[Disclaimer: I received a review key for DeathOmen 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.]
DeathOmen is an atmospheric-horror walking sim that builds tension through interspersed jump-scares with some questionable mechanics.
The game starts with your character waking in a darkened room with a laptop. The laptop seems to be a central hub for cameras placed throughout the house, twelve in all, and one particular room where a woman lays awake on her bed unmoving. There is also a strangely designed storefront where you can buy a hot dog, medication, or a flashlight. This storefront is one of the more clunky aspects of the game and what looks like AI-generated artwork for the icons doesn't really fit thematically with the rest of the game. These same icons pop up again once you enter the code to leave your room and step out into the hallway when the game tells you that you're hungry and should eat sometime, presumably a hot dog purchased from an online marketplace.
I then spent the next 32 minutes trying to figure out what the game wanted me to do. I explored the explorable house with a handful of doors being locked without a "This door requires a key" notification, which was actually nice because that told me that I didn't need to worry about trying to open that door. There was another keypad on a door downstairs that I figured out after reading an apparent letter to myself. The first half, being the last 16 minutes of our first video was actually quite tense as I was fully expecting something to jump out at me or to find something happening on the cameras via the laptop upstairs. By the end of the first video, the first 22 minutes, I felt mostly engaged, but when I quit, it was because I didn't know what else I was supposed to do. In the second video, all 16 minutes, there was close to no feeling of dread or wondering what was going to happen because it was essentially just a repeat of the last half of the first video. Wandering around the house trying to figure out what to do. It was only after reading the Steam Forumsand watching a walkthrough video from Zhain Gaming, did I discover that what I was missing was an annoyingly placed USB drive hidden behind a book on the bookcase in the downstairs office.
I genuinely don't understand this design decision. There's no reason that I can understand to keep the USB drive so secretly hidden from the player since this is essentially what ends up propelling the game forward through to the end of the game; I think it was supposed to have been the player character who was the one that "hid" the USB drive in the first place. The developer even acknowledges that the USB drive is often a difficulty wall that has come up with other players.
Once you have the USB drive, it gives you access to the laptop on the desk in the office which has a similar interface to the laptop upstairs, but instead has access to a different series of cameras. I can only assume that this is your character's regular job as an offsite video surveillance specialist as you acquire $1 every time you click to the next camera in sequential order; although I don't know how you're supposed to "report" anomalies like the paper on the fridge states. Like the USB drive, acquiring money to make purchases from the online marketplace is a form of gating off the player from the next section of the game, requiring you to purchase an item upstairs and then travel down to the front door where the item is immediately delivered and dropped off on the table just inside the front door. At one point I did try to buy the flashlight because I had the money, but the game told me that I didn't need the flashlight yet so I couldn't buy it; until a few minutes later when I needed to go into the basement and the game told me that I should buy a flashlight before going into the basement.
The remainder of the game is a series of tasks, requiring you to return to various rooms in the house to pick up items before the game tells you that your character is tired and should return to bed for the night. While exploring the house and returning to rooms to collect items is when all of the jump scares happen and I do admit that most of them are very well timed, never giving you long enough to look at what it is that's scaring you for you to develop a clear image of who and what is doing the scaring. When there is a static-induced jump scare, there is a slight chance that it will trigger a countdown timer with a classic "mental trauma" icon and the first time it happens the game prompts you to take your medication. So then you must return to the office to click through cameras to earn at least $30, after which you return to your laptop upstairs to buy the meds which are then delivered back downstairs by the front door. Thankfully, and oddly enough, you are given 10 doses of your medication and there were only three or four instances in the rest of the game that required you to take your medication; in a separate playthrough I watched what happened when the timer reached zero and it's just an instakill screen with "Fatal Panic Attack" blazoned across the screen in bright yellow text.
Throughout my entire playthrough on the Steam Deck, the only issue I ran into was that I couldn't invert the y-axis natively, but I was able to invert the touchpad in the Steam Deck controller settings, similar to what I had to do with Hell Dive. This meant that the touchpad was always inverted, making navigating any menu with the cursor a little awkward, but manageable; significantly more so than had I had to play the game with standard y-axis controls. I didn't change any of the graphical settings and the game ran anywhere between 30-52 fps.
