Silverchase
- 20 Posts
- 114 Comments
Joined 1Y ago
Cake day: Jan 21, 2024
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- files.catbox.moe
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CATO is that old nerd joke about cats and toast turned into a puzzle platformer. Cats always land on their feet, but buttered toast always lands butter-side down, so if you strap them together…
I found CATO through a Steam Next Fest in 2024. The first few levels in that demo were promising enough to get me to wishlist the game.
CATO is in a corner of the puzzle game genre I like to call "single-player co-op" since you control two characters at the same time. The cat can run and climb but can't jump, while the toast can jump sideways and up walls but is helpless on ice. When the two are assembled together, their abilities are combined and they also gain infinite jumps. Almost all puzzles in the game involve splitting up and reassembling at the right times.
There's also a basic plot about running out of milk and going out to get more. For a puzzle game, that's enough of an excuse to get the game started. Story is obviously not the reason a puzzle game fan would play this.
## Smart puzzle design
I consider the puzzle design in CATO to be exceptionally smart, yet understandable. The levels are laid out so it's easy to tell what they want you to achieve, with each major step of the puzzle placed in a different part of the screen, so you only need to worry about how to solve it and not what your objective even is. While these are often multiple simple steps, the challenge is completing them all at the same time. The most interesting levels remind me of community-made advanced levels for Portal 2, where it's often easy to just reach the exit but tricky to get there with the door held open. A small number of puzzles instead focus on execution challenges, like sensitive timing, but these are thankfully rare.
The game gently teaches its mechanics with just level design and no text. That's the ideal execution of a tutorial, on the level of the greats. It follows the classic pattern: you first get a very easy puzzle using the mechanic, then the puzzle repeats, each time with an extra twist added that makes it harder, guiding you to discover the mechanic's nuances. The game makes good use of its mechanics, exploring each deeply, and in later levels, starts combining them and challenging you to understand how they interact.
There are mechanics like:
* Walls that become solid if the cat is carrying the toast!
* Cheese that is bouncy for the cat but sticky for the toast!
* High-speed pipe transport!
* Multiple toasts!
Overall, CATO isn't too hard of a puzzle game, but there definitely were a few levels that had me sitting still, thinking for a while. There's also a hint system available for most levels, which marks the important places in a level.
## Action breaks
The final level of each of the five worlds is an action-focused level instead of a puzzle. Some are runner-style platformers, like Canabalt, which have you dodging obstacles while sliding to the exit. Others are boss fights that feature the main mechanic of that world as the key to beating the boss. None are really that difficult, but they're an adequate change of pace after playing a long chain of puzzle levels. Although five worlds sounds somewhat few, each actually has a lot of levels — about 30 or so in each.
## Looks
The art style of the game is pretty interesting. It imitates chunky pixel art with 3D graphics, while maintaining the flat, two-tone shading to sell the pixel art look. But with its 3D art, it gets to have very smooth animations and detailed environments.
Without the obviously artificial pixelation effect, this would have been fine, but unremarkable 3D art. Without the 3D, there may not have been the smoothness in the animation or the flexibility to zoom in and out to appropriately fit levels on screen.
Also, there are skins!
Don't worry, they don't require any money or grinding. You unlock them as rewards for finding in-game secrets. There are separate skins for the cat and the toast, but I find the default toast to be too much fun to switch off of. Despite that, getting these secrets is relevant for achieving…
## One hundred percent!
I liked CATO so much I decided to 100% it. I consider this a great honour for a game, since I so rarely bother with full completion. (The previous time I did so was with Grapple Dog in 2023.) That involved finding all the secrets throughout the game. On the level select map, some level icons have a mark indicating there's a secret there. Some secrets just involve going into a hidden passageway, like in Doom or Quake, but accessing others requires using a level's puzzle elements in a counterintuitive way to get the cat and toast into an obscure corner of the level.
Some secrets just contain unlockable skins or easter eggs, but some actually lead to additional, secret levels. More interestingly, they feature a special mechanic that only appears in these secret levels! If you never go for secrets, you would never even know about this mechanic. (Of course, I won't be giving away what this mechanic is.) Most of these secret levels have a similar difficulty as the main levels, but the ones near the end of the game get particularly hard, involving clever usage of the secret mechanic in combination with the other mechanics.
creator
toI clicked on this post because of the jazz in jazzstronauts.
