[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Hell Dive through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Hell Dive Systems: Windows, Linux Release Date: January 7, 2025 Publisher: Teacup Games Developer: Teacup Games Time Spent: 2.7 Hours
We have an entire playlist up on YouTube here, which I'll be referencing throughout the article. So go on and have a watch; it'll do ya good.
Hell Dive was a retro-inspired minimalist survival-horror game that was light on narrative, but absurdly strong on creating and maintaining an oppressive sense of dread marred only by the game being overly cryptic to a fault.
Hell Diveis the very definition of "bare bones" when it comes to story, although I admittedly didn't read as much on the computer during the first couple of stations and I never did figure out what the display in the bridge was for (although I did try using the security keycards, those didn't seem to work). Visually, all we know upon starting is that we're a person named Daniel who is on a submarine that submerges and that there's a partially leaking hole in the side of the sub. There is the voice of VIRGIL (VIRtual Guide, Info & Liason) who addresses the player as "Daniel" and that Daniel is once again, functional; which makes me wonder if Daniel is even a human or some kind of android?
Without directing the player what they need to do, you kind of bumble around the three areas of the submarine: the quarters, the engine room, and the bridge. Through exploration and trial and error, you find a gas canister that you can use on the engine and a button to push to turn the engine on. You also then find a fixed key/ignition in the bridge along with controls to move the submarine. If you watch any of the playthrough videos, you'll notice that I only use one aspect of the controls at a time, and only in the late game did I realize that you can have the sub moving while also turning at the same time. But despite that, I thought that having separate controls for moving forward/backward and turning was a neat little mechanic. Then using logic derived from playing video games for at least the last 38 years, I drove the sub forward for a few seconds before seeing a structure that read "Storage Offline." So that was where I went intending to turn this Storage Station online; also because there was the lighted list on the bridge that looked essentially like an objective list.
The basic structure of the game from this point on was pretty much the same. You pilot the submarine towards the next station that was offline, explore the unique area, turn the power back on, make your way back towards the submarine, and then find the next station. What changes is the theme for each station and how you go about turning on the power. Some stations will have an enemy that will relentlessly pursue you once spotted, while others only offer the threat of an enemy attacking you, keeping you on edge the entire time, only to make it back to the sub without any issues.
This lingering threat and ever-increasing sense of dread is where Hell Dive really excels. The first station is a great tutorial level for what is expected of you without any enemies to run away from. Just the basics on how the mechanics of the game operate between filling the engine with gas (which was already introduced in the sub), following power lines to switches and power room (which was already introduced in Jurassic Park), the battery life on your flashlights, and inventory management. Pretty typical survival-horror material. Then, in the second station, the game introduces the invincible enemy that if it catches you, you're dead. So when you finally make it back to the sub after having turned the power on and escaped the creature, the sub now feels like your safe place. That nothing can harm you here, that you're completely safe. And that's when VIRGIL questions if you're the only one on the sub and that there might be someone else on board. That was terrifying and brilliantly timed.
And I still don't know what that thing poking out of the toilet was supposed to be. Was there a payoff to that? Did I just miss something somewhere? Was it just there to creep you out and keep you on edge? And as mentioned way back up there at the top, I don't know what the card reader-looking display in the bridge was used for either. Maybe I needed to collect all of the ID badges and use them sequentially to get the display to work. Maybe there were cards that I was supposed to pick up that weren't door key cards? And speaking of missing something, I don't know if I could tell you what the end of the game meant. There was the ice throne across from dozens of video monitors. There was the final elevator that cut to a cutscene that included the creepy-ass doll from Recreational Facility, which coincidentally was also the station where "Murderer" and "REDRUM" were written out in children's blocks. Had Daniel murdered everyone on each of the stations? Did Daniel somehow cause the downfall of this underwater society? Was Daniel a human or an android?
What then was the point of the game?
So many questions were left unanswered, or at least, left completely unable to be deciphered by me. And yet, I wouldn't classify Hell Dive as a bad game. Maybe a little incomplete feeling in the narrative department, but how successful I felt it was in creating and maintaining that uneasy feeling of what's around the next corner was spot-on brilliant, and I will not fault that game. Hell Dive was by no means a perfect game, but where it excelled in the terror department, it really excelled.
P.S. I realize I didn't really mention anything about how the game ran on the Steam Deck, and that might've been a subconscious afterthought. The game ran perfectly fine. I did have to manually invert the y-axis on the camera, but that was it. So that's really all I feel like needs to be mentioned as far as Steam Deck compatibility
I tried to find additional information about "BGM #9" from the 2002 PlayStation release of The Amazing Virtual Sea-Monkeys, but all I was able to find was that this song seems to have been used on Levels 7, 16, 25, and every nine levels all the way up to Level 70. From what I could tell from what I watched of a longplay, this was just the ninth track of the game and was used for the 7th level and every nine levels thereafter. All of the songs in the game fit well with the side perspective solving action that was all the rage of the early 90s (e.g. Lemmings, The Humans, The Adventures of Lomax, etc). It just fits well within the context of the game as well as out of it. Which is why we're all here today.
