Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘Lucid Awakening II’ and ‘Painty Balls’
Well these are names
Lucid Awakening II is a massive JRPG created by MomijiStudios, a solo dev in the USA. Serving as a direct sequel to Lucid Awakening, players are transported to a new Epoch in which our protagonist must learn of their past connections across various lives to save those closest to them while utilizing the souls of heroes of old.
Taking on the role of Zeke, Silas, and Terra, players will journey across dozens of different lands in this Third Epoch in order to reclaim the memories and understanding of the world itself. The overworld is reminiscent of the JRPGs with taverns and people to visit and interact with, items to loot, and random encounters to avoid. Characters can be recruited as the game goes on, and the party members can fill out nicely to balance out different tactics and conversations.
The combat is ATB — no surprises here, thanks to the art style and gameplay — as players will set up their party members and fight off various monsters to level and up and gain new abilities. The core that alters things, however, is in the ‘souls’.
Each protagonist detailed above can imbue themselves with two different souls from heroes of previous Epochs, complete with their own abilities and ‘type’. These types correspond to either Pure or Veil, and to switch between them players will wait until it is that characters turn and press Shift, switching to the opposite soul and setting their bar to 50%.
The point of these two types is that they do more damage to the opposite, which gives players a choice; do they go for the opposite type of the opponent to go on the offensive at the risk of taking more damage, or play it defensive and match the types instead? It gives some dynamic alterations to the tried-and-true format which is quite handy.
I could go on about Lucid Awakening II, like how it contains a lovely slideshow at the beginning of the game to highlight the previous game for those that haven’t played (me). How it keeps everything streamlined so that you can enjoy your time engaging in the plot and combat, or how it is absolutely massive.
Regardless, you’ll know immediately if you like Lucid Awakening by how much you enjoy JRPGs; if you love them, you’ll probably have a blast here.
Painty Balls is an oddly named arcade game created by Miguel Antunes, a solo indie dev, poet, and performer. Players will be competing against each other and themselves in a race to simply match the colours, and somehow relax.
Upon starting, players will see a singular ball bouncing around the screen, and a timer in the centre. This timer is surrounded by a colour, and the goal is to tap on the ball to change its colour so that it matches the timer’s colour; that is it.
The whole game revolves around this simple premise, adding a second on to the timer for each ball on screen that is the same colour. When more balls are added, all of them must be matching for the ‘round’ to end — so if 4 balls are on screen and the timer is red, all four must be red to gain the 4 seconds. This keeps going until players run out of time or decide they’ve had enough.
The game is simple, somehow balancing the relaxing nature of colours and tapping to the tension of trying to make sure that you do it within a set amount of time. While originally designed for mobile, I played it on desktop with no issues — even the events that occur to spice things up went smoothly.
If you need a destressor that doesn’t really look like one, check this game out.
