In this quirky indie title, you play as a caveman named Ergaster who must escort these odd creatures called lemmings the habilis to safety. You start alone in a cave with drawings on the walls that tell you which buttons do what, provided you’re playing on an Xbox 360 controller. This game hates keyboards. If you play on a keyboard, you must look up both the keyboard and game pad controls and memorise the corresponding buttons so you know what the walls are telling you, and don’t even think about rebinding the keys while you’re in the option menu. The options menu isn’t for rebinding keys; it’s for switching between a full screen mode that doesn’t work and a windowed mode that doesn’t work.

You can see my wallpaper and task bar peeking through even in full screen mode.

Like most escort missions, walking the habilis through stone-age Afro-Eurasia is more frustrating than hard. Ergaster can smack a habilis to make it sit down, stopping other habilis from walking past it. If you’ve played Lemmings, think of this as the block skill. Unfortunately, timing it is finicky. I’ve had many a habilis walk past their appointed protector and into a wall of spikes as Ergaster’s outstretched palm came down like a hammer upon the savannah grass. It also necessitates more waiting than I like in anything other than a stealth game because you have to wait for a habilis to show up before you can smack it. To make all this worse, there are no checkpoints, which means doing the easy and boring parts of the level over and over again until you make that jump you keep dying on. This increases iteration cycles, which is bad game design.

Despite all this, there is some fun to be had here. There are silex to collect, and it’s a lot of fun air dashing about to collect them all. It’s also surprisingly satisfying to air dash through a wall of prehistoric crates. It’s also interesting to play such a unique platformer. Unfortunately, Ergaster isn’t executed well enough for me to recommend it over other platformers like The Fourth Wall. If the idea of playing Lemmings as a caveman instead of a benevolent god appeals to you, go ahead and check out Ergaster and the Habilis.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

I got you here safely. Now get in the giant mouth.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Truffle Saga puts you in control of a dog named Truffle who must destroy mushrooms by throwing acorns at them. You throw acorns the same way you slingshot fowl in Angry Birds, except you don’t control how hard you throw them. You even get a white dotted line showing the path of your most recent throw. Unlike Angry Birds, which gives you multiple airborne critters to shoot your enemies into green bacon, Truffle Saga only gives you one acorn per level.

With all the weird stuff in this game, it shouldn’t be surprising that acorns are an effective anti-fungal agent.

At first the only obstacles are sticks and leaves, so all you need to make your shot count is good aim. After a few easy levels bouncing nuts off leaves, you’ll have to learn more tricks. There are flowers that eat your acorn and spit it out, bees that act as trampolines, and monsters that swallow your acorn, ending the level. Those of you who want games to make sense are not going to have a good time. These challenges add depth to the game, but unfortunately they also cause it to fall apart. Some of these extra elements require you to use awkward touch controls, especially the bouncy bees. To make matters worse, Truffle Saga suffers from a common AAA game trap and forgets what kind of game it is. There are a few levels that are solved by moving a bouncy bee around the bottom of the screen like in Breakout. Fortunately, you can skip levels by tapping an onion icon in the corner of the screen.

My other major problem with Truffle Saga is that its ads are really annoying. Paid versions on other platforms may not have them, but I played the Android version on my Droid Razr HD. There were many times when a new level had just loaded and I tapped the screen to throw my acorn, only to be thwarted by an ad that popped up just before I touched the screen. I eventually got sick of this and turned off my WiFi, but then the game kindly informed me that it had also fallen into the AAA trap of requiring a constant Internet connection.

Like most mobile games, Truffle Saga has a three-star ranking system to increase its replay value but with an interesting twist. Each level has three gems to collect in addition to the mushrooms, but after finishing the game you’ll be challenged to play each level four times, collecting a different number of gems each time for a crown. It’s a great design choice because avoiding gems is often trickier than collecting them.

