You know what's nutty? I update the current year's "Games Beaten" list every month and usually average about five or six additions (mostly Indies for IGotW) along with a summary mini-review and score. This month I'll be updating the list with 28 new entries. I'll also have to go back and add wiki pages for a lot of these, obscure as they are. My intent, of course, was never to pad out my game completion scorecard like any of that matters in the long run but to play as many of these smaller charity-contributing Indies as possible during May as I'd really no other opportunity to talk about them, at least with my slate of ongoing features this year.

Dang, though, I could get used to this. Just a firehose of short, intriguing experiences from various budgetary tiers of the Indie circuit, pushing the boundaries of the genres we know well or revisiting those that have long since fallen by the wayside or else just stretching their creative muscles for a Game Jam of some sort. Even so, I think for June I'm going to start some hopelessly long JRPG (I'm side-eyeing my unopened copies of Tales of Arise and Xenoblade Chronicles 3) and just veg out with something structurally familiar for a while. This month's been a long one, after all, and I also don't want to do a lot of thinking when it's this hot.

Links to previous May Magnanimity entries can be found at the bottom, along with a list of games they cover. The first entry also goes into more detail as to why I spent a month doing all this but I'll say it was certainly not time wasted even with the games that didn't quite click with me. My thanks once again to Itch.io and the many creators who put up their babies for honorable causes.

MM23: Sector 781

• Developer: Ben James
• Year: 2020
• Status: Complete

Yo, I found another explormer in my Itch.io library. Who'd have thunk my eyes would be immediately drawn to that? Strange. Anyway, Sector 781 is much like Xeodrifter in that it's a very barebones 8-bit example of the genre that, while it does have a handful of upgrades, is so rudimentary as to resemble something you could play on a graphing calculator. The game is comprised of three 5x5 zones played consecutively, built around the usual loop of exploring what's accessible, finding an upgrade, and then exploring what was previously inaccessible. Each region culminates in a boss fight that doesn't require much strategy (stand somewhere safe and keep shooting) but I guess as micro-sized explormers go—ones boiled down to their absolute fundamentals—it's not too bad. The challenge level is fairly decent at least.

My big issue with the game, and this is probably owed to the fact that you can play it within a browser too, is that hitting the escape key at any point will kick you back to the title screen. If you resume from here, you start from the beginning of the last zone you visited with none of your health upgrades, which sucks. If you hit escape again while on the title screen the game shuts itself off and you have to start over from the very beginning since it doesn't save between sessions. Since I was trying to pause the game halfway through the last zone and panicked when I saw the title screen let's just say I wasn't particularly thrilled with what happened next. Fortunately, the whole game takes somewhere in the region of 45 minutes tops, but that's still a lot of backtracking. More so than is customary in an explormer, anyway. I try not to let these little technical issues affect how I view a game as a whole but at the same time this particular decision detracted quite a lot from the overall experience. Otherwise, Sector 781's just kinda cute and unremarkable like so many "lo-fi" explormers before it though I won't argue it doesn't have the core of the explormer experience figured out. And, hey, if it's a platformer with a map I'll probably end up playing it at some point regardless of how dinky it may or may not be. I'm just broken like that.

MM24: The Black Iris

• Developer: Arboreta Games
• Year: 2021
• Status: Complete

Signalis really opened my eyes (and irises) as to how much the Indie horror game crowd has embraced PS1 low-poly visuals over the past half-decade, and The Black Iris is the second horror game I've covered this month with that style (after last week's Fatum Betula). The Black Iris is a more conventional horror experience though still one that is purely driven by exploration and adventure game puzzles rather than any deeper stealth or combat mechanics. The atmosphere it's able to generate does most of the heavy lifting as far as the horror aspect is concerned, at least. Sent to a remote research outpost in the north of Scotland—having visited Aberdeen, I can attest that it really can feel like the edge of the world up there—the protagonist is to decommission a series of subterranean probes while recovering any video tape logs the station's scientists made about their research. Said researchers themselves are scattered across the area too; you soon learn their current coordinates after starting and can go find them, if you'd like, but given they're not part of your mission here the writing's mostly on the wall about how well they're doing. Turns out, whatever these scientist types were doing up here they ended up drilling too deep, to paraphrase the Lord of the Rings, and there's something not all together wholesome lurking beneath the surface.

