Woodlings draw near!

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.

WOW! WE LOSE!

Bokosuka Wars is an old game that got ported around to various systems of the day, with the Famicom version the one most people would be familiar with in the days of emulation. It is... rather infamous early-Internet kusoge, with every early 2000s comedy site lining up to take a swing. Something Awful's ROM Pit covered it, for example, back when the non-forums sections of Something Awful were relevant to anyone or anything ever.

It's easy to see why: the game is kind of an impenetrable mess at first. The common take was and mostly still is "So you're this white blobby dude and you kind of die for no reason and get the WOW! YOU LOSE! screen and what even is this game?" I decided to take a deeper look, mostly because xyzzysqrl brought the world's least necessary sequel to our attention and, you know, I wanted to see if the original deserved a fairer shake than what it got.

Answer: Sort of. The common "lol what is this" perception, where this is bullshit and you die randomly, is completely unfair. Once you find a guide and actually learn how to play, there is a carefully thought out strategy game here. It's just that the clear-headed strategy game is also bullshit and you die randomly.

Okay, so, let's start at the beginning.

You are King Suren (protip: if you ever want to tell the reviews that actually gave this game a fair chance versus the early SA zeitgeist-chasers, look for the ones that actually learned and recite his name.) You start 600m (one step/tile is 1m) away from the enemy king, and the game ends when either he dies or Suren does. There are three types of allied units, each with their own power levels and abilities, and army unit management becomes the name of the game after a while.

Combat is done by taking the allied and enemy units' respective power levels, adding random numbers to each, whoever has the higher total wins, and the loser instantly dies. There is no health stat or "softening up" or "wearing down" units through repeated battle or anything like that; just a binary "two units enter, one unit leaves" roll. If an allied unit is victorious, it gains some power. Suren gets a flat +10 power per fight up to a cap of 320. Knights and Solders mostly get +10 per battle but they also get massive promotions with a +90 or so boost and a gold color upgrade upon attaining their third victory. Then the promoted units go back to +10/fight up to caps of 310.

Given this plus the way the combat system works, the idea is to have a strategic risk/reward dilemma in regard to how much combat to pursue. Is it better to send your units into battle to get them stronger, even if you could lose them entirely on a bad roll? Is it better to avoid combat as much as you can, only to be left with weaker units when faced with the unavoidable fights?

On its surface, it's an interesting idea, and this game could be really neat and strategic. Its big problem is... well. On a randomness scale of 0-10, where 0 is "Absolutely no randomness whatsoever, a 50 power unit will defeat a 40 power unit 100% every time, no upset victories ever, this is 100% predictable and RNG-free and is literally just chess" and 10 is "every battle is a coin flip, I don't know why this game even has power levels if every fight is just 100% pure chance anyway," Bokosuka Wars is hovering around an 8 or 9. Promoted and level-built units do have a better chance of surviving than a freshly hatched 30-power Soldier, sort of, but not that much better, and if you think hitting that 320 cap means you can send Suren into an entire field of weak 10-power grunts like a Dynasty Warriors game and not die then you're going to be seeing that WOW! YOU LOSE! screen.

Let me put it this way: I tried to have Suren pick a fight with the first five enemies I saw before even worrying about recruiting units or anything else, because losing and restarting in the first 60 seconds of gameplay isn't a problem, while actually pulling it off means a hefty +50 boost for the entire rest of the game. These enemies all had 50 power, which means the literal first fight in the game is 220 vs. 50 in my favor, and I lost that matchup twice in about fifteen total attempts. The second would be 230 vs. 50, and I lost that matchup four times. I got through all five guards of my self-imposed "beat five guards" challenge once, at which point I proceeded to have an overall run that lasted until Suren (who'd worked his way up to an even 300 power by then) eventually fell to a guy with 10.

In short, this game has all the "what do you mean I had like twenty dice to roll against your one and I lost ALL of them" frustration of RISK. There are what appear to be strategic elements on paper built around managing a capricious RNG (the "should I avoid this enemy, try to take it out with one of my weaker common units for the XP, or send my heavy-hitting incredibly rare guy to hopefully take care of it" dilemma) but in practice the RNG is so capricious that managing it just... isn't very fun? This game does not feel like a fair test of skill. I could keep trying until the stars align enough to win every roll I need, but would I really prove anything to anyone by doing that? The CRPG Addict (in a rare "okay but this isn't as kusoge as its reputation suggests, let me explain" defense piece, even) cited that winning could take around 1-2 hours depending on how careful you are, and that's 1-2 hours of trying your best while knowing that one bad roll could surprise Suren and oops there goes your entire game. It's... not a great feeling.

