Silverchase @ silverchase @sh.itjust.works

Posts

124

Comments

229

Joined

1 yr. ago

Yes, Maddy is trans. This is both from word of god and a hint in the background of a piece of art in-game.

Ultimate Chicken Horse $5.24 (65% off, matching the all-time low)

Design platformer levels with your friends, then race them to the end, locally or online. Points are only awarded if someone died, so make the level extra dangerous!

Assault Android Cactus $4.99 (75% off, matching the all-time low)

Slick arcade-style twin-stick shooter with a pumpin' soundtrack. Clear out arenas full of robots, build up combos, and go for a high score. A large roster of characters offer a wide variety of playstyles. There's also 4-player local co-op.

Overcooked! 2 $6.24 (75% off, matching the all-time low)

Chaotic co-op cooking, local or online. Complete restaurant orders quickly in increasingly absurd scenarios. Cook in a haunted kitchen, above a mineshaft, in the middle of the highway, or on a burning hot air balloon that crashes into another restaurant! This is the kind of game that people joke will ruin friendships.

Gato Roboto $1.99 (75% off, matching the all-time low)

Polished metroidvania with great monochrome pixel art. You are a cat piloting a robot suit. It only lasts a few hours, but they're hours well spent.

Tunic $14.99 (50% off, new all-time low)

A little guy in a green tunic picks up a sword and goes on an adventure, but the game is in an unknown language and you only have a few pages of the manual. It's like a metroidvania but your progress is based on knowledge.

Inscryption $7.99 (60% off, new all-time low)

You find an old, abandoned video game and load it up. It's an atmospheric, spooky card game, hiding layers of secrets for you to discover. The less you know before starting the game, the better your experience will be.

Hypnospace Outlaw $4.79 (a bizarre 76% off, new all-time low)

Explore a remarkably authentic simulation of the 1999 World Wide Web as a moderator of a Geocities-like website hub. Rather than just being a joke about the corny retro graphics, it's a heartfelt funeral for that era of the internet.

Celeste $1.99 (90% off, new all-time low)

Hard but fair precision platformer by an expert of platformer design. Excellent controls, deep platforming mechanics, and a cathartic story about internal and external struggles.

Some offline-friendly FPS games.

• Half-Life 1 and 2
• Borderlands 2 and 3
• Dusk
• SEUM: Speedrunners from Hell

First-person puzzle games (other than Portal 1 and 2, which you've heard about enough already):

• Once you're done both Portals, check out community-made mod campaigns!
  • Portal: Revolution is a prequel to Portal 2 that introduces a few new mechanics.
  • Portal Stories: Mel has pretty much zero new mechanics but cranks up the difficulty.
• Viewfinder
• The Witness

I don't see Corn Kidz 64 on that list.

Depends on your definition of "new" and "must-have".

• Grapple Dog 75% off — momentum-based grappling hook platformer with a very funky soundtrack and Nitrome-style 2D art (spoiler: the dev was a Nitrome artist)
• Cobalt Core 25% off — deckbuilding in space! There's an actual plot with an interesting cast of characters. The board game-style positioning mechanic was what sold me on the game.
• Cassette Beasts 40% off — creature collector with an identity that isn't just "indie Pokémon". Cool worldbuilding, heartfelt story, grown-up mechanics, and imaginative monster designs that avoid the "animal + element" formula.

The 2015 Monster Summer Sale was particularly memorable for me thanks to the music. I downloaded it and still listen to it! Ultimately, though, I'm glad Steam doesn't have tie-in minigames and flash deals anymore, since it was tedious to have to metagame them for the best value.

Hi! Hi! What the fuck? AAAAHHH

AAAHH

Personally, I consider "retro graphics" to specifically mean the graphics evoke the look of an old game system, as opposed to just having "lo-fi" art. So I'd say that Celeste has great pixel art, but it's not retro graphics, since it doesn't remind me of any old console's look. In addition to the games others have mentioned, I'll point out these ones.

• Nintendo 64 — Corn Kidz 64
• Game Boy Color — Mina the Hollower
• Game Boy Advance — Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo
• Commodore 64 — VVVVVV
• Mid-late 90s PC — Hypnospace Outlaw

Indie games using retro graphics is nothing new. The ratio of effort vs looks is pretty good. The solo dev of Cave Story (released 2004) said that was why he went for that aesthetic.