Overall, I found DeathOmen to be a mixed bag in the best way possible. The story was a little convoluted in both its telling and its final explanation for why all of the events were happening the way that they were. The purpose of the two laptops with their multiple cameras felt more like a mechanic whose sole purpose was to require the player to perform an action to trigger an event to progress the game without it feeling well integrated with the rest of the story. And the atrociousness of the online store and the USB drive. But once you acquired the USB drive and the rest of the game progressed at a reasonable rate. The jump scares were well timed and paced so that there was a feeling of dread as you walked through the house, constantly wondering if you did actually close that door or when that door opened and by whom. DeathOmen also didn't overstay its welcome taking me a little over an hour once I located the USB drive (although I probably could've saved some time had I remembered that there was a spare fuse for the electrical panel in the nightstand). Good tension and jumpscares hampered by a mediocre story and occasionally confounding mechanics. Take that how you will.
And somehow, we're already in March. Or just 17% of the way through the year, or if we really want to get snarky, only 4.4% of the way until our current scenario either is upgraded to the non-shitty version, or we sink deeper into this experiment in white christian nationalism and fascistoligarchy we currently call the United States; I don't expect you to watch all 65 minutes right now, but I highly recommend it if you havne't already watched it. And major kudos to Volodomyr Zelinsky for rebuking Russian State Media talking points that came out of the mouths of Trump and Vance.
And then there's the bullshit in the SAVE Act reintroduced as a proposed bill by Chip Joy which would bar people from voting and registering to vote if the name on their birth certificate differs from that of their "legal name" (e.g. the name on their driver's license, hunting licenses, passport, school ID, etc). And while the wording in the current "wording" of the SAVE act allows people that this would affect to "provide additional documentation," there was no specific definition as to what that documentation would be. This means if this travesty passes, it could be left up to the states/counties, which means a return to Jim Crow-era voting laws all over again. One state/county could require that a woman who changed her name after getting married to only supply her current government-issued ID and a copy of her marriage certificate, while another state/county could require the following:
Copy of Government Issued ID:
Only passports, state driver's licenses, and hunting permits accepted.
College IDs, High School IDs, not accepted.
Copy of long-form birth certificate.
Copy of marriage certificate.
Signed affidavit from an official notary that all of the documents are legal and present at the time of signing.
All of the above are required every time a ballot is requested.
Likely forbidden from using mail in, or absentee ballots.
Yes, I'm getting into nothing but speculation here. The only people that's not good for are the same ass-hats who want to try and enact these kinds of laws, decrying that it's all part of a nationwide mandate when Trump was elected by an overwhelming majority; Trump received 49.8% of the popular vote, which if we're going to be pedantic, is not the definition of "majority" in the context of the voting population of the United States. Still, yes, Trump won both the popular vote and the electoral vote, so I don't think I'm trying to engage in election denialsim.
And Musk is trash, too, while we're at it, mainly because he's a nazi sympathizer, but less damaging and still related to his character is his acquisition of attempted gaming cred.
Now that we've successfully transitioned to gaming culture, we can now continue with our regularly scheduled program.
Unintentionally, despite the last 8 months or so, there've been a lot of Game EXP articles from games I've received. I had thought this well was drying up, but then there was an uptick on the YouTube side of things, and that just makes me look more attractive to indie publishers. Maybe. There'll likely be a continued slough of Game EXP articles for the next coming weeks, at least through the middle of March and then I'm going to let things slow down a bit so I can play more of the games that I've actually paid money for: Fallout 4, Triangle Strategy, The Elder Scrolls Online, Wolfenstein II: The New Collosus, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Dragon's Dogma, and that list of crowdfunded games I said I would get to back in my January 17th article. And all of the games in my Ultimate Spreadsheet Database.