I tried, there's more to it than it's given credit for, but... nah.

This one is unfortunate, because it was the first game that really gave Ardei an "ooh this looks good, I want us to play this" feeling. All three of us really wanted it to work out, and on at least a few levels, it did! But, well...

Lumin's Path is a student project by a team with no prior development experience, who made this game as part of their classwork, and it... kind of shows. There are some big ideas in here. This game is both graphically and especially musically gorgeous. We had to watch the trailer more than once when we saw this in our Steam Discovery Queue just because the song was so beautiful and soothing that we just wanted to hear it again. It has an absolute mountain of great things going for it, and then it... stumbles in execution.

You are a robot with a light that can be turned off and on at will. The environment reacts accordingly: some vines block your way when it's dark, and you need to shine your light so they recede. Other vines block your way when it's light, and you need to turn your light off so they recede. (The tutorial confusingly claims these ones are attracted to your light and that they "may help," which is completely untrue.) Some floating platforms are only solid when lit, others only when not lit. These elements are all creatively arranged to make jumping segments and such. Watch the trailer and you'll get the basic idea.

A PS2-looking 3D platformer such as this tends to live or die based on its movement and object physics, though, and that is this game's biggest weakness. Your robot will fall off of giant vines that are supposed to be platforms but somehow register as slopes. It will mysteriously stop running when it encounters invisible walls and other forms of wonky object collision. It will get stuck inside things. Don't even get me started on the camera.

This game is not very long, a mere three stages (each of which have secret collectible gems,) and it's free. And I already said this before but it bears repeating: it's gorgeous. The premise and ideas are clever, every screenshot is a work of art, the soundtrack is so charming that I really want it to exist on someone's Bandcamp page or something somewhere. (Seriously, the music is fantastic, can we please get a soundtrack release?) But after finishing the first stage with 100% completion and finishing the second with 3/4 gems (overall progress which took about 70 minutes according to our gameplay stats, but I assure you that at least 20 of them were spent trying to get the gem in the starting room which appears to have been masterfully hidden within an actual labyrinth of invisible force field-like object collision glitches) I just got tired of fighting this game's actual gameplay. I want so badly to like it, but at the end of the day it simply won't let us.

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.

This game is not even a little in English, so I'm just taking my best guess at a title based on the Google translation.

So, what we have here is another one of those Japanese "click on things and solve puzzles to get the young child protagonist through the situation safely" games, like the Hidden my game by mom series. The main differences that this one has are:

1) Different developers
2) Rather than trying to finding a hidden game (by mom) every level, this is about... all sorts of random wacky situations. Bake cookies, walk down the street without being pranked, steal a diamond, help your friend practice chopping a watermelon with a wooden sword blindfolded without getting smacked, you know, whatever the situation demands.
3) Rather than badly-translated Engrish, this one is just completely not in English at all. The good news is that everything is that it's a mostly text-free delivery where nothing is harder to follow what's going on than, say, Ouendan. The bad news is that you're completely out of luck if you get stuck, since that means you can't read the hints.

Basically, if you like the sort of wacky "did I just make two centaurs fall in love so that I could do my homework in peace" puzzle-clickies and you don't mind the utter lack of English, this one is cute and silly and entertaining. 30 levels + an Undertale-esque "dodge the end credits" sequence. That's fine. I feel like I'm ready for a different genre now after going through like four of these games in a row, but this was fun and it didn't overstay its welcome. It's a great companion to the Hidden games if you want to do something besides find your game.

What started out as modifying a spare NES Classic console for the sake of my corporeal sister & brother-in-law's Christmas present turned into re-flashing ours while we had the game list up like that, and poking at various games to make sure they worked turned into trying once more to tackle this old gem that has eluded me for so long.

Little Nemo: The Dream Master is an NES Capcom game based on an anime film (which, due to Development Hell reasons, never actually hit western shores until long after the game) which itself came from the classic Winsor McCay newspaper comic. That's why the game is set in 1905, you see.

