Indie Royale June Bug

Hey look, the new Indie Royale is out.





This time around, the games are PixelJunk Eden, Escape Goat, Noitu Love 2: Devolution, and Auditorium.

I'm actually excited about this one because I loved the Soulcaster games from the Valentine's Bundle, and MagicalTimeBean, the developer who made Soulcaster, is also responsible for Escape Goat.

Escape Goat is a platformer game with puzzle elements.

It was originally released on Xbox Live Arcade, where it's one of the most popular indie games available, and this is its first time being ported over to PC. I have a lot of goodwill towards this developer from my past experience with Soulcaster, and look at that trailer! That looks sweet! So basically, I'm already sold. It looks great.

But let's look at the other games.

Noitu Love 2 is an action game. I don't know much beyond that, but just looking at that gameplay footage, it looks pretty fun. I'm interested in trying this one out.

I'm less sure what to think of PixelJunk Eden. It looks kinda weird. Doesn't it look weird? It looks weird. I think it's some sort of platformer, but I'm not totally sure. Reserving judgement.

And lastly, we have Auditorium, which is a puzzle game. Looks pretty trippy. Might be interesting. I dunno, I'm mostly in it for Escape Goat.

Speaking of puzzle games, I played Ichi. And beat it. And got all A ranks on every level. Go me!

The way it works is there's a yellow dot. The yellow dot travels in a straight line and bounces off objects. You win the game by using the yellow dot to collect all the yellow circles in the level. However, you don't control the dot--you can only manipulate its environment by clicking to rotate red blocks, make shaking blocks vanish, and draw lines along the dot's current path.

Like I said, I've already managed to beat all 51 levels with a top rank, so it's not a super-hard game. But it is very cute, with its crayon-drawing art style and simplistic premise.

Yes, I think "cute" is an appropriate description. This is a simple game that's not very deep, but good casual fun. I can't say I love it, but disliking it would be like disliking a cute kitten.

So yeah, that's Ichi.

Also, I beat Ben There, Dan That.

I don't think I've ever seen anything as tongue-in-cheek as this game. It's constantly self-deprecating and lampshade-hanging, and it's actually pretty funny. So it's hard to hate it, I guess. Whatever my feelings about point-and-click adventure games, I have to concede that this one managed to make me smile. That's gotta be worth something, I suppose. *shrug*