory statement but more in a casual, approachable sense - and takes about an hour or two total even if you do everything, though there's also a New Game+ variant with slightly tighter requirements and additional scenes. It's also saccharine (in a non-cloying way), cute as a button (as you can tell with the graphics in the screenshot above), and absolutely not terror-inducing in any way, shape, or form. Only one ghost wanted to eat my soul, and that was the angsty punk-rock teenager who was soon sorted out with some sisterly bonding.

If your idea of good Halloween entertainment is a charming, bittersweet story about being an empathetic friend to spirits to help them move on, then Corinne Cross's Dead and Breakfast is the breezy Indie hotelier sim for you. Fans of the harder stuff might want to try the Bates Motel Simulator instead, which isn't a real game yet but hopefully might be one day.

• Quality: 4 Stars.
• Spookosity Rating: -2 S.T.A.R.S..

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will be a very clinical critique. Let the chills commence!

October 27th

• Game: This Strange Realm of Mine
• Developer: Doomster Entertainment
• Release Year: 2017
• Available: Itch, Steam, Switch

Now this is a fascinating concept for a game: an elegiac FPS set in the metaphysical realm of the mind of a recently deceased human being, fighting their inner demons in a mixture of forms their fading consciousness can comprehend. This Strange Realm of Mine, which calls itself a "poetic, psychological horror game," is a low-poly FPS with a variety of different worlds to explore, each representing some part of the player character's psyche. It puts its metaphysical foot down early, setting you with the task of customizing your avatar before tossing it all out stating that death strips us of much of our identity -including gender, race, and status - and leaves only our moral center. The allusions to the mind start even earlier: on the title screen, quitting the game is referred to as "disassociating."

The first stretch of the game has you fighting little warped zombie creatures first with a torch and then with a handgun. The visuals and gameplay at this stage are rudimentary: the only furniture are bookcases and crates, and there's a vaguely medieval dungeon feel to the barred windows and stone walls. After that, you reach a non-hostile respite area with a friendly if enigmatic elf named Ulrich, and then you're suddenly whisked away to graffiti-ridden inner city streets filled with "rathugs": bipedal anthro rodents in gangbanger hoodies packing heat. The difficulty takes a marked uptick here, as the rats can absorb a lot more damage and have ranged attacks of their own. It's evident from this point that the game's not going to follow any kind of traditional structure for its progression, and there's no telling where it might send you next.

Sadly, this is one of those cases where Indie game designers working with the mercurial PC platform don't quite understand what "optimization" means. They make a hearty effort, offering modes as versatile as "good," "simple," "fast," and "potato" - each graphically inferior than the last, while easier on the framerate - but the graphical flourishes it diminishes on those later settings aren't at all the ones causing the slowdown. The third "world" of the game is a sewer filled with much tougher versions of the zombie monsters seen during the tutorial, who are now capable of quickly destroying you once they're in melee range, and yet the game lags like hell and moves in single-digit frames down there because of subtle mist effects, reflected light sources on the slick ground surfaces, what I imagine isn't ambient occlusion but is probably close enough, and other SFX that would not be at all possible in the '90s era of FPS games that the 2D sprite monsters and basic polyhedrons of This Strange Realm of Mine evokes. That the graphical settings don't account for any of them, even the lowest setting, is a bizarre misstep that makes this game impossible to play for the more... let's say, "economically priced" systems like my own. I can only speak to my own experiences, and I knew going in that my laptop regularly has problems pushing around polygonal graphics with its feeble integrated hardware, but I feel if you're making a retro-ass game it should probably function on a retro-ass PC. I'm not asking for Doom on a calculator or a smart fridge display, but a functional framerate would suffice.

So This Strange Realm of Mine is going to be one of those rare horror games I can't finish not because it's too scary to continue but because it craps the bed so magnificently with its technical problems that I can't see any avenue forward. A shame, because it clearly has some fun ideas and an drily witty sense of humour about itself, and I would've liked to see the more divergent choices it makes with regards to the genre, its metaphysical musing on the player's role in this indeed strange realm, and whether or not the gameplay ever progresses beyond basic gunplay and switch puzzles. I'm not necessarily expecting an Evoland-style deconstruction of several decades of FPS evolution, where after one sudden moment all the enemies are polygonal and the health pick-ups are replaced with regenerating shields, but I'd have liked to have seen what else the game had in store. Maybe I'll pick this up again when I have something that can run it.

