[Review] Bouncy's Winter Solstice Ride & Maximum Overdrive 2 (Pico-8)
A pair of top-down treats.
After playing all of Twinbeard/Jim Stormdancer's other Pico-8 games, I thought to myself "Self, why not knock off the last two?" And so I did.
Bouncy's Winter Solstice Ride is another holiday-themed game made by Stormdancer as a "greeting card game". This one has you as a cute little rodent of some sort who finds herself bringing her community together by delivering presents to her animal friends and neighbours. She is able to do this because of her own gift, a fancy sled which has fun momentum mechanics and reacts with different surfaces in the snowy glade, especially the frozen-over lake. Navigation is a simple enough task but keeping control of your sled without bumping into every tree on the way is the real challenge. I played this one on my phone thanks to Pico-8's nice touchscreen implementation, although since this game requires holding buttons I encountered some interface issues as the browser kept annoyingly selecting parts of the page, but it didn't stop the game from utterly charming me.
Maximum Overdrive 2 was made for PiCoSteveMo (similarly to Look Who's The Shining 2 which I played recently), a Stephen King-themed Pico-8 game jam. Inspired by the only movie King directed, this has a near-future setting where autonomous vehicles have taken over the world. You play as a hapless human born into the labyrinthine wastes of a fully-mechanised Earth, scrounging for bananas which can uniquely disable the tyrannical automobiles.
It plays out as a roguelike in the truest sense, a top-down maze where your enemies can only take a turn stepping across the grid when you do, and where your runs through the game are totally separate. Bananas are at once your weapon, your restorative, and your final score when your run comes to a sticky end. You also have witch's hats to block pursuing cars, roombas, lawnmowers, etc. in the narrow corridors, and a key fob which can reveal their locations through walls. The robotic menaces have vision cones, but even with their predictable paths you can quickly blunder out of stealth mode and into running-for-your-life mode.
For a seemingly simple game keeping on top of these mechanics is tricky, and the number of enemy vehicles quickly ramps up as you progress through floors. Different floors have their own properties in fun ways: lawn floors are swarming with lawnmowers in wide open space, while road floors are a tight maze of narrow streets. For a game jam project this is impressive and has a lot of ideas packed in, maybe too many! Despite setting the pace yourself the game always has a frantic feel which works well. Once again nice one Jim and I hope to see more Pico-8 experiments in the future!