Stumbled across another great free itch.io game just now:

Platformer. Left/right arrow keys move, spacebar jumps, and after a few screens, you get the ability to possess in-range enemies by pushing the Z key. It takes a bit of getting-used-to since the main block enemies won’t let you move when you are one, so you have to make sure to trigger their movement and then possess them so they carry you safely past spikes. Also, the only other enemy type (the moving circles) will kill themselves and you if they touch a wall while you are one, but everything else about the game is responsive and intuitive. The level design also has a lot of tricky jumps while still being fair. Highly recommended. You can play it here: https://lightpotato.itch.io/parasitism

Puzzle game. Each container is a grid of varying shape/size, and you have to put all the items (also of varying shapes/sizes) into them. You also have weight limits for each container, so you’ll sometimes have to decide between increasing an object’s size to reduce its weight or making it heavier so it’ll be smaller. Also, most levels have space left over once you’ve gotten everything in, so you can add extra candies into them to get more points (larger candies are worth more points), and getting enough points is how you get three stars (the game never tells you the target score, but the star fills up as more candies are added, and it becomes brighter once you’ve reached the threshold).

The difficulty curve is inconsistent. One level will be tricky to get all three stars, and the next you’ll get them all really quickly, almost by accident. The game also has a whole two levels where you’re not supposed to put specific items in the same container before the game gives up on that gimmick, but since it’s free, I can recommend it for the tricky puzzles it does have. You can play it here: https://legoliomanikas.itch.io/scale-mail

P.S. I did notice that it has an expanded version on Steam, but between the issues with the free version and the fact that the store page says there are only nine more levels in the paid version, I don’t think it’s for me.

• Psycutlery
  

  22 hours playtime

  26 of 40 achievements

Platformer. Standard left/right movement+jump, but you can also do five short-hops in midair, after which they’re replaced by a brief hover move with a half-second cooldown until you land. One notable improvement over Psycho Waluigi is that grabbing things is much more reliable to do: you just have to point the D-pad in a direction and push the X button to throw your spork in said direction, and it’ll damage or grab whatever it hits. Unfortunately, this has the knock-on effect of making the controls slightly unresponsive since you can’t attack again until after the spork comes back to you, and many of the basic enemies unnecessarily take several hits to die/become grab-able.

Level design is okay, but just like its predecessor, the difficulty curve is inconsistent. In fact, for the most part, there isn’t much of a difficulty curve at all from level to level; the game instead mainly relies on different stage gimmicks to set its levels apart, especially the optional Gold Spork levels whose gimmicks rarely–if ever–get used again. Even when the difficulty does spike with some less-than-fair stuff, the game showers you with health pickups–and even frequently offers items that temporarily increase your max HP–so you’ll pretty much only ever get Game Over on the really unfair stuff, and even then, never more than once on the same thing (unless you try to get the “beat all levels with Max HP set to 1” achievement; that’d surely put the game’s problems in much sharper focus).

Each main level has three eye emblems, and you need to collect all three to unlock its Gold Spork counterpart level. Again, for the most part, these emblems are in places that are out of the way while still being intuitive to find, and if you do miss any, the checkpoint-select screen has the eye-slot glow when you have the cursor on the checkpoint before the eye in question (though the glow effect is subtle enough that I didn’t notice it until near the end of the game). Even when world 2 introduces invisible doors that don’t appear until you’re standing in front of them, the level design still clues you into their presence with an obvious nook or dead-end. However, there are a small number of emblems that are unintuitively hidden, notably the second eye in the world 3 boss’s level which requires you to throw stuff at a background object to obtain.

Overall, while the game does have some issues, it’s not too bad for a free game, so I can recommend it as long as you’re not an achievement hunter (and if you are, the game is also free on itch.io so you can try it without messing up your stats).

P.S. I tried out a bit of the postgame campaign that you unlock after beating the main game, and although enemies and eye-medallion-placement are different, everything else about the levels appears to be the same (including things like spike-placement), so the differences don’t amount to much when you consider you can now defeat all enemies in one hit anyway. Suffice to say, I don’t think I’ll continue playing that mode.