What can I say other than I'm a sucker for a song in a minor key that resolves from descending notes down to the tonic. I will also add, major kudos to Stephan Reuleaux for throwing the rarely-used key change around 1:24 along with the change up in the drum machine. Great work there.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Unreachable through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
[Trigger Warning: This game involves audible scenes of the murder of a minor. Within the game, there can be audible scenes where a minor is beaten or shot, although there is no discernable difference, from what I could tell, between the adult and the minor being killed. These scenes happen over a radio so there are no visuals, but even the audio some audiences might find disturbing]
Where do I start with Unreachable?
Well, if you haven't already, you can start by watching my playthrough of the series here:
Unreachable[A Stage Select Start Playthrough]. There are four videos covering the entire game. Well, the "entire" game through the one particular ending that I got, which I believe is one of three possible endings.
There is a lot that is good in this game, with a couple of things that are bad and/or hampered the game a bit. The good definitely outweighs the bad though, so if you're looking for the tl;dr, it's that Unreachable was a pretty good game that felt mostly successful in what it set out to do. I will preface that I played this on the Steam Deck and there were a couple of issues likely related to the fact that the game was not designed or optimized with the Steam Deck in mind. Such as, there are at least two times in the game where you are required to type on a live keyboard, not an in-game keyboard [although this could be (somehow?) to make the game controller-compatible and likely "Steam Deck Playable] with one instance essentially soft-locking me from being able to complete the good ending of the game; or maybe the good-bad ending instead of just the bad-bad ending. There were also several instances where I had to pause the game to go into the controller settings to either update or create new keybindings because again, this game wasn't designed with a controller in mind. There's good here, punctuated by not-so-good.
Unreachable is mostly a stealth game with psychological-thriller elements and for the most part it excels at both of those genres (except when it doesn't which we'll get to later). You play the role of Harry Bernes, a cop in rural Smalltown, America who gets pulled into an evening of global espionage against his will after he drives home after a long day at the office to find his young daughter and estranged wife. The kidnapper leaves a radio that they use to communicate with Officer Bernes throughout the game along with bits of spy equipment that's used in context-specific moments in later chapters. You are often required to complete tasks within a certain time limit (at the kidnapper's discretion, so there's no actual in-game clock) or they'll call you out on your tardiness, or just straight-up broadcast the murdering of your family as Harry yells into his own microphone. Harry spends the majority of the game crouched and scurrying around darkened houses, office buildings, cemeteries, and warehouses since running/walking of any kind will draw the attention of local and government authorities who are prowling the area.
Let's go over the few issues with the game that I felt hampered the overall experience.
The biggest issue with Unreachable was how it used cutscenes. There are times in the game when information needs to be communicated from the kidnapper to Harry, and that is mostly when the cutscenes come into play, but they're not traditional cutscenes where the perspective changes. These cutscenes all happen when you're in control of Harry until you're not. In one instance, you're standing in front of a computer to insert a USB drive while two people are patrolling the area. Once you press [F] to insert the drive, the cutscene starts where the kidnapper and Harry have a conversation about what now needs to happen. During that whole conversation, you do not have control of the camera, and therefore, nothing bad can happen to you. You will not be walked in on, you cannot try to find a place to hide if you hear footsteps, you just stand there while being talked to. Because this isn't the first instance of this happening, the player knows that nothing bad will happen to Harry during this sequence and because nothing bad can happen, there is no tension, because if something bad does happen, it was supposed to happen, not something that you could avoid. Every time this happens in the game, it's during a moment when Harry is audibly worried about being caught and thinks he should do something different besides stand around, but to the player, it's just another cutscene to patiently sit through.
Significantly less important, was the hitbox, for lack of a better term, used for objects you had to click on. More often than not, what you needed to click on, be it a pair of earbuds or a car door handle was literally the exact outline of that object. Earbuds are not large objects so getting the single dot reticle exactly over where the earbuds were often felt like an exercise in preciseness that I was not excited about. Maybe it's an in-game way of trying to create and amplify a feeling of stress and anxiety, like Harry's fumbling with his keys, or can't quite grab a hold of the car handle on the first go? Just speculation of course.
There were two short-lived mechanics that I had issues with on a couple of levels. The first was the focus mechanic in Chapter 2 where you had to zoom in (the default was to press and hold the R Joystick), but I had to remap the button to the L shoulder button. A short-lived mechanic that came up in Chapter 4: Lucky Cemetary, was the night vision goggles. The goggles themselves worked fine and the visuals were fine as well, but once enemies were introduced in the second half of the stage and an all-of-a-sudden battery mechanic kicked in that chapter became frustrating. Because of each of the different elements at this point in the chapter: the maze-like paths of the cemetery, the multiple patrolling enemies, the obscuring nature of fog, and the player trying to figure out what a "clue" would be in the cemetery without any additional hints, means that you're going to be doing a lot of wandering. Wandering in the fog while avoiding enemies means you're going to need to put on the night vision goggles to make sure that you're not about to walk into the path of an enemy, and when you check for enemies before you move out of a hiding spot. Using a stopwatch, I figured out that there's roughly only 60 seconds of battery life and at that point, the only real thing to do is to get yourself killed just so that you can get a recharged battery. Considering that one of the game's selling points is the tension that builds when you're in this situation, having a mechanic that makes it literally impossible to complete the level in a single run feels pretty bad. And now even knowing where all of the clues are in the chapter, I don't think it would be possible to complete this chapter on a single battery charge, even using the battery sparingly. This then requires the player to find a clue, maybe two if they're lucky, then get themselves caught/killed just to have another go with a fully charged battery. Which then brings up something good to talk about.