Movie-wise, nothing. New TV show-wise, nothing. I did start Hand of Fire, the final book in the Shandril's Saga trilogy by Ed Greenwood, which continues my chronological journey through the novels in the Forgotten Realms setting; which if you're just joining us, I began because the D&D module, Rime of the Frost Maiden said that it used several older D&D novels and source books as inspiration and reference materials for this and I hadn't read those yet, so now I'm in the middle of 1357DR, although several hard-to-find books happen earlier that I've yet to read. And I'm still reading House of Leaves, and I couldn't tell you how many pages I've read in that book because of all of the jumping around in the text.
Lastly, all this week we'll be releasing a series of playthrough videos for an interesting visual novel and immersive typing sim, S4U: CityPunk 2011 and Love Punch, along with playlists for The Voidness, Goldenheart, Death Omen, and Ashen Arrows, so stay tuned for those as we progress/survive through this month of March.
[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.
[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.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Stupid Cars 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.]
Stupid Cars Release Date: January 9, 2025 Systems: Meta Quest, Windows, Nintendo Switch Publisher: Gimbal Studio Developer: Gimbal Studio Time Spent: 1 Hour 17 Minutes
It's probably my fault for not looking too closely at Stupid Cars before I established in my brain what I thought the game was going to be. Even after watching the trailer, what I was expecting it to be, a VR puzzle game that would be filled with individual puzzles kind of like the board game Rush Hour but played in real-time instead of turns. Even the trailer almost feels like it leaves a lot to interpretation, not even once focusing on the fact that there is a score counter at the top of the screen.
Stupid Cars is instead closer to what is presented on the surface in the trailer. A large arcade cabinet with cars and motorcycles zipping by that you're able to manually speed up and slow down, and for each vehicle that safely makes it through to the other side, you get one point. The highest score. . . is the highest. There is an online leaderboard but I never felt compelled to attempt to even get close to any of the listed highest scores. The score is also there as a way of keeping the next level locked, so you have to earn at least 50 points to continue on to the next stage. There are some modifiers to the score, such as random gold cars that are worth two points, and an unlockable mechanic that speeds up the cars and doubles your score while it's turned on; you're able to toggle the Turbo Mode on and off. You're also allotted a continue if any of the cars crash to carry over your score when you start the same stage again, although it seems that the rate of the cars driving out is the same as when the car crashed, but the board starts out clear.
Let's go through each level because as you're probably aware, I have some thoughts.
Level 1: Classic
You know, just your basic poorly planned out intersection immediately after a series of eight tunnels. I don't know why it didn't stick out to me at first, but the cars are driving on the left side of the road, but that obviously didn't bother me as it wasn't something I noticed until level 3. The tutorial itself is pretty rudimentary and I still found it a little misleading. I thought that along with being able to speed up the cars, that you could also slow them down beyond their initial starting speed, so three speeds altogether. I think that's what I was trying to do at 1:40, was to slow the Jeep down, not drive it right into the convertible. That's also why I was looking down at the control panel, convinced that I missed something about the controls and looking for where the "slow down" button was, not just the "speed up" button.
"Classic" was the only stage I actually felt moderately compelled to get a higher score beyond 50, which is why I played for an additional seven minutes. It was fun, but at that point, still only about 12 minutes, I decided that with no additional gameplay elements in this mode, I was going to stop.
Level 2: Bus Rush
Yeah, I went into this stage a bit cocky. Getting 92 points in the previous level and feeling like I had a decent grasp of the mechanics along with fewer intersecting roads felt like this was going to be a proverbial cakewalk, but this one really put me in my place (or did it?). Not even a minute into the Bus Rush I was barely able to score 8 points, distracted by the bus and where the various roads were intersecting, and seeing two gold-two-point cars got me excited.
The buses ended up being harder to predict how they would affect the rest of the traffic, despite the in-game warning that a bus was coming. I just found it hard to factor in their length and speed with the rest of the cars on the road, which is kind of the whole point of the game. But even after the second attempt where I got 43 points, I still felt like I had a decent grasp on the mechanics. I think the difficulty I faced with this level cemented my desire to not try and go for not a leaderboard high score, but a personal best high score, higher than the 50 required to unlock the next level.