• Overclocked
  

  4 hours playtime

  13 of 36 achievements

First thing you’ll want to do in this platformer is go to the options and turn on “Dedicated Dash Button.” Without that enabled, the controls are unresponsive because a quick tap of the X button will only do a basic punch that stuns enemies and breaks a rarely-occurring shield. To actually defeat enemies, you have to HOLD the X button for a bit in order to activate your dash punch. What’s extra frustrating is that you also have to do this with your ground punch–which the game never tells you also requires holding the button, but is still required significantly more than basic punches since its shockwave disables various switches and kills certain enemies that are immune to your punches. Turning on the Dedicated Dash Button option makes the game significantly more manageable and enjoyable since it makes the X button always do a dash punch no matter how quickly you let go, and you can always push the Y button to do those basic punches in the rare events they’re actually required (though there’s still a noticeable delay between pushing the button and the attack actually happening–a delay that can get you killed sometimes).

The level design starts off maybe a bit too basic, but the difficulty curve is pretty solid. Each level requires defeating all enemies before the goal unlocks, which is annoying both at first and in level 6-2 where the path splits and its not clear which way you’re supposed to go first (which is the top route; it dead-ends with two required drones), but all enemies die in just one dash-punch, and the game is usually pretty good about putting enemies in your way so that even doing basic progression means you can’t overlook them. Also, killing an enemy gives you an extra dash-punch before you have to land, and many levels are built around chaining dash-punching enemies to keep yourself from falling. That said, dash-punches send you further than the edge of the screen, so the game has a bit of a blind-jump problem: it isn’t uncommon to be caught off guard by something you weren’t expecting and end up dying as a result. Sure, levels are only a minute-or-so long, but it’s still an issue. The optional Challenge levels are particularly bad about this: the fifth one ends by requiring you to dash-punch upward, hitting three drones and using your last dash-punch to get above some hazard walls, but if you start your dash-punch at the peak of your jump, you’ll end up killing the second and third drones in the same dash-punch, leaving you no way to get the height required to reach the goal. You just have to remember that’ll happen and fall down a bit after the peak of your jump before dash-punching.

Sure, holding X stops your fall for however long you keep charging your dash-punch, and you can push the B button to cancel that charge and start falling normally without spending your dash-punch, and you can then re-hold X after the cancel to stop yourself again as needed, but 1) it’s very easy to forget that mechanic exists (I beat the entire main campaign without it), and 2) it only helps when falling, not when dash-punching in any direction–which is where a lot of the game’s blind jumps are.

Another annoying thing is that, sometimes, instead of having a linear stage, the game has an arena level where you have to fight waves of enemies. However, once again, all enemies die in just one hit, so these levels aren’t too annoying and generally do a decent job at not killing the game’s pace.

What’s more annoying, though, is the fact that the vast majority of the bosses are wait-to-attack, but even though you die in one hit, you still get sent back to their first phase even if you reach their second or third. Did you think you had to jump under the fourth boss’s wall of missiles, only to get blindsided by another wall of missiles coming at you from the other side of the screen? No time to experiment; back to the start of the fight. The only boss that ISN’T a wait-to-attack boss is the final one, and while that fight is much more engaging and fun than the others, the boss does still activate a shield for the length of one attack after each time you damage him, and some of his attacks can hit you while you’re unable to really do anything if you dash-punch at him at the wrong time.

By the way, unlocking challenge levels requires doing extra objectives in the main levels (which you’re not told what they are until after you beat the level), so although I did beat the challenge levels I unlocked, I didn’t replay levels to get any more of them.

Overall, the game does have some issues, but it’s free and has plenty of fun parts, so I can recommend it.

Yup, time for my Next Fest demo recommendations again. Does anyone else here participate? As always, I highly recommend it; genres I thought were all but dead just a few years ago have actually been getting so many games that I can be picky about it. The only real problem is that it only lasts a week, and some devs remove their demos (both good and bad ones) after Next Fest is over. Who knows what other great games I’ll never know about simply because I hadn’t been checking out Next Fests at the time? Because of that removal issue, this time, I tried to mix in some games that I felt would be the type to get removed along with playing the demos I was really interested in, and for what it’s worth, I did end up encountering fewer demos getting removed before I could play them.

