IGotW Special: Indie Bundle of the Century: Part 2

I'm going to be picking away at the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality for some time to come yet, having already appended my Indie Game of the Week backlog to account for some 70+ new games. However, the bundle has many more items of a smaller and/or freeware nature that I'd have trouble building a whole IGotW blog around but fits quite nicely in a group setting like this. So here's another five games you can try yourselves if you have the bundle (and if you missed out, they're not all that expensive - two of them are even free).

Also, be sure to check out Part 1 of this series.

Cuckoo Castle

A mini-explormer, made for the 2015 GBJam (a Game Boy-focused Game Jam; not to be confused by our own "GB Jam," Giant ROM) by a three person team. I assume Indie devs, especially those pressed for time, gravitate towards the Game Boy aesthetic because it means a smaller canvas for pixel art (160x144 typically) and not a whole lot in the way of in-depth color coordination seeing as there's only the four tints. Cuckoo Castle's kinda cute, but like other micro-sized explormers (e.g. Xeodrifter) there's not a whole lot of what normally makes explormers compelling and it's of course very short. I also didn't care for the combat too much, especially the way that zombies would keep appearing beneath your feet and how little room you had to work with.

Cuckoo Castle manages to couch the usual explormer formula (or explormula) of acquiring traversal upgrades to expand where you can visit via a character switching mechanic. By warping back to town (via any of the pig statues, which double as save/restoration points) you can change to a witch character with ranged spells and a double jump, or a bugman character who can fly and attacks by spawning these little pillbug followers. You also need to unlock the witch first by saving her from the game's first boss, whom in turn is the only one capable of finding and rescuing the bugman. The ultimate goal of the game is to rescue ten missing villagers (though there's supposedly more) and defeat Dracula, who frequently finds his way into games of this genre. Took me about an hour, and while I didn't always have a great time I respect the precise level of craft put into this compact thing, which I imagine is akin to building a ship in a bottle. It had a half-decent soundtrack and the graphics, though limited, had the occasional visual flair like some flickery torchlight or rainfall hitting the ground as you ran by. As an explormer it's probably not entering the upper echelons of the already packed Indie hall of fame, but as a Game Jam product made in a couple of weeks (with a little bit of post-deadline patching) I think it's worthy of accolade.

• You can play Cuckoo Castle for free on Itch.io even if you missed the bundle, either by downloading the executable or playing it via your browser of choice.

Inkanians

I picked up Spelunky in the Summer Steam sale, just because Rorie's been playing a lot of it for the site and I was tempted to start getting into those daily challenges to see if I could keep up with the Boss of Bosses, and while I've no intention of getting so deep into it again that I'm challenging Yama every other day I did notice something about this particular puzzle game while browsing through the Itch.io bundle. Specifically, the blocky, vaguely Central American protagonist of this puzzle game very strongly reminds me of those asshole trap "Thwomps" from Spelunky's late-game temple levels. Could it even be possible to sympathize with these smushing villains were I in their slidey non-shoes?

Inkanians's premise is a simple one: slide around the screen and collect all the gems, avoiding hazards like skull blocks along the way. If you've ever seen one of those puzzles where you push blocks across ice where the block won't stop until it hits something, that's pretty much what this game is in its entirety. Naturally, my head started spinning about 35 stages into its 60 stage total, in part because the game has a lot of mechanics to introduce (including a clone that mirrors your actions and is fatal to you if you should collide) and juggling multiple of those simultaneously makes an already challenging proposition even more so.

