This week, we arm-wrestle with hairy, ripped animalmen. We play chess, with a twist. We wait for a train, we shoot arrows at each other, and we sneakily kill each other from the grass. Note: I'm including last week's column at the bottom of this one, in case you happened to miss it last week.
Bog by Yannish
Bog is an extraordinary local multiplayer game with a name that conjures images of swamps and sewage. Boo! it's great because it manages to be a same-screen stealth game, by using long grass to disguise your character's position from your enemy—who is probably sitting right beside you on your sofa, sharing your monitor. I love the off-kilter angle, the delicious pixel art, the use of colour too. Bog is charming, beautiful and smart.
Station Fantome by Pol Clarissou
Pol Clarissou's "idlescape" puts you in a creepy metro tunnel, a creepy metro tunnel you can't escape from (or even move in). All you can do is wait for the occasional train, staring into the empty windows of its carriages for any flicker of life. (You won't find it. I think. I hope.)
Chesser by Chris Wade
"Chess is slow. Chess is tedious. Chess doesn't have particles. Fuck that. Chesser is like Chess but more."
Unlike normal Chess, Chesser features a button that kills all the units along a single row, which I'm sure they would have had a thousand years ago if they knew were smart enough to program video games back then. It also reduces the board to a perhaps more manageable size, allowing for easy rotation with its two giant buttons, to smooth over the process of single-seat turn-based play. (Via Warp Door)
The Old Man Club by Michael Koloch
A...loose adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man And The Sea, The Old Man Club is a game about arm-wrestling that you probably don't want to play if you suffer from RSI. You do the wrestling by clicking the left mouse button here, and oh yeah you're wrestling a bunch of exquisitely drawn, bulky men with animal heads. It's short, it's really funny, it's a bit disturbing. Play it, obviously.
Sagittarius by George Prosser
Another local multiplayer game, and one that asks you to share a mouse and keyboard with your opponents. Like Bog, this is game that does new, smart things with the deathmatch model, giving each player a bow, and arrows that obey the laws of gravity. "You idiot, all arrows do that", you're probably furiously typing right now, but they don't often do it around a series of colourful planetoids. Your little bowperson can walk around their planet, and draw back the mouse to aim their shot, but its trajectory depends on the gravity wells of nearby planets, which will often interfere with it in interesting ways. This is lovely and creative, and I think it would look beautiful on a massive screen, in front of a bunch of friends.
Previously, on Free games of the week:
Claw Champion Earth by From Smiling
This Indies Vs Gamers Jam game concerns that rigged mechanical claw game you find in amusement arcades. Here it's not (apparently) rigged, and you actually stand a decent chance of grabbing and retrieving precious items, before your opponent snaffles them from under your nose. Yep, this is competitive clawing, where you're often locked in a battle of grabbers, fighting over that shiny jewel or rubbish-looking DVD. When both player and CPU tussle over the same object, points rack up at an alarming rate, with each tug swaying the points counter this way or that. A smart expansion of an existing idea.
Celeste by Matt Thorson and Noel Berry
PICO-8 is a "fantasy console" that lets you make, share and play little games using a surprisingly powerful set of tools. Prolific indie devs Matt Thorson and Noel Berry have used it to make Celeste, a clever platformer where you die repeatedly on spikes and down sheer pits. Between these deaths are brief moments of progress, where you learn to master the game's novel and well-implemented dashing mechanic. You can dash in any direction, and also in the air, but you need to land in order to 'recharge' your aerial sprint. You can tell when a recharge is due by the colour of your hair, which changes from a reddy pink to a shocking blue. The music is ace, the colours look lovely, and you'll want to keep playing Celeste to get better at it.
Wibble Wobble by Daniel Linssen
A very wibbly wobbly Indies Vs Gamers Jam game, that tasks you with collecting stars while avoiding nasty red spikes. Two things make this difficult: the constantly fluctuating ground, and the reddy badness that pokes through the floor when the wibbles pass below the dotted threshold. The music, by Shannon Mason, is basically incredible, evoking Jeremy Soule's exceptional Secret of Evermore soundtrack (at least to me). The other parts of Wibble Wobble are very good too: this is a compelling, and oddly serene score attack game.
Clouds Below by Tree of Life
A gorgeous, and fairly computer-hungry, game about exploring a series of floating Unreal Engine islands. You have wings, and in the game, and you can use your game-wings to shoot straight up into the air, and then to glide birdlike across the map. This is a wonderful feeling, evoking some of the joy of movement found in thatgamecompany's balletic games.
Afterglow by Swofl
Swofl's remarkable puzzle game makes great use of shaders, swish visual effects and sounds, but it's the brainteasers themselves that cause me to recommend Afterglow. They're tough, unusual puzzles that require you to investigate your homely/scary/doors-keep-shrinking-on-me environment in exquisite detail. (And if you find them too much for your brain, like I did, you can lower the puzzle difficulty, and see the world adjust instantly.) Highly recommended, unless you're currently feeling a bit queasy: this world does sway quite a bit.
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