Dan Plays Games 12

Index

Gravity Circuit

Some games, you just know from the bleeps and bloops on the main menu: Gravity Circuit has some immaculate bleeps and bloops, and it lives up to that promise in being the best damn Megaman clone it can be. 

Rather than a blaster you have fists and a grappling hook; on top of that you have four special move slots and three upgrade slots to plug in with everything you can unlock from beating bosses and rescuing civilians scattered in each level. I found a loadout that worked for me fairly early on and so didn’t do a whole lot of experimenting, but I can only imagine that the speedrun tech available with all these upgrades has got to be insane.

Not without some issues, the most prominent for me being how stingy the game is with health upgrades (good luck finding the fucking things) and an real bummer of an ice level.

Lost Wiki Kozlovka

A one-sitting (I came in at just over 2 hours) database deduction game about a mystery in a small eastern European town. It's the shortest and simplest of this type of game I’ve played so far, and the way progress is gated makes it fairly easy to brute force solutions (you’re slotting words into blanks in an existing text, so there are a lot of context clues.), but it was enjoyable and it’s a prime example of one of the side-benefits of this type of game: basically anyone can make one on a budget of nothing. This one had one programmer, one other person helping out with the writing, and a bunch of stock assets. Love to see it. Worse ways to spend five bucks, a bag of peanut m&ms from the vending machine at work is fuckin’ three.

Look Outside

Another all-timer for the “RPG Maker Games For Freaks (Positive)” hall of fame. It’s a very different game from LISA or OFF or Fear and Hunger, but if you’ve enjoyed any of those - or just have an inner fucked up little guy who needs some enrichment - I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The premise is that an unknown entity just called “The Visitor” is passing through through the solar system and turning everyone who looks outside into a monster. You need to survive for 15 days. Maybe you find another way through, maybe you don’t. This undersells the experience, as the music and art are phenomenal all around. Especially the latter, it’s got easily some of the grottiest, grossest, and technically impressive pixel art I’ve ever seen. Nearly every monster you encounter is unique, every NPC is distinct in appearance and personality, there is always something new and horrible just around the next corner. You could convert this premise into a DG / CoC / Liminal Horror campaign easy breezy.

Thematically, Look Outside is a very post-Covid game, not just because of how you’re locked in a building and can’t go outside, but in how banding together with other residents and taking care of each other keeps you in better shape than if you try to tough it alone. Your primary form of health recovery is sharing a meal with your party members. Things like hygiene, sociability, calm and morale are hidden background stats. Brushing your teeth and taking showers are important for long-term success, and your party members are often recruited by making choices that go against the grain. Offering kindness to strangers helps you survive the apocalypse.

There are maybe some comparisons to be made to Undertale’s pacifist run, but I think Look Outside does a better job of accomplishing the same themes by treating the nonviolent encounter as the default when dealing with NPCs. There are still a lot of monsters that will just rush to kill you, but for everyone else you start with dialogue and it won’t turn into combat unless someone escalates the situation. An (Attack) option sits at the bottom of your list of dialogue choices for every NPC in the game, putting the onus on the player for acts of random violence. That sits a lot better for me than "this fish-woman recently attempted to murder you, a child who has been attempting to nonviolently go home, why don't you go over to her house for spaghetti dinner?"

The Message from Deep Space

June, 1973: you and three other scientists have been gathered in secret to decode the radio signals transmitted by a crashed alien probe. Naturally, this is pandering directly to me.

The basic structure is simple: probe sends a message, you send back the correct response, it sends the next message. This is another one of those “you are looking at a screen on your actual screen” games, so most of the gameplay is in your head / notebook.

You start just by repeating the Hydrogen Line back at the probe, then mirroring modifications it makes, then completing sequences, and before you know it you’re breaking out algebra.

The main challenge so far (I’ve completed ~170 puzzles out of over 800) is figuring out the syntax of the messages - a task made more challenging by also having to also format your clunky in-game computer display in a way to make it make sense visually (not helped by the aliens using two space functions as a line break and your in-game computer doesn’t split them into two different symbols with two different formatting options, though I eventually found a solution I liked). It can be a struggle sometimes, but there are enough people playing that you can usually just plug the puzzle # into the steam discussions and find a thread with some clues. Always nice to see a community considerate enough to default to a nudge in the right direction, rather than outright telling you.

Cursed Words

A game ostensibly about assembling words from a 5x5 grid of scrabble tiles, which swiftly proceeds to go entirely off the rails with multiple intersecting systems of wildcard tiles and perks to abuse the Balatro-style scoring system. Breaking the game is the intent, and it feels great when you’re able to pull it off, but there are a fairly constrained number of mechanics to make a build around and while you can cross-pollinate those strategies in some fun ways your strategy for a given character isn’t likely to change all that much as you progress through the difficulty levels: certain combos of stickers and stamps can just repeatedly wipe the floor with little trouble. But I’m not entirely sure that’s a bad thing, since it does allow you to breeze through a character’s unlocks in fairly short order once you get the hang of them and that gives you something of an achievable end goal. 

The other major complaint is that sometimes I really I can't figure out what the fuck is up with the dictionary it uses. I’ve scored points off a variant spelling of a Persian loanword (“qameez”), how is “Gaulish” not in the dictionary? 

Time Break Chronicles

“What if Final Fantasy VI was a roguelike?” is the name of the game, though I’ve stuck with the campaign and haven’t actually touched the roguelike mode yet.

It’s a simple setup: you run a team of 6 (out of ~100 potential party members) through FTL-style node maps, gradually recruiting new allies and gathering metaprogression gribblies to build up your home base. Most of the game is combat, which is fine because the combat is fun (and has a speed control: if I couldn’t bump it up to 4x or more I wouldn’t have stuck with it). The number of status effects a given character can have on them at one time can get overwhelming, but with a bit of smart playing you can power through fights and not have to worry too much about what exactly is affecting who. 

The game is still technically in early access and the campaign isn’t fully completed, but its one of those games where there’s more than enough content to keep you invested for a long while and get plenty of enjoyment out of it.

**

Gameable Material Section

The Apartment Complex

A high-end hotel at the turn of the last century, now an increasingly-decrepit apartment building. Four floors, (or three floors plus ground, for metric architects), plus basement and roof. Your apartment is on the top floor, and most of your avenues to anywhere else need to be unblocked (through means found elsewhere in the building - so as not to spoil the game, add your own)

• The 3rd floor main stairwell is locked.
• The west half of the 2nd floor hallway is blocked off
• 1st floor access is locked from the other side
• Ground floor access is locked behind puzzle items
• The west half of the ground floor is also blocked off 
• Basement access is locked and requires a key 
• The elevator is out of service and needs repaired

Figure out where the keys / secret passages are located and you have half the dungeon built already.