• Quality: 3 Stars.*
• Spookosity: 2 S.T.A.R.S.

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will be a very clinical critique. Let the chills commence!

October 26th

• Game: Sagebrush
• Developer: Redact Games
• Release Year: 2018
• Available: Itch, Steam, PS4, Xbox One, Switch

I think many of us, when approaching a documentary about cults or a piece of fiction inspired by same, afford ourselves an unwarranted mental armor of sorts. A firm belief that we could never find ourselves in a similar situation, beholden to some obviously corrupt and deeply immoral leader figure and willing to sacrifice our own lives for something as nebulous as eternal bliss or spiritual fulfilment. The mass suicide tragedies of Jonestown and Heaven's Gate still weigh heavily on the minds of those who had family members or friends involved, not to mention the state and federal law enforcement who dealt with the aftermath. It's those cults - isolated in self-sufficient agricultural communities, based upon some obscure teachings of Christianity that somehow only their respective leaders were privy to, given rules to abide and punishments doled out to those deemed disruptive - that we have Sagebrush, a first-person narrative exploration game with a low-poly sheen that explores the life and death of a cult.

Like other exemplars of the first-person narrative exploration game, occasionally called "walking simulators," the game takes a deliberately circuitous route through its setting of Black Sage Ranch: the former location of the Perfect Heaven cult, deep within New Mexico. By finding keys and passcodes to the various buildings in a specific, design-led order, the player is drip-fed a story through epistolary means, learning more about the inner workings of the cult from the perspective of a younger worshipper named Lilian. The depths of the depravity of Perfect Heaven and its messianic leader Father James makes itself apparent slowly, as the game first establishes what day-to-day life was like in the cult and the reasons its followers had for joining. An expertly-paced slow-burn view into the life of these devouts, and those like them in Perfect Heaven's real-life equivalents.

The game uses a grainy, low-poly, low-res aesthetic partly, I imagine, because of budgetary and technical limitations, but it's thematically justified by having this cult live and die in the early '90s. The player character is visiting the long-abandoned grounds some undisclosed number of years later, opening a way in through the perimeter fence around late afternoon and eventually spending an entire night exploring the environs. In addition to the low lighting, the game makes excellent - if slightly inexplicable - use of sound design by the way it is continually shutting doors behind you, making you jump at the noise. Distant coyotes and other eerie ambiance creates a sense of danger and foreboding, and even before you reach eye-opening locales like the Cleansing Hall or Father James's Rectory the game has laid the groundwork with notes and audio logs about what horrors you might discover there. Even if there's no traditional scares or monsters (Sagebrush does indeed pull a Gone Home), the atmosphere is palpable and deeply unpleasant.

Sagebrush ultimately isn't a horror game in the conventional sense, but more a fictionalized documentary that explores an unsettling real-life perversion of organized religion (or, perhaps, organized religion simply taken to an exaggerated degree) through a more humane look at the lives of its zealots and how they came to think the way they do, starting with the general alienation they felt towards their Catholic or Protestant upbringing and how recruiters - in Perfect Heaven's case, that was Father James's wife Anne, who apparently had no issue with James's frequent dalliances with other female cultists - are able to identify and prey on these wayward souls. It doesn't spend quite so long on the indoctrination process, though it's evident enough through journals and pamphlets how it happened, and then conveys the increasing paranoia and corruption that brought the whole cult to its final, tragic conclusion. It's sad, it's heavy, it's definitely creepy, and its message is perhaps a little more serious and downbeat than this silly little Halloween-themed blog series can handle. Still, if you ever wanted to explore the abandoned grounds of a cult without the feds breathing down your neck, Sagebrush is as close as you could ever want to comfortably get. Closer, even.

• Quality: 4 Stars.
• Spookosity: 2 S.T.A.R.S.
• (Creeposity: 5 S.T.A.R.S.)

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will be a very clinical critique. Let the chills commence!