I will say, this time, I did notice a concerning amount of blatantly-AI-generated banners among the games, but my Next Fest experience has always been about digging through the trash to find the gems. I also didn’t notice any Advance Wars clones this time, which is disappointing, but I admit I haven’t bought any of the ones that have come out so far.

As always, some of these are wish-list-worthy, while others are just okay for free; they’re not listed in any particular order:

Vertical shoot-em-up. A shoots your regular guns, B fires a laser, and X uses your limited, screen-clearing bombs. The laser is kinda awkward since it starts off slowly moving away from your ship when the button is first held, but it instantly disappears entirely as soon as the button is let go, and on top of this, I didn’t notice much difference between it and the normal shots besides piercing (rarely useful) and slowing your ship’s movement, so I stuck with the regular guns for most of the game. I won’t call this a bullet hell because, besides one moment during the final boss on the hardest difficulty, there was always an obvious ship-wide opening to get through the bullet waves, so getting hit rarely felt unfair.

One thing I really like about this game is that, unlike a lot of other arcade-style shmups, this one actually saves your progress between stages, and getting game over only makes you redo the stage you’re currently on instead of having to start the whole game over.

One thing I didn’t like so much is the fact that the enemy waves thrown at you during the levels are randomized. Even before I realized this, I noticed the last couple levels started getting kinda repetitive and longer than they should have been, but it became obvious when I briefly started new games as the other playable ships to see how they played (their descriptions don’t really explain this) and the game kept throwing different enemies at me as the first wave. Plus, there are times where the randomizer doesn’t spawn any enemies and you’re just flying through an empty field for several seconds. Still, despite this, there is an actual difficulty curve here as well, with the enemies being spawned closer together and maybe shooting more frequently, too. I think the higher difficulties even affect this as well (and sometimes give bosses a new attack), but it’s hard to tell since there’s no description of what’s different between difficulties, and on top of this, I also feel like the higher difficulties increase the number of hits it takes to kill enemies and bosses as well, so between this and the aforementioned repetition, I’d only recommend beating the game once and not replaying it, not even on higher difficulties.

Lastly, although the game is mostly fair with its bullet patterns, there is one attack that’s a cheap hit: the last two or three bosses have laser attacks of their own that spawn instantly, and the only warning for where they’ll show up is an orange reticle against the red/orange background at the edge of the screen, so you won’t see or even know to look for it until after you’ve been hit by it a couple times.

Still, this is a pretty decent game overall, and I can easily recommend it for its base price of $2 (even moreso if you already have it from one of those itch.io bundles). You can buy it here: https://cosmiccrystal.itch.io/hellstar-squadron

More itch.io games, including finally reaching that 1700+ games bundle from six years ago (there were a few I bumped up after seeing SG giveaways for them, but only now have I properly gotten to the bundle chronologically).

SATAN LOVES CAKE is okay for a free metroidvania, though it can be kinda confusing at first because the right path has a few different branches that all dead-end until you go through the left path. Worse, it takes way too long to charge your weapon–and then you have to wait even longer for it to cool down before you can attack again! Sure, there’s an upgrade that reduces its charge time to what it should’ve been from the beginning, but you’ll need to spend your currency on progression powers first, including one that gets quietly added to the shop as you explore the second area and wonder how you’re supposed to get past all these new dead ends. The bosses could also stand to have less forced-waiting in their attack patterns.

Mobility is another platformer that’s really only okay because it’s free, since the levels are quite insubstantial for at least half the game. The goal is to touch all platforms in the level, but you’re really not doing much besides making basic jumps. There’s a hard mode, but that has the platforms disappear after you touch them, and given how aimless some of the levels can be, that’s the wrong way to increase difficulty for this type of game since it can take some trial and error to figure out which path the game expects you to go, so I’d still recommend playing on normal. The harder difficulties also remove checkpoints, which–as I’ve said many times in the past–doesn’t make games harder, only more tedious, so that’s another reason to stay on normal mode.