Truffle Saga has some interesting puzzles and a clever way to add replay value, but I can’t recommend it because of its awkward controls, intrusive ads, and genre amnesia. If you can live with those things, you can get it on Steam, Google Play or the App Store.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

My first problem with Zelik Adventures is how hard it is to start a new game or continue an existing one. Its menu was pretty unresponsive on my Droid Razr HD running KitKat, and it wasn’t readily apparent whether it hadn’t registered my taps or was just taking its time responding. In Zelik Adventures, you play as an alien named Zelik who would have a hard time outrunning my girlfriend’s turtles. After you manage to start a new game, you’re dropped off on planet Earth by a small rocket to begin your mission of meeting five wise men and convincing them to share their wisdom with you. Your first task is to close all the tutorial hints as they tell you how to do things like “run,” jump, and open chests, usually a few seconds after you find out for yourself. Provided you have the patience and will to resist the urge to simply close the app and do something fun, the hardest challenge is jumping using the atrocious controls.  As the ever-so-helpful tutorial hints will tell you without being the least bit intrusive, touching either side of the screen makes Zelik sprint towards that side with all the speed of a seahorse. Swiping upwards on the screen makes him jump as long as you swipe straight up. The slightest slant to your swipe will make it register as a tap on that side of the screen, often walking the alien into spikes or off a ledge.

Throughout whatever part of Earth Zelik Adventures takes place on, there are chests you can open by tapping them. Upon being opened, these chests will vomit up gold coins and a mixture of fruit and junk food the game calls treats. The game keeps track of how many treats you’ve collected, but they aren’t good for anything besides annoying your friends by telling them how many you have. Coins are used to buy disguises like cowboy hats and sunglasses.  The human population of Earth is scared of Zelik, but humans are unobservant enough that they won’t know it’s him if he’s wearing one of these disguises.

Once you have a disguise, you must find a wise man, usually by doing some clumsy platforming. If your disguise is good enough, he’ll talk to you. I would have had a lot more fun with Zelik Adventures if the wise men didn’t all say the exact same thing. The only question on this personality test is “What attracts you?” and each time you are asked it, you are given three answers to choose from. From your answers, the game will assign you a trait like agreeableness or open-mindedness, which you can share with your friends on Facebook until they un-friend you for annoying them. On the game’s stats page, the game will tell you your trait as if it’s your only one.

What is your name? What is your quest? What is your favourite colour?

This could be seen as a good thing in a game with such lousy controls, but Zelik Adventures has no failure state. There are spikes and enemies, but all they do is take away your disguises. This isn’t a big deal because chests can be looted as many times as you want. If you lose your disguise, you can just re-loot a chest and buy another one.

I kept playing, taking frequent occasional breaks to engage in more entertaining activities such as watching my girlfriend’s turtles race, until I found all five wise men and told them what attracts me. At this point, I expected the game to congratulate me for finding all five wise men and show me an endgame cutscene as a reward for putting up with it for so long. Instead, it told me to go find more wise men to learn more about my personality. What immediately followed was the most enjoyable part of my experience with Zelik Adventures: uninstalling the app.

Zelik Adventures is definitely one of the worst games I’ve ever played. The story is boring, the controls are horrible, and it doesn’t even have the decency to be over when you finish it. If you don’t believe me, download it and see for yourself. If you want a mobile platformer that’s actually good, check out Splashy Slime.

Overall Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

In Splashy Slime, you must navigate thirty 2D levels using just one button as a ball of green slime named Splashy, who is probably a ninja-in-training. My favourite thing about Splashy Slime is its control scheme. Despite its apparent simplicity, German developer paranoiax did a lot with it. If you can call it running, Splashy runs from left to right automatically until he/she/it bumps into a wall and turns around. To jump, you tap the screen. The longer the tap, the higher the jump. If you’re touching the screen when you run into a wall, you do a wall jump that I would never have guessed Splashy is in good enough shape to pull off, which is one of the reasons why I think he/she/it is training to be a ninja.

The game loads in a little over six seconds on my Droid Razr HD running KitKat, and the loading screen explains the controls. In case you’re one of those people who doesn’t read the tips on loading screens, the first four of the thirty levels serve as a tutorial that explains the controls again. The problem is that both of these sources are a bit misleading. They say “Tap to jump” and “Hold to jump higher,” which implies that there are only two jump heights: one for tap, one for hold. It would have been more accurate to say “Tap to jump” and “The longer the tap, the higher the jump.” After that, the tutorial teaches you how to wall jump, how to use springboards, and the most important lesson of all, “Remember: if it’s spiky it kills you.”

Remember: if it’s spiky it kills you.