October 25th

• Game: Halloween Forever
• Developer: Imaginary Monsters
• Release Year: 2016
• Available: Itch, Steam, PS4, PSVita

Is there anything more Halloween than a pumpkin man who barfs candy corn? Halloween Forever doesn't think so, and I'm inclined to take its lead as its 8-bit no-frills platforming is entirely too charming. Built closer to the NES blueprint than most throwbacks, for better and worse, Halloween Forever has you progressing through five stages - each containing a mid-boss and an end-boss - with a gaggle of spooky characters. The first of these, Pumpkin Man, is the only one unlocked initially (along with his Christmas holiday special doppelganger, Santa Pumpkin) though others can be found in secret areas as you progress for a maximum of one unlock per playthrough.

In gameplay terms, Halloween Forever is a simple enough platformer where your characters are granted a ranged attack and a double jump. The level design is functionally (and thematically) similar to Castlevania in that there are multiple branching paths that ultimately lead to the same place, and taking the less obvious routes is where you find the game's few secrets, unlockable characters, and helpful 1-Ups. You start with five hearts, though certain hazards like spikes and pits are instant kills. Most enemies have basic attack and movement patterns that shouldn't trouble you unless you mess up or find yourself surrounded, though flying foes and the bosses can be a little more of a handful. The game only checkpoints at bosses, but the levels aren't so long that you're looking at too much work to get back to where you were and it offers another opportunity to look for the secret routes. Silver linings and whatnot.

Having multiple characters to futz around with works as a tonic to the game's most prominent 8-bit trait: a game over state that drops you right back at the start. Each new character that the player finds makes their next playthrough easier, as Pumpkin Man's candy corn emesis has terrible range compared to the others: Butternut Man (Pumpkin Man's "gourd from another lord") tosses explosive squashes that hit multiple times, the Skeleton throws two bones with different arcs, Ms. Witch has her army of cat familiars, and so on. Given the whole game's about 30 minutes long give or take, and there's health refills and the aforementioned 1-Ups to find, the game over state isn't quite the dealbreaker you might expect and the game has accessibility options (by way of a 99-lives cheat that disables achievements) if you just want to enjoy the game's eerie if cute visuals and dig up the handful of secrets strewn about without the risk of losing all your progress.

I wish I had more to say about Halloween Forever, but it's a deliberately simple and short platformer that uses its many unlockable characters as its only means of extending its longevity. Since the Itch version doesn't have achievements, I'm not quite as inclined to complete it seven times to see the full breadth of its content, though it's evident that the level design takes on a whole different angle with its last character: a winged imp named Demon Joe that can safely skip most of the platforming challenges by flying over them. If you're really bad with jump scares but still want to get into the horror spirit with some video games, this is definitely an acceptable, inoffensive PG-rated option.

• Quality: 4 Stars.
• Spookosity: 1 S.T.A.R.S.

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will be a very clinical critique. Let the chills commence!

October 24th

• Game: Immure
• Developer: Wither Studios
• Release Year: 2019
• Available: Itch.io, Steam

I'm glad I started with Immure, because in a lot of ways it's the archetypal Indie survival horror game: it uses a 2D perspective with sprites, but has aspirations closer to Konami's Silent Hill franchise or perhaps Monolith's Condemned in that the player is expected to do more than simply elude unkillable ghoulies and instead spend their time exploring the current area top to bottom, gathering clues and key items, piecing together the context of what happened and how you might permanently escape or defeat your pursuer, and figuring out how best to proceed in the moment without running afoul of an early grisly demise. Immure definitely has that level of ambition in mind, though it might take a while longer for the developers to execute upon it.

Immure tells the story of Will: a frazzled man who, in his desperation, reaches a haunted manor to figure out what happened to his lost love Danielle. It's not clear from early hints if Danielle died prematurely or simply vanished without a trace, but a man looking in the most dangerous of places for his spouse is, I'd argue, the prevailing trend of this genre and an adequate place to start. Immure first gives you a little tutorial of how the game works: explaining how the "Shining Trapezohedron" operates (a possibly cursed object that reveals hints), that monsters exist and must be evaded either by running or hiding or stunning them somehow or a combination thereof, and that many of the game's puzzles are the inventory-based kind where you only have a limited amount of room and must prioritize what seems important (one of the more annoying limitations found in Resident Evil).

