Next month: The Third Shift and Phonopolis, among others. Just didn’t have enough time to finish them to a level I was satisfied with, but I didn’t wanna combine May and June into another monster post like the first, either. We’ll see how much time I end up having, given that the first half of the month will be dominated by Summer Games Fest, and I have a few events to go to as well.
Echo Chaser (itch)
This is a super quick, free, and in-browser play. Echo Chaser is a platformer whose primary mechanic is echolocation, which is one of those hyperspecific concepts that I always enjoy. Having to navigate a simple space in a complex way is the core of many a platformer, and I like the way that it shakes out in Echo Chaser. As you’d hope, the sonic experience is on point with a minimalistic headiness that PICO-8 is quite good at in the right hands.
mini pharma (itch)
This is PUNKCAKE Délicieux Lorraine’s submission for the Falling Block Jam 2025, organized by Davemakes (Mixolumia). It’s very good, and very stressful! It has the same swap and grab mechanics you’d see in a match three game, but, in line with the jam, retains the movement of a falling block puzzler. But there’s a dead zone in the middle — a sorting space between conveyor belts. Past the second belt is a row of vials, which populate with ingredient requests of four items each. It’s Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory: organize and rearrange the continuously arriving ingredients to fulfill enough recipes to clear the stage without letting any incorrect ones get pushed all the way down.
Cleared recipes show a lil visual sparkle and a score of “PERFECT!/GREAT!/NICE!/DONE!,” which have nothing to do with any order, but rather the amount of time/space between delivered ingredients, scored per vial. Delivering the full recipe with one or fewer ticks between each item grants a Perfect. It’s an interesting decision to limit the scoring to each vial, instead of allowing Perfects to be chained together for additional score, or letting the player reset the Perfect timer by interspersing other deliveries. It’s a system that rewards the skill of organization and spatial awareness above pure speed. And although speed is an important factor, quick reflexes and t-spinning won’t win the day. It’s crushing inventory management; fastidiously spinning plates as some are ordered out, though more and more keep arriving. It reminds me of Wilmot’s Warehouse in that way, but the timer never stops.
“Time” is where mini pharma loses me a bit. It is so long for an arcade game. Although there’s constant stress, gameplay is often slow and methodical as you wait for the correct ingredients to arrive — there’s a lot of downtime. On the lower two difficulties, just getting to the last level takes well over an hour. There’s a “three strikes” policy for mistakes, where delivering the wrong ingredient nets a strike and wipes the board, save a tile-wide safe zone on either side. Having all the pressure instantly relieved by failure and then having to sit and wait for enough ingredients to continue playing can feel less like mercy and more like punishment, especially if that’s more a product of bad luck than poor strategy. Strikes don’t affect score, though, so moving some ingredients to the safe zones and evaporating the others in an intentional wipe is a sound strategy whose inclusion feels intentional. But the game is already so long, I’m not quite sure I enjoy this pace.
(Also: lucky beads…?)
Season 31 (itch, Steam, Indiepocalypse #72)
Season 31 is a short narrative experience that spends a very effective half of its runtime as a management sim. As the producer for a nationally televised rally racing program, you manage employees, budgets, camera operations, and oversee track safety (or not — crashes always bring in a lot of views). Then… some stuff happens! No one knows what and it’s difficult to find out given the circumstances. You still have to (try to) manage everyone left at the track and studio, though. Season 31 is certainly hampered in its bigger moments by a clunky and typo-ridden English script, but the broad strokes of its story work well with the light and dubiously consequential gameplay undergirding it. Made my computer kinda hot, though!
Digimon Story: Time Stranger (Steam)
Well, this turned into a full review. Mostly to cover the game’s mechanics more deeply, but also to talk about the story, which is real bad!
Carrot Kingdom (link)
This is another super short platformer playable in browser, though a puzzle-platformer this time. You play as a rabbit with stretchy ears used to grab stuff, and there are some pretty sweet twists on this concept revealed over the course of the game’s ~15 minute runtime. It’d be great to see a bigger game made out of Carrot Kingdom; as quickly as it ramps up, there’s still a lot of juice here even without the addition of extra mechanics, which also feel possible in its space. It’s so brisk that there’s not much time to feel like you’re actually solving any puzzles — more stumbling into solutions. Nevertheless, it’s a delightful play.
Leaftaker (itch)
Leaftaker is right on the edge of being really special. As is the case with many supernatural mysteries, it suffers a bit for wanting to have its cake and eat it too (though not to the extent of Type Help, another deduction game I talked about in the previous edition of this blog). Playing in the supernatural horror space involves a lot of ambiguity and the fear that that brings, but deduction demands correct answers and concrete timelines. Yet, such a work needs to conceal its hand so the mystery remains a mystery for at least a time. Due to both its mechanics and its story, Leaftaker has to do so by force. There are so many things you can’t investigate and so many questions you can’t ask. This wouldn’t be all that noticeable, or easily forgotten as the protagonist’s own decisions/lapses in thought, if this weren’t a text parser with open dialogue prompts. Type in the right words yourself, but still no one answers. The game is certainly aware of and even does some cool stuff with this idea of the player character as a character and not just an avatar for the player, but it’s still a little too easy to see the artifice of the whole thing. They say a mystery is one of the hardest things to write; writing a mystery and then letting a player loose into it with the entire English language at their disposal is a huge ask. Everything has to be tight, tight, tight, and Leaftaker is one or two tights instead of three.
Panthalassa (Steam)
Panthalassa is, gameplay-wise, largely about fiddling with different interfaces — plugging things in, pulling levers, turning knobs, pressin’ keys. It’s a true blue menus game set at the bottom of the ocean in a good-as-alien facility full of squidgy and inscrutable technology. Not that inscrutable though; there were some small tutorials and protagonal nudging added since my time with the demo which I appreciate and understand from the developer’s perspective, but don’t care for myself. I liked how difficult Panthalassa’s interfaces were to figure out, since the puzzles themselves are relatively simple, most often involving memorization, note-taking, or reference of in-game resources. I like the kind of adventure game that shoves some bullshit in your face in the first room and says, “Look, you’re either figuring this out by yourself or you’re not leaving.”
My own preferences aside, challenge isn’t exactly the point of Panthalassa. Like the best point-and-click adventures, it’s all about atmosphere, and the gameplay is less a test of skill than a ritual to present narrative design and move the player through the world. And oooooh, what a world. The lead character is a submersible’s AI, MAG, suddenly transferred into a dormant robot body advanced beyond anything previously thought possible. This expansion of MAG’s consciousness and intelligence, as well as the remnants of the body’s memories, leads to a much more existentially-minded narrative than I had anticipated. I won’t say much else, as the game does well to surprise with its setting, progression, and vignettes. It’s a serious aesthetic treat, a jewel-toned SEGA Saturn acid trip scored by undersea DNB and ambient music for tripod fish. It is sublime, uncanny, and romantic all at once.