There actually is something that could be called jazz, but you’ll have to finish the entire story for that.
How did you get all the images at once, upload beforehand (whether to Lemmy or somewhere else offsite) and that is how you have a link? Repeated editing so Lemmy accepts each new image upload?
I actually published a mini-site on yay.boo containing this post and all of the media. The pictures in this Lemmy post are hotlinked from yay.boo. The video is hotlinked from Imgur because yay.boo did not like it when I did that. In my previous posts, I did directly upload everything to sh.itjust.works, but I wanted to try a different way this time.
For my previous posts, like this one on Gunfire Reborn, I went to the “Create a post” form and used the “upload picture” button on the toolbar of the main body text field.
I have actually been playing multiple cat-themed games in recent months but have been too lazy/busy to bother writing about them.
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[Jazztronauts doesn't have a page on the Steam Store. Instead, it lives on the Steam Workshop!](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1452613192)
Quick facts:
* It's a full game mode for Garry's Mod
* Genre: Uh, first-person collectathon?
* Number of players: Singleplayer and online co-op
### Getting Jazzed Up
*Jazztronauts* is a deeply meta kind of game that takes full advantage of its Garry's Mod base: it uses the Gmod workshop as its playground and the story takes place within it as a "Source engine multiverse" of sorts. I find it's a great experience in online co-op with friends.
The story starts off with you playing normal Gmod. However, while playing some unremarkable Half-Life 2-styled map, a band of interdimensional cats show up, exploring the worlds of the Source engine. They recruit you to help with the mission: you're going to help them gather junk from maps from all over the Gmod workshop. You will actually go out to real maps to steal props and level geometry!
Wait, otherworldly visitors that show up to offer you a job for a mysterious agenda? Am I back in Black Mesa?
### Joining the Band
Once you join the cats, they take you to the Bar Samsara, their hideout between maps. You chat with them to get to know them better and receive jobs from them to fetch certain quantities of certain objects.
You go over to the giant TV and channel surf on the *real* Gmod workshop for a *real* map that you want to visit. These are maps people made for other game modes, like Sandbox, Prop Hunt, or Zombie Survival. In one rare case, I stumbled upon a map that was specifically designed for Jazztronauts, called jazz_artemis, uploaded a few days prior.
[jazz_artemis on the workshop](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3244640713)
Once you find a map you want to raid, you call over a trolley to take you there and the map starts downloading. Panels all over the bar also display stats about the map. Hopefully it has a lot of props to steal! You get in the trolley and honk the horn repeatedly to tell your friends to hurry up and get in.
Once you're in the map, you pull out your prop snatcher baton and start ripping stuff out of the map. You remember to be on the lookout for any quest items you need to grab. When playing with friends, credit for stolen props is shared, so there's no need to compete for props. When you snatch stuff, it'll automatically be lifted off the map, leaving behind a pink crystal pattern to indicate what used to be there.
After a while of stealing potted plants and office windows, you're satisfied with what you've gotten and the map is looking pretty pink. You pull out your keyfob and press the button to summon a trolley to take you back to the bar. This exit effect is absolutely amazing, with the trolley smashing through map geometry to get to you. It's an impressively robust and seamless transition!
Now back at the bar, you head to the prop claim area to get paid. You pull the lever to unload your haul of stolen props for the cats. When playing with friends, all money earned to date is copied to each player, so late joiners automatically get caught up with money. You can then go see the Bartender to buy upgrades for your tools.
The tasks the cats assign you start off simple, like "find 15 barrels", but the needed objects become more and more obscure: washing machines, live headcrabs, suspicious chemicals. Later quests get strange:
### Grooving in Maps
The variety of quest items means you're going to have to explore far corners of the Gmod workshop for many kinds of maps to find your loot. Here are some examples of maps I found.
rp_newexton is a roleplay map where you pretend to live in a fictional Australian city. There are apartments, a shopping mall, a giant banana beside the highway, and even a working train that takes you to out of New Exton to the suburbs!
