Saturday Casual Gaming 245: Incremancer

In Which I Do Crimes And Raise The Dead

So I have this bad habit of not finding a game I want to play until Thursday or Friday... which means I never get very far in these games. I did, however, manage to get the gist of this one.

Incremancer is a game by JamesG466 on Kongregate where you play a necromancer who is raising zombies to devour villages. As you massacre the innocents, you are granted (so far) three forms of currency: Blood, Brains, and Bones. Blood and Brains you start out earning when the first zombie you place begins to chew up the people of whatever little burgh you've ended up in. Every attacked villager earns you 1 Blood, every killed villager earns you 1 Brain. Eventually, you save enough Blood/Brains to start building, and once your graveyard is finished, not only do you automatically spawn zombies, you also now can collect Bones when your victims die!

Bones are just another currency, giving bonuses to your energy renewal speed (every zombie costs 10 energy, so keep an eye on your gauge!), how much energy/blood/bones/brains you can carry, etc.

I think one of my favorite things about this somewhat idle game is that it looks like an old Atari or Commodore game! We're talking super pixellated low-end 8-bit. The Zombies and Villagers are stacked blocks in a vaguely human shape. The houses are boxes with big open entrances. The trees are squiggly sticks. It's all very charming and very fun to look at.

It's also very easy to play - basically the only things you do are click buttons, choose where to drop your zombies, and hope that they don't send more cops... until you've got your zeds properly leveled-up, then you can pull a Return of the Living Dead...

Regardless, Incremancer is a really fun game, and I can't wait to see what later stages look like with more structures built and more blood, brains, and bones poured into my reanimated marauders :)

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 242: They Took Our Candy!

They Took Our Candy
by Rachid1984

I'm not usually one for the arcade-style games, since I'm just plain garbage at them, but once in a while, I find one that's pretty fun, and this week, I played They Took Our Candy, a game by Rachid1984. I played over on Kongregate, but it's available elsewhere, too.

Because who doesn't want to fight aliens and get candy?

They Took Our Candy is a simple game with a simple premise: You and your pals have to rescue the Halloween candy from voracious, murderous aliens. You have a party of 4 kids, each with their own abilities and weapons, and you march in formation down the street. You use your arrow keys to move around the road and your space bar to activate whatever Special Ability you have. There's no attack button because you're constantly firing projectiles (who gave that kid actual ninja stars, and why is no one freaked out that an 8 year old dressed as a fairy suddenly has access to legit magic?).

It's a pretty little game, too!

With a great 8-bit style that reminds me more of Atari than Nintendo, and fun chiptune music, this is a fun game to listen to and look at as well as play. Yes, at first, you're moving very sluggishly, but that's kinda believable, isn't it? That a bunch of kids would have a very hard time staying in formation and throwing things all at once as they started out?

Of all the things I could've expected, a robust party system was not one of them!

When you start a run, you can select your party. Initially, you have only these four to choose from, but as you go, you unlock new characters, like the Cat (a kid in a cat costume) or other costumes. Each one has their own stats and their own Special.

Enemies come at you from both sides, and as you progress, some begin to use weapons with projectiles against you. I'm pretty trash at these kinds of games, so that's about when I start to die, but hey, I tried!

Overall, this game, which is over seven years old now, is absolutely a charming masterpiece and one of the best times I've ever had playing an arcade-style side-scrolling shooter. I've never made it to the end, but maybe one of you will and you can tell me how it went in the comments?

Definitely check it out if you've got the time!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 236: Scrap Quest

Scrap Quest - an idle management RPG by localhero

Sorry about the sleepy nature of yesterday's blog, but I was wiped. I'm still pretty sleepy today, so an idle RPG where I just send adventurer's to their doom is an excellent place to start.

Scrap Quest is one of those games where you're basically playing the Questgiver NPC in any RPG - you select a hero to go on an adventure, you outfit them, you upgrade their town, and then you send them on their merry way to die horribly in the swamp. As far as menu-based RPGs go, this one is exceptionally pretty, with some sweet 8-bit style graphics and a streamlined look.

It's a pretty in-depth game, too. This is just the screen for equipment...

You end up with a lot of upgrades to buy, and while I'm told in-game that there's a prestige system... I don't know how it works or how to activate it. All I know is that I like having purple backgrounds on my items, sometimes characters come with items, and the more scrap I get in the smithing screen, the more upgrades I can buy. That's all on me, though, I wasn't paying enough attention to the text as it popped up on screen.

