Hey all once again to another December's Desura yadda yadda yadda. If you're just joining us, I'm giving the little digital distribution service that could some exposure by exploring a few of the games it has on offer. The three games burped up by the randomizer today are perhaps some of the most underwhelming games yet, but let's not start this article off on a downer. At least they're interesting?

Glass Smashups, Texan Stickups and Jellyfish Shoot-'em-ups

The game: RealAxis Software's Stained

The source: Indie Royale's Debut 3 Bundle

The pre-amble: Stained is a puzzle-platformer adventure game in which the player explores a dilapidated castle, breaking the castle's enchanted stained glass windows in order to summon items, platforms and guardians into the world. Most of the puzzles revolve around breaking stained glass windows in some way, which is presumably therapeutic to anyone who had to sit through a lot of Sunday School. Sorry if there's an abundance of VGX-level jokes today; I guess that stream affected me more than I'd like to admit.

The playthrough: Stained's a game I wanted to like. I remember watching a trailer for it a while ago and thinking that its Trine-inspired look and stained glass enemies might be sort of cool. The game unfortunately does not quite live up to that meager amount of hype. The movement's stiff, the puzzles have been rather obvious so far (protip: smash the windows) and I can't say the background narrative of the castle's former ruler trying to restore his kingdom has been particularly well-written thus far. I could take or leave the tangram puzzles you need to solve to unlock the occasional power-up; I mean, I did buy Neves for the DS so I'm not against them on principle.

Worst of all by a fair margin is the combat though, where your blows will often pass through enemies (or hit them from what looks like a small distance away) and if an enemy's close enough it'll constantly hurt you and keep you stunlocked until your little grim reaper dude just kind of gives up. The only feedback is a chinking glass noise for when you hit and a red flash for when they hit you, otherwise it's your best guess why an attack isn't landing or why an enemy can hit you from a vantage point but only very occasionally while missing the rest of the time. The first boss I reached is borderline impossible (on normal, anyway) because of the lousy feedback and hit detection problems.

It's not a terrible game in all honesty. It looks great, really. Maybe not as colorfully kaleidoscopic as its clear inspiration Trine but it has a sharp look and does some nice things when the light's shining through the game's eponymous wall fixtures. If the graphics were enough to slow down my system, and I'm giving the developers the benefit of the doubt on this one that it was their fancy graphics and not some unrelated resource problem, then they've gotta be good. I dunno, it doesn't feel like enough time and care was spent on the game itself.

The verdict: Nah. I mean, I still have both Trines to beat.

The game: Kitty Lambda's The Real Texas

The source: The Indie Royale Spring Sun Bundle

The pre-amble: The Real Texas has been described as a mash-up between Ultima VI and the Legend of Zelda. The player is a regular good ol' boy from Texas who, while on holiday to the UK, gets transported by a portal to an alternate universe version of Texas filled with monsters and ne'er-do-wells. The game notable for its surreal sense of humor, its use of text parsers for some of the puzzles and odd cuboid graphics that remind me more than a little of 3D Dot Game Heroes, itself a Zelda game with a bit of a bizarre streak. But hey, Giant Bomb recorded a Quick Look, so don't feel like you have to take my word for any of this.

The playthrough: There's not a whole lot more I can tell you about the game that wasn't covered by the Quick Look. You walk around, you have the option of picking up a hell of a lot of completely useless items (that would be the Ultima influence, then) and get embroiled in all manner of strange adventures. The problem is, none of the rudimentary gunplay combat is particularly riveting and the adventure game elements are simply too obtuse due to a number of factors to be any fun or satisfying.

