Woodlings draw near!

Timespinner is a PS1-styled good old pixel graphics Metroidvania with a time travel theme. You are Lunais, a Time Messenger--a member of your extremely persecuted nomadic tribe on "if the empire ever gets us then you need to go back in time and warn the others" duty. Sure enough, the emperor himself invades and burns down your entire backstory, setting you up for a roaring rampage of revenge. Oh, and maybe to like, fix everything? But first and foremost those assholes need to pay for what they did.

Or do they? After having been tossed around in the timestream for a while and traversing through a thousand years ago as well as the present time, things start to get more complicated. Maybe the original founders of the empire a thousand years ago were rebelling for a reason. Maybe blind revenge cycles aren't the healthiest long-term solution.

But this is the ever quick-tempered and hot-blooded Lunais we're talking about. "Who do I have to kill to solve this problem" is such a core part of her personality that even though there are four endings based on your choices, all of them (even the "solve the empire's problems in the past and make them peaceful so they're not such dicks to us in the future" one) involve finding someone who's ruining everything and needs to die.

Anyway, that's the story. Gameplay and presentation-wise, this is an outstandingly well-crafted Metroidvania with two interconnected maps (past and future versions of the world,) stuff to find, bosses to beat, and sidequests to solve. Time manipulation is a mechanic both in the teleporter checkpoints and in the ability to freeze the action at any time, which allows you to do things like use enemies as platforms or get out of the way of a boss's charging rushdown attack. The graphics are gorgeous. The music is also gorgeous. Controls and gameplay are satisfying. There's a lot more story here than in your average SOTN-like Castlevania, and it's a good story that's told and presented well. There's even a good amount of LGBTQ representation, which is always awesome unless you're one of those "I liked this game before it had an agenda" types, in which case why are you following us?

Armor and accessories follow the traditional SOTN-and-beyond approach of being pieces of gear for which one finds upgrades scattered throughout the adventure. For weapons, though, they did something unique. Lunais wields Orbs, each of which have unique playing styles akin to the various weapon types in your average Castlevania (you know, equipping a short sword versus a giant heavy overhand-swinging one versus a whip versus a spear or the like) only without any of them really being a clear upgrade. Defeating an enemy with a certain Orb earns a separate type of experience for that Orb, and its strength and damage increase with levels. Each Orb is situationally useful--I personally tended to favor the Radiant Orb for swatting hard-to-hit flying things at close range, the Blood Orb for dealing with shield knights, and the Forbidden Tome (which counts as an Orb somehow, shut up) for basically everything else--but at the end of the day, the best Orb in the game is the one you favor and have used until it became deadly. There are no wrong answers and no Orb obsoletes any other; the ones you find later merely give you more options.

Simply put, this game is phenomenal. The Orb system works well for introducing variety and a sense of replay value; at this point I've seen every ending, unlocked every Achievement including the Achievement for unlocking every Achievement, and beaten every boss in the game without being hit or stopping time, but I could always go back and play through again on a New Game Plus just to see what playing with some of the other Orbs might be like. (There were quite a few that I was curious about, that I could really see being good if I'd gotten them up to speed, but I was just too married to my current setup.) And when I have hundred-percented this game twice and I'm still curious about things like that, that's how you know just how great this game is, how lasting its appeal.

I was browsing r/tipofmyjoystick, a Subreddit wherein people describe games they half-remember in hopes that someone can tell them what on Earth that one game was. Someone asked, and I quote:

"[Flash] [2010s] A Newgrounds pixel art game were[sic] you play a bizarre and nonsensical game of cards with made up rules against an eyeless man. Behind him is a perverted praying mantis who constantly makes innuendos."

This was solved in the comments--it's Mond Cards, apparently--but with a description like that, you just know I had to check it out.

So Mond Cards is... yeah, it's pretty much that. I don't really have a lot to add here. You play a made-up Calvinball card game you always lose until a twist reveal at the very end, it's barely interactive and your choices don't matter, the praying mantis in the background really wants to fuck you, it's about ten minutes long. Newgrounds-brand trippy art games sure were the days, huh?