And now, a few of the bundle games. BIT RAT Singularity is mostly easy, but the last one-and-a-half puzzles are kinda tricky, even if the gameplay is quite sluggish. The rats ironically don’t have as much impact on the gameplay or story as the title and narration would lead you to believe, and the game does end on a cliffhanger, but don’t worry: the full game will come out sometime in 2018! XD So yeah, this is probably all it’ll ever be, and $2 is quite a stretch for how few tricky puzzles it has, but if you already got it in one of those bundles, I say give it a try.

EAT GIRL is kinda like Pac-Man but with more enemies and levels, and instead of one wave of dots lining every path, there are three-or-so waves of dots that only cover specific areas/patterns. It’s mostly okay, but Greg’s chasing pattern can be hard to get used to, and he makes such an annoying crunching noise that I used 7zip to overwrite those ogg files so I didn’t have to hear that noise constantly during those already-difficult levels. I also encountered a bug where the ghosts would sometimes chase you around a corner instead of stopping at the wall (which made a certain small postgame level very frustrating), but apparently, there was an update shortly after I downloaded the game that fixes the ghosts’ decision-tree, so maybe you’ll have a better time than I did. Also, postgame as a whole is kinda annoying since it requires revisiting certain levels with a new power you don’t get until after beating the game, but since you likely won’t remember which levels have those steel crates blocking secret areas, you pretty much have to do trial and error revisiting every stage until you’ve gone through all of them (and the postgame ending was quite disappointing). Postgame also includes a level with a wall of electric-volt shooters, and since the main game doesn’t familiarize you with them that much, it can take some trial and error for you to realize you need to rush forward and go near around half of them to make them put up their electric forcefield, thus delaying their volt-shots until after the other half shoot so that you don’t get trapped by an unavoidable wall of electricity and die. Again, its base price of $5 is a stretch, but it’s worth trying if you already got it in a bundle.

By the way, I’ve been trying to stick to games I’d at least somewhat recommend, but itch.io really pushes Lenna’s Inception hard for just how boring it is. Seriously, dungeon design struggles to be on par with the original Legend of Zelda for NES, and sometimes, it doesn’t even hit that low bar. For all the talk about procedural generation supposedly making games more replayable, a single run in this game felt like I was playing the same dungeon eight times over, just with a different texture pack and boss. Oh, and if you’re specifically looking for an easy romp, this game still won’t be for you since some of the bosses have unintuitive or cheap attacks, like the squid boss’s second phase where it turns into an invulnerable flying saucer and spams homing projectiles (it took a minute or two for the boss to finally use its tractor beam so my bombs would blow it up). Plus, the only way to access the postgame & good ending is to do a bunch of unintuitive stuff that you’d only maybe know about by wandering around the equally-bland overworld, or keeping a walkthrough handy from before you start the game since it’s very easy to lock yourself out of the postgame by accident, and the hint you get in the normal ending is too vague to be much use. Sure, a walkthrough would spoil the plot twist, but it’s also a fairly common plot twist that you’d easily figure out yourself during the bridge cutscene at the halfway point (or you may even figure it out before then). If you want a roguelite zeldaclone, I recommend Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos instead (on sale, of course).

Lastly, On Rusty Trails is a platformer that actually stands on its own somewhat. You automatically walk on the walls/ceiling when you jump at them or walk to a ledge, and after a few levels, you get a suit that lets you switch between orange and blue, likewise toggling collision with same-color blocks and hazards–and even checkpoints! Speaking of, checkpoints are very frequent, maybe even more frequent than they need to be, but that’s not a problem. It’s not even a huge deal that you have to find a nearby token before you can activate a checkpoint, partly since the game doesn’t expand on this mechanic much and there’s almost always a nearby token that’s easy to see/obtain. You could try to beat the levels without spending any tokens, but I didn’t notice any aknowledgement the one time I did beat a level with all of its tokens, so I say just use the checkpoints as you encounter them. There is a difficulty curve here, but it’s very gradual, so it might take a couple worlds before the game starts being fun, but there are also seven worlds total, so it does get there. My main issue is that the last level of world six has green meteors fall way too fast for you to react, so you kinda have to memorize where they fall in order to get past. Also, the first two levels in world 4 weirdly barely have any checkpoints, making them kinda annoying to redo if you die there. (EDIT: And the momentum can be awkward at times). Still, this is a decent game, and even if you don’t already have it from one of those itch.io bundles, it’s still worth getting on its own on sale (it’s even also on Steam).

