To anyone who noticed my absence and was wondering about it: I decided on a whim to make a mod for a game I liked, but it turns out that learning to code is very time consuming: half of the bugs make no sense, and things you’d think would be simple fixes end up being nigh impossible because of how the engine is constructed. The mod isn’t even done; I just happened to take enough breaks that I finally got through all the summer Next Fest demos I downloaded…one month shy of when the next Next Fest is gonna be. Oh well. Anyway, here are my super-late recommendations:

Got this when it was free on Epic, but put it off because the cutscenes were too long for my tastes. Finally went back and started chipping away at it, and now I’ve 100%ed the game at last.

This is a hybrid Visual Novel+Picross/Nonograms game. It’s themed around being a detective and solving a murder, but all the evidence-gathering is just a cursor you slide around until it starts beeping, at which point you click to get sent to a picross puzzle. The rest of the detective work is either done by the characters for you, or you get a choice of three options, being looped back to the choice if you pick the wrong one. On one hand, you really need to be into the story to enjoy the game due to how big a part the Visual Novel segments are, but at the same time, if you’re hoping for more substantial detective-style gameplay, you’ll be disappointed.

The picross puzzles are all standard. No special or unique gimmicks here; it’s mostly just your average 10x10 or 15x15 boards, with the most it deviates being something like having a 5x10 board or 15x10. Near the end, you’ll get a few 20x15 boards (most of which are optional), but that’s as far as it goes.

The story itself is okay. Normally, I wouldn’t bring up story since gameplay is the most important part of games, but 1) it really is a huge part of this game in particular, maybe even more so than the nonograms, and 2) it really bothered me how heavy-handed the game can be with its foreshadowing, to the point it kinda makes the characters look stupid sometimes. For example, in the first chapter, you find out that one of the suspects planted a tape recorder that captured the audio of the murder, and it’s pretty obvious that this guy wasn’t the killer, but the game keeps looping you back to that dialogue choice until you finally accuse him and–surprise surprise–it wasn’t him. Then, in chapter four, one of the suspects asks “Am I a suspect?” because he wants to leave, and I was just like “Yes you are; it was YOUR memento we found near the body, and the other two suspects don’t exactly have the physique needed to beat someone up,” but then the characters are all like “Nah, you can go” without the game even giving you so much as a fake choice like last time. Guess who the killer was.

Overall, it’s okay, but you need to be someone who really gets into the story to fully enjoy this game (but not get into it so much that you notice the plot contrivances). If it sounds appealing and you missed the Epic giveaway, get it on sale.

Despite the name, this is a twin-stick shoot-em-up with zero ledge-hopping–or even regular hopping!!–throughout its entire five-level campaign (there are a few ledges in the game, but they all just act the same as your standard walls). Left stick moves, right stick aims, RT shoots (main gun has infinite ammo), and X summons a force-field that can do a couple different things: tap X and it’ll reflect bullets (uses less energy), or hold X and it’ll chain-absorb enemy bullets (uses more energy) which lets you shoot them back at your own pace. This means that, although the game can often get close to bullet-hell territory, you can easily push the X button to stop the series of bullets coming your way, giving you plenty of room and time to shoot back as said bullets get absorbed by you. Your ammo for those special bullets is based on how much of them you absorb, and pushing LB/RB cycles between your current weapon so you can save them for later. Lastly, you can also push LT to spend some slowly-regenerating stamina to do a dodge, but since this move also makes your character spin around and shoot a bunch, the tutorial introduces it as a special attack, so I thought “I should save this for bosses” and then kinda forgot about it, even though most of the items dropped by enemies recover this very resource.

Oh, the game also powers-up your shot if you hit the button on time with the rhythm-meter at the top of the screen, but I ignored that entirely for the whole game and still beat the game just fine. Sure, I died two or three times, but that was more because I kept forgetting about the dodge move.