The object of Splashy Slime is to reach the exit sign in each of the levels without getting killed by the multitude of bottomless pits and spikes that are out to ruin your day. The game never explains what’s at the end of these exit signs that mean so much to Splashy that he/she/it is willing to risk his/her/its life, but jumping over saw blades and avoiding spikes both sound like skills that would be taught at a school for video game ninjas. This is the other reason I think Splashy Slime takes place at a ninja school, and I never saw Splashy in a history lesson to disprove this hypothesis.

I never expected a mobile game to do platforming as well as Splashy Slime, but I do have some gripes with it. As is the case with many platformers, there are coins you can collect. However, there’s no reason to collect them, so they end up being annoying rather than adding to the game. In a hardcore platformer, I would expect the coins to add another layer of difficulty for those brave enough to try collecting them, but paranoiax misses that opportunity.

There are three different environments, but the only one I liked was the dungeon between the forest levels and the winter holiday-themed ones. The dungeon appeals to my affinity for dark themes in video games and literature, and it’s the only level where all the spikes and saw blades don’t seem out of place. The dungeon levels also feature hanging platforms that aren’t in the rest of the game, making the game play slightly different. The other two environments don’t do this. The woodlands and the holiday environment would be indistinguishable given a paint job, and the spikes look out of place in both of them. All three environments also share the same music, which is a shame because having three background songs would have made the game’s biggest problem a little more bearable.

Just like I never expected anyone to make a good platformer for mobile devices, I never expected anyone to make a game with music so bad that the game is better on mute. I usually like chip-tune soundtracks, but Splashy Slime‘s is easily the worst part of the game. The music in the trailer is actually pretty good, so I’m not sure why it’s horrible in the final product. Splashy Slime touts itself as “an impossible hardcore platformer”, but I stopped playing more times because I was sick of the music than because I was frustrated by the difficulty. I ended up playing the second half of the game on mute, and it only took that long because the mute button also silences the sound effects.

Despite some design flaws that keep it from being as good as it should be, Splashy Slime is a great game that exceeds my previous expectations of mobile platformers. It’s a free download on Google Play, and I recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind playing it on mute.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

The Flashlight: Chupacabra’s Greatest Foe

After a loading screen that politely reminds you that the game is made by MEGO, Chupacabra prompts you to press start. Since most smartphones lack a start button, this is emulated by tapping anywhere on your phone’s screen. Your reward for discovering the solution to this first puzzle is that you’re given control of a goat-murdering vampire and mercilessly unleashed upon the unsuspecting goat population of a 2D version of Mexico. The game doesn’t explain the controls, but I can overlook that because they’re so simple: to run, you do nothing. To stop, you “press start” the same way you did to get past the title screen.

The objective, which shouldn’t surprise you, is to kill as many goats as you can without being spotted by any flashlight-wielding cowboys, who are probably just jealous that you get to be a vampire and they don’t. To kill goats, you simply avoid tapping the emulated start button and allow yourself to sprint through them. Every time you do this, your score increases by one. As an added bonus, you get to see each goat you kill explode into red, tasty pixels of  goat blood. Chupacabra is a messy eater.

You must be careful though. Throughout 2D Mexico, vigilant cowboys sit on horseback, waving flashlights back and forth, hoping to spot the monster that slaughters their goats in the night. If you are caught in the beam of a flashlight, the cowboy holding that flashlight will immediately shoot you. When Chupacabra comes into contact with a bullet, the result is similar to the slime in a video game adaptation of the 90s Nickelodeon show All That: green, pixelated, messy, and completely innocuous to goats. And being innocuous to goats means the game is over.

To complicate matters, the screen constantly gets darker, returning to full brightness every time you kill a goat. If you allow the screen to go completely black, you starve to death and the game is over. This creates a nice balancing act that requires you to slow down enough to avoid the flashlight beams but not enough to starve to death before reaching the next goat.

All of this would make for a great game except for two problems I have with it. The first is that doing well seems to rely, at least to some degree, on luck. If you’re lucky, there will be lots of goats to eat with only the occasional cowboy to  evade. If you’re unlucky, you’ll run into too many cowboys too close together and starve to death trying to sneak past them.

The second is that, if you run for a few seconds without stopping, you switch speeds from moderately fast to extremely fast. When running extremely fast, it’s much harder to stop in time when you see a cowboy. To get around this, I tapped my screen every few seconds to keep my speed at moderately fast. This probably won’t be an issue for everyone, but it kept the game from being fun for me. I hate having to constantly interrupt the game to keep it from giving me something that would usually be, and should be, considered a power up.

