I gave Gumstein: The Awakening a chance, but on top of having slow, delayed controls ( which make precision platforming next to impossible), levels often require multiple retraversals of the exact same part of the level, often in order to put boxes on switches. I gave up when the game introduced the cannon form, but even though I could enter the form just fine, pushing the button the game told me to push afterward didn’t do anything, neither on controller nor keyboard (I also tried pushing a bunch of other buttons, but to no avail), so I couldn’t progress.

Anyway, I decided to make one post for both of these games since they’re pretty similar in what they set out to do:

Both are SHMUPs, though Black Widow is a Twinstick and Centipede only lets you shoot straight up (without a powerup). Both are predominantly high-score-based games, which is a game-type I’ve never been a fan of since you play them for a minute or two and you’ve literally already seen everything the game has to offer. Thankfully, they both also have a set of a bunch of “challenges,” each with a unique goal, and they can have unique level design and even unique enemy-wave orders/frequency. That said, the challenges are all listed on a single row despite how many there are (you can’t even push left to loop around to the end until you’ve unlocked all of them), with only the next three unlocked despite the fact that they’re not in order of difficulty.

I played Black Widow first, and it’s okay. Enemies can move erratically, but they’re slow enough and your shots are rapid enough that it isn’t that big an issue; even when there’s a huge crowd of enemies on screen, it still feels somewhat doable. Your default shot has range (maybe 1/3rd the screen’s width), but while most powerups let you shoot further, they also reduce the frequency of your shots. Something that really bothered me was when some “kill a certain amount of a specific enemy” challenges just wouldn’t spawn the enemy in question for 20+ second intervals, so I’d just have to sit there and wait (maybe the real challenge is overcoming impatience?). The other challenges are fine, though; you can even turn off “twinstick mode” to make the “do X without killing this type of enemy” challenges easier since now the right stick only aims, and you push R to shoot.

Then I played Centipede, and it’s obvious this was made earlier because it’s worse in every way (EDIT: even the enemy variety is less varied). You can only have ONE shot on screen at a time without a powerup, but each centipede-segment you kill leaves behind a mushroom, and those take FOUR shots to destroy! Worse, mushrooms are the basically the only level design option, with the other being rocks that block your shots completely and can’t be destroyed. As a result, gameplay is a lot slower and more tedious. In contrast, Black Widow would have walls in various challenges, but you could always shoot through them; they only blocked your movement. Back to Centipede: some challenges involve killing enemies with bombs, but the bomb powerup spawns the bomb group in a random location, so you just have to hope it’s near where the randomly-spawning enemies will move to; it’s more luck-based than skill-based. The game also has challenges that involve not-killing certain enemy types, but the flea will leave behind mushrooms if you don’t kill it, and in the “don’t kill fleas” challenge, they spawn very frequently, to the point where you can get trapped in a small area and be unable to dodge the other enemies effectively. Plus, the only powerup that spawns during the “don’t kill fleas” challenges is the orbiting projectiles, which you’d also need to make sure don’t hit the constantly-spawning fleas. Once again, it’s more luck-based than skill-based. EDIT: I can’t believe I almost forgot the worst part: enemy-death explosions are layered in front of everything, and also last an overly-long time with the latter frames being the same color as the background! This means you’ll shoot a bunch of centipedes and you’ll think it’s safe, only to crash into a straggler that survived because your last shots hit one of the mushrooms that spawned behind that same explosion.

Black Widow is worth maybe a dollar, but skip Centipede.

P.S. Previous Epic freebies let me ignore the internet pop-up asking me to share data, but when I tried that with these games, they got hung-up on the loading screen. It wasn’t until I clicked “Allow” that they’d actually go in-game.