Recommending games. (2/25–3/3)

quasiotter
4 min readMar 4, 2018

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Hi.

This year I’ve been documenting every videogame I play. Most of these are tiny one-session games that I might forget about if I don’t keep the memory of them. Steam games are documented via my reviews that tend to have a more personal slant for recollection purposes. I often leave ratings for creators on itch.io as well, and those automatically show up in a collection “My rated games.”

Developers encourage people to share their work, and I love doing exactly that, so I figure I’d make my documentation public in some form! I’m not sure what is the best way to do this, but here are the considerations:

  • I’m only posting games I recommend, just once, regardless of when it was released. I’m not posting games I don’t enjoy for whatever reason.
  • Recommending the game is more important than showing off my writing/design skills.
  • What platform to use? Medium seems like a great place to try this out. I’d prefer to do this on Twitter, but I’m not quite sure how it’d work with its four-image limit.
  • Weekly sounds like a good time period, but I don’t know if I care about keeping a strict 7-day schedule. I feel that if I can post whenever I think is best, that might be more fruitful.
  • I want to keep this process simple because I’ll burn out trying to make it all fancy and shit.

Anyways, here are games I’ve played from 25 February-3 March!

Free games

The World Beneath by Clément Duquesne

A low-poly dark cave traversal: https://spotline.itch.io/the-world-beneath. This was recommended by the creator below…

Gem Flask (wandering game) by clyde

A NaissanceE-like created before bedtime: https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/11008

Breakpoint by Baycun, Sam Blye, Harrison Bright, Levi Davis, Jesse Hamel, Austin Hibbs, and Quade Zaban

Psychedelic glitchy 3D platformer. It was admittedly frustrating enough for me to quit without completing it, but considering it is free, it was totally worth tripping out for twenty-or-so minutes. https://quadezaban.itch.io/breakpoint

Dinosaur Party by everythingistaken

Daily cute browser games: https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/11003

The Spicy Meatball Saves The Day by Cheeseness

First-person text adventure. Despite my distaste for text-heavy games, I really enjoyed this. Uses mouselook and requires imagination. https://cheeseness.itch.io/spicy-meatball

The Invincible Run-Gun-Bot by GuerraGames

Super cool shooty platformer. I think I’m going to do a little feature on Pico-8 platformers someday. https://guerragames.itch.io/run-gun-bot

Gift by rxi

Key platformer with quite lovely tiny graphics. https://rxi.itch.io/gift

Knytt Stories+ user-made levels

Knytt Stories is an amazing atmospheric platformer. User creations are emphasized. Download it for free here: http://egomassive.com/ks/

Capitalism! by googoojoob

Just… play it. https://nifflas.lpchip.nl/index.php?topic=968.0

Under the Crack by Dessgeega

Lovely little thing. http://levels.egomassive.com/?p=173

Don’t Eat the Mushroom by Uncle Sporky

Apparently, this is a staple of KS. http://juniverse.spriteclad.com/otherlevels.html

Paid/well-known games

Tower of Guns by Terrible Posture Games

FPS roguelike-like-like. Or something. The appeal here is that you only shoot robots. No murder. It’s quite idiosyncratic and makes me want to hug the developer. The screenshot is from a bonus level. It’s cute. http://www.towerofguns.com

The Swapper by Facepalm Games

Puzzle-platformer, one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played. I was stuck on the pictured puzzle for about two hours over five play sessions, and I think I kinda fudged a solution that might not have been intended. Oh well! http://facepalmgames.com/the-swapper/

TNT: Evilution (completed!). This is part of Final Doom and contains incredibly good and/or fun level design. I didn’t take any screenshots, sorry.

Doom64 EX by Kaiser

A source port of the original Doom64. The lighting and sound design really make me favour this over the original Doom games. Heck, when I was a kid, I bought the strategy guide despite the fact that only my older brother played it. https://doom64ex.wordpress.com

Thanks to Sergio Cornaga for noting items I needed to correct.

Alright, that’s it for this week. I’m not quite sure how this will evolve, or how long it will even last, but I’m hoping this isn’t a one-time only event! Feel free to suggest anything at all!

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