After that tutorial, it becomes evident that the game is built to be modular: the mansion is full of distinctive doors that link to other dimensions, each of which is a self-contained scenario where Will has to find the tormented soul trapped within and either help release it or destroy it. The former seems to be the harder path, requiring a bit more sussing out, but may prove to be the more preferable solution in the long-run. The latter still requires some guesswork however, as a trapped soul can only be destroyed in the same manner it originally died. In what turns out to be "Immure Part 1," you get to see just one of these scenarios play out, set in a burned down apartment building haunted by the phantom of a monstrous firefighter swinging around a deadly fire axe. After each of these scenarios, you get a brief snippet of Will's backstory before you're once again given the keys to a new door and a new spook to overcome.

I generally find that the type of horror adventure game with lots of puzzles and reading that also includes monster attacks and combat mechanics tends to get dogged down with the uninteresting (and repetitive) second aspect while you're more invested in the first, and nothing takes you out of the moment like dropping the investigation of a scene partway through to run halfway across the zone to escape your would-be spectral killer. On the other hand, a horror survival game without danger has a much harder job to do putting the player in a state of unease and terror, so I can appreciate the inherent design dilemma. Immure does as fine a job as it can with its stalking terrors, though they can be absurdly fast sometimes. I ran into a lot of problems trying to get the hiding interactions to work, so my usual strategy was to instead run to one of the "safe rooms" (there's an enigmatic being in here that provides a small amount of levity as well as hints and the ability to make hard saves, though is still unsettling enough to not extinguish the eerie mood entirely) and wait them out.

As I stated earlier, Immure is built to be modular and this "Part 1" was relatively short, having only the tutorial and that first scenario in the apartment building. With the gameplay structure and much of the art assets already in place, the studio will have an easier time putting out subsequent chapters as DLC to fill out the story: a financially beneficial format that a lot of Indie devs have taken a shine to, especially with more narrative-focused games. I'm sure the evasion mechanics and minor issues like typos and visual glitches will continue to improve and be fixed as the studio works on these new episodes, all of which have some hints to their future content by the type of doors you can see while exploring the central manor (one looks to be the door to a child's bedroom, so I'm sure that'll be a laugh riot). This might be a series to watch, but for now there's only a skeleton of what may one day be. (Then again, what's scarier than a skeleton?)

• Quality: 4 Stars.
• Spookosity: 3 S.T.A.R.S.

After the troubled development and lukewarm reception of Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power, I was slightly anxious that we wouldn't get any more games in this acrobatic puzzle-platformer series. That would be a shame, since while Trine tends to stick to its wheelhouse of box physics and character-switching mechanics this franchise always brings it when it comes to satisfying puzzles and a wonderful and ethereal art direction, and it's something I never mind dipping back into whenever I'm looking through my library for something to play.

Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince is a deliberate return to form for the franchise, dropping the 3D platformer aspirations of its star-crossed predecessor to deliver a game that's... well, a whole lot like Trine 2 and Trine: Enchanted Edition. The level design is strictly 2D, characters gradually learn new powers gradually over the course of the game which are then seamlessly integrated into the player's repertoire of puzzle-solving tools, and the three heroes continue to bounce lines off one another: Amadeus the meek and scholarly wizard, Pontius the honest and unflappable knight, and Zoya the sarcastic and self-serving thief. To add to the puzzle-solving aspect, it feels like Trine 4 introduces so many new game-changing powers that it almost threatens to derail the difficulty curve, but the game's philosophy is a gentle one: these additional powers often serve as alternative solutions, rather than any one instance forcing the player towards a very specific course of action. You could rely on Amadeus's summoned boxes as platforms, Zoya's elemental arrows or new fairy rope (which causes hooked items to start floating upwards), and while Pontius again is given the fewest options for puzzle-solving he is granted a horizontal air-dash "charge" early on that proves very effective at crossing gaps.

Trine's focus on giving the player a good time than scrambling their brains with tough puzzles or frustrating them with overly exact solutions with its frequently-capricious physics extends beyond the level/puzzle design itself. The game's collectibles are numerous and well-hidden, but the game's generous checkpointing system - and a post-level report that tells you what you're missing and where - makes it very simple to jump back in and sweep up those elusive items. If a character dies, they don't stay dead until the player reaches the next checkpoint: instead, they're back in a manner of seconds. The exception to this are the game's little combat encounters, but these are relatively easy and characters can be revived quickly by hanging around where they fell for a few moments. I've never particularly liked Trine's combat - it's far from the highlight - but I tolerated here due to the mix of combat-effective powers and some smart boss design: they're all based on a particular nightmare of one of the trio and they each take their boss on solo, relying on their own specific powers to bring it down.