Despite its good points, Chupacabra isn’t a good game. To be fair, it’s not that bad either, and I can understand how other people would like it. The bottom line is that I didn’t enjoy it, but it’s a free download, so it may still be worth checking out.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

There’s lava at the bottom of this pit, but it can’t hurt me because it’s not on screen.

If I were a sarcastic person, I would say there is a dearth of indie 2D platformers like The Fourth Wall and Four Sided Fantasy with unique and often-clever gimmicks. The Fourth Wall‘s gimmick is that pressing CTRL locks the screen in place and allows the hero to walk off one side of the screen to emerge on the other side, fall through the bottom of the screen and reappear at the top, or jump through the top of the screen and pop out of bottom. The game is filled with puzzles that are solved by using this gimmick, and I encourage you to download The Fourth Wall for free because because playing it for yourself will give you a much better idea of whether you like it than reading about how much I enjoyed it. Four Sided Fantasy‘s developer, Ludo Land, will build on The Fourth Wall by adding multiplayer, more ways to use screen wrap, and a new art style.

Four Sided Fantasy is scheduled to be released on PC for $10 next year. You can vote for it on its Steam Greenlight page.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

I’m not sure what kind of animals those are.

Hilomi is the opposite of a 2D platformer. In a platformer, you are given a character and an environment. You control the character to navigate the environment, collecting items and completing objectives. In Hilomi, you are given a character named Hilomi and an environment, but now you control the environment to help Hilomi collect pictures of animals and reach the gate to the next level.

The mechanics of Hilomi are pretty simple. The environment is made out of Minecraft-like blocks that Yamago repainted with better textures. There are different materials like earth, stone, sand, water, totem, wood, ice, and fire. All of them are good for something except stone. You can create and destroy blocks of earth, and you can turn materials into other materials. Making and destroying earth takes one mana per move, and converting materials takes two. My first problem with Hilomi is the contrived nature of this Minecraft alchemy. It makes sense that you can turn wood into totems because totems are often made of wood. It makes sense that these wooden totems can be turned into fire because, as any pyromaniac who’s received something from a Hawaiian gift shop knows, wooden totems burn quite well. If anyone understands the logic between being able to turn fire into sand, please, I implore you: leave me a comment and explain it to me.

Hilomi has a variety of environments, so you won’t get bored of the scenery.

The other contrived bit is the way you get more alchemy powers. In the beginning of the game, all you can do is make and destroy earth. Your alchemy powers are introduced one by one as you need them, with no explanation as to why you just learned a new trick. In fact, I don’t know who is helping Hilomi navigate these areas to take pictures of the wildlife. Hilomi is introduced in the opening cut-scene as a young, probably French girl who likes to take pictures of animals. I really like her as a character, but I have no clue who I am playing as. Am I some kind of benevolent god? Am I Hilomi’s subconscious, controlling a dream she is having? Am I a vampire who is working to gain her trust so I can eat her later?

That last one would make me feel better about the art style and music choice. In my preview of Forward to the Sky, I made a distinction between the kind of cheery that makes me feel like I’m going on an epic adventure and the kind of cheery that makes me sick. The art style of Hilomi is the latter.

My other problem with Hilomi is its loading times. My phone is a Droid Razr HD running Jelly Bean, and it took an average of 27 seconds of loading time to be ready to play. After that, there is a 5 second load time between worlds. This won’t be a big deal to some people, but when you’re waiting for your grandfather to get his hair cut, 27 seconds feels like a couple of minutes. The development team is currently looking at the issue.

Other than that, the game is really good. It’s easily the best mobile game I’ve ever played. While the cute art style annoys me, I like that the animals smile when Hilomi gets close to them. It has a rating system similar to the three-star system in games like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, and Ten Second Ninja. Each level has three or four animals, and you must take pictures of all of them in order to get the highest rating. It’s incredibly satisfying to come back to a level that’s been troublesome and finally get all of the pictures. It also amuses me that Hilomi takes no fall damage but dies instantly in water like Cole McGrath from inFamous. Once you get past how contrived the game is, it’s incredibly fun. It has minor flaws that keep it from being perfect, but if you have an iOS or Android device, I strongly suggest you at least download the free version.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed on an Android-based device using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Forward to the Sky stars a little girl who runs around in a castle-like environment in the sky and kills reanimated skeletons that I like to imagine were once little boys. I had some gripes about the controls; whenever you attack, you attack in the direction the camera is facing, not in the direction the character is facing. It’s also a bit awkward to manoeuver using WASD and the mouse as in a typical first-person shooter, but that’s mostly just the result of using a keyboard and mouse to play a game designed for a game pad.