If you're familiar with Roadside Picnic, The Color Out of Space, or Annihilation there's a similar oppressive vibe to the landscape here, the feeling of being in a place trapped in a bubble where the laws of reality appear to be breaking down due to a malign, otherworldly presence. The danger is unknown but all too apparent from the general atmosphere of the place and it takes some digging, and a few really messed up corpses wearing the same hazmat suit you are, before anything starts clicking into place. When it's finally time to enter the north cave and track down the titular Black Iris that your former comrades have written about in a state of near madness, there's a heavy sense of something very wrong afoot. The ending actually kinda made me laugh a little, but I'll admit it was a cool way to end a tension-building narrative like this. What playing The Black Iris did do was make me want to watch the Alex Garland movie adaptation of Annihilation, which I'd been meaning to get around to for a while. Not that the movie was a direct influence on this game, probably, but it's certainly of a similar alien mutant vein right down to the little stock video on abnormal cell duplication. No fucked up bears in The Black Iris though, at least none that I could make out.

MM25: Gunmetal Arcadia Zero

• Developer: Minor Key Games
• Year: 2016
• Status: Complete

So this is something I've been seeing more often: prologue games for bigger projects. That is, a small team works on a game that requires so many years needed to develop and so in the meantime they simultaneously work on a smaller game with similar tech and release that as a teaser of sorts for what's to come. Happened to Bloodstained with Curse of the Moon and with Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, to name two examples. Smart, from a development standpoint, to have something out there generating a modest profit to support the ongoing larger project while also giving people an idea of what that larger project might entail along with building their hype for it. Gunmetal Arcadia Zero—the prologue chapter for Gunmetal Arcadia—is going for a sort of Zelda II/Faxanadu 8-bit side-scrolling action-RPG angle with some occasionally circuitous level design (detours are mostly in aid of earning cash and consumable items, and the occasional hidden shop). You spend the money you earn fighting enemies and finding chests on consumables and new equipment, the latter either replacing your current weapon or otherwise adding to your combat or traversal abilities somehow, say with higher jumps or an immunity to lava. It has a lives system, pretty old-school, but it saves after every stage and checkpoints after the mid-stage mini-boss: losing a life knocks you back to the checkpoint, but losing all of them means restarting the stage.

I ran into the same issues here as I did with Infernax, played at the start of the year, where managing your health and fighting monsters is only around a moderate difficulty level but some squirrely platforming over bottomless pits presents a disproportionate challenge. Definitely close to Zelda II's foibles where you can masterfully take down a boss after a tough internecine battle only to instantly die and be kicked back to the start because of a single mistimed jump or an enemy bumping into you in mid-air and knocking you into a spike trap. In that regard, at least, Gunmetal Arcadia Zero's done its homework. It also has a stronger than average emphasis on story, with multiple NPCs that you keep bumping into with an overarching narrative about two groups of elves—one communing with nature, the other forming a city and trading with the outside world—being forced to contend with an almost alien incursion of strange monsters, led by a hive queen deep underground. The player's even given the choice of guild to join: the warrior-like Gunmetal Avengers or the rogueish explorers the Seekers, the choice of which determines the prices from certain allied vendors (the former's better for weapons, the latter for traversal upgrades). Its punitive platforming irked me more than a few times, but for a brief prologue chapter for a larger game it's robust enough and offers a decent challenge albeit one that seems much more predicated towards not jumping into spikes more than the easy combat.