The story is, as always, kind of whatever, and exists as a protracted excuse for the trio to run across a bunch of picturesque levels kvetching about their newest plight. In this case, they're pursuing the titular royal, who accidentally cursed himself with nightmare-conjuring powers that go on to ravage the countryside. This nightmare power draws its strength from the fears of the locals: this accounts for the trio's bosses, but they'll frequently bump into some new NPC who needs help, who in turn has inadvertently added a new creature to the menagerie of nightmare creatures that the heroes keep fighting. One instance has a pair of bickering neighbors - a badger and a hedgehog - whose respective fears are each other, adding nightmare badgers (very fast) and nightmare hedgehogs (spin around a lot) to subsequent brawls. It's a neat idea and lends itself to some imaginative level design as the trio inevitably find themselves within the realm of nightmares, or at least frequently on the cusp of same, but nothing to really write home about plot-wise.

I'm ultimately a little torn about Trine 4. It's evident that the designers wanted to win back the audience they lost with Trine 3, and so played it safe this time around. However, they may have gone too safe, as the game is almost a carbon copy of the first two in the series with only a handful new powers to set itself apart (as well as the requisite graphical upgrade). The controls are as tight and responsive as they've ever been, or at least as much as they can be with all the chaotic physics involved, and the new batch of quality of life touches are definitely appreciated; don't get me wrong, this is the best Trine has felt in years. Of course, I still have a few technical complaints: having so many abilities can lead to some intuitiveness issues with the many ways it has to map to a finite number of keys (or buttons, since I played the PS4 version), the shortcut indicators for where collectibles are can be misleading (sometimes you need to head forward, up, and then back left to find a collectible, which the game registers as appearing in the previous area), and there's a weird glitch that pops up that I only assume is the game and not my controller where it seems to refuse to move left. Those are minor nitpicks, none of which I can guarantee exist outside the PS4 port, but it made the game feel a little less polished.

My biggest issue is more of a subjective meta one; that it just seems unfortunate for the developers that they felt the need to course-correct so much after sticking their necks out with a big flashy jump to 3D that didn't pan out the way anyone wanted, instead allowing Trine's growth to stagnate by resuming their old habits. Hopefully, by resetting history and re-establishing the franchise's virtues with this strong but safe entry, they might once again have the confidence to try something risky and different with Trine 5. (NB: I played this game entirely solo, so take that perspective into consideration when reading this review. I don't doubt that this game would feel very different with three players, especially as you'd need to solve puzzles in such a manner that all three could proceed.)

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Welcome once again to the Mega Archive, where we take a chronological look at the tinny MIDI wonder that is Sega's Mega Drive/Genesis one game at a time. Or ten games at a time, as is now the current system. What's been a great time-saver for me this week is that seven of the ten games featured on this list also came out on the SNES: a degree of overlap we'll be seeing more frequently now that Nintendo's 16-bit platform is available globally (it released in Europe and Australia in the summer of 1992). Since I've already completed the entire SNES library on the Giant Bomb wiki, that means most of the work for these pages has already been done save for all the Mega Drive-specific releases and screenshots.

This entry, which covers September 1992, is another one dominated by western developers. In fact, except for a single Koei game, it's all studios from either the US, Canada, or the UK. That said, we have some notable debuts to celebrate here from major EA and Acclaim subsidiaries that would go on to define the 16-bit era to many. This batch naturally involves even more annual sports titles, though there's a fair mix of platforming, puzzles, strategy, board, and educational games to keep things moderately engaging. Not a whole lot of surprises or obscurities this week but, hey, maybe covering games people have actually heard of could do wonders for the Mega Archive's SEO.