This map, whose name I don't remember, has a turret that rapid fires rockets.
vp_voidmall is a creepy, sprawling abandoned mall with phenomenal lighting. There's also a playable story in this map if you were to play it properly. It was too powerful for Jazztronauts and crashed the game! However, it was too intriguing to pass on, so my friends and I explored the map in vanilla Gmod instead. This is no doubt the highest-quality map I've ever played from the Gmod workshop.
### Coda
Jazztronauts feels like a wild take on a story mode for Garry's Mod itself, given its persistent story and its awareness of Garry's Mod and its player culture. It has a special, meta perspective on the game it's built on, reaching through the fourth wall but never getting smarmy or self-referential about it. This game certainly could only exist as a mod on top of the mountains of content made for Garry's Mod.
Jazztronauts is an earnest love letter to the Source engine and celebrates all of the things fans have made for it over the years. In fact, this is at the core of their objectives: they want you to collect stuff so they can build an interactive Source engine museum! Learn about brushes, the intricacies of crouch-jumping, and surfing! Now this is edutainment.
Is the gameplay of Jazztronauts thin? Yes. One of the cats even says to your face that this is "fetch quest hell". You run a long chain of fetch quests for objects that aren't even guaranteed to appear in the maps you visit. How many maps do you think contain Dr. Kleiner?
Nonetheless, my friends and I enjoy playing; we care more about the journey than the destination. We get to share our reactions to all the interesting things we find, and some maps have stuck with us. Months on, we still talk about the memorable ones: maps with awesome atmosphere, humour, wacky ideas from novice mappers, and inventive interactive elements. Jazztronauts has taken us on trips to see more of the Garry's Mod workshop than we'd normally bother to. (If you really want, you can open the console and directly load a map that you know has quest items.)
Jazztronauts is like some fever dream interpretation of what surfing the web looks like inside cyberspace. It's like a StumbleUpon for Garry's Mod.
### Want to play Jazztronauts?
You'll need:
* [Garry's Mod](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4000/Garrys_Mod/)
* [Jazztronauts from the Garry's Mod workshop](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1452613192)
To avoid map errors, make sure you have Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2 installed. To avoid *more* map errors, you'll probably have to install more Valve games, like Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2.
If you're playing with friends, make sure to always have the same person host the game because the save file is kept on their computer.
😺
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> Coming to PC and Consoles on May 28, 2025
I’d say it’s a step more “serious racing” than Kart. Transformed had more complex drifting and boosting mechanics to emphasize good racing skills. There are still powerups, but they’re relatively weak. The closest blue shell equivalent is the swarm, which summons a swarm of giant wasps to sit in front of the race leader, but it’s always dodgeable with good steering. The medium-level pickups require good aim or awareness of who’s near you. The Kart strategy of only caring about the last lap is still possible in Transformed, but trying to get ahead as far as possible is also a doable strategy.
I’m sure someone at Valve also had fond memories of that toilet.
Amazingly, I played this game when it came out and discovered it has Steam Controller binds out of the box!
At this point, the fact that Portal is in the Half-Life universe is just a fluke. The plots of Portal 2 singleplayer, co-op, and PTI are very “distant” from anything happening with Half-Life. The two series are tonally very mismatched. Their strongest connection is that Aperture bumbled their way into possessing Half-Life plot-critical stuff and then losing the boat that contained it.
creator
toThe maps aren’t generated inch-by-inch, if that’s what you were hoping for. Each stage has a bucket of unique rooms it stitches together to create the level geometry. The devs did a clever thing and made rooms with multiple doorways, with two chosen at random to be part of the path, so you can traverse through the same room in a slightly different way each run. At this point, I’ve seen all the possible rooms, but the combination of character upgrades, surprise challenges the game springs on you, weapons, and enemies keeps it fresh. There’s a lot of replayability in just character builds alone, since you can find multiple ways to make each character effective, depending on what perks you got first and what risks you take.