Yeah.

When I was younger, I had a poster.

To set the scene a little: The original Dragon Warrior (AKA the localized American version of Dragon Quest) was the first game I ever beat. It wasn't the first game I ever played (the NES did come with Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt, after all, and I'm sure there were others,) but it was the first one that had an ending that young me was able to reach. The Dragonlord was defeated, Alefgard was saved. I did it. It was over. I won. The rush I got from that, to someone who had never experienced it before, was... immense, a feeling I can still remember.

We never owned Dragon Warrior 2, and I never got to play it until just now. However, we sure had that poster. I think it was part of some Nintendo Power promotion or another (much like Dragon Warrior 1 itself had been,) a giveaway advertisement meant to entice people to continue their adventure with this all new game. I'm honestly not sure why we never bit on that, because I couldn't have been more into the concept of it. I read and reread this poster, the enemies and items, and just imagined what this game could be like. I'm not sure whatever happened to the poster, but it disappeared ages ago, and I kind of regret its absence to this day. I've been meaning to track down a replacement on eBay or something, but they're kind of expensive these days.

As for the game itself... well. I guess I finally got tired of being wondering about it from afar and realized that, hey, I'm an adult now and I could just play the dang thing if I'm that curious.

Early Dragon Quest titles, like early Final Fantasy titles, have been ported and remade and ROMhacked and fan-translated a zillion times over, so the first step in the journey of correcting this age-old oversight was deciding which Dragon Quest/Warrior II to play. Each version has a lot of pros, cons, and apples-to-oranges comparisons about the localization versus the game balance and quality of life features versus the touchscreen controls and so on. In the end, for a variety of reasons, I settled for the good old original NES version, including the original western "Dragon Warrior II" localization and script. The only modifications I accepted (which admittedly were fairly big and important ones) were an XP/GP reward doubler because original NES DW2 is grindier than Breath of Fire II, and a thing to fix some menu display issues.

(And for those keeping track of self-imposed challenge levels: in addition to the payout doubler, there is an well known exploit that lets you farm Staves of Thunder to raise lots of gold as soon as you have access to all three keys, and an exploit that lets you get two Water Flying Cloths, both of which I used. There are similarly well known exploits that let you get the attack power of cursed equipment without the drawbacks, and those I did not use.)

After the events of the first game, the Descendant of Erdrick and Princess Gwaelin went on to found not one, not two, but three new kingdoms. You are [enter name here], the young Prince of Midenhall, and one of the Descendants of the Descendant of Erdrick. The evil priest/cultist Hargon is up to no good, and his army sacks and burns the kingdom of Moonbrooke. News of the tragedy reaches Midenhall, and your adventure is underway. You must team up with your cousins, the Prince of Cannock and the now-missing Princess of Moonbrooke, stop Hargon's army, and save the world.

Dragon Quest/Warrior II is an ultimately fascinating milestone of JRPG history, in that you can move from 1 to 2 and instantly see how it's the same game at heart but also see all the upgrades and innovations they were able to add.

Like, recall primitive Dragon Quest/Warrior 1 was. It starts with a text dump of the king of Tantegel giving you the entire story and sending you on your way. It has so many engine limitations that they accidentally establish rules--a town tile on the world map always leads to a friendly town, which plays the town theme and has no random encounters, you only hear the dungeon theme in caves and actual dungeons, and so on. That was what made Hauksness (the ruined ghost town from this icon) so traumatizing as a child and a gaming location I still find creepy and unsettling to this day: when it broke those rules, it was like... you can't do that, that's illegal. D:

The second game, by contrast, starts with an honest to God cutscene, using battle sounds and sprite flashing and disappearing to depict actors fighting and dying. It has a party of heroes and groups of enemies instead of one-on-one encounters. It has a boat, making water tiles accessible. It's... well, by modern standards this is still something you could probably make in RPGMaker, and it would be considered a fairly low-effort beginner game even then. But back then? Young me would have been blown away... and, somehow, current me kind of still is. DW2 remains similar enough at its core to DW1 that I find myself able to slip into the mindset I had back then, and see it with a DW1 fan's eyes.