I had to smack a couple of those red switches to get the platforms in place.

In addition to smacking undead things about with a giant sword, Forward to the Sky has puzzles and platforming, and the two interact quite well. There was a part that involved hitting the right switches to move platforms around so I could get to a new location, although I hope the puzzles get more complex than figuring out which two of the three switches I need to hit. Whenever I hit a switch, I can clearly see what it does because it happens right in front of me. It’s amazing how many games frustrate me by making me flip a switch or press a button and then wander around through the level trying to find the secret door it opened.

The platforming has all the polish of a game in alpha, but when it works, it works like a simplified version of the greatest PS2 platformers. There are no double jump or mid-air attack to stay in the air longer, but it is also devoid of annoying magnetic assistance features and invisible walls. Speaking of walls, all of them seem to be weak against gigantic swords. If I wanted to see what was on the other side of a wall, I smacked said wall a few times and jumped over the pile of rubble left in its place. It was a refreshing change after all the games populated by buildings and furniture that seem unaffected by rockets and grenades.

Forward to the Sky has a bright, cheery, cartoonish art style and soundtrack, but it’s not the kind that makes me sick and long for a darker, grittier game. It gives the impression that you are a young adventurer at the beginning of an epic tale in which the sky is the limit. With its platforming, combat, and bright music and visuals, Forward to the Sky reminds me of a 3D version of Maplestory without the bugs, hackers, fetch quests, and pretty much everything else that made Maplestory suck. I’d like to see different environments because grey stone seems like it would get old fast, so hopefully Magichnology adds some grass, bricks, trees, and more natural-looking stone to change it up. Despite that, the game looks promising.

Forward to the Sky is scheduled for release late this year for Windows, Mac, and everyone’s favourite penguin-endorsed OS. If you’re interested, please check out its Indiegogo page and consider contributing.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

One of these people is breaking the rules. Can you tell which one?

No Photos, Please! is a social stealth game in the works from The Basement Studios that has passed Greenlight on Steam, and after playing a few rounds of it with my little sister, I’ve come to the conclusion that it has a lot of potential. Two players share a screen with an isometric view of a museum and race to figure out which of the many 8-bit characters they are controlling. After this, the photographer must phase through each exhibit to take a picture of it, (no, I don’t get how that works either) and the security guard must get within range of the photographer and apprehend him. Anyone who’s played the Assassin’s Creed multi-player will feel right at home with this game. You spend most of your time not knowing which of the many avatars in the room are hunting you or breaking the rules, you have class-specific abilities to combat your opponent, and you have to trick your friend, sister, or mortal enemy into believing that you are just another brainless, computer-controlled drone. I really like the concept. The problem is that the photographer is overpowered.

When playing as the security guard, I won about half the time. When playing as the photographer, I never lost. That includes the time I was blindly fumbling about because I never actually figured out which character I was. There are two main things that contribute to this. One, as the photographer, you don’t really need to know who the other person is. If you act like an NPC, your anti-security abilities will delay the security guard long enough to get all the pictures. As the security guard, you need to figure out which avatar is yours, which one is your opponent’s, and then you need to get close to your opponent without giving away that you are more than another NPC enjoying a day at the museum. The other thing that tilts the game in the photographer’s favour is the time limit. When the photographer takes the first picture, a two-minute timer is started. If the security guard doesn’t find and apprehend the photographer before the timer goes off, the photographer wins. In fact, I found that the easiest way to win as the photographer was to take one picture and run out the clock.

The good thing is that this is Sparta! beta. No Photos, Please! is still in development, and if the classes are balanced, it will be a great game that I’ll have no problem recommending. No Photos, Please! is scheduled for release later this year. For more information or to watch some gameplay videos, check out its Steam page.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.