The co-op works well. Gunfire Reborn is a lot easier in co-op because friends can revive each other with unlimited tries, whereas in singleplayer, you get only one revive by sacrificing the character-upgrading resource. Recently, they’ve added a Left 4 Dead-style bot co-op mode so you can have that experience instead of the pure solo one. I’ve actually ground myself into a weird corner where I’m way better than everyone else I play with and can carry a whole team, dealing like 80% of the entire team’s damage across the whole run. I’ve not actually tried public matchmaking, just playing solo or with friends.
In terms of DLCs, each comes with two new characters and a handful of weapons. Each DLC character has a different mechanical focus in case you’re getting bored of the characters you already have. The base game is just fine to start with. I have the first two packs, but the latest one, the third, I skipped during the Steam winter sale to buy more games. The character I was playing here, Zi Xiao, comes from the second pack, Artisan and Magician. His counterpart in that pack is Nona, who is pretty much the red panda version of Gaige from Borderlands 2 (no anarchy stacks, though), summoning and commanding a combat robot. The first pack, Spirit Realm, has a monkey who aggressively upgrades his guns and a fox who, with the right build, can just stop using guns and drop fireballs on enemies instead.
Okay, here’s my final pitch. The game is on sale as part of the launch of the new season. It’s not the all-time low, but it’s pretty close.
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## The condensed looter shooter experience
Gunfire Reborn is a looter shooter with an Asian aesthetic and a short, but extremely replayable campaign, which runs for less than an hour. It supports four-player online co-op, but this time, I was running solo. In short, it's the full Borderlands experience without the questionable writing and Randy Pitchford.
You travel across multiple lands to purge the corruption (an ARPG classic), fighting terracotta soldiers in their crypts, sniper birds in the desert, samurai fish at the shores, and polar bears up in the frozen mountains.
Within the past few years since exiting early access, Gunfire Reborn has had seasonal events, like Path of Exile's leagues, adding a bit of extra spice to the campaign. The fourth season (Star Link) started just a few days ago, so I thought it was a good time to get a run in with a character I wasn't familiar with.
## This run: Zi Xiao
In the head video, I'm playing as Zi Xiao, an owl who commands the stars with cards. I'm using Golden Bow, which deals immense amounts of single-target damage but is terrible with dealing with large packs of monsters. Good thing Zi Xiao's abilities can make up for it! With the best cards, I call the stars to strike down an area in front of me.
Oh yeah, I somehow managed to get more than 100% accuracy in this run. I wonder how the game is counting that.
## Yeah, it really is a fast, Asian Borderlands
Gunfire Reborn is transparently inspired by Borderlands. It features the same three core elements of Borderlands: fire, corrosion, and shock, and has the same focus on scavenging for weapons. One difference is that it relies on mechanically unique weapon designs, compared to the part-by-part weapon generation system that Borderlands has. Still, like any proper ARPG, there are piles of modifiers that can appear on any item.
Why not try…
* An octopus that sucks moisture from enemies to power a water laser
* A shotgun that's really a small, handheld demon that eats fish and sneezes death
* A star compass that rather than shooting bullets, projects a damaging ring around you that you can grow and shrink
* The [Unkempt Harold](https://www.lootlemon.com/weapon/unkempt-harold-bl2), straight from Borderlands 2
* A brick
*Yeet.*
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Have you ever read Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott?
I did as a kid (nerd). Each group in literature class got to choose a novel to study and we picked Flatland. One day, two-dimensional creature A. Square gets a visit from a three-dimensional creature and gets a glimpse of a new dimension beyond his world's two. The novel ends something like this:
> "So are there more dimensions beyond the third?"
>
> "Nah," said Sphere.
## Anyway, let's go golfing!
Sphere was wrong and 4D Golf is the proof. I got it on the recent sale and just started it and it's just about what I expected.
It's really a straightforward game. You play mini-golf, but the course spans the space of four dimensions instead of three. However, you, the player, are still a 3D creature and can only see a slice of the 4D space. That means the part of the challenge is just to figure out where you actually need to face to get the ball into the hole.
As a bit of aid, the game gives you several tools to help you visualize and navigate the course. You have the ability to spin around the 4th axis and you can see ghost images of what's perpendicular to you in the fourth axis so you get a better idea of what's around you.