Although the level design is fairly simple, enemy placement and bullet patterns are what make the game fun to play. There are standard patterns like five way spreads and bullets in a circle-formation moving outward from enemies, but there are also some more unique ones like an enemy that’ll shoot ice walls in a pincer-shape to trap you in a smaller area for several seconds. The only attack-type I didn’t like are the lasers because 1) they shoot instantly, and 2) the red light-beams that are supposed to serve as the lasers’ warnings are finicky and unreliable. That said, I did realize just now that I played the outdated 2019 version of the game, so hopefully that’s something that got fixed in the 2025 version.

Even if it wasn’t, though, the game is still more than worth its one dollar base price, and if you got that 1700+ itch.io bundle from six years ago, you don’t even have to pay that much because you already have it. Easily recommended. You can buy it here: https://chairgtables.itch.io/superledgehop

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.

• The Rush
  

  88 minutes playtime

  no achievements

This game was really close to being a great free shoot-em-up, but it makes a few notable missteps. First, although the game sets you back to a checkpoint when you die (in one hit), the game still has the gall to have limited lives (max you can set is 9). Also, although Training Mode lets you play any stage from the get go without having to reach it in Arcade Mode first, it still only lets you play a level from the start or from the boss rather than let you retry from any specific checkpoint between them. Sure, you can get around this by going to your AppData/Local/The_Rush_Laptop folder and opening the game’s settings file in Notepad to give yourself 999 lives, but this obviously wasn’t intended; the game was meant to be tedious for no reason, and it kills me that so many Shmups do this. Second, bullets can be kinda hard to see sometimes, especially since I’m pretty sure they get drawn behind your own bullets, so a lot of your deaths will be from shots you didn’t even see, and trying to do a blind play-through of Arcade Mode legitimately will get you a game over on level 2 or 3 (out of 8). Third, some of the enemies and hazards require trial-and-error before you’ll understand how they operate, like how the stage 4 boss shoots directly at you for every shot you land on it (something that nothing else in the game will do) or how level 7 has gates suddenly close when they reach specific points in the autoscroll (not always the same points that previous gates closed at).

Overall, there’s a lot of good here, especially for a free game, but the missteps still make it kinda hard to recommend.

• Funky Panic Attack
  

  53 minutes playtime

  no achievements

First-person platformer. Standard left stick to walk and right stick to look around, A button double-jumps, RT fires your freeze-gun (which you only get if you go through the tutorial) though the lack of reticle makes it hard to aim, Y advances dialogue, and RB toggles a mode where you move faster but constantly bounce. If you freeze a moving platform, jumping off of it will launch you in the direction that platform was moving when you froze it, which is an interesting concept, but it really just makes it kinda annoying to make the long jumps you’re expected to, especially when you only barely miss reaching the next platform despite having toggled on the fast-moving bouncing mode and double-jumped. Making those jumps feels a bit more like luck than skill.

Level design is pretty good. Checkpoints are frequent and hazards are fair. Only issues I had besides the aforementioned launch mechanic is that hazards can sometimes unfreeze faster than you expect and kill you when you’ve just moved past them and can’t see them anymore, and also the fact that frozen hazards still deal contact damage, but both of those are things you can get used to.

It’s also worth mentioning that the game ends very abruptly. The protagonist finds a picture of people who “look familiar,” and then nothing ever comes of that. Near the end, the protagonist mentions that she doesn’t sense what she’s looking for nearby, but then ten seconds later, you enter a door and find exactly that and the credits show up and you’re back to the title screen. It definitely feels like there were bigger plans for this game that fell through, and the demo for its sequel has an entirely new cast of characters, so unless I missed a hidden Easter egg somewhere, the questions raised by this game will remain unanswered (the secret area shown in the game’s only Steam Guide just raises more questions).

Overall, it’s okay for a free game, so I can recommend it.

Seems like the dev is more or less done updating this game, so I’ll go ahead and make my post.