One of the key mechanics in Unreachable is the clue system that requires Harry to find a certain number of clues in each chapter in order to progress the story, like finding four clues in the cemetery before you can leave and move on to the next chapter. Sometimes the time required to find the clues is hidden behind an in-game timer with the kidnapper becoming frustrated if Harry isn't moving fast enough, while others trigger the kidnapper to tell Harry that he's finished with that particular area and that he can move on. Thankfully the devs have given the player a bit of leeway in the collection and retainment of these clues in that if you're caught/killed/family is killed, any clues that you had collected up until that point, still count as collected, even if you restart from the last checkpoint 5 minutes prior. This saving of clues even if you die is a proverbial godsend because specifically in Chapter 4: Lucky Cemetary, this would have been a stopping point for me if I were required to collect each clue every time I was caught/killed.
The document and "photographic memory" mechanic I also really enjoyed, coupled with how the games doesn't do any kind of handholding in terms of solving puzzles. Knowing what email address to use in Chapter 3 and the answer to the security question were great. I also didn't mind the overabundance of clues and red herrings either as it made the characters and world feel more fleshed out than had there been highlighted sections in documents that pointed to only important information. Being able to solve a puzzle on your own is infinitely more satisfying than following a walkthrough. While in the police station, I thought I would need information from a Morse code transcript until I realized that that was probably being too thorough and stopped a few words in; this wasn't Jerichoafter all. That being said, I did get stuck on the final puzzle, where you had to know what code name to enter into the pager to start the process of calling out for help. Part of giving up on that puzzle though was due to issues with the Steam Deck closing down the pager interface every time I pressed a key on the virtual keyboard, something that didn't happen while typing on the computer in the police station.
I'm not overly upset that I wasn't able to do better than the bad-bad ending as it's not like I was able to solve the final puzzle, even if the game hadn't been buggy when using the Steam Deck's virtual keyboard. So it wasn't entirely a soft-lock issue. Not entirely anyway. Disappointed, sure, but that's not going to overshadow the rest of the game. I also appreciated that the game wasn't so long that the novelty of the whole experience began to wane, but was a satisfying amount of time; even with all of the times I was caught in both the police station and the cemetery. The highs were pretty high, and the lows were frustrating, but not rage-quitting frustrating low.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Dark Trip through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Dark Trip Release Date: February 13, 2025 Systems: Meta Quest 2 & 3 Publisher: iTales VR Developer: iTales VR Time Spent: 2 Hours 34 Minutes
[Trigger Warning: While the game doesn't include specific Nazi imagery such as the co-opted swastika, there are textual references to any specific members of the Nazi party and some imagery that when combined with Nazi references could be disturbing to some audiences.]
Part 2 of our article series looking at Dark Trip from iTales VR will cover the remaining five escape-style rooms in the game. For the general description of the game and its mechanics along with the first three rooms, you can read Part 1 here.
Room #4 Part 2 & Rooms 5, 6, & 7.
If you watched the above video, you might have noticed that I seemed to fly through the room rather quickly, almost as if I had been through the room several times and knew where everything was and what needed to be done to get through the room. This is true because as mentioned in Part 1 of this article series, I spent more time in this room trying to figure out two of the puzzles associated with the paintings in the room before figuring out that these puzzles were bugged because I was playing in "Roomscale." I genuinely don't know how this would affect the game or its assets, but when I played in "Stationary" mode, the button panels were correct, and the buttons functioned the way that I thought they should have when I first attempted the room.
In Room #5, the elevator I had previously started after finishing Room #4, but stopped partway through because I was filming while I was at work on my lunch break and had to step away from the game, so when I returned, I just started over the room from the beginning and spliced that onto the footage from the previous room. I tried to play the room naturally performing the same actions in roughly the same order; I had previously only got as far as centering the lights in the middle of the room. The letter puzzle I thought was both clever and pretty easy to figure out. A four-letter word appears above a keyboard with four empty black boxes above them. Maybe I should try and enter this four-letter word here?
The rotating chamber, Room #6. I really enjoyed the first half but became frustrated with the second half when you had to rotate the circles/panels to create the shape on the paper. In this room, I decided to take the pills again for any kind of hint since what I thought was intuitive about the room (the shapes, and what looked like battery packs), but I apparently found a way to make the pentacle and the cross in a way that did not solve the puzzle. So I apologize to anyone watching this with the incessant squeaking and squealing of the metal parts as I spent nearly a third of this entire video trying to find the right configuration.
Room #7 I also really enjoyed for different reasons. First, I love that the ladder is right in front of you when you start but that it's not something you use until the absolute end of the room. After solving all of the puzzles (unless you count finding all of the pictures and unlocking the last door), I had forgotten that I had even picked the ladder up until I started cycling through my inventory debating if I wanted to take the pills again; but we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves. Second, this room gave me my first (and only?) "Ooooohhhhh shit, that's what this is" moment while preparing through a viewing portal into a room that looked like a gas chamber with a slide-away floor revealing a firey pit underneath. In a house, designed by Nazi scientists. Yeah. There are a lot of implications that come along with this room, thankfully iTales VR wasn't grotesque in its presentation and maybe that wasn't the intended purpose of this room, but that's what it felt like to me.