Level 3: Bike Blitz
If I had thought that Bus Rush was hard, I had no idea what was in store for me with Bike Blitz. This was also, surprisingly enough, the level where I realized that the vehicles driving on the left side of the road, as opposed to the right side like here in the United States, was throwing off my perspective and previous knowledge of traffic circles. The other complication here was keeping track of the motorcycles/mopeds once they entered the traffic circle because once you get two or more bikes in there at the same time, it's all a manner of remembering when each vehicle entered and where they're going to exit.
I do love how around 19:00 I just gave up a kind of meddling just to see how many points I could score without touching any of the bikes. Like, maybe that was the trick to this level, was to just let the bikes to their thing and you could get to 50 points. But, as evidenced by the video, leaving the bikes alone will net you zero points on average. And it's not like I could feel myself getting any better at this, like it all just felt like luck. Which is probably why at 21 minutes in, my high score was still only 39. And then on the next run, I managed to score 39 on my first try, briefly thinking that I would turn Turbo Mode on and off anytime a gold car was about to finish, but I found that tactic to be too risky. That excitement you see in my magnificent attempt at a laser light show at 22:57 is 100% real. I wasn't doing that for the camera.
Level 4: Train Wreck
After the chaosness that was Bus Rush and what felt like an exponentially increasing difficulty curve in the game, I was so thankful that this level was easier and thereby, actually felt fun again. The train moved faster than I thought it would and was on its own dedicated track (as opposed to the bus also using the road) and came at a regular 15 seconds. I mean, I got 49 points on my second attempt. Then after only about three minutes, I got 50 points. I briefly thought about quitting, but because I was feeling more joy than I'd felt since the first level, I decided to continue and just see how high I could get my score; it was 90.
So while it took some getting used to keeping my eye on the track and the rest of the cars on the road, overall, I really enjoyed this level.
Level 5: Loopy Lanes
Like Train Wreck before, Loopy Lanes was more fun than I expected with the return of traffic circles (traffic quarters?). This level actually feels like it should have come before Bike Blitz as it felt easier despite there being two traffic circles instead of one. That being said, this level was still pretty challenging having to time the delayed turn of the traffic circle in cars making an elongated right-hand turn; like I'm genuinely curious what the road sign prior to entering that intersection would look like.
Level 6: Chaos
You know, for a level titled "Chaos," I expected the culmination of all of the elements from each previous level to actually feel more chaotic. I don't mean having cars and bikes and trains and buses all in the same level, and while that would have been entertainingly chaotic, this didn't feel chaotic. Just busy. Instead, we have 20 straight lanes of traffic and four intersections with only cars to deal with. I would have at least expected there to be both cars and bikes or maybe a turn or two. Maybe an overpass or something. But sadly no. Apart from there just potentially being more cars on the roads, the actual playing area was pretty disappointing.
Now, that doesn't mean that this level was easy because dealing with 10+ cars on the screen at the same time is mentally taxing and hard to keep track of. I probably could have tried additional plays after getting to 69 on my go (at 5:14), but with how uninspired Chaos felt, I didn't really feel like trying to get a higher score than 70.
So that's Stupid Cars, or at least most of it. I only unlocked two medals which can give you bonus points, which is probably how people get 350+ points on Classic, although I never looked into how to unlock all of the medals or how to actively try and score bonus points based on the medals I did have. I'm not a big multiplayer person, but something about this game feels like it could somehow benefit from multiple players, although not even the Nintendo Switch version is multiplayer, so it's not just an issue to get it to work in VR. I don't really know how much this game benefits from being a VR title as the controllers basically felt like mouse pointers and even though I was equipped with two of them, I never felt coordinated enough to use both at the same time; plus I felt that one was more than enough in most situations. The environment was neat, but it was always the same skybox and ther was no change in the decore as you progressed through the game. I guess I just feel like even without trying to unlock all of the medals, there didn't feel like there was a whole lot of game here. Six levels that are already in endless mode so there really isn't anywhere to go unless you're trying for the leaderboard.