You can also switch to a "volume view", which lets you see and explore the floor plan of the level. Like how a floor plan is two-dimensional for a 3D area, it's three-dimensional in 4D, so you fly around with six degrees of freedom in the floor plan mode.
After playing a handful of levels, I think I've built up enough of an intuition to orient myself properly. I'm getting a hang of this internal mental shorthand of the level changing around the ball as it moves.
The first few levels also deliver a quick tutorial on understanding 4D space, with the classic explanation for the topic. It starts by talking about how a 2D creature would perceive 3D space, then extends the analogy to a 3D creature in 4D space. It really is quick, so I'm not sure how helpful it could be for anyone who isn't already slightly familiar with 4D.
## I'm slightly familiar with 4D
Yeah, Flatland got young me fascinated in this kind of funky geometry stuff. I was finding sites to learn about exotic geometries. Four dimensions was only the start.
Well, I clearly wasn't the only person who was fascinated by this stuff. 4D Golf is essentially developer CodeParade's followup to their previous game, Hyperbolica, which was set in a three-dimensional world where the rules of geometry were different. Parallel lines never stayed parallel and five squares could share a corner, not four.
I'm glad I get to enjoy multiple extremely nerdy geometry games.
## Bonus: discover more funky geometry-related stuff
Novels
* Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott — A. Square lives in a two-dimensional society and discovers the third dimension. It's in the public domain, so it's free to read online!
* The Planiverse by A. K. Dewdney — A class in a computer lab accidentally makes contact with a two-dimensional universe. It's a more rational, "hard" take on how a two-dimensional universe would work.
Online resources
* <http://hi.gher.space/> — 2003-era site with an introduction to four-dimensional space and an exploration of how a world like that would work.
* [Outside In AKA "turning a sphere inside out"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO61D9x6lNY) — An old-school YouTube upload of an even older-school animated presentation about math research on the topic. [Here's the 1996 official site!](http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/docs/outreach/oi/)
* [Portals to Non-Euclidean Geometries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqUv2JO2BCs) — In this YouTube video, the host takes you through portals to spaces where the rules of geometry are weird and different.
More games
* Hyperbolica — By the same guy as 4D Golf. A light-hearted walking simulator in a world with hyperbolic geometry.
* Miegakure — A 4D puzzle game that's been perpetually in development since like 2007. It still shows up on YouTube, at conferences, and in the solo dev's blog posts from time to time.
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My gift for Christmas is sore arms from playing Beat Saber. It's a serious workout playing high-difficulty maps.
That map shown in the head video is:
* [Lights Camera Action](https://meganeko.bandcamp.com/track/lights-camera-action)
* Artist: meganeko
* [Map by Tacky](https://beatsaver.com/maps/10d15)
I consider Beat Saber to be one part of the essentials pack of modern VR gaming. As a rhythm game fan, it's what got me hooked on VR, having played it at a VR arcade back when the HTC Vive was considered new. I visited that arcade multiple times and would spend my entire time slot playing Beat Saber. A few years later, I got a Valve Index and it's still one of my go-to games when I use it, alongside Half-Life: Alyx.
## Water breaks!
Beat Saber is obviously a physically intense game, so I make sure to stretch beforehand. I also take water breaks every few songs or I'll get too exhausted to play well. To help reduce fatigue, I move the rest of my body around with the beat so I'm not just standing still like a scarecrow.
## Modding!
One great benefit of PC-powered VR is easy access to modding, and with Beat Saber, modding enables the ability to play community-made beatmaps, which are all I play. Interestingly, my preferences for music in rhythm games tends to be slightly different from my personal tastes. As a result, my collection of maps is very EDM-heavy since the strong beats feel fun to hit in-game.
I also use a camera mod that shows a view on my monitor that's nicer for spectators and screen captures, which is why I have clips of my gameplay. I record with camera settings that roughly approximate what I see and my experience in the headset.