I do apologize for several of the angles in this room and for instance, at 29:12, you can't see what I'm looking at when solving the red/green button puzzle due to framing on my part. The thing with filming on the Quest 2 is that you have to tell the system which eye you want the filming to originate from, and I set it to the right eye. But even then, not everything I see seems to be captured, especially out of my peripheral.
Eventually, I realize that I have the ladder in my hand, get it attached to the floor, and safely make my way across the burning pit, open the door and exit the stage into a cloud of bright pink haze.
Room #8 & New Game+
Like my videos for Room #4, I've included multiple videos in my attempts to solve the final room but was hampered due to Quest 2 system issues and a bug. The bug happened around the 4:18 mark while trying to figure out what I needed to do and stumbled upon my hands turning green while reaching up towards the macabre headless Barbie chandelier. When I pulled down on this thing one of my hands disappeared. Then my other hand disappeared when I pulled down on it again with the other. While I did try to continue playing without hands, I eventually restarted because I wasn't certain that I would be able to continue since I couldn't see the items cycling in my hand. I then triggered the same bug again (around 9:20) while trying to figure out what to do with the weird worm-eyeball-tube thing.
Something interesting I reacted to that you can't see in the video, was that at 9:35, was that the right eye of the girl in the picture looked like it was either starting to wink or sneer at me and that creeped me out. Which is then why you immediately see me back up to the door, just in case something was going to happen, I didn't want to be right next to the picture.
The next glitch happened around the 14:30 mark when I realized that the game thought that the real-world floor was lower than it was, which meant that I was essentially hovering over higher than I should have been. This meant that being able to place the Rubix cube in the square-shaped hole in the floor was impossible because, with my hand on the real-world floor, it was still too high off of the virtual floor, and too far away for the cube to snap into place. I edited out the parts where I tried to go into the Quest 2 environment settings to get the floor correct, but I ended up having to manually exit out of the game to reset the virtual floor height, which I actually set about a foot lower just to be safe. Then after playing through the room again, I manage to get the cube in the hole, which then opens a crank that pops up from the floor. I didn't really know what to expect to happen as the room around me spun, but I did not expect to show up back in the starting tutorial room.
At this point, I thought I did something wrong. Maybe I turned the crank in the wrong direction? Maybe I was supposed to collect all of the pictures to get the "good ending?" Maybe I was supposed to play through the game without taking any pills? I wasn't sure what to do, so I just played through the game again, although I did find several other bugs/glitches; I didn't film the entire thing. There was the porch that didn't collapse and how I could walk through the virtual porch and the mailbox not opening. And then not being able to progress through the door after cutting the lock. The video then continued as I stepped into the elevator and decided that I would take the pills in each room I hadn't collected all three pictures. This time around, I still wasn't able to find the second picture in Room #7, and then again after completing Room #8, I was taken back to the beginning of the game. I don't know what was going on behind the scenes, but this New Game+ type playthrough definitely had some bugs/glitches going on with the hands, and then if you made it to the end of the video, completely broke something with not being able to pick up the last picture and not being able to exit the room.
On the iTales VR Discord channel, the devs did mention that since the game was still in "early access" the end where you transport back to the starting room was in fact the end. "Once you complete it [Olga's room] the game sends you back to the beginning and give (sic) you more pills so that you can keep searching for the complete set of photos/evidence and unfold the story." This made me feel a bit better that I wasn't missing something or that there were extra steps hidden somewhere in order to achieve the good/true ending of the game. It would've been nice though to have at least some sort of "Game Complete: Play again to find all of the clues" before just dropping you back in the beginning without any kind of notification.
And that was my playthrough for Dark Trip. The puzzles were fun because they weren't overly difficult but were also satisfying. There was some level of difficulty for several of the puzzles to help me feel accomplished, but had it been 1990s point-and-click adventure levels of difficulty, I might not have had as much fun as this game was. The taking drugs mechanic was very cool in how it changed the world/room and would give hints, but I think I would have liked the effects to change over time, or really just be a bit more disturbing. Maybe instead of just pushing a button on a panel, after taking the pills you now had to reach into a bug-infested hole to push the button a la Temple of Doom. Maybe some additional audible hallucinations.
I don't know if I'll leave Dark Trip installed on the Quest 2 (I need that valuable real estate after all), but I will look forward to see how the game changes and updates as it progresses through early access to a fully finished game.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Dark Trip through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
"Deinne innere Welt" from Dark Trip on the Meta Quest 2 Composer: iTales VR & Suno Album: No Official Release Publisher: iTales VR Developer: iTales VR
I was legitimately questioning whether or not I should use this track for a MIDI Week Singles article. First and foremost, the song is entirely AI-generated from the site Suno.com. From what I can tell from the site, you put in a description prompt of the song you want created, just like any other AI platform, but here you specifically reference existing musical artists and genres.
For "Deinne innere Welt" the words were created by iTales VR with a nudge in the genre and style direction, but the music and the vocals were all created by Suno. I didn't know this at the time I first heard the song in Room #4 and it actually reminded me a lot of the steampunk group, The Clockwork Quartet who only released three songs 12 years ago, although with a slightly kinkier edge and full of innuendo. The quality of the music and the vocals sounded intentional in that slightly garbled way you would expect an old record to sound on a phonograph from 80+ years ago. So I found that I was really enjoying the song in the game and hoped for a longer version after leaving the VR world. And that was when I discovered the origin of the song.
