Figment 2: Creed Valley and Machinarium

A pair of puzzle games.

Figment 2: Creed Valley

This is a worthy sequel to the first game, continuing the child friendly theme of adventuring across the imaginary(?) landscape of the mind to once again thwart singing nightmares. Seriously, the musical numbers are fun. Easy controls and easy puzzles combined with a good story and good voice acting make for a game worthy of your time investment. Recommended, though I suggest playing the previous game first if you haven't already.

Machinarium

In this voiceless and hand drawn point and click adventure you play a trashed robot trying to make his way back into robot city. Each screen is a puzzle to solve and they quickly progress into somewhat technical trial and error guess work of finding out what combination of levers or knobs do the thing you need to advance through the scene. I didn't have the patience for this one.

Make Way and Road Redemption

A pair of racing games.

Make Way

This cartoony party racing game (with NPCs able to fill empty slots) is a pretty fun one with colorful and possibly armed vehicles on offer. The race itself is one of point accumulation across a number of segments. Each segment each racer picks a segment of track to attach to the course, effectively building what everyone is going to be racing on. Then the race and mayhem begin. Falling off the track or getting left behind (because the camera only follows the lead car) is instant death, but its ok because you'll respawn at the start of the next track segment. 

I must admit it's a pretty clever way to avoid player elimination and at the same time rewards survivors by giving them a bigger share of the points to reach whatever the "total goal" selected was at the start. Pretty fun though I suspect it will get tiring quickly.

Road Redemption

This is a four player bike race (plus many NPCs) where riders are armed with pipes and machetes. There's a story of chasing an assassin but really you'll just be wanting to win each leg for bonus money to upgrade your bike or killing skills. Nice enough graphics but very basic racing and combat. Even for me, who doesn't like racing games to begin with, I can confidently say there are better racing games out there.

River City Girls, Keylocker, and Crypt of the Necrodancer

A trio of girl power games.

River City Girls

This side scrolling beat em up which plays a lot like the old Double Dragon game (complete with 2 player capability) has the best art, animation and music of this trio (despite the next two games supposedly having a "music" focus. You play as one of two female school students who set out to go on a quest to free their boyfriends. There is actually currency to collect and shops where you can spend it to upgrade skills or buy consumables. Unfortunately there is so much fighting due to the leave / return to area respawn that it gets tiring quickly. 
 
Keylocker

On a planet where music is banned, you must escape from prison for being a "musician". This is a really strange one with huge maps of its painful neon pixel art style to explore and then turn based combat with some guitar hero and timing elements - like pressing "Z" at the apex of your attack will do more damage, and perfect timing when an enemy attacks lets you evade completely. I just couldn't get into it.

Crypt of the Necrodancer

This dungeon crawler has you traversing through seizure inducing disco floors where you (and the enemies) move to the beat. Learning how the groovy bad guys "dance" is key to beating them without getting hurt and moving in time gives you some bonuses that you lose if you ignore the pulse. You also can't wait around too much as when the song ends, you drop down to the next level down where harder things await. To top it off, this is a Roguelike so expect to lose pretty much everything when you die, except for maybe the people that you can save to expand the services in your lobby. I am surprised that this turned out to be the weakest of this trio.

Miscellaneous Music Time

I haven't posted anything music related for awhile so lets remedy that now with some Eurovision 2025 stuff (which as always, I'm super late with). There were sirens, a sauna, a couple of ballads, a lot of techno music and numerous food related songs. As rare as it is, I agreed with the winner this time around as they were the best in the field.

If Eurovision isn't your thing maybe try instead these covers of Dancing in the Dark and We all Lift/for Narmer. Or if you want something with more class, the BBCs coverage of the 75th Military Tattoo is on youtube now and is very entertaining. Hope are all having a good day! :)

Kameru: A Frog Refuge and Strange Horticulture

Two games whose themes didn't hook me in.

Kameru: A Frog Refuge

In this management game you are making a frog refuge by putting frog furniture around to attract frogs which you can then tame with food and photograph. To get more food you also need to make the dry "wetlands" more wet to attract and capture all sorts of bugs. Yuck. Despite the cute art I really could not bring myself to like this one.

Strange Horticulture

This strange game has you inheriting an odd plant shop and selling/giving plants to people who wander in, but they're after specific ones and you start with nothing ID'ed - just a book of clues. Giving the wrong thing too many times will shatter your mind because... evil plants? Anyway, then you need to spend time doing the puzzle to put your mind back together to continue - all while the visitor patiently waits for their order. Super odd, and lots of reading. Not one for me.

Dodo

One for the kiddies. 

In this cooperative game there's a cardboard "mountain" atop of which a giant dodo lays an egg. Said egg (which is an interestingly constructed ball) slowly then makes its way down and its the players job to attach the ramps that will let it gently fall into a waiting boat below. Of course, you can't just attach the ramps...

On a players turn you roll the die which will show 1 of the 6 resources available on scattered face down tokens. If you flip up the correct token great, it goes towards building the next ramp piece and if all the "token spaces" on the ramp are filled then it can go onto the mountain and the used pieces discarded "into" the mountain. If you picked up a mismatching token, flip it back down and hopefully everyone remembers what it is. Then its the next players turn!

Very simple, very fast, and easily scalable where the ramps can need more resource slots to complete and the villager "wild card" resources are removed from the random pile to make it harder. Can get pretty exciting for such a simple little game. :)

Pilgrims, Hidden Folks, Totally Reliable Delivery Service

Three smaller Epic freebies.

Pilgrims

This funny and short point and click adventure puzzle is a pretty relaxing experience and given its lower difficulty and pretty short playtime you odds are high that you will be done with it in a single sitting. Enjoyable and recommended. :)

Hidden Folks

This is a finder ("where's wally") type game that features minor interactions with mouse clicks that can move some scenery because more than a few things are hiding behind or inside the decor. Despite the doodly type graphics (a lot of which is animated, already making it more complicated than 100 Hidden Frogs) the difficulty comes from the ever increasing map sizes which make me thankful that the list of things or people to find each come with a clue, like "this truffle is about to be found by some hogs" is a good indication of looking around areas with piggies. If that's your sort of thing its worth checking out.

Totally Reliable Delivery Service

My hard disk certainly didn't like loading this game with all the squeeking going on, and I didn't like the intentionally bad controls implemented (ie. left mouse button = left hand, right mouse button = right hand) but this along with the aesthetic is clearly going for the funny party game vibe where you cooperate or compete to deliver packages and are rated based on time taken and damage to product by delivery. There are vehicles included too just to up the mayhem even more but it's really not my sort of thing. I'd recommend Deliver at all Costs over this.