I also saw it with the eyes of someone who grew up with that poster and it was really weird seeing the game namedrop all these enemies and spells and items after I'd heard and fantasized about the names for so long. Lottery tickets are kind of garbage items in this game, it turns out, because it's absurdly hard to win anything more valuable than a medical herb. The first time I ever found one, though, I instantly had a flashback to the poster and its cool artwork of it, and treated it like some kind of precious holy relic.

Mind you, all this isn't to say that DW2, especially the NES version, doesn't have its share of balance issues and bad game design decisions. I was playing with the doubler patch and still had to stop and grind a few times, especially in Rhone. Rhone... now I understand why the Cave to Rhone and Rhone itself are infamous That One Levels among series fans. The entire endgame isn't difficult so much as it is broken. The heroes' ever-advancing levels and power are counterbalanced not with tougher enemies, but cheaper enemies, the kind that know 100% unfailingly accurate party-wide instant death spells (if anyone ever casts Sacrifice that's a wipe, period) and various nonsense tricks like that. The final bosses... actually went down pretty quickly for me, mostly because they have a lot of cheap tactics they probably could have used but the RNG decided not to. The endboss can completely 100% full-heal himself at will, for example, but the only time he ever did that was at the start of the first round, acting before the party and casting it before anyone had even had a chance to damage him yet. Then we beat him in three and a half rounds before he had a chance to try that again. I can list at least five random encounters that gave us more trouble than he did. In fact, the only time the party ever ate a full-on Game Over party wipe was when one of said random encounters got off an unlucky Sacrifice.

The party inventory space is horribly restricted, at least in the NES version. Large parts of the main quest feel self-guided. (That is, the king gives you very little to go on besides "Go stop Hargon." There happens to be a dungeon over there, which you may decide to explore because that's what dungeons are for. The locations of a lot of required-to-complete-the-game key items are... not obvious. I feel like this was intended to be a "share secrets with your friends at recess" kind of game at the time; these days it's "you'll need a walkthrough.") There are large stretches of the game wherein the party's equipment is more powerful than they are--as in, "You over there, your function in this party isn't so much as a person as it is someone who goes into your inventory and use the Staff of Thunder as an item every round." The Prince of Cannock in particular is a roller coaster of a character who goes from being an absolute essential lifesaver and team MVP, to completely obsolete once Shields of Strength become available, then some of his buffs and debuffs and ability to heal other people (like when the Prince of Midenhall is too busy hitting bosses with his sword to have time to use his own Shield of Strength) finally start to become useful again just in time for the game to be over. There are probably other things I'm forgetting, too.

This game has a lot of new-for-its-time innovations but is still incredibly rough around the edges, is what I'm saying, here.

Still, there is an undeniable charm that shines brightly beneath the unpolished surface, especially for the kid in me who grew up with the original. This is Dragon Warrior 2. It's Dragon Warrior, only 2. Even now I can feel that it is everything that I would have wanted back then, and I'm thrilled that we finally got to experience it.

Especially because it was the "I dunno, I want to play this game but I should probably get through DW2 first" prerequisite to a whopping three other games on our radar (Dragon Warrior 3, Dragon Quest 11, and Dragon Quest Builders 2.) That plus finally answering the ancient curiosity from that poster made for a pretty worthy accomplishment here, I feel.

This one hurts.

Welcome to Moreytown by S. Andrew Swann is my first personal experience (friends have gone through other works and I've read their reviews) with Choice of Games, a publisher whose entire thing is Choose Your Own Adventure-style interactive fiction games. No graphics, no flashiness, just reading, multiple choice prompts, and some background stats that affect your chance of success when overpowering/sneaking around/persuading/etc. They also tend to be very open as far as your character's gender, gender identity, sexual orientation (including everything from "anything that moves" to "let's just keep things platonic, thanks") and more, which is nice.