All right, that's enough table-setting for this entry. Now it's time to set up this table of previous installments:

Part XXI: 311-320 (September '92 - October '92)

311: Galahad / The Legend of Galahad

• Developer: Traveller's Tales / Psygnosis
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: September 1992 (as Galahad)
• EU Release: November 1992 (as The Legend of Galahad)
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Anime Knights
• Premise: The mythical Leander died trying to reach his lady love, but this Leander will probably be fine in his quest to save Princess Lucanna. Changing his name to Galahad helps his chances.
• Availability: Unless Traveller's Tales hid the entire game in some Lego title as an Easter egg and didn't tell anyone, we're looking at the original cart only.
• Preservation: Welcome to Sega, Traveller's Tales. The UK-based company is better known these days for their endless Lego platformers, but in the late '90s they would enjoy a close relationship with Sega and Sonic Team working on games like Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic R. Of course, those games weren't great, but what 3D Sonic games are? Galahad is actually Leander, a platformer that originated on the Amiga and Atari ST (no surprises there) and the first game TT ever worked on. The game's original publishers and all-round tech wizards Psygnosis may have helped port the game over with Electronic Arts's support, the latter now eclipsing every other game company besides Sega for the most contributions to the Genesis library. I wish I had more to say about the game itself, but it's the most Amiga platformer ever: ridiculous degree of unnecessary graphical detail, gradient fills everywhere, extremely surface-level interaction of "jump" and "slash" where each level involves finding an object and using it on the portal to move on (and the interstitial tutorial lady tells you where the items are, in case there was any confusion). It's not that bad though; kinda like a slower Strider with more bullshit Ninja Gaiden birds.

312: Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude!

• Developer: Interactive Designs
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: September 1992
• EU Release: September 1992
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Bodacious Surfage, Brah
• Premise: Cursed by Aztec gold after wiping out on a mondo wave, Greendog is informed by his deeply knowledgeable girlfriend that he must find even more Aztec gold to lift the curse. I guess the best way to get back at the thieving Conquistadors was to force them to steal even more of your shit.
• Availability: I'm sure copies of this wash up on beaches all the time, but it's not been rereleased in any official capacity.
• Preservation: I didn't think too much of this going in - surfer dudes were everywhere in the early 1990s, whether you wanted them around or not (I blame Spicoli), and second-rate mascot platformers were even more ubiquitous - but I guess there's a little bit of history to unwrap here. Inventor Ric Green created a board game all about his beloved pastime of surfing, Surf Trip, bringing in concept artist and fellow Californian Cam de Leon (who worked on Hollywood movies as a digital illustrator and designed a bunch of Tool album covers) to create a faceless mascot character based on Ric himself. That then lead to this mascot platformer by Interactive Designs, their first Sega game, and they would later that same year be purchased by Sega and turned into short-lived subsidiary Sega Interactive. The game itself is entirely whatever; its first level a combination of fish, vines, and frogs that seems to endlessly repeat. Like Windjammers, it seems to labor under the same delusion that a Frisbee can be thrown hard enough to seriously hurt someone.

313: The Humans

• Developer: Imagitec Design
• Publisher: GameTek
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: September 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: The Humans
• Genre: Puzzle Platformer
• Theme: Prehistoric
• Premise: The Humans isn't afraid to say that, while lemmings are dumb, when it comes to suicidally inept species we're pretty much at the top when it comes to topping ourselves.
• Availability: There was a 2009 reboot for the DS called The Humans: Meet the Ancestors!, and Piko Interactive saw fit to release what I think might be an emulated version of the SNES port to Steam in 2018.
• Preservation: Back for the third Mega Archive entry in a row, Imagitec Design and GameTek's next Genesis release is this puzzle game inspired by DMA Design's Lemmings. The titular homo sapiens, still in an early stage of development, must band together to complete stage objectives with a limited number of tools at their disposal. My enduring memories of this franchise was in how often in leaned on the "human ladder" ability where the Humans stand on other Humans to reach higher locations. It's also another game like Cyber-Cop/Corporation (MA XX) where you run into conversion problems porting a game built for a mouse to a system that doesn't have one, but just about compensates with an automatic lock-on; since it's real-time though, having a mouse really helps the split-second timing the later levels demand. The Genesis version also only allows sound effects or music, not both, which seems like a dumb thing to mess up but possibly speaks to how little time Imagitec had to work on the port: don't forget, we've already had two games from them in as many months. Quick reminder: Imagitec is from the UK, which is why GameTek was kind enough to not release this port in any European territory despite the large extant fanbase for its original Amiga incarnation. Wise decisions like that are why GameTek are still trucking along today (they went defunct in 1998).

