September 2016 Archives

Here at Jay Is Games we like our games a little strange and wacky, and Jake Hollands delivers that in spades with his offbeat sci-fi incremental game Spaceplan. You find yourself adrift in space with most of your systems out of commission, not sure what's going on or even where you are. It's up to you to get those systems repaired, find out what the heck is going on and try to sort it out. By clicking, of course! Spaceplan is a title that's tough to feature in a review without giving too much away, because so much of it's about learning about your situation and developing innovative — alright, utterly outlandish — ways to resolve it all. Spaceplan is fairly brief, something you can finish in a day or so — rather than something that stays around in a browser tab somewhere until you're ready to start charging rent — and it has plenty of ingenuity and creativity (along with a couple of naughty words, which we should probably alert you to). Unlike the vast majority of incrementals in which you click to buy things which give you bonuses and which only exist conceptually, here Jake has actually implemented them in the game as the other genres do and the results are palpable and a major improvement to the gaming experience. Even your craft's console is whimsically implemented, with vital functions designated things like, 'Word Outputter', 'Planet Looker', and 'Fact Holder'.

(Disclaimer: This game is rated-r for sexual-references and language, so be cautious and "Pound the Puss at your own risk")

Today is the great day! Today is YOUR great day! Do you know why? Of course you do! Because today is the day you start your epic adventure, as every epic hero should have an epic adventure. At least that's true if your name is Pound, and you're a puss. But don't worry, because even if you are not, you can still help Pound in his epic adventure!

Pound the Puss, by Orange Pylon, tells the story of Pound. Pound is a 9-years-old puss that lives with his sister and mother in a nice house at a nice place. Today Pound got to do his chores. But even the simplest task as doing chores can turn into a quest. In this game you'll point and click your way through various places, talking to many people and using many items to fulfill your goal, which is: *spoilers* (don't expect much from me here).

Escape from the Planet of the Dravids is a charming and well thought out point-and click-adventure brought to you by the talented developers at Kitfox studios. It has an awfully long name to keep typing out though so I'll just refer to it as Dravids from now on, I'm sure you'll understand. The action begins with a familiar premise when our reptilian protagonist crash lands his (or maybe her) space ship on an alien planet, leaving them with the sole task of finding their way home. To do that they'll need to send word back to, erm, wherever they flew in from - how difficult can that be?

There are some questions that mankind always ponders. One of these questions, one that probably won't show up in a philosophy class, is "what is in that box?".

To figure out what is inside Bart Bonte's boxes, you'll have to solve puzzles. I say boxes because there are two versions of the game: a 30 level online version and a 100 level mobile version. (The reason the mobile version has more levels is because those levels use mechanics such as tilting.) Both are free, the levels between the two versions are not all identical, and whatever is inside the browser box is different than whatever is inside the mobile box.

Although this game has been released at the end of May (and maybe you already played it) it's the fun typical of Bonte's games, so no matter what is inside, there still is plenty of levels and fun.

Play What's inside The Box?

Acclaimed bitwrangler zillix (exposure, denudation, endeavor) emerges from the pixel mines once again for Ludum Dare's Ancient Technology game jam, and are we ever glad he did! Someone needs to get the lights on around here, and in his new anachroma that means doing it one color at a time. In the classic style of metroidvania games you'll be toodling around an increasingly sophisticated map, but your accessible range will be limited at first and increase as you discover new abilities and game mechanisms that bring on new game mechanics and freedom. Right from the start, a new mechanic helps you survive long falls — and encourages exploration — with what we like to think of as Retroactive Fall Avoidance: fall beyond a certain distance and you'll crash hard, but the game will then courteously rewind you to the last ledge you were on minus anything you may have acquired during the fall. This neatly enables you to repeat the process several more times a la Groundhog Day until you find a better approach, but we like the encouragement to explore that anachroma provides along with that charitable approach.

There's all the ingredients for a good robot heist. You have switches, lasers, guard robots, valuable loot, two endings, and robots.
Val (alias: Vertibot), a robot who can only push things vertically, has plans for the ultimate heist. A heist so big that not even the master of vertical pushing can do it alone. Val needs Harry (alias: Horibot), a robot who can only push things horizontally, in order to pull it off.

Arrow keys move, pressing x or space will switch bots (the activated bot will have a red light in the middle), r resets the level, and z rewinds time. You're close to the end of a level only to push a block too far? Pressing z undoes your mistake, so you don't have to redo the whole level!

Some of the larger levels really shrink the graphics on screen, but never to the extent that I couldn't tell what was going on.

Play Robot Heist

I remember at school when we learnt physics. I really like optics because it was nice, and because our teachers gave us lasers, mirrors and lenses, and we did cool experiments, and blew up balloons, and burned a table, and got all school evacuated because of fire hazard... School was a great time. Indeed.