So yeah, I did have fun 60% of the time, with two of the middle levels causing me all manners of grief. But if high-score hunting is your thing, then a VR game for less than $6.00 might just be your thing.
Over the last several months, The Squire has wanted to play Castle Crashers in the morning before we leave to take him to preschool. When I first booted up the game for him, I had forgotten how damn good the opening titles music was, but since I'm not usually able to listen to more than the first 10-15 seconds of the song before The Squire button mashes his way to the character select screen and to the map screen, I thought I'd find the music and put it up as a MIDI Week Single.
What's interesting about this song is that when it plays during the opening menus, there's only about the first minute and twenty seconds of the song before it repeats, which makes sense because you normally wouldn't have a grand four-minute epic while you cycle through menus. I say "normally" because that is something that I would do and have done for various games when the title music goes particularly hard, and "Four Brave Champions" is no exception.
*While there appears to have been an unofficial soundtrack available through Newgrounds at one time, that page no longer exists, but there is a playlist of sorts with all of the music from Newgrounds musicians that I linked to up there at the top of the page.
It was only earlier this year that I discovered that a new BIT.TRIP game was released back in September 2023. I was a little disappointed when it looked like a revamped remastered version based on the trailer. But, then it got into the "Maker" portion of the game and there started to be elements that didn't exist in the original 2011 game. Something to do with CommanderVideo firing projectiles and turning into The Void from BIT.TRIP VOIDmade it look like more than a cash grabby glowup. So, onto my Steam Wishlist, it went and with it being 60% off for Steam's Winter Sale, I thought why not!? Plus I was hoping that The Squire might want me to play this so I wouldn't have to do the same set of levels from BIT.TRIP RUNNER; although I may still end up doing that because that's what he's familiar with.
But this last week I played through the first world in BIT.TRIP RERUNNER and since I had played through the first 10 worlds in the original game earlier in the day, I thought I was moderately qualified to write a First Impressions article about my first 23 minutes. Upon booting up, the game asks which difficulty setting to play based somewhat on your previous experience with the BIT.TRIP series and since I was sub-moderately good at Runner3and somewhat decent at both previous Runner installments, I went with the Medium level of difficulty.
Well, after playing 23 minutes and making it through the first world, I have mostly positive thoughts about the game. I like how much of the game feels like a throwback to the original BIT.TRIP RUNNER with a fair amount of accessibility features baked in, even at the Medium difficulty. There are an abundance of checkpoints, most occurring right after you pick up a power-up or right before an overly difficult section. I do think that there are too many checkpoints most of the time, although in the later stages, I did appreciate not being kicked back to the middle or the beginning of the stage. I'd be surprised if there isn't a setting that lets you turn off or limit the number of checkpoints.
I was a little disappointed after finishing the levels that there wasn't the expected "Bonus Get!" that happens in the first BIT.TRIP RUNNER, but it appears that each of your gold bars goes towards a pool that earns you the ability to unlock extras that I haven't delved into yet apart from seeing what the keys/boombox items can be used for; that will likely be for a later article. The only other thing I'm currently critical about is that each stage seems to have exactly 32 gold bars whereas previous games would sometimes have as few as six gold bars and as many as 93. I know it's completely arbitrary knowing how many gold bars there are in a stage before I start, but something inside me seems to prefer having the number of gold bars be a surprise before I start.
But apart from that, I am finding that I am having a lot more fun in BIT.TRIP RERUNNER than in Runner3. There seems to be less of a focus on making the game visually distinct and being wacky than on the gameplay actually being fun. So far, RERUNNER is a lot of fun and is a refreshing return to the complex simplicity of the BIT.TRIP series that I was afraid had been lost.
P.S. And if you're interested in watching my unedited first-play playthrough, complete with minute-long pauses to help The Squire with Super Mario Bros. Wonder, then you can check out my video below:
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)