314: Monopoly

• Developer: Sculptured Software
• Publisher: Parker Brothers
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: September 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Monopoly
• Genre: Board Game
• Theme: It's Monopoly
• Premise: It's Monopoly
• Availability: It's Monopoly. Throw a stone in any Toys'R'Us (don't actually do this) and you'll probably hit a Monopoly Funko Pop Edition or some such nonsense.
• Preservation: It's Monopoly. This particular version by Sculptured Software (which was briefly Acclaim Salt Lake City before Acclaim went defunct and buried all its new subsidiaries with them like an Egyptian Pharaoh) also released on NES, SNES, Game Boy, and Game Boy Color, though I couldn't say if there are any significant differences between them all, purely because I don't care to play several more versions of Monopoly. The strength of a Monopoly adaptation, beyond everything working like it's supposed to (sorry Ubisoft), is in its pre-game options and how much freedom it affords you with house rules and the like. Sadly, this one does not provide any alternative rulesets, though you can have up to eight players and can change a player's initial cash and properties for a handicap/advantage (or if you're resuming a game, perhaps). The smartest feature, which became default in successors, is giving any human player the option to turn their in-game avatar into a CPU opponent once they inevitably get bored and ask to sit out the rest so they can go outside or watch paint dry or really anything besides playing more Monopoly.

315: NHLPA Hockey '93

• Developer: Park Place Productions
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: September 1992
• EU Release: November 1992
• Franchise: NHL Hockey
• Genre: Hockey
• Theme: Bakalar Bait
• Premise: EA Sports powers up the annual sports franchise machine every harvest season,
• Availability: NHL 21 came out mere days ago. Just saying.
• Preservation: The second EA Sports NHL game misplaced the NHL license somewhere, so they had to contend with just the Player Association license for this sole aberration in the NHL franchise. That meant all the correct player names for the '92/'93 season but none of the team names, as if they would be difficult to figure out when you already have the city and the roster. I don't know if it's because of Mallrats or what, but the sports games I most closely identify with the Mega Drive are probably these EA NHL games. Either those or Mutant League, anyway. I always found them more agreeable than the other sports franchises, probably because real-life hockey moves so quick that it's a perfect format for video game adaptations.

316: Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

• Developer: EA Canada
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: September 1992
• EU Release: 1992
• Franchise: Carmen Sandiego
• Genre: Educational
• Theme: International Crime
• Premise: Carmen Sandiego has probably stolen the Golden Gate Bridge somehow, and it's up to ACME Detective Agency to find out where she stashed it. Seems like an easy thing to hide.
• Availability: It came out on everything in the late '80s and early '90s, but there's also a recent browser-only Google Earth edition based on the Netflix animated reboot if you felt like despairing at the current state of the world.
• Preservation: We've seen EA plenty of times so far, but this is technically the first sighting of their Canadian subsidiary from all the way up in sunny Burnaby, British Columbia. What would become a major pillar of the present EA juggernaut, EA Canada was (and still is, as EA Vancouver) responsible for many entries in the EA Sports franchises along with creating FIFA, SSX, Need for Speed, and Skate. They were originally Distinctive Software (we saw them for the first and last time with Test Drive II: The Duel (MA XVII)) and became the first of many studios EA would gradually absorb over the years, also taking on board its founder Don Mattrick (last we'll see of that guy, I'm sure). This is actually their first release on any system as the newly minted EA Canada, but far from their last. As for the game, it's the old educational Brøderbund classic about hot thieves and the location thereof, graphically adapted for 16-bit consoles (it also came out on SNES). A little strange that it came out after the port of its sequel, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? (MA XVII), though perhaps World took a little more work to "modernize."

317: R.B.I. Baseball 4

• Developer: Tengen
• Publisher: Tengen
• JP Release: 1992-12-18
• NA Release: September 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: R.B.I. Baseball
• Genre: Baseball
• Theme: Hittin' Some Dingers
• Premise: Swing for the fences in the newest R.B.I. Baseball game, now exclusive to Sega systems.
• Availability: Unless it blew up again, new R.B.I. Baseball games are still coming out every year as far as I know.
• Preservation: EA's not the only one trotting out their annual sports franchises, as Tengen is here with a baseball series they found after it fell off the back of a Namco truck. RBI Baseball 4 is almost unrecognizable compared to the melon-headed batters and pitchers of the first game for NES, yet this sequel did eventually go full circle and see a Japanese localization. I wonder if they recognized its Famista roots? It also marks the first time an R.B.I. Baseball game was exclusive to the Sega Genesis, which will also be the case for the next one, R.B.I. Baseball '93. R.B.I. Baseball '94, meanwhile, saw a Game Gear port and R.B.I. Baseball '95 was a rare 32X exclusive, and like anything else touched by the 32X the franchise (temporarily) died shortly thereafter.