## So many maps!
Over the past few years, I've collected a whole lot of maps. I've noticed that the maps I like to download and play fall into four categories:
1. Really fun movement and patterns
2. Music from another rhythm game (mainly osu!)
3. Music I own
4. Novelty (maps of stuff like ["half life 1 medkit type beat"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN5vhvZIBXE))
Here's an example of movement that I find particularly fun, on a map that I like to play a lot as a warmup. Both hands move independently while having a matching rhythm.
* [Hoohah (VIP Edit)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee7fEEMaPPA)
* Artists: Fox Stevenson & Curbi
* [Map by Ruckus](https://beatsaver.com/maps/216d)
Finally, here's a "Bandcamp special", a map I found just today by plugging in names from my music collection into search. Getting to play music I personally listen to is a treat. I think this would count as *extremely* active listening.
* [CITRUS!](https://lianhua.bandcamp.com/track/citrus)
* Artist: lianhua
* [Map by adgato](https://beatsaver.com/maps/3e34d)
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Did you know you can throw objects in Portal 2? You pretty much use your player camera as a cannon to fling objects by letting go of them while moving your view. This is not intended, [so clever throws can just bypass or break some puzzles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NhfVHLl6uE).
This quirk came up in a puzzle while playing co-op with a friend. We figured out a throw that would bypass the main part of the puzzle.
I've played the co-op campaign multiple times, but this time I was playing it with a friend who hadn't. It took them a while to get used to thinking with four portals. I would hang back and let them take charge in solving the puzzles, since I'd obviously know how to solve them. Except…
This level, Funnel Drill, I didn't remember how to solve, so the two of us were stumped together. After some co-op thinking, we had roughly narrowed down the flow of the problem. We needed to pass an object through that barrier to block a laser with it.
We played half-court basketball instead.
I had an exit portal facing the laser. As soon as the ball came out of it, I quickly sent out an excursion funnel right behind the ball, completely bypassing the need to carry it through the barrier.
We probably could have figured out the puzzle in the time it took us to get a successful throw.
## Bonus video 🥏
I throw a disc like I'm playing ultimate with GLaDOS! It actually lands in the disc reader!
Petition to name A Short Hike the best open world game.
Bastion 👍
If you liked Pseudoregalia, why not try the other N64-style 3D platformer released in 2023 with a goat protagonist trapped in a dream, Corn Kidz 64? Yes, this is a particularly specific coincidence. It features great humour, extremely cartoony animation, and polished movement. It’s very much quality over quantity.
The obvious cameo happens if you get to the right place.
I also “completed” Dead Cells and went “yeah, that’s enough.”
Anyway, my games.
Completed games
- Neon White
- Run fast. Puts you in the speedrunning grindset. Corny anime plot. Unnecessary dating sim elements. The addictive gameplay carries it.
- Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer
- Retro-style FPS with stylistic suck but still with lots of in-universe and IRL soul. Takes the piss out of edgy teen boy fantasies. This is an essential part of the Hypnospace Outlaw canon.
- Gauntlet Slayer Edition
- It’s Gauntlet but modern. Fun dungeon crawling online co-op with friends.
Games that aren’t reasonably completeable
- Shotgun King
- Chess but the only piece you have is a king with a shotgun. It was fun for a bit, but I quickly lost interest.
- Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed
- Kart racing. Cool maps that change over time. Less bullshit than Mario Kart. It has a hint of more “hardcore” racing mechanics, so it felt like I had more agency. It’s a 2013-era PC game with a surprising amount of jank to make work properly.
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I haven't logged into Steam for several days now. All my gaming recently has been rRootage, which I recently rediscovered after looking around on Flathub for unrelated software.
This is an old favourite of mine. Years ago in high school, I snuck it onto some computers and later saw it on others, so people were definitely copying it around.
rRootage is a bullet hell with all the extra stuff ripped out. Yeah, that's just about all there is to say about it. There are no minor enemies. Each level is a rush of five bosses. Each difficulty, from 1 to 9 then 0, has three hand-crafted levels, plus a fourth where the bullet barrages are created randomly using a genetic algorithm! All my footage here is captured from my attempts on difficulty 8. It features four game modes. There's a "normal" mode plus three modes with mechanics inspired by other shoot-em-up titles: Giga Wing, Psyvariar, and Ikaruga.