On its own, outside of the game, it is more obvious that the vocals are not sung by a living person and they come across as somewhat stilted, even with the crescendo and greater inflection towards the end of the song. But you know, I still like the song. Maybe a live band will stumble upon this article and/or the song on Suno and decide that it needs to be covered. That'd be cool.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Dark Trip through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Dark Trip Release Date: February 13, 2025 Systems: Meta Quest 2 & 3 Publisher: iTales VR Developer: iTales VR Time Spent: 2 Hours 34 Minutes
[Trigger Warning: While the game doesn't include specific Nazi imagery such as the co-opted swastika, there are textual references to any specific members of the Nazi party and some imagery that when combined with Nazi references could be disturbing to some audiences.]
At it's core, Dark Trip is a collection of escape rooms interconnected by an overarching story that is not particularly necessary to either follow or understand in order to progress. And in all honesty, I wasn't paying as much attention to the storyline as I probably should have in order to have appreciated the entire story. Throughout the game, you can pull up a journal that gives a brief synopsis for the room that you're in, but since that book would be towards the end of items that you would cycle through to use within the room, I would often times forget that it was even there until I came upon it by accident. So the deeper story of something to do with Nazis taking women as children because they believed them to be a superior medium for supernatural purposes and research-related bullshittery that Nazis are known for resulting in one particular woman who had exceptional powers was all I was able to gather.
I have a playlist with an entire playthrough, or at least, most of a playthrough as I wasn't able to finish-finish the game, because in this game, you need to find all the things in order to unlock the true end of the game, and I have found most of the things before the game started glitching out on me. But more on that when we get there.
So let's break things down as we go through each of the videos because that's going to be the easiest way for me to have some semblance of a coherent commentary about what I played.
#1: Rooms 1, 2, & 3
We start in the opening room, which is the very definition of a tutorial room, despite being very familiar with escape rooms, I did appreciate it since some in-game mechanics may not have been intuitive to me, plus not everyone is versed in escape room logic, so it was nice to have this room nonetheless. Another thing that I discovered which I'll get to in video #4, is that there will be instances where specific number or letter codes need to be entered to progress, but with each playthrough the code changes. So in this first video, I need to enter 5629 into the combination lock, but on another playthrough, that code will change. It might be a little thing, but I think it's great forethought by iTales VR to have some amount of randomization to make replays and walkthroughs/playthroughs not be entirely full of puzzle-solving spoilers. I also really liked the drug/hallucinogenic mechanic in that it wasn't something entirely bizarre or nausea-inducing and it could just as easily have been a sanity mechanic akin to Eternal Darkness but to a lesser degree. It's also worth noting that you start out with only five capsules and there are a total of eight rooms and you have to use one capsule in the tutorial room, so there are going to be at least three rooms that you don't use capsules in; this will come into play in video #4 as well.
In the second room, outside the house, it was a great feeling to be outside, which is often not commonplace in escape rooms, but a bit anxiety-driven at the same time because it's not a normal place to be for escape rooms. Then once I took the drug and the outhouse changed into a statue was a bit unnerving. Even more so when I turned and saw a body lying on the ground and a headless statue sitting on the park bench. I genuinely expected an Evil Dead moment when reaching for the picture that was placed on the corpse's back.
The third room, inside the mansion, was fun and well-designed and I liked how you started in darkness with a box of matches illuminated. This implied to me that I would have to use a lit match to explore the room, something that would have terrified and thrilled me, while also hoping that the developers weren't going to limit me to only the matches that were on the table. Thankfully after you light the lantern, the entire room is illuminated to see all the steps of the different puzzles you need to solve.
Room #4: Part 1
I decided to include this video even though everything in it is covered in the next video. Why I'm including it because it contains a bug that the developers have since told me has been patched out but was unique at least to me. When I started the game in the previous video, I was standing in my kitchen so I selected "Stationary" instead of a "Roomscale" environment, which tells the game that you don't plan on physically moving about the virtual environment. In this video for Room #4, I selected "Roomscale." Apparently, this caused something to happen behind the scenes and made all of the button pads under each painting function the way that you see in this video, which made solving the puzzles for paintings #1 and #3 impossible. Not knowing this at the time, I was very distressed and frustrated. I probably played three additional times for about another 45 minutes total trying to figure out how to solve this room. I eventually messaged the developers for a solution, which they gave me in picture form and that was when I realized that their button pads were different than mine. I recorded another video to send to them, and after that, I tried again to use their solutions, but this time I chose "Stationary" because I was in our kitchen. For whatever reason, this cleared the problem, the button pads were as you will see in the next video on Friday and I was able to proceed.
Yes, I apologize that I am again splitting this article up into two as I did with Mr. Goofer. Attaching four videos along with written commentary always seems like a doable feat until you actually get to the writing part and then the entire article just feels too long. I mean, I wouldn't want to sit down and read something that long outside of a physical newspaper or periodical. So on Friday, February 21st, we'll cover the final two videos and the last five rooms in Dark Trip, plus some additional video footage of a second playthrough for reasons hinted at up at the top.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party! through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Today we'll look at the eight remaining games I was able to play in Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party! on the Steam Deck and my explanation for why I was unable to continue with game number 18. Part 1 of our series published on Monday looks at the first nine games and the general approach to the game, so go back and read that if you haven't already because we're going to jump right into game number nine.