Inkanians also has this striking visual style, which uses a monochrome color scheme (many shades of gray at least) but an oddly intense amount of detail for such a functionally simple premise. Some realistic torchlight flickering (which is starting to become a theme this week), effective lights and shadows when applicable, and whenever your Thwompy hero hits a wall it produces small dust clouds from the neighboring blocks. No music, but plenty of loud "thonks" as your Incan deathtrap pounds against the walls which, honestly, can get a bit cacophonous if you're quickly retracing steps to get back to where you messed up on the last attempt (or, at least, a little before). Overall, I don't think you could do a whole lot more with this premise that Inkanians doesn't provide you, and while my interest was piqued by the totally incidental Spelunky comparison I'm not really a fan of this type of puzzle set-up. To me, it's like Sokoban or those light beam refraction puzzles: something I probably could do having less of in general in action-adventure types like Zelda.

• Inkanians can only be bought from Itch.io. A demo version, featuring 25% of the levels, can be tried for free.

Little Comet

I've no real interest in the sport itself, but something about video game golf (especially mini-golf) has this relaxing, almost soporific effect on me where I just hit this zone of Absolute Geometry. I suspect it's because the game physics always boils it down to something akin to a puzzle game, where you can reliably work with constants - your little golfer guy unerringly hits their yardage with each shot, provided the player does their part in hitting the various power gauges at the right intervals - and then figure out the minimal number of shots at the right tangents to sink the ball. Theoretically, pool games put me in the same state, except I've never been able to intuit the correct deflection angle when the cue ball connects so I just end up getting annoyed about bouncing the same ball off the cushions for ten minutes straight.

Little Comet's whole aesthetic and premise immediately reminded me of two pieces of media: the first is perennial SNES favorite Kirby's Dream Course, the connection largely due to how exasperatingly cute the two games are, and a 1991 episode of Red Dwarf named "White Hole" where slobbish everyman hero Dave Lister takes it upon himself to play pool with planets, forgetting that the variable gravity wells of celestial objects makes planning such a proposition the exclusive domain of hyperintelligent AI (in fact, he wrests control from one such AI to make the shot himself, which miraculously still works). Little Comet's conceit is mini-golf with the added wrinkle of planetary gravity wells and other space phenomena, with each course sometimes requiring extra steps like hitting a button or knocking a soccerball into a goal for whatever reason.

While this is a fun idea in practice, as a means of setting up a bunch of unpredictable courses, Little Comet isn't a whole lot of fun to play. That's no fault of the interface, which uses an intuitive slingshot motion where you hold away from the direction you want your starry protagonist to move towards and hold it further away the further you wish them to move (I particularly liked this control scheme in The Game Bakers's Squids, which used it in a more combative action-strategy format). Likewise, all gravity wells and their effective ranges are clearly demarcated by a dotted circle to let you know where and when they'll apply. However, navigating these gravity wells for the sake of slingshotting around a planet or moon very rarely goes the way you'd hope, and sometimes it becomes a struggle just to escape a planetoid once you're trapped within its gravitational influence, let alone then go on to reach the hole's par score. When you start finding courses with multiple gravity wells to maneuver past this particular star-crossed mini-golf format goes from mild frustration to a very strong sensation of not wanting to continue.

I feel like this has been the end result of any puzzle game (or puzzle scenario within a game) that decides to incorporate gravity wells: I recall my spotty time with Osmos (one of the earliest Humble Indie Bundle games), or more recently with the deeply flawed Outer Wilds and trying to land on that damn solar platform, and deciding I'd rather be doing anything else than trying to contend with the unpredictable nature of the endless cosmic ballet. Well, at least Little Comet is adorable; if you collide with a planetoid too hard you give it a boo-boo!

• Little Comet is available to buy on Itch.io and Steam. It can also be bought for iOS and Android (via the Google App store).

Marie's Room

I wasn't going to include Marie's Room because I discovered that it isn't optimized for lesser video cards, and thus unplayable for me, but it caused such a bizarre problem that I figured it'd be just as interesting to discuss that as it would be hearing about my adventures rifling through the belongings of some girl in a similar vein to Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch. Given that the game is freely available on both Itch.io and Steam both and will likely take about an hour to complete, there's no lofty investment here so there's really no need for any written pre-amble from this guy about whether or not to try it out. Hope you have a better time with it than I did.