MM26: Hatch

• Developer: Rubeki Games
• Year: 2019
• Status: Complete

This was a cool idea for a game, if a little frustrating in parts. If you were to say "Skyrim horse mountain climbing" then enough people would understand precisely what you mean. That is, the process in which you climb incredibly steep cliffs by running at them until your model is magically transported up; the only requirement is that the incline is pointing away from you rather than toward (nor is perfectly vertical). Same general idea behind the gameplay here. You start by getting hatched from an egg, a minor event that lends the game its name but has little bearing on what the game's about, and are then told by a paternal figure to make your way to the top of an impossibly tall nearby structure that reaches all the way up and out of sight. The only rule is that you can't spend too long in view of the half-sun, which causes you damage when its viewpoint isn't blocked much like that one late-game area of Bloodborne (or The Sentinel, if anyone's old enough to remember that). You then have to find a path up, hitting any of the correct inclines to make upward progress. I'll describe what kind of "correct inclines" I mean with some crude ASCII art (the dot represents the player):

. / = Good

. I or . \ = Bad

Doing this, while avoiding the sun's gaze, will eventually get you to the second half of the game where the sun is lower than you are and no longer applies damage on sight, but the climbing part becomes that much harder to compensate with some tricky 3D platforming. Your progress is routinely checkpointed however, and you'll always return to the highest checkpoint even if you should fall to the very bottom of the map: this is not a Bennett Foddy game, after all, but rather one created by a human capable of empathy (I'm just kidding, Mr. Foddy; at least you try to cheer up the players you routinely torture). It's yet another of those low-poly 3D PS1 aesthetic affairs too, which uses its oblique graphics and some great sound design (the sound of the sun burning you to death is appropriately unpleasant, since it's meant to be a deterrent) to give the game a vibe that is somehow both chill and slightly disquieting. I lost track of how long I played but it couldn't have been more than a couple of hours; something about gradually climbing something so massive has a way of causing you to lose track of time. Very interesting and serene experience and I'm glad I gave it a shot, though fair warning that it's a tad on the vertiginous side if that's a dealbreaker for anyone.

MM27: The Light at the End of the Ocean

• Developer: Jane Titor
• Year: 2020
• Status: Complete

Hey, guess who's back on his GL-themed VN bullshit for one last time this month? The Light at the End of the Ocean is a story about an amnesiac woman, referred to by the game as "Guest", and an ornery lighthouse keeper who peels her off the beach after her ship capsized and keeps her company while she recovers. The island's only other occupant is a bubbly woman calling herself "L" who works as an archivist at a nearby subterranean data storage. Though by all appearances a small and unremarkable island, the Guest has been discovering strange things happening to her as soon as she came to, including the ability to touch an item and receive a memory sense of its past by way of a sudden vision. These visions relate to a woman who looks a lot like her, as well as others about a woman who looks a lot like the lighthouse keeper, though set some unknown time in the past. The game's fairly short at around a couple hours in length so it doesn't let the mystery of the island and its inhabitants linger for too long—it's fairly obvious where it's going, especially as a portrait of L and her two sisters spinning thread is a big giveaway to anyone familiar with the classics (or God of War, in my case)—but there's a few branches that allows for some additional endings and other revelations to encourage replays. Man, it feels like I've spent this whole month looking for a visual novel that does the story branching thing to a more significant extent than "pick which one of these love interests you want to pursue".

The ending I eventually received was a sad one, probably the "bad" or "normal" one, and yet it felt so appropriate to the story and its themes of depression and self-destruction that I'm satisfied with leaving it there. Some love stories have that eleventh-hour moment where everything seems to fall apart, only for the finale to kick in and fix everything, yet I've always been drawn to that "this isn't going to work" "false" conclusion because it's somehow more true to life. I realize romance fiction is a form of escapism as much as anything else, and I'm probably revealing way too much about my own love life if failure reads more normal than not, but I think the strength of the genre is that sometimes it feels like everything should go right for the protagonist lovebirds and sometimes it feels like it probably shouldn't. Like maybe the pairing wasn't a healthy one, or one that neither party deserves if there's been lying or manipulation or infidelity involved, or that ending on a break-up or something even more extreme like a Romeo and Juliet tragedy makes it all the more effective a conclusion. I'm really talking out my butt here since it's not a genre I have any keen interest in, just that it happens to be very popular with VN writers if the handful that showed up in these bundles is any indication of a trend, but in this case I'd say the game leaves a strong enough impression with its characters and writing that I could get this invested and be content with a choice like this, for as much of a downer as it might be.

That's going to bring this feature to a close, just as May itself draws to an end and the summer lies before us. Thanks to anyone who has followed along so far and the developers who indirectly contributed, and I'll restart the process of piling up the backlog for next year's May Madness equivalent.