This story, specifically, is about a city of anthropomorphic animals called "moreys" (cutesy reference to "Moreau," as in "Doctor," "The Island of") which is... okay, look. They're furries. I'm sorry, but they're furries and they're called "moreys" presumably in an attempt to come up with something grim and serious for this grim and serious setting, but like many of the endgame decisions (oh, I'll get to those,) I think it backfires a little. Anyway, an entire race of f... "moreys" was created for some war in the distant backstory, then given basic rights and such (sort of,) and now exist in a highly discriminated-against underclass relegated to run-down slums, low-paying retail jobs, and a very difficult relationship with the police. This game is very subtle with its metaphors, you see.

There's a gang war, a doomsday cult, a probably-doomed peace and love movement, lots of danger, and options. Your goal is to... well, that depends, I guess. You could try to foil the big terrorist attack at the end without casualties, take over leadership of at least a few of the various factions, become lovers or mortal enemies with several characters, and probably a few other things I either am forgetting or didn't see in our runs. Much like the gender and sexuality options, this openness appears to be a selling point of Choice of Games products, and on paper this is something that Welcome to Moreytown in particular does right in at least trying to include it.

This review hurts because on paper Welcome to Moreytown does a lot of things right, actually. The writing is well done and engaging. The character options only feel limiting in any way if you happen to be a furry whose fursona is not represented here. (You can get an actual type-whatever-you-want text entry box for your gender if you declare the need for one, but you're out of luck if your chosen species isn't on the predefined multiple-choice list. Which, yeah, that's probably because the game depends on those options for some stats--a bear is bigger, more powerful, but slower and worse at stealth than a rat. Fine. Stiiillllll.) Other reviews complain that this is very short, but I found that to be a good thing, as it makes it easier to replay. I was ready to declare it one of my personal GOTY candidates after the first playthrough, which was a whirlwind of adventure that ended in a near-flawless good ending almost by complete accident. It's just... there are two major, fatal flaws that become apparent upon closer examination.

One, a lot of that whirlwind turns out to be badly railroaded. Most of the plot beats will happen, whether you try to avoid them or not. There is no way to avoid being all but conscripted into one of the gangs, for example; you will be close enough to a certain incident to attract their attention, they will find you shortly afterward, you will come with them (you can agree or be kidnapped,) and you will cooperate with them (you can either lose the "initiation" fight and be at their mercy, win and accept the offer anyway, or win and be extorted into accepting when they threaten your friends/loved ones, and if you try to go to the detective or reporter contacts afterward they just want you to do exactly what the gang wants you to do anyway.)

Two, for as inevitable as the endgame is, it's also upsettingly hard to get through it in one piece. You are dealing with some incredibly twitchy suicide bombers, and while you have an impressive array of tactics to try (Tackle them? Try to talk them down? Warn the crowd? Work with any of the various factions, or confront them alone?) it breaks immersion just how blatantly the author has their finger on the "this option somehow works, that one backfires spectacularly and kills everyone" button. Choice of Games does not believe in a "save" function since it enables scumming; they say your choices should matter and you should live with the consequences of them, period. Fine, I respect that, but given how quickly and capriciously bad endings come in the last chapter, and how each one means a full restart from the beginning, let's just say it boggles my mind that anyone wanted this story to be longer.

I've seen and done about 68% of the things there are to see and do in this game, according to Achievement stats. There are even a few of them that I'm curious about. I kind of want to go back and see where some of the other roads lead, but I also kind of don't because I already know. It's strange how a game can feel so open and so on rails at the same time.

This was on an itch.io bundle of "So you're stuck inside self-isolating, here are like a million games you could play" giveaways. I picked up more games that day alone than I will probably ever play, but of all of them, this weird-ass thing I was curious about and so it was the (first? only? so far?) one I actually installed and played.

A Game For You, Josh is a 15-30 minute romp. You are Josh, and it is is your birthday. Your best friend could not be here in person, so he made this game where you take a tour of your own house while conversing with your friend's stand-in.