• Void of Lilly
  

  4 hours playtime

  14 of 14 achievements

This game combines overworld RPG exploration with real-time twin-stick battles, but you mostly only have a melee sword attack. There are a couple battles around the middle (and one part of the final boss’s fight) where you actually shoot, but it’s mostly a twin-stick slasher rather than a twin-stick shooter. It has clear Undertale inspiration, but it doesn’t quite play like Undertale since 1) battles are entirely real time, without any turn-based elements, and 2) you don’t have the option of placating enemies; only attacking them. Also, the overworld sometimes has easy block-pushing segments, but there are only three of them in total (one of which is for an optional segment), so it’s not so much a gameplay focus as much as it’s just there to break up the monotony of the RPG exploration.

The game is fairly short; its description claims the game will last around 60-120 minutes, but I must be slow because I reached the two-hour mark when I first beat the game despite picking up from my demo save. Either way, my point is that its short length results in a steep difficulty curve. Even in the demo, I noticed that its last battle (the bit-matching segment) was quite a bit harder than what came before, but the first battle after the demo (immediately after the unnecessarily tedious password-brute-forcing) already reaches the point where it requires some trial and error to avoid everything. The battle after that one is actually easier on account of being fair, and besides the final boss, the only battles left are two optional ones. The hardest one of those, the White Knight, is chock full of cheap shots, and although the dev claims that it’s possible to avoid all of its attacks and beat the boss without taking any damage, I’m not entirely convinced. Plus, if you’re an achievement hunter, you might like to know that the only way to get one of the game’s achievements is not only to beat the game after having defeated the White Knight, but to do so WITHOUT having beaten the other, easier optional boss, as that will lock you into the True Ending which has its own achievement. I definitely recommend following the spoiler-free All achievements and endings guide instead of doing a blind playthrough if you want all the achievements.

Overall, the game can be kinda rough in spots, but it’s also free, so I can recommend it.

This platformer is okay for the most part, but it’s not quite on par with the two games I posted about previously. There are a few times where the game makes you time jumps from moving platforms that also have springs on them, so you have to wait a bit for the platform’s movement to line up with the springboard’s constant bouncing of you. Plus, it has a couple minor issues, like how signs don’t always change your actions at the same points as other signs (though this never caused any cheap deaths for me) or how you can’t use up on the arrow keys to perform your equipped aciton like you can with the W key for WASD, but overall, it’s okay, and I can recommend it since it’s free. You can play it here: https://jefry-umanzor.itch.io/duckbert

This bullet hell, on the other hand, is really well made. The game’s defining feature is that you can “steal” from yellow sparkling enemies by pushing the X key near them when your meter is full. You’re told that doing this makes the game harder–which it does (mostly more projectiles, though some of them move a bit faster–but never so fast that you can’t react to them)–but you’re never told that this is also how you upgrade your weapon, nor are you told that this move can also be used to clear away nearby bullets. On my first playthrough, I didn’t steal anything so that I could better see how the difficulty ramped up, and while it did take a bit too long to kill the final boss, it was still pretty fun. On my second playthrough, I found out that getting hit lowers your weapon power and thus the difficulty, which is a bit frustrating since I mainly only got hit while trying to get close enough to a sparkling enemy to steal from them. I also found out the difficulty/weapon-power doesn’t go above three stars, so you can hang back once you get that far. Still, the extra projectiles and faster boss deaths helped keep the harder difficulty feeling fresh while the game overall was still very fair, and on top of everything else, this game is also free, so I highly recommend it. You can play it here: https://doctor-succubus.itch.io/gotcha-gun

Celeste clone; just has left/right movement, jumping, and wall-jumping. Movement momentum can be a bit finicky, but the level design still manages to be challenging without being overbearing. The game is a bit nonlinear, but due to its short length, that pretty much just means two paths that loop back in on themselves. Unlike Celeste and many of its clones, there’s no set level end; the goal is to collect what would be the optional items in other Celeste clones, then return back to the start, and the ending you get depends on how many of them you got. The game never explicitly says that you have X/X crystal orbs, nor does it even have some sort of cue for when you get them all, but again, due to its short length, it’s not hard to tell when you’ve got them all and can go back to get the best ending.

Also, it’s free, so I can recommend it. You can play it here: https://creamsicle42.itch.io/gravity-acolyte

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.