I'm still over here throwing darts at my sizeable (humblebrag?) Itch.io bundle backlog to see what gaming morsels I've been putting off for far too long, as a belated means of thanking those developers who put up their creative efforts to help with various charitable efforts over the past few years (and also to clear out a whole bunch of Indies this month, which used to be how I spent most Mays). The first week is over here and gets into more detail about what we're up to with this feature, but suffice it to say I'm knocking out a bunch of smaller Indies in one fell swoop that wouldn't really benefit from the huge write-ups offered by my usual Indie Game of the Week feature.

This week's topics of conversation include:

MM07: Summer Gems

• Developer: 3ofcupsgames
• Year: 2021
• Status: Complete.

Always a good sign when a game takes longer to download than it does to complete. I kid, of course: this was more the flavor I had in mind when I started looking through all these Itch.io games for those that might serve a quick-fire feature like this. Summer Gems presents a sudden friendship that strikes up between two kids, one a native to a picturesque seaside village and the other a summer tourist to same, and sees them bond over the handful of days they have together as they play on the beach collecting knick-knacks deposited by the tides, followed by summarizing their thoughts with a written letter to each other as the sun goes down.

The player's influence is minimal—you select which of the three found items per day is your favorite, and then direct the letter's content through emotions rather than directly choosing the wording—and the game's over in just a handful of minutes, but the goal of flashing its audience back to a youthful age where a summer friendship is somehow both meaningful and incredibly ephemeral is one it accomplishes adroitly. Nostalgic, cute as a button, and taps into something maybe universal about childhood that most of us may have already forgotten about. It's only because my brain has been so broken by video games that I found myself longing for some kind of collectibles encyclopedia for all the beach trash I kept finding.

MM08: The Adventures of Wolf and Hood - A Jigsaw Tale

• Developer: Stone Baked Games
• Year: 2020
• Status: Complete

Nothing too special about this jigsaw game, save a few medium-unique elements like some (but sparingly few) animated parts to make it easier to figure out where they fit in the scene and a format that has pieces "click" into place for good once in their correct locations. There's also a feature where you can highlight edge pieces mixed in around the unsolved pieces if you're looking to finish the circumference before starting on the interior. Beyond that it's otherwise real straightforward and the art's mostly OK if not spectacular, with not nearly enough background details for my liking beyond what is spared for the central characters of any given scene.

There's a story to follow, which is distinct enough for a jigsaw game, with each image adding another step to the narrative. It's set in a reimagined world of fairytales where Hood and Wolf aren't enemies but a bounty-hunting duo whose most recent target is Jack the Giant Slayer, wanted for the slaying of several giants. He's initially allies with Rapunzel but she turns on him towards the end, choosing to help Hood and Wolf bring him to justice. I'm all for turning fairytale characters into little Samus Arans. Length-wise the game offers multiple sizes from 24 pieces all the way up to 296 pieces (or 21x14), the latter of which can take a good half-hour or so to solve, with a total of 20 puzzles. I can relax with jigsaws in much the same way I can with picross where I'm familiar enough with the process that I can do it on autopilot all Zen style, but the best jigsaw games tend to be those that take advantage of the medium more often. More animations, more surprises, more detailed artwork, and possibly a few extra features would make for a more confident sequel, but I'm overall satisfied with what was here. (Now I'm curious if there's ever been a hidden image game that had you assemble the scene of random junk as a jigsaw puzzle beforehand. Might make it too easy to find stuff afterwards, though.)

MM09: Ynglet

• Developer: Nifflas
• Year: 2021
• Status: Complete

If it isn't my old buddy Nifflas (real name Nicklas Nygren). Not that I've met the guy personally, but a lot of my early Indie game writing on this site often involved one of his chill, lonely explormers like NightSky, Knytt Underground, and Saira. The last time I encountered his output was with IGotW #55, the subject of which was his Wii U-exclusive tablet-driven survival-exploration game Affordable Space Adventures. Nifflas has always had a keen sense of both atmosphere and building a distinctive gameplay experience out of simple mechanics, and Ynglet very much follows in that vein. Set in a world you might only see with a powerful microscope, Ynglet has the player control a fish-like creature whose world is suddenly transformed by a meteor attack: this has scattered the geography far and wide, creating zones of relative safety surrounded by a ceaseless void.

