Steam | Humble Store | Nintendo e-Shop | Playstation
| Part of the Jamestown Series (2nd of 2)
Jamestown + is an alternate history in which what would become the United States were a series of colonies on Mars. You play Roanoke, a refugee from England attempting to clear his name before he is executed by the king. This embroils him in a major conflict with the Spanish forces occupying the Martian landscape, and the Conquistidor himself! The presentation and UI craftsmanship is incredible, and the music of Francisco Cerda brings the whole package home to deliver a really special experience. In terms of danmaku, Jamestown + is great for people looking to try out the genre but maybe don't have a lot of confidence for other shumps - you have a set number of lives and continues for each level equalling 9 lives per level, and you're given a healthy number of comeback mechanics such as the Vaunt mechanic. The Vaunt works as a temporary shield and damage boost, and also adds to your total score at the end of the level, but being in Vaunt decreases a bar that can be repleated by collecting golden cogs and gears from fallen enemies, giving a fun risk-reward mechanic not only to pick the unsafe options but to do it efficently. Unlike a lot of shumps, the ship style you have to choose from doesn't have different collectable attacks or options on the play field, but the game makes up for that by having seven different ships available to purchase, and a randomized ship that changes with every death. Because Jamestown + is a semi-rare example of a 'vertizontal' shooter where you can move vertically and horizontally, your ship moves a bit slower than one might expect for a shump but makes up for it by having a fairly roomy margin of error for avoiding attack patterns.
Steam | itch.io | Humble Store
| Steam Net Revenue: $153,305.54 153k | Game Engine: Unity 
| Part of the Lakeview Cabin series (2nd of 4)
Roope Tamminen follows up with his well-recieved Lakeview Cabin Flash game with this collection, a densely packed and intricate series of movies in which a group of people attempt to survive everything from murderous mutants, cannibals, aliens and rakes. Each level and environmental detail serves some kind of purpose in Tamminen's work and every environment is a delight to run, fall, and die in. Even failure has a brutal beauty as you attempt to piece together how to stop the onslaught of violence being set against you.
The level is built mainly to accomodate the MIDI cover of "Quad Machine" from Quake II (sequenced by longtime Doom community member Silentzorah), and Angry Saint really worked hard to give each different sector a unique feel from the last. You are infiltrating a research lab disguised as a NMN Corporation storage facility that's running tests on demon's genetic material. The end result is the scant few demons you run into being cybernetically enhanced to great effect - even your Super Shotgun equivalent takes two slugs to down a Cyber Imp. The enemies that aren't from Hell are mainly hitscanners, sepefically the kinds of hitscanners that are even more dangerous than your typical Chaingunner, for not only do they chew through your health at a steady rate but also have a secondary grenade attack that took me completely off guard upon first booting up the game. Your weapons are generally servicable, and the Super Shotgun will be most players' go-to, but the Pulse Machinegun you acquire has the remarkable quality of being the most ineffective stunlocking weapon in your roster. This is mainly because the enemy AI is advanced enough that peppering an enemy into paste with a Chaingun equivalant simply isn't an option and will get you killed. Simply put, the design of the WAD proves to be a delightful challenge in ways that not many single level WADs typically reach.
| Steam Net Revenue: $905.35 $905 | Game Engine: Unreal 
The first thing about this game right off the bat is it's not shy about how much it is truly of the Unreal engine. That being said, I find myself absolutely absorbed by this game. You play an unnamed fellow with a very unlucky streak when it comes to transportation, and finding yourself regularly face to face with tons of aliens! The gameplay has a lot of fetch quest minutae that might turn off some, but the idea is straightforward enough - in the Wasteland map, your goal is to load up a recovered car with gas, food, and water to escape the area. With every item delivered to the car, another wave of aliens comes to beat your head in. With the Island map, the goal is to load up a plane with supplies after finding the key - you get the idea. With the Wasteland map in particular, the long stretch of highway that makes up the map helps make it very clear what's coming and from what direction, making it an ideal starter map, while the Island map is more intermediate based on the foilage hiding aliens regularly and moving slowly through water being a factor. The aliens all have specific ways they affect the tide of battle, as the quick small aliens run up and nip at your heels, the purple aliens shoot acid and act while you're distracted by the quick aliens, and the giant aliens are there to take up your focus fire from the other two. The game has a weird way it handles audio, because you'll hear the pitter-patter of aliens that are homing in on you, but not in relation to where they are on the map. Every single footstep sounds like it's directly behind you, which is great for the atmosphere but not so much the shooting. There's plenty of opportunities to get above ground to avoid the aliens, but don't get too attached, because practically everything is destructable and the aliens WILL rip apart any shelter to get at you. All of these add up to a hoard shooter where it's imperative to use your shots wisely - at least at first, as each session in the game gives you points to spend on better movements and weapons to make each successive run easier, similar to what you'd find in a roguelike. Improved weapons hit harder, and golden weapons will explode on impact like a Borderlands gun. This one really charmed me, and I believe it will charm you too!
I know the screenshots here may not tell the whole story, but here's the situation - this is a by-the-book incremental game, just a series of UI buttons and progress bars with descriptive text, but I've been glued to it for a day since picking it up! The story so far is you've crash-landed on an alien planet, alone and forced to forage to survive! Before long, you uncover a species known as Trimps that appear to be under your command! It starts off innocently enough, setting your first trap and training your newly-discovered Trimps in the finer points of agriculture and engineering...next thing you know, it's time to put ever Trimp not currently employed into conscription and tearing down the planet's fauna to retrieve books to upgrade your burgeoning civilization. Satirical autocracy aside, this game is a blast to play. The main source of the gameplay loop is in bolstering your army's resources to better handle the enemies coming in later zones. Your reserve of Trimps is functionally infinite, but you have to spend the necessary time to keep the Trimps' stats up to help them survive attacks, or even better, levelling up their Block ability so they don't get hurt in the first place. It's sounds funny for a game where the menu stays the same 89 percent of the time, but there's always new things going on, new maps to charge through, new tweaks and optimizations waiting just around the next cell of the next zone!
| Steam Net Revenue: $3,498.82 3k | Game Engine: Unity 5 Free Version
In the classic style for David Szymanski's "hour-long" games made during this time period, A Wolf in Autumn is a depressing story about child abuse at the hands of a parent, but unlike in the earlier game Fingerbones, A Wolf in Autumn has quite a bit more to say about the nature of womanhood, the mother-daughter relationship and how abuse affects it, and what we do as victims when we victimize others. The gameplay loop is straightforward adventure game stuff, find tools to break locks and solve puzzles, but with the added wrinkle of your mother (played by Julie Hoverson) growing increasingly cruel and hostile with you. Some of the more interesting lighting solutions that would go on to persist in his later FPS work are beginning to blossom here.