Some bosses are so dense with bullets that the game actually starts slowing down. It even seems to me that the game is balanced around this. You get more time to figure out how to navigate a field packed with bullets and your ship moves slower, which lets you nudge around safely.
It was originally released in 2003 by [Kenta Cho (aka ABA Games)](https://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/), who has made a name for himself making shmups and quirky minigames. A few years ago, he updated it, and more recently, [someone ported it to Switch](http://victor.madtriangles.com/code%20experiment/2021/10/07/rrootage-port.html). He also created a markup language called BulletML for describing bullet barrages, which has appeared in some of his other games as well as in games by others.
## Getting the game
rRootage costs nothing. [The official page](https://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/rr_e.html) offers Windows downloads. Some Linux distributions offer a package, and if yours doesn't, [you can get the Flatpak](https://flathub.org/apps/com.abagames.rRootage).
(It's also free software released with the 2-clause BSD license, so you're free to mess around with its 2003-era C++ codebase, which features an obsolete version of SDL. Good luck building it from source.)
## Bonus video
This is me somehow making it through a relentlessly fast bullet pattern on pure instinct.
With hindsight, I view this generation of the Pokémon series as an awkward transition to 3D. It’s pretty apparent in the graphics and UI that Diamond/Pearl/Platinum are essentially upgraded GBA games. 3D effects occur only sparingly, and I remember the backpack UI bizarrely having an iPod-style scroll wheel on the touchscreen.
The following generation got more adventurous with the 3D and started using the DS touchscreen more effectively. The “sprite puppet” effect in Black/White looked janky as heck but I honestly loved it anyway. The character sprites in Cassette Beasts worked similarly, which I guess is another reason I liked that game.
Also, man, the pacing of battle animations and UI is so slow in this generation.
My build for Settlers league was the most fun map blaster I’ve ever made. I made a melee witch (occultist) with Viper Strike that could one-shot entire packs and some map bosses! Just running up to a pack and slapping it and running off.
It was absolute garbage at bossing, though. The survivability was softcore/10.
I’m not familiar with the games you mentioned, so I went to check them out. And look what we have on the Steam store page!
Reviews
“It shares some of the feeling of Her Story, albeit featuring today’s technology and with less of a focus on the crime angle. But it has the same small moments of revelation, all of which come together to form a story in its own neat yet meandering way.” Rock Paper Shotgun
Guess that means you have to play it now.
Her Story is a detective game that starts with you sitting at a computer, not even knowing what mystery you’re supposed to investigate. You have to search through the computer’s database for police interview footage to figure that out. Then you have to figure out the answer to the mystery you think you need to solve. The interview clips have a lot of details for you to track and link together. I had to make a big chunky note for this game and even had to implement a system to keep track of the likelihood of the statements.
If you want more point and click adventures, try the Submachine series, which was originally in Flash but now remastered as a ten-game compilation called Submachine: Legacy. The developer trained as an architect, so you get to admire intricate, hand-drawn architecture porn. It starts off as a typical 00s Flash room escape, until you realize it was all a… hallucination. You realize that you’re actually going to explore a vast, utterly lonely underground world as you try to track down the only person who seems to know how to get out. Teleportation and parallel universe travel come up a lot in the series, so keeping notes will be useful. Incredible dark ambient soundtrack, too.
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- store.steampowered.com
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- 5M
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Bonus: it also seems that the episodes have been rolled into the base game. [Full details of the anniversary update.](https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife2/20th)
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- youtu.be
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- 7M
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https://dadako.itch.io/bad-pixels
The developer occasionally uploads clips of the game.
Cassette Beasts is a creature collector with a substantial single-player campaign and a permadeath difficulty option.
You could also have permadeath as a house rule, which would let you play singleplayer games with traditional campaigns. For example, you could play Elden Ring or Borderlands 2 and commit to deleting the character upon death.
A weird suggestion: Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a co-op puzzle game about defusing a bomb. The player who’s streaming will have the bomb but stream only audio, not video, and everyone else will have to use the defusal manual to guide them to safely disarm the bomb. You’ll have to advance level by level.