The basics behind this game are pretty simple. Pick up and place the running blobs in the box based solely on their color. Each color is associated with a different shape, too, but they're hard enough to see with the filter on, and it's really just easier to focus on their color instead. What's hard about this game is using the touchpad on the Steam Deck quickly and efficiently. You also cannot let any of the running blobs make it across the screen as that counts against you the same way that sorting the runners incorrectly does. What I found worked best for me was to use the Steam Deck's touchscreen functionality as I found it worked better and allowed me to sort at a faster rate. But not fast enough to catch the orange runner or to figure out where you're supposed to put this one.
Face Fixing Frenzy
Hoo boy. I thought for a while that this game was going to be the end of the road for me. In the first section, you're expected to button-mash the keyboard to wake up Sally, and for the first half, I was only using the L/R trigger buttons, but then once I figured out that I could also use the directional pad and buttons along with the triggers, you'll notice this section passing a lot faster; except that times that it wasn't because this was apparently pretty loud and was waking Conklederp up. The second section of this game caused me some serious grief. I just couldn't get the mouse to move as quickly and as accurately as I needed it to pop every pimple (which I also found to be a pretty disgusting portion of this mini-game). Then the apparent accuracy needed to click and drag specific objects to their corresponding other half before applying them to Sally's face was equally frustrating. Like Smartly Sort, I ended up reverting to using my finger to play this mini-game, but even then, it was only after coming back to the game and turning off the filter (believing that part of my issue might have been the warping of the image from the filter, or just me being a shitty player) and I was finally able to make it through.
Crazy Clown Cafe
The concept of this game was rather simple: play a modified Shell Game but with cakes, then deliver individual cakes to a customer, but avoid the banana peel on the ground. What made this game maddening were the controls which only used the mouse. Getting the clown to move requires you to slide the mouse, or in the Steam Deck's case, your thumb across the trackpad, then click the R trigger to jump, but you have to maintain the movement of the mouse/thumb through the jump as the Clown does not maintain forward momentum. Now, I don't know how the real estate of the trackpad on the Steam Deck relates to an actual standard size mouse pad, but it genuinely didn't feel like there was enough room. On top of that, the Clown starts moving the split second you're on that screen. The first half-dozen times I started, I thought that the Clown was falling over as part of a "this is what happens," but no, it was because the "start" button is on the right side of the screen, so when you click the button the start the game if the cursor (which sadly is not visible in the video) is still hovering over the start button, then the Clown will start running right into the banana. This also made selecting the cake when it landed on the far side of the table in the Shell Game portion, all the more anxiety-driven because you almost had to select the cake while you're moving the cursor back over to the left side of the screen. And even after feeling like I had a good grasp on the controls, moving always put me on edge.
Pill Puzzle
I don't want to say that I was made for this mini-game, but I know that for at least the time I was ranked #1 (I'll need to jump back in and double-check), I can say that my Mom could be proud of me; The Kid would probably comment that I should've gotten to at least 300. So Pill Puzzle is essentially a mix of Dr. Mario, Tetris, and any generic match-three game on the market. The game wasn't difficult perse, but you could only rotate the blocks in one direction since you could only use one button, then once the blocks started speeding up, that's when it became difficult to get them where I wanted them to be. Obviously or I would've gotten 300+ points.
Downer Diver
After the fun and relative easiness of Pill Puzzle, I was worried about an underwater stage, but Downer Diver was a lot more relaxing than I had feared. While the game did start you out with 5 HP, I was afraid that you would have to do the run flawlessly without getting hit, which would send you back up to the surface to attempt your descent all over again. I also feared that upon reaching the treasure chest at the bottom, you would then have to go back through the stage all the way to the top. But no. Instead Downer Diver is a more-or-less semi-relaxing descent into the water while avoiding often slow-moving sea creatures and once you get the chest, that's it. You're done.
When Pigs Can Fly
This mini-game is essentially just Downer Diver but in reverse. Instead of a diving duck, you're a flying pig. The basics are pretty much the same although there are some tweaks to the mechanics. Instead of pressing down, you press the A button to flutter your wings and can release A to slowly drop down to avoid mid-air obstacles. The one thing that threw me in this game was how to effectively avoid the wind and not get pushed into the clouds. I obviously was able to make it through the windy section, but I feel like you should be able to beat this without taking a hit, but I don't know how to maneuver around the wind gusts without just trying to occasionally dodge while powering my way through. And honestly, that end of the level. . . just a little sad.
Trivial Timed Tasks
What is it with the collection of games and accuracy? Trivial Timed Tasks is made up of four separate games, all with a 30-second time limit, and failing to complete the task in the time allowed kicks you back to the game select screen. So this one is pretty brutal as evidenced by the fact that it took me 22 minutes to figure out all of the sections. Getting through the cheese section unscathed took an embarrassing amount of attempts. Even the fact that one-hit-kills here, which makes sense because they're mouse traps and you're a mouse, makes this one of the many unforgiving mini-games not just in this collection of tasks, but out of all of the mini-games in this entire game. In the second game, the claw game, once I figured out that you should grab the clock, it became a lot easier to get through; and thankfully the hit box for each item was very forgiving. The fly-swatting game felt more hectic although once you realize the trick to this one* it becomes a little easier. The final game, the ship battle against the pirate, is the definition of simplicity. Unless you're me and you don't realize you're supposed to sail off-screen at the end to actually beat the stage.
