I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews.

It's a lovely morning in the home, and you are a horrible cat. Your aim is to cause mayhem and destruction by knocking over as many things as possible.

This is a joyful little game - although I suspect it is a lot more fun in VR than on a laptop.

The cartoony graphics ran perfectly on Linux. The controls aren't particularly suited to a laptop. Or, at least, I had difficulty coordinating my trackpad and WASD movements.

For $10 it's a perfectly distracting little physics simulator. Not quite worth buying a VR system for - but lots of silly fun.

I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews.

I have mixed feelings about this. It isn't really a game - and admits as much - more of a low-stakes exploration simulator.

It is gorgeous. I couldn't believe my laptop was capable of rendering some of the scenes that it did. It worked perfectly on Linux running Wayland.

Overly moody and atmospheric with - thankfully - no jump scares.

But it starts really badly. About 10 minutes of non-skippable demo effects. I genuinely thought the game was broken. When it starts, there's no instructions. Luckily, it's just arrow keys and the mouse, nothing more complicated than that.

The whole experience takes about 45 minutes. Some of the rooms fade out just as they get interesting, other seem to drag on.

It's worth playing - and shows great promise as the basis for a future game. It is interesting without being entertaining.

I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews.

This is... awful? It is visually interesting without actually being fun. It is intriguing for five minutes before becoming hollow.

It is surreal and delightfully weird. But it isn't a game. You have to hunt for tiny little targets and click repeatedly to see if anything happens. Sometimes it does. Frankly, the experience would have been more honest if there was just a big "NEXT" button.

What starts off weird and melancholy becomes repetitive and frustrating.

It worked flawlessly in Linux. I kinda think you should play it just because it is so different. It isn't a game, more of an artistic demo.

I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews.

This starts as a fun little logic puzzle, but quickly descends into frustration.

Like Portal, you have limited array of actions and have to manipulate your environment in order to get move on to the next level.

But it has a bit of a problem. It is so easy to get lost. There are a bunch of rooms which all look similar, and I found myself quickly running out of puzzles and mostly trying to find my way around.

The logic puzzles are neatly done and it's pretty clever mechanic. But I got bored trying to find the next room to go to. It is designed to be short game, but I found it a little too tedious to finish.

Linux

It runs under Linux using WINE, but you will need to run winetricks d3dcompiler_47 first. That gets Direct 3D installed. Even so, after a while, it seemed to crash out.

Remember all those one-night-stands you had when you were younger? No - me neither. I was a paragon of virtue...

But, if you did engage in such shameless behaviour, did you ever wonder how the morning-after-the-night-before could have gone if you'd played things just a little differently?

ONS is a simple piece of interactive fiction; gather up clues and converse your way to victory. At times it feels a little like "put friendship in; get sex out" as you try to maintain a relationship. But there are some weird twists and turns, and a bunch of different endings to discover.

It's a casual game and will only take you a couple of hours to play through all the scenarios. It's hard to say there's a "winning" ending - but perhaps that's not the point.

I've never played a dating simulator before. I'd heard of them, and their weird parodies like Hatoful Boyfriend, but this is my first time playing one. And, I'm delighted to say, Arcade Spirits is delightful.

The game looks gorgeous, the voice acting is top notch, and the sound design is just perfect. It's also really, really funny. I don't think I've laughed like this at a game since I last played Day of the Tentacle.

Unlike the previous conversation games I've played, there's a real sense that the choices you make effect what happens as the game progresses. It is wry, self-knowing, has lots of classic game references, and makes a good effort at inclusion.

I'm still playing through it and enjoying all the twists and turns it takes. My only criticism would be that the story progresses kinda slowly. But I expect that's normal for these games.

Oh, and it works perfectly in Linux.

Right, I'm heading back into it to see how many people I can seduce.

I like puzzle games, and Minit has a unique twist. You only have 60 seconds to complete each action. But, before we get onto the review, here's how to get it running on Linux.

Linux

• Download the minit_linux.zip file to your Downloads directory.
• Download libssl_1.0.0_32-bit.tar.gz and put it in the same directory as the game archive.
• Install play.it
• Once you've installed play.it, use the command line, go to where you cloned the play.it git repo and run ./play.it ~/Downloads/minit_linux.zip
• It will create a game package which you can install by following the on-screen instructions. Usually, that's sudo apt install ~/git/play.it.git/minit_1.0.0-itch1+20200617.7_i386.deb ~/git/play.it.git/minit-data_1.0.0-itch1+20200617.7_all.deb

Gameplay

It's a top-down, one-map-per-screen adventure puzzler. Pick up the thing, take it over there. Find the person, slay the dragon. All rendered in glorious one-bit graphics.

The mechanism of constant death is neat. You know that every mission is time limited. And it means you can't waste too much time battling baddies.