318: Super High Impact

• Developer: Iguana Entertainment
• Publisher: Arena Entertainment
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: September 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: High Impact Football
• Genre: Football
• Theme: Concussions
• Premise: We've had every other major American sport between this entry and the last, so here's some football why not.
• Availability: John Madden needs money for his turducken farm. Buy his game. Whichever the newest one is.
• Preservation: Here we have the introduction of yet another doomed Acclaim subsidiary - Iguana Entertainment! (Later, Acclaim Studios Austin.) Best known to Genesis fans for NFL Quarterback Club and the NBA Jam home ports, and maybe slightly less so for Aero the Acro-Bat and Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel (boy, the 90s were a time), Iguana was one of the few developers able to compete face-to-face with Electronic Arts and their ongoing domination of the sports game sphere. They were apparently founded by former members of Punk Development/RazorSoft, presumably because they grew bored of making terrible games that relied on boobs and blood to appease an audience of adolescents. I'm the furthest thing from a football expert so I can't tell you much about Super High Impact besides that it was a sequel to an arcade game, High Impact Football, which was sort of a precursor to NFL Blitz in how it leaned into the arcade sensibility of loud noises and frantic activity (and an overly passionate commentator).

319: P.T.O.: Pacific Theater of Operations / Teitoku no Ketsudan

• Developer: Koei
• Publisher: Koei
• JP Release: 1992-09-24 (as Teitoku no Ketsudan)
• NA Release: August 1993 (as P.T.O.: Pacific Theater of Operations)
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: P.T.O.
• Genre: Strategy
• Theme: World War II
• Premise: I don't think any amount of PTO is worth a job where you're constantly getting shot at by battleships and fighter planes. Where would you even vacation to in the middle of World War II, Hawaii?
• Availability: P.T.O. IV for PlayStation 2 is the most recent game in the series. It wasn't one of Koei's strategy series they decided to keep around.
• Preservation: Capturing the excitement of WW2, this Koei strategy sim is all about maintaining port bases and long-term diplomatic solutions. Specifically with regards to the latter, you're working on keeping your allies (either Allied or Axis) happy while convincing those on the opposite side to join you, as I guess no-one was fighting for ideological reasons back then. Throw enough money at them and even the Brits will join the Axis eventually. Koei wasn't known for throwing softballs back then so you were expected to fully memorize the documentation to get anywhere with this, or any of their other strategy games. Its sequel P.T.O. II missed the Genesis, coming too late in 1995, but that made it ideal for a Saturn release insomuch as the Saturn was an ideal place to release anything (I'll get around to appreciating it eventually, I'm sure).

320: Alien³

• Developer: Probe Software
• Publisher: Arena Entertainment
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: October 1992
• EU Release: November 1992
• Franchise: Alien
• Genre: Shooter
• Theme: Disappointing the Michael Biehn Fans
• Premise: The Alien's back, and now it's cubed!
• Availability: There are newer and better Alien games. Not Colonial Marines.
• Preservation: This was one of many 16-bit games based on movies I was too young to see at the time, but got the gist from the game's content after renting it or reading about it in game magazines. Or, at least, that's what I thought: turns out movies undergo a lot of "massaging" to better fit a video game format. For years I simply assumed Alien³ was filled with xenomorphs and plasma guns, like Aliens, but there's just the one alien and there's no weaponry to be found on Alien³'s prison planet until the Weyland-Yutani commandos show up at the end. Fincher's downbeat sequel was the grim black sheep (well, until all the other sequels that followed), and a part of its darker tone was in how it played into the sense of danger, hostility, and paranoia already present in a prison setting before adding a xenomorph apex predator to the mix that nobody had the means to defeat: you don't get a whole lot of that sinister nuance here, as a bald Ripley runs around flamethrower-ing xenos in the hundreds while hunting for eggs and survivors.