With RAMP out of the way, I returned to wasting my free time on videos game.
I played a bit more of The Last Door - Season One. Not really enough to comment further on the game as a whole. But enough to note that the quality and "polish" on the presentation is significantly improved in the second episode.
Nauticrawl is one of a few games about working out how to operate some very cumbersome and poorly documented machine. In this case you play as a convict escaping from an alien ocean base in a strange submersible craft. The game starts with you in front of a screen full of incomprehensible controls and gauges. You have to work out how to start and operate this machine from nothing. This is an incredibly satisfying and novel puzzle-solving experience. Then after you've spent 10 minutes working this out, the game takes about 5 seconds to tell you the game is about being fast and precise. It's at this point the game stops being enjoyable.
Golf Monday is a top down golf game. One of many small pico8 games by "apskeppet" (maker of Hellgineer). Other than the novelty of having to physically move your character around the course, the game is very slight. You walk up to the ball, press a button to address, move the aim (the aiming circle expands to indicate uncertainty on longer shots) with directions, then press a button to swing. That's it. And it works perfectly. There's just enough random ephemera around the course (funny signs, golf carts, other golfers) and random interactivity to keep it interesting. A great way to spend 15 minutes.
I have to play the game Star of Providence every few months to remember it exists. The game was formally called Monolith, but was renamed after jumping at shadows from a hypothetical legal threat over the name. Other games have since re-used the name "Monolith", so now a fantastic game is stuck with a different name nobody remembers. Which is a shame, because it's still incredible. It's a top-down "dual joystick" (mouse + keyboard) shooter, with roguelike-ish tendencies. Every run feels different, with a variety of enemies, weapons, and fantastic bosses. And feels great and controls well (other than some slightly finicky collision.) Though I do have my usual complaint that the meta-progression, of unlocking the ability to unlock things, doesn't add anything to the game.
Agent A: A puzzle in disguise is a puzzle game of first-person static scenes. It has a contrived, but entertaining, story about the titular Agent A infiltrating the insane byzantine puzzle mansion of "Ruby La Rouge". It's vaguely similar in tone to Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent, but with far less charm. That said the puzzles are mostly enough to keep the game going, just satisfying my enough to power through the mounting minor complaints. Unfortunately there are a few too many choke-point puzzles, and the interface is terrible (The worst sin is using escape to pause, and the using escape again to do something other than unpause). And worst of all, every time I had to look up a puzzle, I did not regret it. Despite this, I think there's a lot more good than bad in this game. Recommended if you want to unlock a door my making all the lights on a grid switch off.
I also played the developer's second game Down in Bermuda. The good news is that they've discovered how to pause a game properly now. The bad news is that the game is mostly clicking on shiny objects, or pulling a lever to open a box containing a shiny object, or rotating the screen to find a shiny object. Also the game is set on "Bermuda", which in real life is not an uninhabited rock, but an island with one of the highest per capita incomes in the world.
Having finished making my own map, I started playing the other maps in RAMP2024. RAMP2024 itself is still in beta, but the overwhelming majority of the participants' maps themselves are completely finished. This year, the project's metagame involves a train traveling between various themed stations while Transport Tycoon music plays. You can either free roam between them or search out a map you want to try. Or you can take on a quest mode that involves stopping at one of the stations and completing a certain number of maps. I'm really enjoying the theme this year, though if I had a complaint it's that the actual goals seem wildly inconsistent. My first station required me to complete "30 points" (based on map length and difficulty) worth of maps, but the next one just required finishing any two maps. I suspect this is just an artifact of the unfinished nature of the project though.
Anthology of the Killer is a collection of the assorted ...of the Killer games in one handy executable art gallery simulation. I had long planned to play all these games before the release of this collection, and avoid the shame of "waiting til its done". Having committed this great moral failure, this is actually a very convenient way to play the games. And the presentation gels well with the contents of the games.
Ostensibly the games in Anthology of the Killer concern zinester "BB" and her adventures in her local murder-infested town. Most of the episodes involve BB on some sort of journey, encountering a threat to her life, and then running away. Gameplay features advanced features like "movement" and very very occasionally selecting items from a menu, or picking up collectibles. The maps in the game are very evocative, and seem much more robust to the prying player than the usual walking sim adjacent game. But it's really the absurd and brilliantly creative humour in the writing that carries these games.
As a special bonus this week. There will be added sections for individual RAMP 2024 maps and ... of the Killer games shortly.
All Games Played
- Leaf's Odyssey: Great
- The Last Door - Season One: Good
- Nauticrawl: OK
- Golf Monday: Great
- Star of Providence: Great
- Agent A - A puzzle in disguise: Good
- Down in Bermuda: Disappointing
- RAMP2024: GREAT (Notable)
- Anthology of the Killer: GREAT (Notable)