Since I've moved most of my itch.io reviews to Backloggd, I've decided to keep what games aren't on Backloggd here. (So far, the only game I would positively rate out of all of these is Cargo Breach, and even then it's not a totally 100% strong recommendation so much as it is a "huh not bad".) Every now and then I add some of these games to the IGDB in the hopes of getting them on Backloggd.
Not Yet Played/Completed
No wonder the Allies won WWI. We had temporary invincibility and the ability to double-jump. Seems like an unfair fight.
A cutesy little game that reminds me of when movies used to have little tiny tie-in apps that advertised the movie while being a fun little distraction for a brief time. Charming visual style (except for the Sabaton logo, which looks hastily cut and pasted lmao), nice remix of "Race to the Sea", even a high score board if you're insane and somehow get 30k+ points (not even sure how that's possible, considering how the scrolling speed makes it kind of impossible to know where your jump will land you at a certain point). Not anything to play long term, but certainly fun for a few rounds as a high-effort advertisement for a great (if sometimes slightly jingoistic) album.
Absolutely adorable art, and as someone who once dedicated myself to listening to songs by every single Vocaloid in existence, all the Vocaloids present made me very happy because I recognized them all. Unfortunately, the programming was a bit clunky (NPCs were often in two places at once, Ring once clipped entirely inside a house, NPCs and followers would often block your way, walking speed was a bit slow, and why on Earth is the interact button with Z when your movement is with WASD? It means you have to move your hand constantly while you're playing, when the interact button could easily have been the space bar or enter key), and the writing (which suffered from a few typos) didn't really grab me - though a few lines (mostly Ring's) did make me laugh. Probably the part that made me the most sad was that you don't ever get to see the idol performances or hear any music - not even still images, or unsung instrumentals (since obviously the fact that the stars were canceled Vocaloids means that you wouldn't be able to use their voicebanks). It felt a lot like watching an idol anime, but if you didn't actually get to see any concerts or hear any songs...
A well-put together text-adventure whose competence pleasantly surprised me given the... general quality of the WWI games on this website lmao. I only wish there was a bit more story to it! But it's definitely one of the best I've played on here.
Very cute demo, and I love Sono Chi no Sadame in Undertale sound font. As it is, since it's just a little demo that probably won't be updated, the battle lasts too long for pretty much zero ending payoff. But the idea and some of the other little aspects of it are very cute.
I couldn't recall what to review the first Living Playground game, but I remembered I had ranked it as middling, and this game is similar. It's not that it's bad, it's just that it feels... eh to me? In a way I can't describe. It may entirely just be my personal opinion, because I can't articulate a reason for it. The actual reason I quit playing this game before finishing, however, is that I encountered game-breaking bugs on two separate occasions - first, I got stuck in the police officer's office with the power refusing to go out (I started the game on Pablo's route) and had to restart the game, and second, after I turned back from a slide and was given a rock by the green-haired kid, Pablo entirely disappeared and I was unable to move or continue the game. At this point I figured I wasn't invested enough to risk running into more game-breaking bugs, so I quit. The sprite visuals are super cute though! It's really impressive that no assets in this game are third-party.
I mean, the art was good, and the gameplay wasn't bad or anything... I think this game's premise just stressed me out too much. I was having too much trouble trying to determine whether or not it was overly insensitive to enjoy it. But you might like it, it's an arcade style sort of thing - though it's really hard to manage all the soldiers coming in...
Very beautiful art! I admit I didn't entirely understand what the game was about though... but it feels very personal to the artist, so it's probably more important to them than it is to me.
While I did like some of the stories in this, overall the walking speed was too slow and the background too tedious and mazelike to be enjoyable. The characters told stories, yes, but they didn't really talk to you personally, nor did the characters talk to each other, so they ended up feeling like something isolated instead of dead comrades from different walks of life. I couldn't convince myself to get all the way through to the end - not after 45 minutes of slow, slow walking.
The most interesting thing about this game is definitely the ability to make Paul Bäumer be a dick for no reason. Like when Kat is telling Müller not to be so callous about asking for the dying Kemmerich's boots, and instead of trying to convince Müller to be more empathetic, Paul can be like "actually I think I should have his boots." This is a very funny and terrible thing you are able to do. Aside from that, though, the game more or less reads like a rather dull and very rushed summary of the events of the book with choices thrown in, which is especially apparent with a book as well-written and emotionally-affecting as All Quiet is. You're much better off just reading the novel.
(Also, why is the cover page a photograph from the Christmas truce? That's nowhere close to the same part of the war as the novel.)
Unfortunately, the writing kinda put me off this one... there were a lot of typos, and the dialogue also felt much too modern at times for the era, nor did the characters compel me particularly.
The humor was pretty funny in this game, but unfortunately the gameplay was kind of monotonous. It took forever to watch the enemies go through, and there wasn't a lot of satisfaction in it.
A very busted Bejeweled rip-off where there's no real sense of progression and the timer actually stopped working after a while, leading to me essentially being stuck in the game forever.
Very nice visuals, but the usage of long blocks of text from the book I and probably everyone playing this has already read makes it rather boring, especially since the text is lacking in punctuation and has other errors. I don't think the platforming really adds much to it, either.