But, after a couple of hours, it does get a bit wearing. The objectives are sufficiently obscure that you end up wandering around aimlessly hoping to find the thing. I resorted to reading a guide, which kinda showed there's no way to understand how to beat the game.

You can probably figure out that you can use a watering can to put out a fire. But the only way to solve other puzzles is to literally click on everything on a screen in the hope it does something. There's no quest log, so you'd better have a good memory for what you're doing.

It's a neat game, and a quirky mechanic, but a little too illogical for my liking.

The thing about EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER is that it is EXTREME. And it is so EXTREME that it feels a little like a tweenager shouting about how bad-ass they are.

The story aesthetic is gorgeous. Brilliant mix of cartoon and ASCII art.

I'm not good with controls. I found moving the mouse in one direction while navigating my MEATPUNK MECH in another to be a bit confusing. And, if I'm honest, the graphics for the fights are a bit too lo-fi for my liking. But you can skip the fights if you want and just play story mode.

Like lots of indie games, it doesn't really matter what choices you make. The story progresses in a set fashion, all you're doing is selecting the brand of snark that comes out of the characters' mouths.

The EXTREME DRAMA is a bit wearing if you play the game all in one go. Probably best to spread the episodes out. Otherwise you become a bit numb to the endless EXTREME MEAT GORE.

Works perfectly on Linux. And the soundtrack is brilliant.

EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER is available on itch.io

How many people have you killed in a video game? Thousands? At least. But how many funerals have you performed in game? Hardly any.

It's hard to describe A Mortician's Tale as a game. It is a lovely experience where you play a new employee of a funeral home. The game is, literally, preparing the corpses and dealing with the families of the deceased.

Parts of the gameplay are reminiscent of the Wii's Trauma Centre surgeon simulator game. Scalpels, stiches, and fluids everywhere. This isn't a gory game, everything is handled sensitively.

It advertises itself as taking an hour to complete. That's about right. There are no real choices, no scores, and only a simple story. It's almost a trailer for what a full game could be and, frankly, I'd like to play a full-length version.

In a weird way, it reminded me of the deleted scenes in Austin Powers

Perhaps every blood 'n' guts shoot-em-up should force you to deal with the messy reality of your trail of the dead?

Night in the Woods is a cute looking indie game, with one fatal flaw. ​Nothing happens in it.

I gave the game an hour or so, and all I did was walk left and right and click next in the dialogue. There are a few dialogue options, but that doesn't alter the course of the game.

I think I must be missing something. The game gets rave reviews... but for what? There are no choices, no interactivity, no puzzles. It felt like watching a cartoon where I had to repeatedly thump the space bar to progress the dialogue.

There's a weird dungeon crawler mini-game and a Guitar Hero wannabe. But that's it. The Guitar Hero is pretty pointless because it doesn't use popular songs. And whether you hit the notes or miss them all - nothing changes.

There are hints of a story. Something to do with you killing a kid. Or your grandad dying. But it is pretty sparse. I don't know if the story develops, or gets any better because it was ​so​ boring.

Graphics and music are charming. But that's not enough.

Am I wrong? Do let me know if it's worth progressing.

This is the delightful indie game A Short Hike. I don't play many video games, because I find them arbitrary and confusing. They also go on far too long. But "Hike" is the perfect length. I completed it within 2 hours (I think - more on that later). Which, considering I paid $10 for a hundred games as part of the bundle, feels like good value for money!

It's an open-world adventure, which basically consists of a couple of dozen Zelda-style side-quests. Get the mission, pick up a thing, take it over there, climb this, use that, sell this, buy that. Nothing stunningly original, but a great way to spend an afternoon.

I absolutely hated Untitled Goose Game because it was all hype and no substance. This is different. It's a charming little adventure. Zero stress, zero consequences.

There are three minor things I found annoying. And I'm prepared to believe that they're just me not being used to this style of game.

Crappy graphics.

Apparently the blocky graphics are part of the game's aesthetic. I can appreciate that - but it made my eyes hurt and made certain quests really hard.

Annoyingly, after I completed the game, I found there was an option to have smooth graphics.

I've no idea why that isn't the default.

Where am I? What do I have to do?

There's no map, so I found myself wandering around lost. That's not a feeling I enjoy in life, so I don't enjoy it in a game. Similarly, there's no quest log. I've no idea what quests I have, which have been completed, how many MacGuffins I need to pick up. It was quite frustrating.

Which leads me to the last complaint...

Have I completed the game?

I don't know. I climbed the mountain. Took the phone call. Got most objects back to their owners (I think). And found a load of feathers.

Is that it?

It's fine if it is. But I ended up getting a bit bored wandering around lost - so the game fizzled out.

I don't have time to play many games. My gaming experience is mostly sitting and watching my wife play endless quests on Skyrim and Dragon Age. So this was an entertaining - if slightly frustrating - diversion.