So, back to that issue. Turns out, on lesser graphics cards - mine's some integrated piece of Intel HD crap that came with this laptop - the game is almost pitch black. None of the extant light sources work and there are no in-game illumination options as far as I can (not) see. There is sticking the gamma way up on the menu, but that just turns the pitch blackness into something closer to pitch navyblueness. While you can still interact with the various journals, photos, and other keepsakes strewn about Marie's titular room it's sort of moot if you can't actually see where they are. The dev(s) were in the Steam forums trying to collate some dxdiag files to narrow down the problem last year but apparently gave up, so we have yet another case of an Indie PC game that simply isn't compatible with older/lesser tech. I could stick it on the same pile as the others I've come across while doing the Indie Game of the Week feature, most notably The Bard's Tale IV, Obduction, Cradle, The Witness, and the more recent The Room ports or Stories Untold (both of which still had IGotW reviews, though in retrospect I probably should've skipped them given they weren't working right).

But hey, since I'm almost certain the game is about some dead kid, maybe the devs were making a point however indirectly about leaving the past in the dark, and that exposing them to the warm light of day might only serve to cause more heartbreak and regret. Now that an effort was made at an interpretation, I feel I can probably move on. (For disclaimer's sake, I also tried The World Begins With You, mostly because I'd just bought The World Ends With You: Final Remix and thought it fitting, but ran into a similar graphical compatibility problem.)

• Marie's Room is free to download on Itch.io and Steam. The Steam version has achievements and paid soundtrack DLC.

Perspectrum

The last game today is a puzzle-platformer, the genre that would define the Indie development scene for many years. Perspectrum uses the traditional elements as a means of transforming the surrounding environment, and through that mechanic the player is able to traverse a series of locations all branching off a hub village. The goal of the game is to collect spirit fragments, which are used to open a door that leads to the endgame.

These spirit fragments are scattered across the overworld itself and its many side-areas, and navigating this world can be a bit of a chore due to the way its world is built upon multiple doorways that lead to different areas. Some zones, like the library, make it easy for you: the central library area has about a dozen books, each of which either leads to a puzzle with one or more fragments to collect or an NPC who dispense with a bit of lore about the setting (a mountain) and the story (the mountain is sick, and the spirit that once resided within has gone missing). Other areas, like the cistern, are a massive maze of passageways and doors, some of which link up in smaller nexuses or just lead to dead-ends with fragments. With no map, it was a little tricky to navigate. The catacombs, meanwhile, have these floating ghosts that carry elements with them: the goal is to use their influence to make elemental pockets to proceed, but I could never figure out how to move beyond a certain point involving an underwater door surrounded by bracken (the bracken is removed if a ghost with the green/toxic element touches it, but there's no way of getting it down there without running afoul of the toxicity yourself).

There's also the matter of the visuals, which are evidently the result of a phenomenon widely known as "programmer graphics". I'm generally not bothered by a lack of graphical finesse if the gameplay core is fine, which is more or less the case in Perspectrum, but it's definitely not winning any beauty contests. Most NPCs and details are far too small to leave an impression, leaving mostly barren dirt tunnels and flat water bodies as your primary settings. I liked the soundtrack, which was melodic and atmospheric if a bit xylophone-heavy, though the sound design was rough: no sound effects whatsoever, besides a very discordant mic scratch whenever you died and were reset to the last entryway. Presentation is not Perspectrum's strong suit, then, though I can't say I disagreed too much with the game in the middle. Bit fiddly with wall jumps (especially where there's an overhang, since squeezing through vertical gaps with the walljump's wide clearance is like pulling teeth) and I'm definitely missing a tutorial or something on how to deal with those catacomb levels, but otherwise a fine little game that could be the precursor to something greater, or at least something more substantial and attractive.

• Perspectrum is available to buy on Itch.io and Steam. Itch.io has a free demo version to try.