Saturday Casual Gaming 251: Starlight XMas

In Which I Play A Very Sweet Game

Back in the earliest days of my being an internet gamer, I discovered a little studio called Armor Games. Of course, within a year, Armor Games became a massive publisher, but back when I first encountered them, they had a few lil Flash games under their belt and hadn't yet seen massive success. Through Armor Games, I found a lot of RPGs and weird action puzzlers that I loved, but then Christmas rolled around, and I found Starlight Xmas.

A fun, clever puzzle game by Zedarus on Kongregate

The goal of the Starlight series is to use your mouse to guide a field of stars into position. You're rotating a 3D field until you form a constellation, at which point you have beaten the level! This mechanic is so clever it's no wonder that there's at least two main games at this point, and to top it all off, the music is gorgeous (if a bit loud at times).

It's perhaps a one-trick pony, but when your trick is this cool, you don't really need more.

This is not a game for the adrenaline junkie. It's not intense in any way shape or form. It's peaceful. It's tranquil. It's occasionally frustrating as you search for just the right position to make the reindeer appear... In short, this is a borderline Grandma Game, and I love it even more for it. With its simple, elegant art style and its easy-to-learn-lifetime-to-master gameplay, it's the perfect thing to curl up with a cup of cocoa and play through.

If you're looking for a sweet, simple game to put you in a holiday mood, why not give it a look-see? I mean, you're probably gonna need to activate Flash or install a substitute in order to play it, but it's so great that I'm down with that. It's one of those games where I replay it every year to see if I can beat my old high scores, and every year, I remember why I love it.

Happy Holidays,
Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 235: Elephant Quest

Elephant Quest
From Armor Games, Jimp, and jmtb02
on Kongregate

Every so often, I like to go back to certain games after I've beaten them. I mean, me beating a game is a rare enough occurrence in and of itself that it's pretty noteworthy, but sometimes a game is good enough to return to. Elephant Quest is one such game.

This game is older than you'd think. Armor Games was pretty small when this game appeared on Kongregate, and I have many happy memories of getting stuck in that one block on level 8, blasting my way through Nudgers, and reveling in the fact that there was so much blue in this game! Seriously, it's old enough that blue was not back in vogue at the time. It was still in the barren wasteland of brown and gray.

Seriously, it's really blue. I love it.

Sadly, if you click on the merchant button, they no longer have gear through Armor Games, but the game is still available both there and on Kongregate!

Anyway, what is the story for this little platformer?

You are Elephant the Elephant (yes, that's seriously your name).

You are a dapper little pachyderm.

You're hanging out with the other elephants, who aren't named Elephant by the way (some are named Bob, Bobert, and Bobbington...), when the local ruffian, a bully named Woolly, shows up and decides what's his is his, but what's yours is his too. He ganks your bowler and books it.

Elephant is, understandably, heartbroken over this.

The rest of this game is your quest to regain your hat and beat down that mammoth! Sounds simple, right?

Well, it's kinda harder than it sounds. You're dropped, sans any instruction, into this screen, which has an adorable Yoshi's Crafted World-esque backdrop that I love.

What do? Well, you move with the arrow keys, apparently...

After clicking around (which activates the laser cannon on your back - yes you have a laser cannon, you really liked that hat), I eventually realized that the arrow keys move, so I approached the shiny yellow elephant. His name is Sprouts. A prompt to press the "down" arrow popped up, so I did so.

This activates a dialogue with Sprouts, who tells you what you've already figured out...
you use arrow keys to move, mouse to attack. Up key jumps. Down key interacts.

Sprouts is your first indication that this game is a bit silly. Okay, the fact that you're an elephant named Elephant toting laser cannons and going after a kleptomaniac woolly mammoth named Woolly might have been your first clue, but the fact remains, there are no serious moments in this game. Nothing is dour or dark or bitter. I mean, Elephant's pretty bitter about his bowler, but he's not going full Batman or anything.

The rest of the game is spent doing fetch-quests for other elephants, like hunting balloons for the Bob brothers (Bob, Bobert, and Bobbington), finding lost teddy bears or umbrellas, etc, while you hunt down Woolly. While you're doing these quests, literally everything in this world tries to kill you. Creatures, spikes, endless pits... the world hates elephants. Luckily, you've got a laser cannon or six to help you out, and the more you level up or complete quests, the more firepower and health you gain!

But how do you level up?

You shoot everything that's not an elephant. Seriously. Every moving thing wants you dead, so kill it first.

One of my favorite rooms is this one. I call it the Kill Pit.
You just sit up on the slope and shoot everything to death down there.
You also get the Yellow Key, which you'll need.

When you level up, the box with your level number will glow. You click on it and it takes you to the skill tree. Which is more of a skill jungle. Seriously, there's, like, a million little things to click on. The skill tree takes Credits (which you get about two of with every level), and when you spend them, you might get skill points (if you land on an orange, purple, green, or blue node) or health (red nodes). There are yellow nodes that give you a random node color, too, but they're pretty uncommon. Then, you take all of the skill points you just got from your nodes and head down to the teal part of the menu you're on.

This section is fairly self explanatory...

So you've got your points, you spend them on one of three different sub-skills per skill path. When you hit 25 points in a single section, you get a bonus. Acrobatics improves your jump height, Weapon Targeting gives you better aim with less jitter, Weapons makes your lasers hurt more, and the Miniphant Swarm gives you laser-shooting flying pygmy elephants who swarm around you and murder your foes. I like to max out the Swarm as quickly as possible.

You can also improve your damage resistance, health, how many credits you get per levelup, resistance to spike damage specifically, how fast you move, how quickly you regenerate health, how much XP you gain from quests, and "how cute you look".