On the surface, it's made to look like a low-budget yet sincere happy "Happy Birthday Josh! I made you a game and I hope you like it :)" effort, the kind I used to make for people in ZZT when I was a teen. Meanwhile, I went in expecting Eversion or Pony Island or some kind of indie horror along those lines. The guide is clearly meant to look unsettling, after all, and it's clear as you talk to him that he is desperate to please you and give you a good gift and a good Birthday because he is a good friend and you're having fun, right? Please?? He even has various states of physical breakdown. The sprite where he appears to be made up of image-searched patches of close up photos of human skin is just the outer layer, naturally, and he loses and regains, uh, layers I guess, in time with his composure. I expected some kind of Baldi's Basics style "Uh oh, now you've made him upset" surprise switch to be thrown at any moment.

But it's not really that, either. It's not vapid surface-level saccharinity but neither is it a haunted gaming creepypasta. It's... self-aware, and vaguely sad. You're not Josh. He knows that. He knows he's a program, too. He does his best, but he can never be what he's emulating, and the world out there scares him. He's sorry.

I got the ending where I comforted and bonded with him, watched as he picked a name for himself, and thanked me for our time together. I assured him that I was his friend and he could be more than just code, because... *aside glances toward Sara and Ardei* ... well, this is a topic that hits close to home for us, I guess.

It looks like the 100% off sale is over and I don't know if I can recommend paying $5 for this, but I do hope you find a way to check it out at some point. Maybe find a longplay or something, or wait for another sale. Or heck, maybe just buy it full price, if you're as intrigued as I was. It's good. It's worth experiencing, especially if I know you well enough that we talk on IMs and such. There are a lot of weighty quotes from there we need to talk about with people next time we see them.

Another free little nibble of a thing from the Queue, this one a bit more successful.

Mushroom Cats is a... game? Arguably? It's not exactly what I would call a point-and-click, though there is a lot of pointing and clicking.

There is a large scrollable area. There are a total of 21 hats strewn about here and there. Click on them to collect them. There are a total of 21 cats strewn about here and there. Click on them to place one of your collected hats on them. There is a credits screen when you have be-hatted every cat. That's it, that's the game.

Look, there's hardly anything here, but it's incredibly cute, the music is nice, and even the purring sound effect is soothing. With a run time of approximately five minutes and a cost of Free, it will not take much time or resources out of your day. Just... enjoy some cute mushroom cats real quick. Why not? It weighs next to nothing, all things considered, and it's a pleasant experience.

I was using Hakchi2 to flash various games to my NES Classic console, and I noticed within the sort of app-store-like module repository, next to the RetroArch cores, emulators for various other systems, and other mods and options, they offered a selection of homebrew games you could just download and install. Some of them looked pretty neat, and I was adding a kjhgpillion games to this thing anyway, so why not toss them in, right? You might hear about the other ones on here if we get around to them, but I started with this one because a staged-based arcade thing-doer seemed shorter and less of a commitment than, say, a Crystalis/Zelda-like ARPG.

Anyway, Lawn Mower. You are the world's least efficient riding mower, able to last an impressive ten seconds or so on a full tank of gas. You drive around at one of two speeds: leisurely, and hold A for AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. You need to mow every grass tile before you run out of fuel. Gas cans appear one at a time, in a random location that can be any already-mowed grass tile. This makes stages easier when you first start them, since you know the can is going to be nearby and within easy reach, but woe unto you if you're like 99% done and working on one corner of the screen and the can spawns all the way over there in the other one. You need to clear everywhere, but since the can can be anywhere you've cleared, things get tricky.

There are also flowers and rocks, which you're meant to avoid at the cost of a significant loss of fuel if you smack into them. Flowers become standard mowable tiles once you hit them once whereas rocks are still there no matter how many times you run over them, but let's be honest; you hit either one once and you're probably going to run out of fuel and lose anyway.

All in all, it's a very solid concept for a stage-clearer game, and it's pretty enjoyable early on. I was starting to run into Down Ward syndrome toward the end, where the stages were getting longer and harder and oh God how much longer is this? Am I almost done? I then looked up a playthrough video and it turned out that I was on the literal last stage, and all I had to do was sweat it out for one more lawn and I'd have it. And so I did.

So yeah, good experience, neat fun little thing, ended just in time if not one single stage too late.

This is tough to review, because it's really more a heartbroken game developer's personal art therapy project than, like, something mass audiences are supposed to enjoy.

Something for Someone Else was originally a private one-off game someone made for his boyfriend to communicate a rough patch they were going through at the time, with the hope that playing this would help fix things between them. It did not, and now the memories of failure and loss haunt the developer, who eventually put the game on Steam in a sort of Director's Cut version to help himself move on.

You are a poorly drawn stick figure. You walk around and jump over things and avoid obstacles on your way to the next checkpoint. It's very basic. It gets cheaply difficult (that is, you will die a zillion times due to what feels more like fiddly controls and hitboxes and unfairly placed obstacles than a fair test of player skill) but there is an option to no-sell damage and be invincible as long as you hold Shift, so you can either engage with the author's "intended experience" or not. Once you finally make it to the end, you then do it all again in a sort of director's commentary mode (and this is where I cheated my way through, because I'd done the whole climb legitimately and really didn't need to prove anything to anyone by doing it again) while the author explains the intention and feelings behind the various design decisions. Then there's an epilogue where the author ruminates about the game in hindsight and about you the player. Then the game finally ends after the author finally works up the courage to let you go.

Can I recommend this? I hesitate to say yes because the actual game is an awful slog. If I say yes, it sounds like I'm calling this a good game, which it emphatically isn't. It's cheap and frustrating, it has one song that's decent enough but you will grow to hate it by about the millionth time it loops, it plays like My First Fusion Platformer By Billy (Age 6). But it's... kind of supposed to? Everything from the cheap and frustrating difficulty to the obnoxious musical repetition to the bad graphics are all 100% intentional. The developer wanted to capture feelings of hope versus hopelessness, striving toward some sort of nebulous goal at the top even with a tidal wave of bitter frustrations in the way. He wanted to punish his then-partner for every grievance in their relationship by making him suffer through the un-fun parts of this, while still hoping that their problems could be worked out and a happy ending could come of all this. When it didn't, the author then turned it into a thought exercise about game development and a time capsule from his past self, something for his present self along with you and me to chew on and think about. Therefore, I hesitate to not recommend this because on that sense it succeeds. If I say no, it sounds like I'm calling the entire experience a failure, which it also emphatically isn't. It's pensive, it's raw and vulnerable and touching, it's a clear window into the author's soul.

In the end, I'm going to say no, but only because I'm thinking of... you know... typical audiences, who want a game they can play, which this isn't. If you expect quality, and especially if you don't care about this one particular game developer enough to play through his bad game twice just to hear him talk about his feelings, then there's nothing here for you.

However, if this looks interesting to you, then it probably is. If you're curious, then you should probably ignore my downvote and hear him out. This made me feel a slight connection, like I'm a good listener just for having gone through it. And that's... something.

Um.

Help, we've really fallen into the free twenty-minute games these days, haven't we.

HOME is a short little walking simulator where you interact with things (or not) as the narrator slowly unwinds a poem/speech about what home means to them. Controls are simple; you can walk around or do a single action command that makes your character sort of wave at whatever is directly in front of them. For NPCs and meaningful objects, this just makes a heart appear over them in a sort of "yes, you have interacted with me" acknowledgement. For doors, this opens the way to the next screen. The poem/narration changes depending on what you do or don't choose to interact with (talk to every single coworker in the office screen, just one or two, or none, etc.) and at the end it repeats the whole thing back to you. Then there's a kind of epilogue where everyone and everything you interacted with is there in your home. That's it, that's the game.

It's okay. There's not a whole lot to it but it's short and free so it doesn't really get in your way much. A cute fluffy little popcorn piece of a game, for, uh, relaxing at home I guess.