The Painful Platformer
You know, despite this one also taking nearly 20 minutes to complete, it wasn't nearly as difficult as I feared, it just takes a long time to get through. If there had been a countdown timer for different sections, this would've been significantly more difficult. I also like the inclusion of two other characters to play as, both with different jumping heights. Sunny Shyon has a shorter jump which requires them to take longer, often having to double back after obtaining the hard-to-reach key to progress through the stage. Hopper has a higher jump which means you can skip having to redo sections and just, jump up and grab a key. The problem with Hopper is when the stages get more compact which even with Sunny, often requires you to jump and then move laterally to not hit the ceiling spikes. So not overly difficult, just a long stage that gets more stressful as you near the end.
Disco at Dusk
This is where my Mr. Goofer adventure sadly came to an end due to some kind of incompatibility with the Steam Deck. Before you play the game, you have to select the song that you want to play, but you're also able to load and play your own custom songs, as long as they're in an OGG format. Now, for whatever reason, the Steam Deck didn't like how the game brought up a separate window for song selection, and while I was able to move the mouse cursor around on the screen, I wasn't able to click on anything (as in my clicks weren't registering). I tried multiple times but to no avail. Unfortunately, you have to go through this process since if you select the option to play the mini-game, the game tells you that a song needs to be selected first before you can play.
Yeah, I was pretty sad that this was how the game ended for me. I did boot it up on my laptop to see if I could just play this level and then go back to the Steam Deck for the rest of the game. I did try to locate where the game saves its save files to then transfer that single file to my laptop, but since that's apparently not a uniform location, I wasn't able to find it either. My last option was to replay each of the mini-games to continue and finish the game on my laptop, but as I started playing through the first six games again, I began to feel that that wasn't something that I wanted to do all over again. That being said, this was a decent collection of games that you're not likely to find outside of an Atari 2600/Intellivision or your local Wunderland/Quarterworld arcade. There's charm here, but some of that charm is hiding a nasty-looking and unforgiving mouse trap.
P.S. I promise that if I figure out where the save files are located or if I make it to Disco at Dusk on my laptop, I'll continue and hopefully finish this fun/frustrating/endurance-driven collection of games and upload the videos to our existing playlist.
"BGM #18" from Cardcaptor Sakura: Tomoeda Shougakkou Daiundoukai on the Game Boy Color (2000) Composer/Sound Team: Kiyohiro Sada Album: No Official Release Publisher: MTO Developer: MTO(?)
No, I've never played Cardcaptor Sakura: Tomoeda Shougakkou Daiundoukai or any game in the Cardcaptor Sakura series, but something drew me to the penultimate track from this game. I watched/sped-through a walkthrough of this game and didn't hear this tune anywhere, but the video did seem to skip the credits if there were credits and that was one of two thoughts as to where this track would go. Considering the rest of the game is about challenging your classmates to various athletic activities during a sanctioned sports day at school, this track feels either a little out of place or perfectly in place as a victory march full of pomp and circumstance.
This could just be me, but I hear a lot of similarities between this and some of the music in Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II, specifically "Ending Theme - FFI" and "Finale - FFII." So, you know, music that closes out a video game. I wasn't able to find a lot of information about this game, let alone the specific composer, but I did find that Kiyohiro Sada worked on the sound team in the role of "Sound Driver." Maybe he just worked on some aspect of the music in the game without being the actual composer, but we're going to list him as at least working on the Sound Team until I can find something more conclusive.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party! through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party! is at its base, a collection of 25 individual unconnected arcade games that you might find at a nickel-and-dime arcade with some modern adaptations. You start out with access to only one game, and after completing a specific requirement, you unlock the ability to play the next game. Of the 25 possible games, I was only able to play 17 as I ended up being soft-locked out of the 18th due to compatibility issues on the Steam Deck with the 18th game, which we'll get to on Friday. Like any collection of 25 games in a single package, there are going to be some great games, some good games, and some bad games so we're going to break down each game and give our brief thoughts on each. One of the connecting factors for a lot of the games is that they are unforgiving and require a lot of patience and fortitude to reach the required number of points to unlock the next stage.
A pretty simple game where you have to catch the right things and avoid the wrong things. Thankfully, you don't have to catch all the things, only just don't touch the bad things like bombs and dynamite. But then there's me during my first playthrough where I mistook the grey circles for bombs or at least something bad because the gold coins, gold bells, and red fruit looked like the things you were supposed to catch. I never did figure out about the fruit bonus, if you're supposed to only catch fruit, but I wasn't about to find out.
Jumper
This game went on waaaaaaay too long in every way shape, and form. You can only jump one height, from what I could tell, until you get the propeller hat and that just gives you a higher jump and changes the rhythm that you established in the previous 79 jumps. I also couldn't tell if the pace of the barrels changed at all throughout the game, but it feels like they stayed at the same rhythm and momentum the whole time.