There wasn't a lot to this game, I suppose? The entire extent of it was just plugging cords into the right spots (and sometimes even when I plugged it into the right spots, it said I'd done it incorrectly, so I'm not sure if that's a glitch or if I just didn't properly understand how it worked), but I figured that might be a great way to tell a story, and it... wasn't, really? There didn't seem to be one. The cords not going back to where they were originally also means everything gets really clunky and hard to maneuver after a while.
I remember this game really epitomizing the kind of writing where you can tell the author has memorized every single military strategy and the specs of every weapon and vehicle in the entire war but focus on this over actually telling a compelling story with human characters. That kind of feels like what's happening here - you are not terribly motivated in what decisions you make, because you feel no real urgency or investment in the narrative. The typos don't really help in this regard...
An interesting idea that wasn't really expanded on at all. The animations of the French soldiers at the beginning were pretty cool, but overall the art was a bit inconsistent (and the UI was not great) - not necessarily a crime with a good story, but this story had issues. One was that there was a significant number of typos, ranging from the minor to some that hindered understanding, but probably the biggest issue was that just when it seems like the story is going somewhere (when the ghost pilot of the title reveals himself), it suddenly becomes a rapid montage of random events and then just ends. Like a fast-forward was put on the story. It's not even explained why the pilot is a ghost???? So in the end, it didn't really work for me.
Interesting idea - I really liked the inclusion of real letters - but the combination of typos, clunky gameplay, and numerous glitches (clipping, audio playing over itself, sort of aimless gameplay) meant that I don't really recommend it.
Art was sorta cute, but the jumping was incredibly floaty, and when I realized I messed up and tried to restart, the game broke and I couldn’t do anything.
The number one thing you should know about this game is that despite being on the WWI tag, and despite mentioning the "Kaizer", it is in no way a WWI game. This is a WWII game. The country of this game is so blatantly a thinly-disguised fictionalized Nazi Germany that I wonder if the creator didn't mix up the two wars. The art's actually pretty good, but beyond a single line at the beginning of the game in the main character's father's letter where he says to value love over violence, the writing is... not - and when it's a kinetic novel with no choices, gameplay, or interaction beyond clicking to advance the story, writing is quite literally everything. Here, though, it's very, very on the nose, and the characters aren't terrible deep, and the whole thing feels a little like a 14-year-old who just learned about Nazis for the first time and wanted to make a game about how they were bad. The ending twist was sort of neat, but I wasn't invested enough in the rest of the story for it to be worth the journey there...
The idea of carving a violin and learning things about war history as you do is great, and the facts included in the game were quite heartbreaking. I was especially glad to see Walter Tull mentioned, since his status as a black lieutenant in the British Army is oft-forgotten, and I also appreciated the acknowledgement and dedication to the nurse who helped people escape the war, rather than only appreciating those who supported the war effort. Unfortunately, the greatest flaw with this is that it's not, like... actually a good game. All the gameplay is just sort of trying to carve a violin by clicking, clicking, dragging, clicking, over and over again, often without clearly defined places where you're meant to click, until all the wood is gone. So it's a lot of tedium with some sad and compelling facts in the middle of it.
Previously I'd said that this game didn't download, but I downloaded the Ludum Dare version and that seemed to work fine. However, if there was something to this game other than "your tiny character walks around extremely slowly and can see random names, regiments, and years/ages of death on the gravestones when you mouse over them", I did not find it. So it didn't really do anything for me.
Mostly what I remember about this game is that the controls were weird, I couldn't even see the bullet that hit me, and it felt more like I was in some kind of forest than near any sort of trench. Apparently it's unfinished anyhow, but regardless it wasn't very good.
A genuinely fascinating idea for a game - unfortunately, the gameplay, such that it was, was rather tedious and uninteresting, and the writing wasn't subtle or good enough to really invest me in the storyline.
I was really excited for this one, but the writing unfortunately just wasn't up to par with my hopes. There were typos, I didn't really connect with the characters, the ending was abrupt (and also glitched? a character died in my run but it said he survived the war with a wounded leg??), and by far the strangest part was the main character speaking in a Southern American accent. Even though he's Canadian. Huh? Is this meant to be shorthand for him being from a small town? I'm not Canadian myself, but I asked my friend who is, and she said she's never heard a Canadian say "y'all" or "ain't" as part of a typical accent there, unlike in the Southern US. This was especially weird, given that Private Bell was a real person, who I suspect didn't speak like that...
This flight sim was so hard to control that I didn't even know where I was most of the time. I flew for quite some time, hoping to get to whatever the monsters were, but it took so long and was monotonous enough that I eventually gave up.
Very cute idea - I love men kissing across enemy lines - but beyond that there wasn't much to it - it was literally just walking around and finding men to kiss and nothing else - so it kind of felt more like a meme than a game.
The controls, physics, and assets weren't the best, and a man can only listen to Danger Zone so many times before he starts to lose his mind, I fear.
The writing's not very compelling and has errors in grammar and such, but probably most glaring is that at one point it calls the Germans the "axis". They were. They were not the Axis in WWI.
Well, this one did thankfully not call the German forces the Axis Powers like the other one did, but it had the same spelling mistakes and lack of compelling writing.
This game looks really neat, actually, and I was so interested to know what sort of fantasy/death element was going on with the poppies... but unfortunately the game refused to progress (it said I needed to go back and talk to my commander, but whenever I talked to him he said the same dialogue he'd said at the beginning, and I couldn't find any other way to move the story forward). I left a comment on the developer's page noting the bug, but I haven't heard back...