The player gets around these worlds by swimming and bouncing between voids to the safety zones between, soon learning a mid-air dash that can be aimed (the game drops into slow-motion to help you aim) to close the distance. The game continues to expand its repertoire from that kernel, often giving you smaller tutorial levels between the larger standard ones to impart some critical info about how some new obstacle or technique works. These might include blue barriers, which will cause you to bounce off when travelling normally or can be passed through while dashing, and red barriers which have the opposite rule. The microbial world where it feels like you're hopping between amoebas is very cleverly done—it reminds me of that one level from Rhythm Heaven Fever with the synchronized bacteria—and the tricky mechanics combined with the quick resets recalled Flywrench and the way it has you dancing to a certain rhythm once you have the necessary steps down to complete a sequence. It's much more forgiving overall though, forgoing death penalties and allowing players to set their own checkpoints a la Fred Wood's Love series in the standard difficulty modes. A series of collectibles adds some extra challenges to aim for while playing, but it's otherwise a brief game with a handful of stages that bows out gracefully once it's explored all the ideas it has, which is the mark of a well-considered Indie game that doesn't have to conform to some publisher-mandated minimum "time to beat" requirement. It's also really pretty in an abstract sort of way, with Nifflas's ability to use visuals and music to set a tone that might otherwise be a little too elusive to grasp with just the simple graphics alone.

MM10: The World Begins With You

• Developer: Fabian Denter
• Year: 2018
• Status: Complete

Created for a Game Jam, The World Begins With You is a game I'm sure doesn't have too many reviews out there on the world wide web so I'm going to spare its developer Fabian Denter a TWEWY joke and get down to brass tacks. Styled as an ICO-like (or an ICLONE if I'm being a dick), the game sees a little bald guy mysteriously rescued from his jail cell and has him wander around some vaguely Arabic ruins for a while in pursuit of answers. While very pretty—I believe Denter is an environment artist by trade, and is working on the upcoming dramatic road trip adventure game Forever Ago with a team—there's not too much substance to this short narrative adventure, barring a few sequences where you're navigating a maze or avoiding the neon-blue glare of automated spotlights by using the nearby scenery to block their view.

It's definitely more of a mood piece, as well as a technical demonstration of the creator's excellent use of lighting and cinematography as it alternates following the protagonist up close or at a great distance to punctuate the picturesque desolation of his surroundings. I mentioned ICO, which really set the stage for this type of moody environmental action-adventure game, but there's plenty of Journey here too especially with the sandy setting. For as brief as it is it's definitely a remarkable achievement if this was all created for a Game Jam.

MM11: MiniNatura

• Developer: Carl Peters
• Year: 2021
• Status: Complete

A similar case here too, only this was created as a university project by its sole developer Carl Peters. Again, the visuals here are outstanding for a single-person team operating under a strict time budget, as it follows a forest sprite as it goes around a diorama collecting six well-hidden seedlings. The player needs to make ample use of the 3D camera to look at the environment from every angle and zoom distance to understand how everywhere is connected and where you need to direct the sprite to reach these out-the-way places.

Both the gameplay and the cute little protagonist reminded me of Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, especially in how that game's puzzles were often predicated around changing your perspective to get a better sense of the level geometry. The game mercifully has a run button—the default walk is painfully slow—and with only one scene and six seeds to find, it's about an hour tops, yet I imagine for a university assignment it was more than enough. Definitely worth putting out there for others to see.

MM12: Ecchi Sketch: Draw Cute Girls Everyday

• Developer: NewWestGames
• Year: 2017
• Status: Complete

Itch.io has seen a lot of LGBTQ+ affiliated charity bundles in its time, so there's a crowd of developers working in that space that always seem happy enough to lend their support to other causes Itch.io might champion. Hence, there's more than a few queer-coded games in these bundles to the extent that I should start peppering them in more often. Ecchi Sketch—which I'll admit to selecting purely for the pun title—sees lesbian and struggling artist Yume join a yuri (i.e. girl x girl) adult comics studio staffed by three women: the cool but aloof author Megumi, the bratty but cute shader and colorist Rin, and the put-upon corporate scion Kyoko who founded the studio to follow her own niche interests. By choosing who to hold meetings with during the work week a total of three times, the player is fixed onto that person's route (using a similar simplified dating sim mechanic as Go! Go! Nippon! ~My First Trip to Japan~, which I LPed to mixed success way back when) and follows it to that love story's conclusion.

Since this was the all-ages version—I think the bundles had a rule to only allow family-friendly games to maximize their reach—there's nothing too salacious with the visual content but there's certainly a lot of sex talk, flirting, and romance-centric writing once locked into a route. In contrast, the game doesn't really spend a lot of time on its characters due to its limited duration and has precious little of standard VN interactivity like decision splits (besides picking a love interest to pursue, there are no choices beyond one that doesn't seem to make any difference to the following cutscenes) or bad/false endings or the stat-building/life-scheduling aspect that is often central to dating sims. Each playthrough takes about a couple of hours, less so if you're skipping already read text, and the artwork is mostly fine if unremarkable. Every route does have a bit of drama at the end, albeit the kind of drama that feels like it came out of nowhere as an eleventh hour grasp at dramatic tension, but it mostly works in making each love interest feel distinct and their own person with their own prior baggage and potential conflicts about dating another woman. It's all pretty cute overall so I wasn't too disappointed, but it could've used more of everything; the developer's gone on to make several more thematically-similar VNs of increasing confidence, so I wish them well in reaching greater heights with their writing and art.