Griffin Harp

Literary goose

[harpgriffin]

Hello there

I'm bad at social media, and kind of good at literature and history. I'm also bad at video games, but I play a lot of them and I wanted to talk about them, so that's what this is. I think. I promise if I decide to go off-topic to just make a side-blog and spare us all some sanity. I have no idea if I'm doing this right, but that's fine. We learn as we go. Life is like that. So are a lot of video games, although personally I prefer tutorials.

[harpgriffin]

The Case of the Worst Day Ever Preview

A cute deductive mystery game, with the game mechanics of The Case of the Golden Idol and Duck Detective, the art style of Family Guy and the wholesomeness of Blue's Clues. It's rather charming. A bit rough around the edges, and a bit of change of pace from the developers, whose previous games are ciphers like Prose and Codes. It also has some surprising amount of accessibility, with show clue spots, auto-collect words (good for both dyslexia and dexterity!), and show word count being options.

[harpgriffin]

Aquadream Preview

This feels like it belongs on itch. They even have a free wix site as their webpage! There are no enemies. It consists of huge levels with no map so you get very lost, but it's very atmospheric. There's an error in the lore that might be a translation issue. The protagonist is clearly meant to be a female ceratioid anglerfish, but is referred to as "he". Fun fact! Ceratioid anglerfish are particularly noted for extreme sexual dimorphism, and the males are tiny and do not have bioluminescent lures. Much as I'd like to tell myself he's a trans-masc fish, this is probably because of French grammatical gender playing silly buggers. The lack of map could definitely be a big barrier for many. I even tried drawing a map of level 6 but somehow I got it wrong and I finally gave up, though I'd probably still play it when I felt like a chill game that might take forever. The demo has since been removed and supposedly no longer reflects the final game, so who knows?

[harpgriffin]

Cats in Wonderland Preview

Hidden Cat Metroidvania is now a thing, thanks first to the DevCats, but it looks like this team is trying it out, too. The cats disappear when you find them, which is disappointing but there's story reasons. They're fairly easy to find, and I didn't see any scene interactivity, but there's a map, backtracking, and fetch quests. There's also some nice accessibility with zoom, edge scrolling, and recharging hints. It was pretty cute.

[harpgriffin]

CatTris Preview

This has nothing to do with Tetris. You have cats in a low poly scene, who can "jump", mostly so limited in their jumps that it will take them forever to get where they are going. Any mistake requires a full reset, including when the bad physics knocks sideways something you're trying to use to raise the cats upwards. There might be a good concept in here if you dig long enough, but I really don't advise you to do so.

[harpgriffin]

Empty Review

I was meant to play this for Mystery Funhouse's Grand Prix tournament, but ended up playing a different game and played this normally instead of in a race. It's very relaxing, as a slow-paced puzzle game with superficially (and sometimes nonsensically) "deep" text presented between stages. While the PC release seems to be the original version, the Android release seems to play more smoothly and the entire design seems more informed by mobile games - a great deal relies on tapping/clicking without being told that's an option. A lack of familiarity with mobile game design definitely seems to have made a lot of the tournament players struggle with it. Besides a hint function, you can also tap elements of the scene and it will highlight the items you need to disappear. After that, it's a matter of turning the camera to align like-coloured objects and walls to disappear them, with some objects imparting a new colour to the matching wall when they disappear. I was excited to look into the developers' other games, but then saw they've been developing genAI tools and I heaved a deep, tired sigh.

[harpgriffin]

Cats & Seek: Tokyo Review

Unsurprisingly, I enjoyed the newest Noobzilla hidden object game. Their latest addition to the formula, on top of being able to colour the scenes, is a a new mini stamp feature. You find the ink stamps along with the cats, and then use the stamps to make scenes and cats. The speedrun mode has also been improved, now requiring only half the cats but disabling the hint function. The game continues to have Noobzilla's increasing suite of accessibility features, like edge scroll, zoom, recharging hints, and colour palette customisation.

[harpgriffin]

Oscuro Blossom's Glow Preview

It starts in a cutscene and then gameplay, which I'm never a fan of. The platforming feels bad. Look, I'm no platformer connoisseur, but this feels stiff and slow. Puzzle reactions are also delayed, so you can do the correct thing, think you haven't, move and get killed. Or! You can get killed by not moving quickly enough in response to the puzzle solution you didn't know yet. Superficially, it looks good, but it just doesn't play nicely, and if we want a weird plant and bug themed text-less puzzle platformer with a vague narrative, quite honestly Botanicula was, in fact, better - and normally I wouldn't go for that sort of cheap shot, but Botanicula is more accessible and better made and a third of the harddrive space for the full game.

[harpgriffin]

Kabuto Park Preview

A very cute bug battling game, where in the spirit of Japanese summer holidays, you catch bugs in a simple minigame, then battle them in a tournament. Each bug has randomized stats and a standard deck of three cards, and you have a team of 3 bugs who push an opposing team at the same time in a time-based battle. The whole package is very nice, but it's just not really something that interests me that much. I don't see any plan for a narrative, either, which granted it doesn't need one, but that might have caught my interest more. It does have capture difficulty settings, so if you're not very good at the standard fishing/golf reaction meter, you can go easy on yourself.

[harpgriffin]

Pillie Pals Preview

A very cute sokoban meant to be all-ages. That does mean it skews towards the easier side. It tracks your moves, so you can self-challenge with reducing your steps taken. A little basic but a fun time, and I imagine it could be very nice for a parent with a small child if it had been co-op. The hint system is composed of an automatic play-through that you can stop at any time to pick up the puzzle from there. And the game is playable with both gamepad and keyboard and mouse controls.

[harpgriffin]

PikuPals Review

A very cute little GB picross, although it doesn't have a Gameboy file like Taiyaki Fabulous Museum of Fish. There's a little story, and each NPC grants a bonus help effect, usually extra hearts (mistakes) or revealing answers, and you select 3 of them to be in your party and passively apply their bonus. It's pretty easy and over quickly, but fairly polished for a jam game and left me wanting more.

[harpgriffin]

Magirune 2

It's a dungeon crawler that's effectively turn-based. Enemies don't move, and you walk into them to attack. It's not a bad game as such, but it's half-baked, with no music and pretty minimal sound design and narrative, and the gamepad support is only partial. There's a normal mode and a hard mode, and hard mode is the intended playstyle, but I'm not sure how fun that really would be. The full game is also on itch.io if you do vibe with the demo.

[harpgriffin]

Ailin Traps and Treasures Preview

Can you tell I was playing a bunch of sokoban due to a Steam fest? It's fine but very rough with not nearly enough charm to make up for it. The music track choices are weird and mostly annoying. The lighting effects are bizarre. The sprite positions don't match up with the grid and target circles can be hidden behind other objects entirely. You move so slowly and the controls are unresponsive. In a turn based puzzle! At least it has undo, reset, and gamepad support.

[harpgriffin]

Keridwen Preview

A fairly adorable sokoban in which you can both push AND pull boxes. This doesn't trivialize the fundamental puzzle of sokoban, as the puzzles are designed around it. That said, I did find the 13 demo levels fairly easy. If they do get tricky in the full game, it features undos and resets. It's also made with Kenney assets and the developers seem to want to make it as accessible as possible, hence the gentle difficulty curve and lack of timers. It also includes control rebinding, font & UI scale; caption opacity; captions for sfx etc; floor transparency for contrast; joystick deadzone adjustment; move speed; push speed; and single move.

[harpgriffin]

Lighthaze World Preview

A narrative puzzle game, along the lines of Down in Bermuda, but this time with a non-binary protagonist looking for their dog. It's meant to be cosy, although the spike floors and melancholy music work a bit against that. I apparently missed 3 optional coins and I have no idea where they could be - there's definitely issues with the camera angle and movement, but those are fixable. Thankfully, the little dog didn't bark. The only thing I'd really like is a toggle to run, rather than having to hold it down.

[harpgriffin]

Wise Garden Preview

This is a routing puzzle inspired by the look of Japanese rock gardens. The game design ended up being unclear - it doesn't even bother telling the player the premise or what they need to do for the first level, despite not having a textless ethos. If you fuck up, the client will be uncharacteristically rude about it. What I mean is, it doesn't fit at all with Zen gardens (which aren't traditionally commercial endeavours in the first place) or Japanese culture. It doesn't seem to care one bit about the ethos of zen gardens at all, which is obvious from the garden-breaking rules in the marketing images, much less in the puzzles themselves. There's a tedious control scheme, undos, and hints - the full game has a proper reset apparently. The developers don't give a fuck about accessibility, based on both the game and things they said in Steam discussions. Those with light sensitivity issues, be warned that there's some strobing icons for no good reason that cannot be turned off. I found the game neither meditative nor fun, and a significant part of the challenge had more to do with tedious execution than actual difficulty.

[harpgriffin]

Mimi the Cat: Meow Together Preview

This would be a cute sokoban except it runs horribly for no reason, the controls are impressively unresponsive, and there would be multiple solutions except behaviours are randomly turned off. I softlocked with a glitch in level 4. It's just very broken.