You are the titular Little Nemo, a kid plagued with really weird dreams and difficulty sleeping through the night. Whisked off to Slumberland at the invitation of Princess Camille, you go through seven mostly unrelated plot-free stages before getting there and "oh by the way I need you to rescue my father King Morpheus from the Nightmare King who kidnapped him, here's a weapon, good luck" and there's your finale. For most of the game, your only "weapon" is an infinite supply of candy that can be lobbed about a foot in front of you, and even that can never defeat enemies but it does stun them for about one second for jumping-over-them purposes. There is exactly one screen in the entire game where this is useful; otherwise it's typically trouble than it's worth to add the extra step to the dodging process.

Your saving grace comes from a wide variety of friendly animal helpers that, after being fed some candy, allow you to ride/transform into/merge with them, granting you access to different movement and offensive options. The frog has a painfully slow walking speed but incredible leaps, can defeat enemies by Mario stomping them, and is one of the very few helpers in the game that can swim. The lizard has literally no attack or action button at all and a pretty terrible jump, so God help you if you have to take it through a section with enemies, but it has a great walking speed, can climb walls, is small enough to fit through narrow passages, and has an extra hit point. Etc.

For the most part, the formula is that Nemo and his various helpers must scour each map to find enough keys to unlock the door at the end that leads to the next stage. There are certain exceptions--House of Toys, for example, has no helpers at all and is just a long brutal auto-scrolling enemy and obstacle gantlet with all the keys you need just sitting there before and after the train ride of doom. Once you get to the final level, Nightmare Land, the key mechanic is done away with entirely and you even (finally) get a weapon you can use in your base form.

Being an NES Capcom game, the gameplay and graphics are mostly solid to fine and the music is nothing short of incredible. Everyone has their own personal favorites from this soundtrack (mine are House of Toys and Cloud Ruins) but the soundtrack overall is inarguably outstanding by every measure.

Also being an NES Capcom game, the gameplay starts out pleasant enough but very quickly takes a turn for the impossible. The game allows you to continue from the start menu as many times as you'd like if you run out of lives, but it has no save or password feature and that "Continue" option only persists as long as the play session does--90s kids would have been able to take as many tries as they needed to beat this game, but they would have had to do it all in one sitting. There is a stage select cheat code, but using that to continue where you left off or just to cheat like a cheater kind of gets into a whole big discussion in itself. This is not the first time I've ever beaten the endboss and seen the end credits, but younger me always skipped directly to him. I did make an aborted attempt to get through the entire game a few years ago, and made it all the way to the final stage (where younger me would have skipped to,) but the final stage is heinous (more on that in a bit) and I wasn't able to get all the way through the endbosses at that time. Today's entry marks the first time I've ever started it, played every stage in the middle, and finished it. I played this on an NES Classic, and saved my state between levels. Not to give myself an advantage, but just so I could, you know, go to bed.

Actually, you know what? ( Let's go ahead and tackle that discussion about difficulty and accessibility. )

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.

Hidden my game by mom 3 is 30 more levels of the Hidden my game by mom series. Remember what I said about parts one and two? It's like that but three.

They experimented with a few more interface-screwy puzzles this time, like tapping and holding over a block of ice to melt it, tapping to start inflating a balloon and then tapping again to stop inflating it before it pops, etc. There had been maybe a small teasing of these in the previous games, but I feel like this one has more of them? Maybe? I could be wrong. The levels are kind of blending together at this point.

Still, it's the same zaniness you've come to expect (startle mom with a fly because the jagged speech bubble with her "!!!" reaction is the exact size and shape you need to steal and carpet over a pit on the ground) and I can't complain. I feel like I've maybe just about had my fill of this series after 90 levels total of it, but it was fun and many laughs were had along the way.

xyzzysqrl handled this one before and my writeup is going to sound plagiaristically like hers because my experience was basically identical.

Escape Lala is a short freeware room escape puzzle with pixel graphics. Wander around the cave, solve puzzles, collect inventory, use inventory to solve more puzzles. There are also Professor Layton-style Hint Coins lying around, and I used something like nine or ten of them because one or two of the puzzles are not even poorly clued; they're not clued, like, at all. On the other hand, there was at least one room where I was dinking around with things and I have no idea what I did but apparently it was the solution. (That's good, because I didn't see any clues for that one either, like, if I'd had to actually solve it on purpose.)

Still, one or two bad puzzles aside, what we have here is a short and simple room escape with great graphics, most of the puzzles are clever, and it's free. If you like solving puzzles, there are many worse ways to spend the fifteen minutes of your time this game will take.

There's a longer and more money-costing Escape Lala 2 and based on the strength of this one, I'll go ahead and wishlist it, sure.