The lavender bar on the menu takes you to the Level Map, which is... kinda simple. It's basically screenshots of the different levels with lines connecting the doors to each other. It's useful if you get lost, which you probably will, because the game is bigger than you'd expect from a Flash game from 2011.

The orange bar keeps track of your Quests, which will help you when you get confused about who needs what where and how you need to get it.

Then you've got the goldenrod bar at the bottom that takes you back to the game.

You can die in this game, by the way. If you get swarmed by Nudgers or something, they can absolutely kill you. Thankfully, I have yet to encounter a game-over screen in eight years of play. You just instantly respawn. This can be an issue if the flying enemies swarm you in the center of the level and you have to creep your way back to the door so you can leave, but aside from that, it's really useful.

Yes, you respawn where you fall. Yes, that can be very annoying.

But nothing makes the game bad. I had to restart once because there's a bug in Zone 8 where you can jump into a specific block and get trapped (though sometimes sufficient wiggling can release you), but even that was quaint and funny!

If you're absolute trash at platformers, love elephants, and want to shoot some weird slime birds with lasers, definitely give Elephant Quest a try!


Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 234: Roguathia

Roguathia
by Seiyria on Kongregate

I like me some Rouguelike games, as you might have guessed, so when I see a newer game that sounds like it's going to be a Roguelike RPG, I'm going to try it out. What I found when I clicked on the link to Seiyria's Roguathia on Kongregate was... very different from what I'm used to, but I dig it.

When I say different, I mean it...

Roguathia is, as you might have guessed, a Roguelike RPG, but it's not like I'm used to seeing. If you zoom in on that screencap, you'll probably notice that the entire dungeon is rendered in ASCII, and everything is... well...

It looks like a DOS or Commodore game.

And I'm 100% there for it.

Guys, I grew up with DOS and Commodore games. It's like returning to my roots. It's like coming home. There's something comforting about this game. It doesn't hold your hand or tell you, really, anything about itself within the game itself. There doesn't appear to be any button for instructions, you have absolutely zero control over the heroes as they trudge through the dungeons, and you have no indication of what each of the three "currencies" are within the game, how they work, or what they're for until suddenly, upgrades appear and you may or may not be able to afford them.

So it's a DOS/Commodore game. It has no mercy. You don't need it.

You've got, for currencies, SP, KP, and VP. I don't understand what they are. I don't need to understand, really. All I need to know is that when SP upgrades appear, they primarily deal with character creation - different classes or races, bonuses to stats, maybe starting equipment? - and when KP upgrades appear, they're usually for the Dungeon modifiers - monsters, difficulty, depth of dungeon. I'm... lost as to what VP will get me. I think I earned some, but I was tired and just clicked "BUY" without paying much attention.

That is how it differs from a DOS or Commodore game. It's not a text-parser, it's a clicker!

So you might be trawling through your dungeon with an Evil Lizardman Archaeologist (which is 100% a thing you can get. Mine is named Esali, apparently) and if you end up with upgrades, you click on the yellow command to buy the upgrade. If you're not fond of the randomly generated critter you've got, or if they go really stupid and just... walk around the same room for 30 minutes (which is a real possibility), you can click on the Options tab and...

Commit Seppuku.

No joke.

You get your points (SP and KP, from what I can tell) and a new hero is generated to go through your hilariously labyrinthine dungeons.

I am really digging this game, and to the incredibly skilled programming nerd who generated this game: thank you. You did a really good job on this and it rocks!

Go check out Roguathia on Kongregate, guys. It's worth it!

And Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 233: Pride of Place

Pride of Place from Rubble Games

I explore a lot on Kongregate. It's lead me to a lot of really cool, fun games, like NGU Idle or Realm Grinder, and that's basically what happened with Pride of Place.

What a cool game!

This is a fun little game from Rubble Games out of Sheffield, UK. With a fun pixelly style and great bleeps and bloops mixed with cartoonish screams and grunts, as well as a fantastic score, this is a great game both visually and audibly, though you may want to turn the sound down a bit, as the bleeps and bloops may be a bit jarring for the unprepared.

The story of Pride of Place is basically this: you are a put-upon drone desperate to protect your intellectually lacking master as the two of you fly through space. Since you're flying exhausted and un-maintained, due to your master's inability to stop napping, you fly the spaceship right into an asteroid belt. Now, to be fair, humans need sleep, so I'm not going to give PoP Guy a lot of trouble over this. Especially when you consider how cool this all looks!

Is it showing my age if this is how I think games look when I think about games?

You crashland on a strange world and are almost immediately thrown into the combat system. It's a match-3 system, but you don't swipe or drag, you click the adjacent pieces you're swapping. That took me a hot minute to figure out and I got a littttttle frustrated there. I think that's more on me for trying to figure out simple gameplay elements at 4AM while struggling with acid reflux... Regardless, combat is automatic and pretty easy to grasp once you understand the "click to swap" thing.

And you are going to swap a lot as you play.

While you're swapping, sometimes you'll find different shapes (a gray rock, a gold rock, money, hearts, red diamonds, etc) - these are your resources, and you need them to buy upgrades. Do not skip out on resources - PoP Guy will shoot baddies automatically (albeit not as powerfully, I think?) while you gather resources. Once gathered, you take the resources back to Town and sell them to the various NPCs (who you have to rescue). Sell enough of each resource they ask for and you'll find they've made you weapons or armor or other upgrades! Then you buy the upgrades from them. Yeah. I don't really understand their economy either. I'm also reasonably certain that you are being taken advantage of by the NPCs.

I'm really enjoying my runs through Pride of Place, so if you're looking for a fun, odd RPG to play, and you like the idea of playing as basically Skeets from Booster Gold, this'll definitely be great for you, too!

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