Behold the tavern, a lovely place to hire adventurers. This Castout Chemist Pyro came with a free sword!
Bargain!

Your goal, in the end, is to buy all of the upgrades and unlock and clear all of the areas in  the Battle area. You recruit your adventurers from the Tavern (which is located under the Town button, or, conveniently, you can just click on the Talents button and it will take you to your choice of three different adventurers), pick their Talents, Equip them with weapons and items you've already found (if any), and then send them to die in Battle. There are no survivors.

Items are sent back from the field to be examined by you. If you like the item, you can equip it to the next fool you send to die. If it's a garbage item made of garbage (indicated by red markings on the item portrait), you can scrap it in the Town. Scrapping items earns you Scrap (among other things), which can then be used on upgrades.

But you need to be sure you want to destroy something. There are no take-backsies once it's in the chute.

More upgrades mean less difficulty challenging the different zones in the Battle tab. Here, your adventurers wander about, whacking baddies and, eventually, dropping dead, all while sending you their spoils. How nice of them! Now, obviously you're going to lose a lot of guys here. Don't feel guilty about that. I'm pretty sure they all know what they're signing up for.

And it's a fun little warzone, too.
Very simple. Very streamlined.
Wow.

So that's Scrap Quest in a nutshell - you kill tons of adventurers for fun and profit. Everyone wins.

Definitely give this little Kongregate game a go - and encourage Localhero to make more games, because this one's pretty darn fun!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 231: The Dark One

The Dark One from Tenfor on Kongregate

If you know me, you'll know that I love me some RPGs. You'll also know that I've played all kinds of very blocky, pixelly RPGs and loved them just as much as any hyper-realistic super 3D 1080p ultra-high-end RPG from a major AAA company and boy was that some word-salad right there... deep breaths.

Anywho, this is a game from Tenfor on Kongregate called The Dark One.

First things first: this game is a prequel to Tenfor's Landor Quest series, which are all also RPGs, and I found this one at random on the Kongregate landing page. Published back in March of 2019, this is a really new game, too, but so far, I haven't encountered any bugs (which is kind of novel, when you consider how buggy console games tend to be even a year out from the first sales). Score one for the little guys!

We enter with a story:

I love me some stories!

The gist of the tale is this: a very bad demon tried to take over the world and was stopped by a tough wizard who wound up stuck as the demon's prison guard and opened a wizard school right on top of his prisoner. If that seems like poor planning, you'd be right. You play as Varthen, a wizard-in-training who ends up having to help stop a necromancer from taking over because, as you might guess, sometimes wizards aren't the good guys.

You start out, however, taking your final exam - killing a big bad demon in the school's dungeon.

look at this lovely pixel art!

As you play, Varthen will level up, gain artifacts, and learn new spells. All of this is shown in adorable pixel art on a nifty weathered-parchment background that I dig.

As you can see, I took these screenshots way early in the game to avoid spoilers.

You'll travel to various locations, all with a very cute pixely vibe to them. The game isn't afraid to use humor to defuse the tension of literally being thrown into the fires of a necromantic invasion five seconds after you graduate.

I cackled when I saw that bird's name!

You move around using the A and D keys on your keyboard, interact with E, and cast spells or use potions during battle with Q, W, E, A, S, and D. The music is an adorable and super simple chiptune that loops around and kind of blends into the gameplay, augmenting the world around you without being too obtrusive, and the sound effects make me feel like I'm playing video games in the early 1990s. I love it!

Combat isn't turn based, by the way.

When you cast spells, they have a cooldown period, which means that you sometimes have to just absorb some hits in between blasts, and you also have to manage your magic carefully, because you can run out of MP during battle. While your Q attack uses no mana, it also has a pretty significant cooldown period compared to your W attack (a fireball), so you have to choose between hurling the powerful stuff quickly and running out of magic or waiting for your Q attack to recharge while you're pummeled by faster enemies.

All in all, I like this RPG. It's simple without being dumbed-down, it's fun without being addictive, and it's heckin pretty to look at and listen to. For being a game about fighting demons and undead, it had me smiling my whole playtime!

If you're looking for an RPG to fiddle around with, definitely give The Dark One a go, and while you're at it, follow the links on Kongregate to the other games in the Landor series!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC