Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘Guide of the Butterfly’ and ‘BackFire’
Shorts today.
Guide of the Butterfly is an atmospheric game created by Luke Parker, an indie dev in the UK that previously brought us Dungeons of Loot and Best Garden. This time, players will follow a butterfly on their journey through the darkness.
Simply move the butterfly in one of four directions. The only ‘goal’ is to reach the ‘end’. There is no end in sight thanks to the pitch black environment, but there does not appear to be any other direction to go but forward.
As the butterfly moves, strange tiles will appear on the floor in various sizes of rectangle, some with stars and hearts in the centre. The farther one goes, the more these rectangles will be accompanied by physical objects that cover them, such as boxes. All the while, a sound begins to build.
It’s no secret, nor is it spoilers to say that this is a game about moving forward. Butterflies have been synonymous with transformation and acceptance forever; only here it takes a more somber tone as you slowly recognizes what that beeping sound means, as it is followed by a single tone.
There’s not much else I can say, for it achieves its goal of giving you a space to contemplate life while allowing for the ability to simply move forward. If you want to experience this little game, go for it.
BackFire is a competitive space fighter created by Nebula Projects, an indie duo who we will be seeing a bit more in the future (they have three entries on this page of the bundle alone). For this game, players will be pitted against each other and ordered to figure out “how do I blow the other ship up without a gun”?
The hint is in the name; ‘BackFire’. Players cannot use guns, so they’ll use their ship’s exhaust flames to burn their enemies. This brings a strange paradigm, as the only way to move towards the enemy is to use those same thrusters, but they also need to be facing away from the enemy to burn them. There are tiny thrusters on the sides of the ship, but they do not seem to spark far enough to deal any significant damage. Therefore, it becomes a game of cat and mouse; who can swing around fast enough to do damage, and who can escape getting hit?
Once a victory is awarded, the game ends and you can do it all over again. This makes it quite short unless you find yourself in a stalemate with your opponent. However, the core concept allows for infinite replays if you feel that you can find someone that can always play against you. If that sounds like fun, then give it a whirl.
Installing this game is a tad tricky. Both files are necessary to play the game, but they are not zipped together. If you attempt to install through itch’s client, it will only notice and download the ‘windows’ file and NOT the exe, so make sure to grab both.
Won’t lie, both games were short today — and that’s ok. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.
