March 2017 Archives

While making my way through the net, looking for flash games to play, I've found this little gem. The game Rullo by Elihu Gideon and developed by Crescentyr, is one of those games that follow the concept of simple rules, but challenging game.

Note: this game has been reviewed in August. One week ago, the developer and Akkad published an iOS and android version of the game with more features.

It's the winter of 1972. In Rusty Lake's latest instalment of the disturbing Cube Escape series, the protagonist rows across the lake to a strange cave full of weird and wonderful goodies, including a dog (how long has it been in there?) and an unfortunate diver who needs your help.

Fans of the series will recognise Rusty Lake's signature surrealist style and weird creepiness in this latest game. After entering the cave, use the mouse to explore your surroundings and collect items to help you escape. The puzzles are a mix of utilising items and mini-game style puzzles, which keeps things interesting. There are a few gruesome moments, so be prepared for that if you are a little squeamish.

Welcome to the trichromatic puzzle world of Theihe's Color Me Young Kaleido. You will discover steps, portals, and any number of traps out to get you. Your main ability is changing the color of the backdrop, causing elements good and bad to fade into the background. Your objective is to navigate to the box-like element and complete each level, progressing to the next. The game uses standard platform mechanics, with [WASD] or arrow keys to move around. Number keys (1, 2, 3) change the background color but be careful not to morph straight into a hazard! In some of the later levels, it is possible to irreparably mess up, which is where a quick reset [R] comes in handy.

Hi! Quality time ahead! The Weekday Escape is here for all puzzles and riddles lovers! Just sit back and loosen up yourself, there are three adventures of the mind for you!

Common theme for this week is poultry. Really. You are not escaping a poultry farm, but some domestic fowl is involved in each game. In the first one from daba you are a huge and apparently very clever rooster. In Yonashi´s game you find a rooster´s figurine in the laboratory during the escaping process. And in beautiful Kamotokamotokamo´s game you have to fulfill some tasks for two cute duckies.

Have a good time and enjoy!

BOO! Did I scare you? No? Well not to worry, FMStudio is here with a new chapter of their Forgotten Hill saga that will fill you with proper terror. But before we go further, you might want to get in the mood by playing the first two games in this haunting series: Forgotten Hill: Fall where you had the brilliant idea to invite yourself into a house with the lights turned off and its continuation, Forgotten Hill: Puppeteer.

It's a familiar story for many of us old enough to have lived it. Mae Borowski, 20 years old and newly a college dropout, returns to her hometown of the formerly prosperous mining town of Possum Springs in Western Pennsylvania, only to find that the train station is closed and her parents have forgotten to come pick her up.

Have you ever had the experience of an impending feeling of dread after taking an exam? That lead weight in your stomach telling you that you probably flunked? One course of action might be to study better for the next exam. But if you're Gideon, you have a friend Joe with a far more radical solution: summon a demon to do your bidding and make your teacher, Ms. Rage, give you an A+++ on your exams!

Carmel Games delivers their usual mix of colorful graphics, wit, and puzzles in The Ritual - Part 1. You'll need to think outside the box, pillow, whatever, to track down the three needed ingredients and summon the demon. And if this just isn't enough for you, well, stay tuned - rumor has it there is a part 2 along the way!

Play The Ritual - Part 1

If being a cuddly adorable creature just isn't enough for you, how about being several? Aladar presents Eatvolve, an indie action game about augmenting yourself with the biological characteristics of the creatures around you — and which may or may not be intended as a depiction of how we become like the people we socialize with. Thwomp the creatures around you and you'll get a particle effect which imbues you with their particular form and abilities: nab that butterfly to gain some colorful wings, or that beetle for some nifty chitinous headgear that can help you get through stone. As you take on the qualities of the local fauna your form gradually shifts, and it's done on such an authentic piecemeal basis that the transitions are smooth and seem viable, and pretty cute too! We've included a few examples of what you can become in the main graphic for this review; they don't all appear in Eatvolve at once, but you can also come up with plenty of other possibilities through trial and error.

We've climbed the mountain of Monday and torn through the terror of Tuesday - now it's Wonderful Wednesday, and it's time to escape!