Recker
The first of several multi-stage mini-games that actually do a pretty decent job of introducing mechanics that help in later stages. How ladders will launch you into the air once you reach the top instead of a traditional climbing mechanic. With each timed stage, if you don't wreck all the things and reach the end flag before the timer reaches zero, you have to start the whole sequence of games over from the beginning. What kind of annoyed me a bit was that the second stage where you have to avoid the union workers and smash the glass they're carrying requires almost near-constant movement and down-to-the-wire precision, that even two missed jumps will eat up too much time and you won't be able to reach the flag before the timer reaches zero. Frustrations aside, a pretty fun and satisfying mini-game.
Laser Launch
Like Recker before it, Laser Launch introduces the first of several games that offer two distinct mini-games, but this one changes the fundamentals of the second game. In Recker, you're Recker breaking things with your mallet in each stage. In Laser Launch, you're first playing a Space Invaders-like game except the aliens don't progress down the stage and there is no timer, only lives. After defeating all of the enemies, you then play an Asteroids clone on a much smaller screen with a larger ship, but instead of having a set number of lives, this is more of a bonus stage to rack up as many points as possible within a two-minute time limit. Neither Space Invaders or Asteroids are really my cup of tea so I didn't find this game overly interesting.
Icebreaker
Just like Laser Launch, Icebreaker is a two-part game, starting off with a Pong-like game where you have to survive an unbeatable snowman where the snowball that bounces back and forth slowly increases speed as the seconds count down. Oddly enough, with 5 seconds remaining the timer starts broadcasting an audible "tick" sound each second which makes the game all the more nerve-wracking as you fear missing hitting the snowball back and having to start the game over from the beginning. The second phase of this game is a Breakout-clone, but like the second half of Laser Launch, is purely optional in its completion if you just want to continue on to the next game. I will say though that the ball physics in both games leave a lot to be desired and the direction that the paddles move when they hit the ball doesn't seem to have any effect on the trajectory or speed of the ball, which only made the Breakout-clone frustratingly difficult towards the end.
A Gridlock Maze
You know, this was kind of an interesting take on the Pac-Man genre, and unrelated, the first time in this collection that I ran into any kind of compatibility issue with the Steam Deck; which is also slightly my own fault. In A Gridlock Maze, you control a chicken as they move through a maze filled with trucks that move vertically and horizontally and you have to collect every pellet on the screen to proceed to the next level. The compatibility issue came up after collecting the larger pellets in the corners of the maze as the Enter key wasn't mapped to any of the buttons on the Steam Deck I tried the Right Trigger, R Shoulder Button, and all of the A/B/X/Y so I was never able to use the speed boost. There is a second stage that is slightly more complicated in that it requires the player to keep the lines that the trucks move in their mind since the grid is more open with less obvious "lanes."
Goofball Pinball
I know of at least one person who would absolutely hate this game, but I won't name-drop her here. Goofball Pinball was a strangely created pinball game on so many levels. First, there's no door/stopper from having the ball re-enter the hammer chamber either after your initial hit to start the game, or at any other time the ball is in play. It can just end up back in the alley where it started. Second, the flippers are useable only with the directional pad, meaning you can't press both flippers at the same time; except this only applies to the Steam Deck since you're able to press two keys at the same time on the keyboard, which the game was initially designed for. Thirdly, the ball has horrible unweighted physics. I don't know how else to describe it than just that the ball physics is absolutely horrible. Lastly, because there was no ball limit, this game just felt, like so many other games in this collection, like a test of endurance. The second game, required to actually pass this stage, the Skeeball section, was a lot more difficult than it initially looked because you only have 12 balls and 10 targets to hit, which means you're only allowed two misses while you try and figure out the right angle to throw the balls. And since trying to get the ball up the ramp on the left portion of the screen feels more like luck than any actual skill required, you really feel like messing up the Skeeball is tantamount to restarting from the beginning. The good things I will say are that the sound effects for the bumpers and slingshots were very satisfying.
Whack-A-Gopher
While as simplistic as both of the games in Whack-A-Gopher are and considering the difficulty with down-to-the-wire timers in previous games, I was surprised that there wasn't a timer of any kind here. Even a "whack the mole, but don't whack the bunny" mechanic since the pinwheels at the top felt like stand-ins for lives. Or even if you miss a gopher you lose a pinwheel since there never seemed to be more than one gopher pop up at any given time. So this was just, whack until you get a score then play a simplistic match three and just really hope that the game is forgiving enough to give you at least one possible match.
Odd Hue Out
This was probably one of the stranger games in the collection. The first of the two games is to simply fill in the playing space while the second game is to click on the one square on the grid whose color doesn't belong. And then do that 100 times to move on to the next game. This is another example of a game that just goes on way too long. There's no bonus square to hit or any other way to boost your score. It's all just a test of patience and endurance to make it to 100. I guess nerves could be factored into the equations, which is what happened to me when I missed the second time. The first miss was getting the yellow square that turned red and blended in with the other red squares around it.
So those were the first nine games in Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party! Like I said waaay up there, there are some fun games and some not much fun games and most require the player to maintain a level of patience and an exercise in monotony I feel is not often seen in arcade games. We'll cover the other nine games on Friday, but if there's a future patch, we'll likely cover the rest of the games, which I will also get into more in Friday's article.
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