Although DOGS THROWING SWORDS II: Three Barks To The Wind was in that 1700+ itch.io bundle from six years ago, I checked the page recently to see if it had been updated since I downloaded it and I noticed it had gone free to play. For that price, it’s a pretty decent–albeit short and basic–shoot-em-up. The second (final) boss is the same as the first, but there’s still variety since the arena now has spikes you have to avoid. The levels could scroll a bit faster and the enemies maybe take a bit too long to die sometimes, but it’s a solid game overall, and I recommend it. You can download it here: https://itsmelilyv.itch.io/dogsthrowingswords2

I also recently learned that if a game on your wishlist goes free-to-play, Steam does NOT send you an email like they do when it gets discounted; I had to find this out from that “Free 2 Plays That Were Once Buyable” thread:

• Unless
  

  54 minutes playtime

  15 of 32 achievements

Platformer. Standard left/right movement, jump, and wall-jump.

As I said when I posted about its demo, the controls are responsive and the level design is decent, with frequent checkpoints and fair enemies (except the torches in world 2; those things do NOT look like hazards!). Also, although berries are needed to unlock four bonus levels, and the only way to get enough berries for them is to beat previous levels fast enough, the entire main campaign can be finished just by beating the levels normally. Problem there is that the entire main campaign is only 42 minutes long, and that’s going based on Steam’s timer; the in-game timer that only measures level playtime had me at slightly less than 21 minutes. Plus, you don’t unlock berry levels by simply obtaining the amount shown on them; you have to SPEND that many berries to unlock them individually, and although you get 25 berries for each level you B rank, you’re also just as likely to get a C rank on your first play-through of a level, which gives you zero berries.

On top of this, although the levels in world 1, 2, and 4 cost between 125 and 150 berries each to unlock, the dev(s) randomly decided to make the one in world 3 cost a whopping 225 berries! When I beat the game, I had enough for the other three (again, combined ‘cuz you have to spend the berries), but I didn’t have enough for that one, so I just edited my save file to change the level’s unlock status from false to true, and you know what? None of the berry levels are that much harder or more special compared to the levels in the main campaign. I was disappointed.

After you beat those four berry-locked levels, you unlock four more levels that ARE supposed to be much harder, and you know what? They’re not. Beat them and you’ve beaten every level in the game…in 54 minutes, not even half of the Steam refund window. There isn’t even a level editor despite the lack of content and despite the game’s story being about spreading the joy of creating your own Worlds. It feels like there were bigger plans for this game that fell through, or that the dev(s) focused too much on appealing to speedrunners that they didn’t put enough effort into appealing to casual players.

By the way, even after beating all of those extra levels, I still didn’t have the 225 berries needed to unlock the world 3 berry level that I cheated to access.

Still, the game is pretty good overall, especially for free, and even if you don’t cheat to unlock a berry level like I did, you can still have a decent (if slightly disappointing) time just playing through the main campaign and leaving it at that. Recommended.

P.S. I will say, though: I’m convinced that it’s impossible to get to 4-3 from 4-2. The glass platform reforms too quickly for you to get the height needed to boost from the portal; I always either didn’t have enough height or I hit my head on the glass as soon as it reformed. The only way I finally reached 4-3 was by backtracking from the start of the world and going past 4-4.