This week, MayMay wants you to locate that elusive USB that always seems to go missing at the bottom of your junk drawer. TomoLaSiDo has stolen a couple of key components of your bicycle. And Amajeto thinks your culinary skills could use some work, so they've sent you off to cooking classes.

Remember that cringe-worthy thing you said to that really important person that one time? How about the time you took a tumble in front of your entire school? Or when you slept through your alarm and were late to a job interview?

Wouldn't it be great if you could manipulate time and make those moments disappear?

Are you ready for a treasure hunt? I sure hope so, because ExperaGameS has prepared a pixel adventure game for you. After less than ideal navigation of messy swamps and barely escaping savage cannibals, you arrive at the crypt of the leech king to claim your prize! But before adventurer Konrad Meridian can even finish his string of bravado about his exploits, a metal gate slams shut trapping you, the player, inside. Take on the puzzles inside to look for the legendary treasure - and just maybe make an even more daring escape!

Here we are, another paranormal crime investigation! Vortex Point 8: The Rock is another installment of this spooktastic point-and-click adventure series by Carmel Games. So what's the newest creepy crime you've been called to resolve?

Hi! Another week is over and a new Weekday Escape is here! Three escape games for a break from responsibilities or just for fun. It´s time to dive into the world of cupboards with highly secured drawers and the world, where the most valuable commodity is a screwdriver. Go ahead!

Tototoroom´s Button Escape is an escape from a hotel suite, probably 5 or more stars hotel, considering a jacuzzi.

Appgoya´s Mystery Meeting Room Escape is an escape from a dull place, where you surely want to escape from.

The last game, Spiritual Escape´s Orbit Escape, is almost full size escape game. Definitely not 10 minutes, you need more time to get through this one!

Have a good time and enjoy!

How long you haven´t played proper escape game? Well, yes, there was a new Tesshi-e recently, but except for this one? It was the Christmas Tesshi-e, right? Not many big escapes these days, really. I´m not complaining, I´m just a little sad as a big escape games fan. Luckily, some designers still do them and KamotoKamotoKamo is one of them.

What kind of a predicament have the monkeys gotten themselves into this time? You find your monkey friend crying outside an ancient tomb, having lost its friends. A camel is tied up to a pole, but in order to free it, you will need to give the greedy man holding it hostage twenty coins. Finding all this wealth is going to require quite the effort and spelunking expedition! Enter the pyramid, if you dare, solving a series of increasingly intricate puzzles and uncovering mini monkeys in the oddest possible places.

In Realm Grinder, you're the ruler of a kingdom, and you can choose to align yourself with the forces of good, or the forces of evil. As you click, you accumulate gold and faction coins. Your accumulation of faction coins lets you align with Fairy, Angel, or Elf factions while aligned with the forces of good, or Goblin, Undead, or Demon while aligned with evil. Your choice of alignments also chooses which types of buildings you are able to build.

Wake up. You're in a dark room. In some sort of cabin. The power's off. It's bolted shut. You search yourself in vain yet find no memory of who you are, how you got here. Did I mention the cabin is haunted by a strange creature? Is your heart beating faster and the adrenaline coursing through your veins preparing you for a fight, or have your fight-or-flight reflexes also poured out of your paralyzed mind into the darkness?

Welcome back to Wednesday! Congratulations on surviving another turbulent week in style. You rock. As a reward, you have a choice of three fantastic getaways in this week's Weekday Escape.

Ichima's beautiful cabin in the snow, Funkyland's decadent European hotel and... Vitamin Hana's dingy old playroom/attic. I know, I know. It seems like an obvious choice, right? But even the more pleasing options come with a flood of locks and codes that will make you second-guess your choice of vacation spot.

Hunting monsters and criminals, escorting merchants, serving as a bodyguard...they all conjure up vivid images. Raius, however, puts a much different and welcome twist on the everyday medieval hero in a pair of interactive fiction games, the first of which is entitled simply Home. Your escapades are described entirely through text, merged with prompts of which actions to take or simply to examine the omnipresent fire burning brightly in the game's namesake.

Created in just 48 hours for Ludum Dare's One Room theme, levelone is a short humorous game that turns a game developer's finest creation against him. You manifest as a bland little game avatar and are promptly dropped into a box-like prison by an omnipresent developer, who still needs a bit of practice to hone his craft. The controls are still a bit wonky, and there's that teensy little problem of the second level that hasn't been created yet...

