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.

In an industry where every successful indie title requires a powerful story or a unique art style to achieve media attention equal to that of blockbuster studios, Knightmare Tower is a breath of fresh air. This is a game purely focused on having fun by being incredibly addicting. Knightmare Tower by Juicy Beast brings players back to a time where it was common practice to sneak into the high school library and play on the (likely outdated) computers, and it is absolutely perfect.

It is difficult to describe why Knightmare Tower is so great, but you play as a knight and you get to pummel dragons in the face. The player’s primary goal is to save ten princesses who have been kidnapped and locked in a massive tower. Instead of simply taking the stairs, our hero launches himself from a barrel and gains speed by slaying each monster along the way. Failing to hit a monster results in losing friction, and if you miss too many times, the risk of falling into lava becomes greater.

The simple mechanics are reminiscent of the flash games of yore in a sense that Juicy Beast fixates on the “Less Is More” ideology. It works wonderfully, of course. The music is over the top and the art style is aesthetically similar to that of Behemoth’s Castle Crashers. The developers acknowledge that this is a very silly experience, but the bells and whistles are part of what makes Knightmare Tower so much fun. It all blends together seamlessly, and nothing feels out of place in this gravity-defying adventure.

More importantly, Knightmare Tower is addicting. The player earns gold for each turn, and depending on the performance, a better score means more gold. Gold can purchase any number of items including armor that can take more damage, or boots that increase the player’s overall speed. By the end of the journey, your roughshod knight will look like a valiant warrior. This is not to say that the game is without challenges, however. Knightmare Tower is very easy to pick up but it can be difficult to master. Certain levels of skill and timing are required to beat the game’s later levels, but it is a steady stream of progression that anyone can jump into without feeling overburdened. Not only that, but it is quite rewarding to beat your previous score with each turn.

Knightmare Tower succeeds at everything it attempts. While the journey to the top is not without its fair share of challenges, the smooth gameplay and silly artistic landscape make the climb a much more enjoyable experience. Plus, Knightmare Tower is cheap. It is on Steam for $3.99, and it is available on iOS, Android, and OUYA as well. Juicy Beast gives players a great product at an affordable price, and I can not give it enough of the praise it deserves. The bottom line? Knightmare Tower provides hours of fun and is easily one of the best indie games available right now.

To purchase Knightmare Tower and check out more from Juicy Beast, feel free to check them out here.

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.

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.

10 Second Ninja will make your heart race, your palms will be constantly soaked in the sweat of stress, and your sense of time will be reduced to intervals of ten seconds. Why? Because Dan Pearce, a BAFTA award winning developer no less, has deemed it necessary to condense the best parts of break-neck platforming down to the rigid constraints of a stopwatch.

And it’s bloody brilliant.

The game has you take control of a ninja on a quest to destroy Robot Hitler and his army. Being the unpleasant fellow that he is, Robot Hitler has banned all ninjas, and so begins your swift journey of vengeance as you cleave your way through his army of Nazi robots, and eventually even Robot Hitler himself.

Everything that makes 10 Second Ninja great can be traced back to that damned ten second timer. Your time is everything, down to the millisecond. It’s tense, perhaps more than it should be, but there’s something almost inexplicably compelling about trying to shave your best scores by even a fraction of a second. Figuring out the fastest path will have you returning to each level time and time again like a twisted drug addiction, adding buckets of replay value to what could have otherwise been a one-time experience.

In an effort to help you achieve the best scores possible, your arsenal includes a sword with a deceptively large arc of attack, a double jump that can help you change course mid-flight, and three shurikens that can help you skip sections all together with a bit of timely precision. Learning to master these three simple mechanics can help you knock seconds off your time.

And then there’s the leaderboard. If 10 Second Ninja’s timer is the drug, then being able to see everyone else’s score on a worldwide leaderboard is undoubtedly the dealer of this score-obsessed addiction. Never before have I been so compelled to try, time and time again, to beat the scores of other players as obsessively as I did in this game.  To say that achieving a high slot on the leaderboard is fulfilling would be an understatement, but perhaps more importantly your time on there will be fleeting as everyone else attempts to vie for the top spots, turning the rush for domination into a finely tuned arena for only the most dexterous.

10 Second Ninja doesn’t complicate things. The gameplay is simple enough to pick up and play without much guidance, and yet at the same time allows for more experienced and score-hungry players to experiment within the confines of each level in an effort to minimise their completion time. With the added drive of leaderboard dominance and fluid animations all around, this is one addiction I will struggle to shake for a long time.

Oh and I’m currently third place worldwide on Canyon, so if you could just not beat that score, that’d be great.

Overall Rating: ★★★★★ 

What does this score mean?

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

10 Second Ninja was released March 5^TH on PC & Mac.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

I played through the entire demo, and I am not over-exaggerating when I say it becomes a very difficult, and at times, very infuriating game. There are many signs with funny comments and suggestions throughout the game that help to balance this out. But I still felt that in certain parts it was unintentionally hard, specifically during the boss fight, which was one of my main problems with the game.

The boss fight seemed to be too hard to be fun, and lacking in humor of any kind. Although I did beat it, I don’t think the joy of beating it warranted its difficulty. Difficulty options easily remedy this, but the game has other problems. I also found that the graphics were outdated, and that the music looped too many times. Other than the lack in the amount of music, I found it to be pleasing to the ears. They’ve also hired the artist Brent Black to do the music for the game since the demo was released, so things are looking promising. In the end, my problems with the game could easily be fixed by the time the game is officially released, and the gameplay itself was already enjoyable.

Overall, the game has lots of potential, and because it was successfully Kickstarted, it will probably end up being a very good game by release. The group of enthusiastic developers and artists from Atlanta, GA hope for the game to come out sometime in 2014.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Super Obstacle Boy is a retro-style platformer for iPhone & iPad from indie developer, Matthias Falk. You’ll play as (spoiler alert: Super Obstacle Boy) as you run and jump, and then run and jump some more through 125+ levels of pixely, 8-bit glory to save your girlfriend who’s been kidnapped by the evil Dr. Negative. If it sounds like Super Meat Boy, that’s because it does (they’re not related, but they did meet at a party once). SOB will feature Game Center integration, achievements, and online leaderboards so you can compete with friends, family, and random people who totally hacked the game, because we all know there’s no way they scored 999,999,999. I mean, come on. My score is only 11,349. Don’t they have anything better to do?

A release date hasn’t been announced yet, but Falk is hoping to have the game available in the App Store later this month. For now, enjoy the trailer below, complete with chiptune soundtrack!

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.