Symphonia immediately jumped out to me as one of those games that, once people start talking about it, will be talked about a lot. So, that’s what I wanted to do. It’s developed by Team SPEAR, a group of thirteen developers who actually made the game as their graduate project at ISART Digital Paris. You’re a violinist called Philemon, navigating throughout the world of Symphonia using your violin bow/spear to catapult yourself through some interesting platforming puzzles, occasionally getting your instrument out to play it and awaken parts of the map.
Across the world, pride parades are cancelled because of COVID-19. Float On by Queermo Games doesn’t seek to completely replicate the experience, but that idea of spreading awareness of important causes is definitely still there. It’s a web-based pride parade creator, where you can create your own little floats using a selection of different shapes and colours, attach a hyperlink to something important to you, and pop it on a custom server. You can then share that link around, allowing people to not only watch the “parade” and click on the links for each float, but can even add their own to the lineup. It’s a sweet little idea, and worth giving a look.
It’s a little bit difficult to figure out what you need to do in A Skier’s Journey by Samso_n, to the extent that the experience can start to become a little eerie. You play as someone who seems to be having a bit of a day, and find yourself at a skiing resort which--once you’ve bought a day pass and rented your equipment--you can explore to your heart’s content. It’s really gunning for the early PSX-era aesthetic (if the game’s itch store icon being a Playstation 1 game box didn’t give that away) and the further objects become, the fewer and fewer pixels they’re given to work with. It has a similar effect to that of Silent Hill’s performance-saving fog, obscuring distant scenery until you mash your face right up into it to get a better look. It’s… strange, but enjoyable.
Terracotta is a good example of something I’d like to see more of in games; pure self-expression. All you really do is gently walk down a colourful, idyllic little street lined with houses, while overlaid subtitles talk through the struggle the developer, Olivia Haines, is having with depression and productivity. It doesn’t feel like it’s for anyone, it’s simply a creative expression of Olivia’s feelings. People do this all the time in other mediums; they write poems, paint paintings, compose songs; not with the intent of putting it in front of other people, but just purely to make something. Creating something for the sake of creativity is a beautiful aspect of the human experience, so why not do that but with video games?
Perhaps depressingly optimistic, Super Bernie World is a game made in support of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 election campaign. It plays like a relatively standard Super Mario clone, but instead of the goombas having shells, they’re wearing MAGA hats. There’s occasional interspersed scenes of disembodied dialogue explaining what Bernie Sanders’ campaigning policies were compared to rival candidates, and in the main menu there’s a list of ways to support the campaign, so it’s fairly standard stuff for games in this vein.
Stoneblade takes my favourite puzzle game, Tetris, and turns it into a low-pressure C4 tower-exploding chillfest. Instead of having to complete lines before your stack of tetrominoes crosses the failure line, you’re assembling tetromino-shaped blocks of plastic explosives and cartoonish round metal bombs into winding towers that you blast into nothingness with fireworks. The bigger the stack you set off, the more points you get. But there aren’t leaderboards, there isn’t a mad rush to Tetris everything, and there isn’t a time limit. It’s all just blowing up bombs for the sake of blowing up bombs. It’s well good, it is.
I feel like I’ve played hundreds of games like Theorem, but I can’t quite remember what any of them are called. Regardless, it’s just as enjoyable this time around as it was before. You move a cube with a grey X icon on one side along a grid pathway, and you have to get from the starting square to the finishing square, with that grey X icon touching the finishing square. There’s a lot of spatial manipulation and lateral thinking involved, but if you can stomach feeling more like that GIF of the woman surrounded by mathematical equations the further you get into the game, then it’s absolutely worth checking out.
I’m a big fan of the LucasArts point-and-click adventure games, like Secret of Monkey Island. TookiPatooki, developers of Chook & Sosig: Walk the Plank, must be big fans too given how proudly their game wears that inspiration on its sleeve. You’re an anthropomorphic cat called Sosig with a ghostly chicken friend called Chook, who you’ve dragged along with you to take part in your pirate-themed tabletop roleplaying game. It’s even got the sense of humour you’d expect from those games, some of the jokes even garnered an out-loud chuckle.
Delicious Letters is a French Rococo aristocrat simulator. You manage an ever-growing pool of demanding lovers you meet in the city, each with different feelings about three categories of tone; passion, feelings, and spirit; which you learn more about the more you interact with them. The aim of the game is to keep as many lovers passionate about you as possible, by sparingly using differently-toned letter components that you have a limited amount of every day in the right combinations for each lover. It’s more of an engaging puzzle game than its exterior would have you believe, and I absolutely recommend trying it out and doing silly voices for all of yours and your lovers’ letters.
Desktop Garden is an interactive desktop game. You’re a little dude on a floating island, and all across your monitor, pockets of water spawn which you need to water your tree seedlings. To do that, you have to drag windows around your monitor and arrange them so that you can run, jump, and climb your way across them to get the water. It’s still a little bit buggy on account of it being a game jam game, but the concept is just lovely and the art is really cute.
ADRENA-LINE was made for Ludum Dare 46, the theme of which was “Keep it alive.” Here, that’s translated into a procedurally-generated sliding block puzzle game that gives you a short timeframe wherein you have to get your block to the button on each level. It can actually prove quite challenging, and its sepia-tone colour scheme with great use of shading makes it really easy to see what you’re doing. It doesn’t make the game easier, though.
Tanuki Sunset is the video game manifestation of good vibes. You’re a raccoon dog on a longboard, cruising down endless highways with pointy, polygonal scenery and cars to dodge, slide, and jump through and around, all on the backdrop of a retrowave sun that thumps in time with the soundtrack, which ranges from synthwave to smooth jazz. There are two versions of Tanuki Sunset right now, a browser version that’s a little more basic and comes with a mode that plays music from online radio stations, and a more put-together demo which Rewind Games are hoping to bring to the Switch, too. Both versions are free, and if Outrun but with a longboarding tanuki sounds like your jam, give this a look.