Been going through my itch.io backlog some more, and as usual, it’s taking me a while to find another game I can recommend without any caveats. Frog Hop has a decent amount of content, but level design is kinda mediocre and sometimes aimless (which makes trying to find the collectibles extra annoying). Plus, the zoomed-in nature of the screen can result in some blind jumps/cheap hits, and the bosses–particularly the final boss–have attacks that you just have to memorize their foreshadow animations to be able to dodge them. Also, it’s $5, which might seem cheap if you’re used to the standard $20-$30 for indie games, but for this game, that price is a stretch at best.

Then there’s Gun Princess 2, which is a free metroidvania with more engaging level design and enemy patterns, but it also suffers from its final boss having cheap hits. Plus, it has this annoying mechanic where you have to wait for your main gun to reload ammo slowly, and this is on top of your other guns having finite ammo that only refills at save points. You also have to backtrack aaaaalll the way back to the ruins if you want to buy some of the items that you’d never have enough money to afford when you first get there, and I beat the game with less than half of the money you’d need to buy the “earn more money” item. Wasn’t a fan of its forward momentum, either.

Super Robot Ninja Girl is another free game, this one being a short platformer which does away with that slowly-refilling-ammo mechanic and forward momentum, but the game is entirely carried by the enemies’ SHMUP-style bullet patterns since the level design itself is quite flat (even moreso than Frog Hop). Plus, its final boss might just be the cheapest out of this bunch; I was only able to win by tanking hits with a full set of health after dying to it previously. I’m also not too keen on its lives system, but then again, the game is short enough that you don’t have to worry too much about getting game over (I only died twice).

Lastly, Xydonia Alpha 3 was ALMOST a solid recommendation, being a highly polished Shoot-em-up with decent level design, okay bosses, and lots of spectacle. Thing is, when you beat the first level, you get three different choices for which to play as the second level–and it’s already annoying enough having to replay the first stage three times to see everything, but the more you play, the more you start to notice certain things:

• The boss of the middle second level (Stage 1B) has its weak point on top of it, which doesn’t give you much room or time to hit it with your rightward-shooting guns. Sure, the green gun has an upgrade that lets it shoot vertically, but you lose all your upgrades when you die, which will certainly happen when this boss’s missiles blindside you by suddenly shooting out fast, 8-way projectiles when they’re destroyed. Also, these bosses take way too long to defeat if you’re downed to your default guns.
• The boss of the bottom second level (Stage 1C) has a move where it suddenly emits blue smoke from its mouth which is also harmful even though it just looks like a visual effect (in fact, I’m pretty sure it’s just a blue recolor of the harmless explosion graphics).
• The third and final level is always the same no matter which second level you pick, and it’s also the one with the repetitive snake boss that does the same thing it already did twice during the regular stage. That said, at least with this one, you can just pause+quit so you don’t have to replay THIS level again.
• The game never tells you this, but the characters in the character selection have weaker weapons the further right you go. If you play as the rightmost character, it’s bad enough that the levels themselves also become kinda tedious. Meanwhile, if the leftmost character is fully upgraded, he can sometimes defeat certain bosses before they’ve cycled their pattern once.
• The meteors in the first stage don’t stand out too well considering one of them comes at you from the left at a decent speed (and that tiny red arrow warning about it also isn’t very eye-catching, either).

But the biggest one of all: the full game never came out even though it had a fully-funded Kickstarter campaign, last updated 2020. I don’t see much harm coming from playing this free alpha build; just keep in mind that this is likely all that will ever exist (perhaps even all that was intended to exist).