Joke's on you. Slay the Spire is having a sequel!

Pipsqueak looks interesting! I don't know how I missed it when browsing. If you like that GBA style, also check out the demo for Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2870350/Pipistrello_and_the_Cursed_Yoyo/

I blasted through eight demos yesterday (my Mastodon log). There were some very promising ones.

Akimbot is a third-person shooter/platformer in the vein of Ratchet and Clank. I liked the environment art and the combat shows promise, but since the demo is for the start of the game, the combat is pretty simple. The playable duo is a grumpy robot and a Claptrap expy who don't get along. Their interactions annoy me, so their relationship better improve a lot as the game goes on. This is apparently the debut game for much of the staff, which is very impressive. Wishlisted.

Slash Quest is a lighthearted Zelda-style adventure, but you control the sword and drag the wielder around. It's a funny use of tank controls. I don't know how long this gimmick can last, though.

Ash & Adam's GOBSMACKED is a fast-paced roguish FPS about going goblin mode. The game is a linear chain of arenas against garbage bin robots that only last 1-2 minutes. The combat is intense and chaotic and encourages stylish gameplay without getting exhausting. Compared to Gunfire Reborn, it seems to be less of a "numbers game" with complex build strategy and will take way less time for a run. I can see myself enjoying both at the same time. Wishlisted.

Sparedevil is a bowling-themed FPS, vaguely with the arena gameplay of Devil Daggers. The graphics are goofy and have that 90s crusty 3D look. You get bonus points for trick shots and a powerup when you hit a strike. It's an amusing and unique theme, but I'm not sure how much more game there can be beyond this demo. A run seems to be extremely short: less than 30 seconds.

NBB.EXE is a 3D platformer with Bomberman-style gameplay. It has a futuristic "sports on TV" theme, which is a niche aesthetic that I like a lot. It has a very stylish presentation and graphic design style that's kind of metalheart. The singleplayer content I tried was just platforming with a bit of bombing out obstacles; multiplayer wasn't available in the demo. Unfortunately, the sometimes unresponsive controls, flashy graphics, and high top-down camera angle are awful for platforming. I want to like this game, so I'll at least keep an eye on it.

Pinball Spire is pinball metroidvania. In practice, it's a long, interconnected series of tables with some exploration in between. It's a cool combination of two types of game, but it's not for me. I spend a lot of time fumbling around with the ball to try to get it to the right opening.

RUBATO is a 2D collectathon platformer. It has a lot of personality and a great sense of humour, with a silly plot, funny cutscenes, and bizarre breaks in the art style. The music is catchy and the pixel art is polished, other than the intentional breaks. This is a true pixel art game, with everything snapped to a pixel grid. Pixel art has definitely been overrepresented in my Next Fest lineup, and so far, this and Pipistrello stand out in the quality of the pixel art. Wishlisted.

Slider is a top-down puzzle game that takes place on a sliding tile puzzle. You slide the pieces of the world around to get to places and unlock more world tiles. This is a cool, novel mechanic that I've seen about once before this, in a Flash platformer. The pixel art and music are fine, but not amazing, but it still looks like a complete, polished effort as a student game.

I've been maintaining a log in my own Mastodon thread. I'll summarize from yesterday:

• Push The Cat with WASD is reverse sokoban with interesting story/gameplay integration, but I find the puzzles unsatisfying.
• Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is a stylish callback to colourful GBA adventures. It zooms out to show the GBA when you're idle! Wishlisted.
• Stardust Demon triggers my Cave Story neurons and the 3D FMVs are a very cool aesthetic choice. It needs a little more polish to be great.
• NanoApostle is a very hard boss rush with deadly but well-telegraphed attacks. The range of visual intensity in the art is impressively huge.
• The Rise is a precision platformer about jumping, dashing, and going up. It's competently produced, but I don't see anything novel about it.
• Waltz & Jam is a very cute top-down adventure with interesting characters. It's a lot more forgiving than Tunic. Wishlisted.
• What the Car? Extremely silly. Wishlisted.

The repo has source code and a brief writeup, including run instructions. It's an x86 port from Atari Basic. Actually, since this video, a contributor cut it down to 483 bytes!