When I say there's a number of factors that preclude several puzzles from being solved in any quick fashion, I'm not exaggerating. The first issue is the deliberately simplistic graphics that make objects hard to distinguish unless you look at every single one to figure out what it is. There's a limited inventory space (I mean, I assume, since the inventory window is only so many blocks high) and so much of the stuff you find in the game - mostly notes, flowers, pieces of furniture and the like - are of no use whatsoever. Couple this with the text parser, which always leaves you paranoid that a useless NPC you just encountered wasn't just there for flavor and actually had a purpose and was necessary for moving the game forward, but only if you typed in that one command that lead to anything helpful. There's no harm in having interactivity options in an adventure game, since rubbing every inventory item on every hotspot gets tiresome after a while, but having too much choice in this genre just stresses me out.

I have to admit, I also wasn't really on The Real Texas' humor wavelength. At first I figured it was some kind of incredibly foreign sense of humor that I wouldn't be able to culturally identify with, but once the Discworld references started showing up I realized that it's all just being oddly surreal for the sake of it. Having twenty tourism brochures lying around in various half-hidden spots and then discovering that they didn't do anything was probably an amusing idea (or perhaps they were just littered around by tactless tourists for a sense of verisimilitude), but I just spent a few hours wandering around in something approaching utter confusion. Is this funny? Is it meant to be funny? I'm guessing the game might require more than just a few hours before it starts making sense and becomes interesting.

The verdict: Weeeeell, I'm not completely turned off by the game. The surrealness does lend a certain sense of walking around someone else's headspace, which is something games don't do often enough for my liking. I'm not saying it's particularly "arty auteur" or anything, but it does remind me of the sort of bizarre adventure games that showed up around the early-to-mid 90s after LucasArt and Sierra proved you could make (and sell) point-and-clicks with a lot of personality to them. Maybe I'll return to the burg of Strange some day to shoot more blobs and talk to snippy horses. I would like to know what was up with all those mysterious locked doors in the England portion of the game.

The game: Charliegames' Irukandji

The source: Indie Royale's 2nd Difficult Bundle

The pre-amble: Irukandji is an underwater vertically-scrolling shoot 'em up, part of that huge wave of eyecandy psychedelic shooters that have a big emphasis on trippy lasershow visuals. It's the sort of game you could play Rush or Pink Floyd over and have it be totally germane to the experience. Though the game only has one level, as far as I can tell, it'll change things up by unlocking more ships for the player to try and randomizing the order of the incoming enemy waves. Oh, and an irukandji is a type of venomous jellyfish. Don't know if you knew that.

The playthrough: Well, if you were here with me last year when I did this feature, there's no shortage of Indie shmups being given away in these Desura bundles. I'm guessing these things are everywhere because of the Touhou games, which I believe are still the most popular "doujin" PC games in Japan (very much their Indie equivalent), and due to the success of Geometry Wars on XBLA. I don't have a problem with a nice-looking shmup from time to time, but I generally object to the long, arduous process of memorizing attack patterns and mastering point combo systems and all that enervating rigmarole. I feel that, like fighters, there's two extremes for this type of game: they're either ephemeral throwaway experiences that brighten up any arcade visit for a scant ten minutes or so before you either run out of money or fucks to give, or they're the type of thing genre purists might spend hours upon days learning back to front so they can properly master it.

With Irukandji I don't think there's any doubt that this is squarely in the "throwaway funtime" camp. With its single level and randomly assigned enemy waves, there isn't a whole lot to memorize, and the various ships seem to have been added to give players a reason, any reason, to want to play through it again. It looks sharp and stunning, in that bloom-heavy psychedelic way these shooters always look, and flying around firing half of the Death Star's total ordinance every second isn't going to look anything short of amazing. These games are all predicated on getting as many power-ups as possible and simply blasting through everything and having a grand old time while doing so. Irukandji is that. It is all it is, for better or worse.

The verdict: Probably not. I got shmups pouring out the ol' Vic Viper (if you know what I mean, ladies) so the last thing I want is to spend any more time with one that isn't going to go anywhere or change significantly from stage to stage. It's probably fine if you like these things, but then there are a lot more PC shmups like it out there. I've been meaning to try Sine Mora, actually...