Where is Cat this time? In this charming little puzzle game from Bart Bonte, Cat has a craving for authentic Japanese sushi that simply can't be satiated through a trip to his local Sushi Train. He needs the real deal! Cat decides to takes a trip to Japan in search of 20 delicious pieces of his favourite Asian delicacy, but he needs your help to find and eat them all. (He probably needs less help with the eating part than the finding part).

Few matters could be of greater urgency to a zombie than the unaccounted disappearance of a large number of brains. After all, this vital staple of the zombie diet is to die for! If you remember joining Detective Margh in Lu Muja's three-part thriller interactive comic tale expanded into interactive fiction, then it's probably a dead giveaway that you'll love this prequel adventure. Margh is sitting in his office when an older zombie comes in, looking to hire him for his services in regard to help with a robbery. You'll be asked to delve right in, taking down notes before your conversation with him even starts. If Sherlock Holmes were a zombie, he would be impressssssed!

It doesn't happen very often, but you've been invited to participate in the making of a game without having to actually contend with a lot of complicated coding. Pinqu!'s new space-based arcade exploration game MòOóN has you stranded in caverns on the moon trying to retrieve components to reassemble your craft and fending off some bizarre native lifeforms with a plethora of different offensive weaponry, each with its own unique physics. It's definitely developed enough to be an exciting if basic action shooter, but Pinqu!'s also seeking ideas from the player community about what would make it even better. If you've got a great idea for something to add to MòOóN, leave a comment about it below!

To say the least, things have certainly become caotic--err, chaotic, pardon me, in the fourth and final episode of the series A Matter of Caos. After falling in love with a so-named "Lucky Guy," Daphne discovers his history is not exactly squeaky-clean. Bestowed with the promise that everything will be sorted out once he can finish this one last job that cannot be abandoned part way through, she agrees to help him out. She goes so far as to accept a couple objects that he needs to be hidden, along with a very important artefact - the Heart of Caos. You begin once again assuming the role of Mr. Gilbert, tentacled private eye extraordinaire, tending to Daphne in the heart of a crypt.

What's this? A game all about social media? Looks innocent enough, right? Don't give in to first impressions though, this isn't a game for the faint of heart. You start by observing the world of circle and square-headed people, and take pictures of their interactions and goings on. Your pictures then become the focus of their world, and influence their behavior. How bad can things get...?

Turns out pretty bad. Nicky Case serves up some intense foreboding with We Become What We Behold. A game with a hidden political warning about how social media and the news influences our thoughts, actions, and overall lives: Only big news goes viral, and often times that news is pre-packaged to deliver just part of the whole story. When our only window to the outside world is social media and news, these one-sided stories become all we know, and we in turn base our thoughts and actions on what we know. In the end, We Become What We Behold.

Play We Become What We Behold

Going out in a blizzard is rarely a smart move, and when you try it in Raius' new adventure game Millika Village, you end up in a crumpled heap at the bottom of a steep slope. Fortunately your motionless body is spotted by Kira, a hunter from nearby Millika Village, who picks you up and brings you to village healer Lissara to be nursed back to health. Upon your recovery, the village chieftain puts you to work in exchange for food and shelter. You spend the next twenty days helping the villagers prepare for a freak storm that has the potential to tear the village apart, and your decisions will directly impact your chances of survival.

Hello again! It´s Wednesday and a new Weekday Escape is here! Three escape games for you to relax, all from Japanese developers this week. Thank you very much, Japan, for week dose of puzzles and fun.

Flatsan's game is a small room escape game with logic puzzles, not so easy as it seems.
In surreal Chokochai´s game is inspired by Indiana Jones´adventures and includes a whip, a hat (three hats for three cats) and a mine cart!
Cute game from Nekonote is an escape game with adorable creatures´ bonus.

Have a good time and enjoy!

You're in a city of thousands with a small cache of emergency professionals at your disposal. A call comes in, a report, another call, a few more reports, and suddenly all your units are busy responding to other emergencies. A car accident, a robbery, a kitchen fire, an altercation in the street, an unconscious man on the sidewalk. Another call comes in and it's something worse: a serious industrial accident, the victim barely holding it together over the line. You look to your map and see the nearest ambulance is miles away. What do you do? What can you do?