Sunday! The winter is still trying to hold on, its frosty claws digging into the earth with snow and frigid cold, but the scent of spring is in the air. With longer days and more sunlight, there is even more energy to, yes, play more games! February is shaping up to be an excellent month for indie games enthusiasts, with an absolute deluge of great titles... And great demos to whet our appetites. This time around we're going to look into a pretty diverse cast of fun titles - a colorful, retro-vibed collectathon puzzler, a delightfully whimsical logical game, and a roguelike twist on... Minesweeper, of all things! Let's roll.
RUFFY AND THE RIVERSIDE
Are you a vintage connoisseur of the good ol´ PSX and N64 collectathon platformers? Do you feel a Jiggy and/or Star shaped hole in your heart because of the dreadful draught of the aforementioned genre, then listen up - I have a goodie for you. Ruffy and the Riverside might be worth checking out.
From the first second, this demo oozes charisma, humor, and nostalgia. You have instantly likable characters, a cute 2.5D art style reminding me of a mix of PAPER MARIO and GRANDIA, and funky PSX-era tunes.
This game shouts: "Hey you, just have fun exploring this world, what are you waiting for?". And you just go out there and see where your feet will take you. The game takes its inspiration from a few classics, like BANJO-KAZOOIE, PAPER MARIO & MARIO 64, and adds a unique mechanic that distinguishes itself from its antecedents. While the collectathon aspect seems to be understated (at least in the demo), the focus is more on solving environmental puzzles with the main copy-paste mechanic. It allows you to copy a texture to apply it to a different object or area to change its properties. That's it, now go and have fun discovering what you can do with it.
So far, its use is limited to specific objects in the environment, but I am looking forward to seeing how much you can mix and match your environments with it in the final game and how complex the puzzles could become with it. Overall, I loved everything I saw in the demo and I can't wait for the release. Plus extra points for plentiful chubby birds.
This demo insight is brought to you by Börbo - our newest writer slash contributor
IS THIS SEAT TAKEN?
I don't really know how to frame a thought I have about this game, so I'll try to extrapolate it into a proper paragraph. See, sometimes a rudimentary concept, a simple gameplay loop can be elevated by how well it is executed. Seems obvious, but in this case, I don't mean that it brings some new, ingenious idea to the table. No, it's just... Feels good. Crafted to perfection. It's like that single hot pocket you microwaved by sheer cosmic luck to ideal temperature and meltiness. It's still just a hot pocket but damn, was it good. IS THIS SEAT TAKEN? is a very simple game - you get some cutesy shape-people and need to allocate them to various seats in accordance to their likes, dislikes, and various other minor factors. The puzzles, at least in these early levels of the demo, are hardly demanding, so I flew through them, scoring perfect every single time with ease. The bonus level had a little bit more cerebral requirement but wasn't anything hard either.
What makes this game work is exactly how sublimely the interactions are crafted. Everything is communicated with precision, clarity... and whimsical charm. Your shape-folks beam up with shiny eyes and big smiles when placed correctly. If anything bothers them - loud noises, chatter of others, or the brown note from some showers-allergic folks - they will make it very clear to you with little complaints and fitting animation. Might sound like such a small thing, but it isn't - every single interaction feeds produce that dollop of serotonin. It was pure delight, a sweet pleasure to figure out each little conundrum. And heck, there's even a bit of a narrative woven there! A rarity for a logical puzzler, but we do some characters coming back, chatting it up as we follow their lives through the bustling city.
IS THIS SEAT TAKEN? is now very high on my priority list to play and complete; It brought joy into my heart, with gorgeous animations, a perfectly responsive and flowing interface, and the core loop just fun enough to keep me going level after level.
INFINITY SWEEPER
Love the idea, and squint at execution. The demo is... rough. But first things first. We live in an age where everything is getting zapped by Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz's 'Roguelikeinator'. We have roguelike poker, roguelike pachinko, god damn roguelike calculator! So it is no wonder that some clever people looked at the Windows staple for killing time at the office - Minesweeper - and decided to spruce it up with all the bits and bobs to make it a roguelike. And let me say, the ideas packed here are pretty darn good! Love the unique tiles, their interactions, and the slow and steady ramp-up to fantastic combos, where a single click on the grid can lead to a cascade of various effects. New traps are also interesting, even if some of them are hardly much more than minor inconveniences. The idea shows potential, and with bigger grids, more traps, and a rich variety of tiles we can see a great game shaping up towards its release.
That is if the developers will manage to unbugger it up. Because right now it's pretty gosh darn buggered. I might've been unlucky but the game managed to completely crash on me a few times. Then there were levels where, despite filliping every single time, the game forgot to wrap the level up so I was stuck. And the way the grids are formed seems to have some serious wonkiness because even pretty late in the run I would have grids spawn with like 3-4 mines and 99% of tiles being just my tiles or empty tiles. Doesn't feel like the difficulty curve is working currently. I sure do hope that a more stable and more polished version of the demo will land to check it out... and hope that the final product will be free of such issues. Because otherwise, it's a fun concept executed pretty well, when it comes to the gameplay feel.
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