• Blobun Mini
  

  76 minutes playtime

  no achievements

Top down puzzle. Arrow keys move, X undoes your moves, and Z is the confirm button for menus. The goal is to move over every tile without moving onto the same tile twice; a fairly common puzzle-type, and sure enough, a lot of the early levels are pretty boring and easy. That said, the game does start to get more challenging as the game progresses, and sure, part of that is because each world introduces new gimmicks and you’ll start to have trouble keeping up with all of them, but there were also quite a few levels where I did remember what everything did and yet still had to think about how to solve the level for a couple minutes or so. Some of the levels near the end are larger than what the screen shows, which is always annoying since you have to burn an attempt simply to scout ahead, but at least there are only a few of them.

Plus, the game’s free, so I can definitely recommend it. There’s also a paid, non-mini version, but looking at its screenshots, the only thing that stands out to me is that it has more gimmicks, including a darkness gimmick of all things, so this free version might ironically be the better game by virtue of keeping its scope somewhat limited in comparison.

Hey, can someone tell media to stop becoming lost? It’s getting on my nerves.

Platformer. Left/right move, A jumps, X attacks, and Y switches between two characters: the guy has a ranged weapon and can jump higher and can charge his shots to break blue walls, and the girl…can break red brick tiles with her sword, which is a bit more powerful than the guy’s regular shots but not as strong as his charged shots. They both share a health bar. Gems are scattered throughout the game’s three levels, and if you get 999, you temporarily get an attack upgrade that lasts until your gem counter drains back to 0.

The plot is stupid, but like with most games of this type, it’s really just an excuse for the gameplay to happen, and the gameplay is fine. There’s a small variety of enemies and other hazards, with the only annoying one being the chainsaws that turn the same color as the walls when they’re not moving (sure, they’re harmless at that point, but you also get caught off guard when they suddenly stop being harmful). The level design is equally varied, even having a couple vertical segments where you have to run from instakill hazards.

For the most part, the worst thing about the game is how there’s no options menu, so you won’t know how to turn off the CRT filter unless you check one of the external txt files. However, the game itself started to lose me with its bosses. First, the level 1 boss doesn’t do much more than shamble around and shoot a single projectile every now and then that can be destroyed with your upgraded gun; it can easily be killed before it finishes doing a second thing. Then, the second boss can’t be damaged by your attacks at all; you have to wait for a bomb to drop and then knock it into the boss, but at least it only takes three bombs to kill it.

However, the final boss was when this game really tried my patience. First, it kept crashing when trying to transition to the final boss’s room, and since the dev had taken the game down, the only way I could get this bug fixed was to use UndertaleModTool and try messing around with the offending gml file myself (I switched back to the original game after the transition worked so that I could be sure nothing afterward was my fault). Then, the boss’s first phase is another wait-to-attack where you just have to wait in the corners for the boss to shoot missiles into its own fists. Its second phase was passable, being a head that flies around and shoots at you, but not only is it too high to attack half the time, it also doesn’t give decent (any?) feedback on if you’re doing damage to it or not (which is kinda critical for a game that keeps flip-flopping between your typical always-vulnerable bosses and invulnerable wait-to-attack ones). The third phase has it walk left and right, occasionally jumping and shooting descending projectiles before stopping and doing that Mega Man Xtreme 2 thing where it’s only vulnerable to one character based on a color hint. At least you get a checkpoint between each boss phase to make them more manageable.

Overall, I did find this game a bit hard to recommend, but what convinced me to make this post were 1) it was permafree before being delisted, so it’s not like this is piracy: https://web.archive.org/web/20201129223605/http://amon26.itch.io/williu 2) this guy also asked for the game to be reuploaded, so I figured I’d also share my upload link for all of you in case something happens to those links at some point, and 3) I spent quite a few minutes fixing that crash bug and selfishly want as many people to know about and benefit from it as possible. Besides, I figure some of you probably already have the game in your backlogs and would appreciate knowing about a potential fix for that crash should it happen to you, too.

Anyway, you can download the original game here: https://www.mediafire.com/file/vysys9frqvcpcrd/WilliU_1.1.5.zip/file

and my crashfix here: www.mediafire.com/file/36a9zuotzb6pgtc/WilliU_1.1.5.0.√-1+crashfix+version.zip/file

(I credited myself under my itch.io username, just in case my tweaked credits txt file confused you).