2D GAME OVERVIEW
140 is a colorful yet minimalist platformer with an underlying focus on musical beats as a means of navigating the world and overcoming obstacles. The abstract game world is also designed to provide an intuitive system of progression by presenting new elements that impact the player’s movement in a variety of ways, and showing these properties to the player rather than explaining them. The game provides a relatively penalty-free environment to experiment with solutions as well, allowing the player to build an understanding of how the world works.

The title, 140, is essentially a representation of the 3 basic shapes that you can take during the course of the game: a square, a triangle, and a circle. When stationary, you appear as a square, where moving to the left or right transforms you into a circle, and jumping makes you appear as a triangle. These are merely cosmetic changes, however, as they are automatic based on your movement; you are not required to inhabit a particular shape to navigate the environment.

Things start out very simply, with a smooth escalation in difficulty over the game’s three worlds, each of which is designed to be completed in a single sitting. The game offers no interface… not even a proper title menu. When the title screen appears, you can start the game to dive in and hold a button to exit. There is no pause interface (and in fact, there is no way to pause the game, but also no reason to do so), no score, no timer, and most importantly, no tutorial messages.

When you begin the game, you are placed in a plain room with a black floor and a grey background, with a white square sitting in the center of the room. Press to the left or right, and your shape will change to a circle and the environment scrolls in the appropriate direction. However, given the lack of any sort of texture or other detail, the only way to tell that you’re moving in a plain room is by looking at the hazy trail of light left behind you. Moving to the left brings you to a solid wall, while heading right reveals a series of three indentations, each of which houses a hovering circular object.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Dragon’s Crown is an action-RPG with a heavy focus on brawler-based combat and multiplayer action. The game is set in a fantasy realm of knights and magicians, elves and dwarves, princesses and political intrigue, and lush landscapes overrun by creatures of every sort. You play the part of an adventurer who is just starting out… and quickly gets embroiled in some of the major events of the kingdom, not the least of which are the rumors surrounding a magical item called the Dragon’s Crown, which allows its wearer to control dragons.

As with many RPG’s your quest begins in a medieval village, replete with a tavern, a shop, a temple, and the Adventurer’s Guild. There is also a castle in the distance which becomes accessible early in the going, and a few other useful areas as well, many of which have quest givers that appear at plot-specific points on your journey.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Fugitive begins with a familiar science fiction premise: You are an astronaut alone on an alien world. You set out from your ship and make your way through the dangerous landscape, destroying hostile creatures along the way. However, unlike most games where you are slowly building your skills and strength along the way, here you are slowly losing your abilities.

You begin at maximum strength with five units of health, a 2x jump, and the ability to double jump. At your disposal is a powerful laser that can fire a long beam across the screen, as well as a shield which can defend you from enemy attacks and even deflect missiles.

You can only have one laser blast on the screen at a time, but given the small number of enemies in most rooms and their predictable patrol routes, this rarely places any restriction on the player. The shield, on the other hand, is considerably more difficult to use, but arguably even more useful. The shield can only be activated for a brief moment, and mis-timing its use will cause you to take damage. However, there are numerous missile-launching enemies that can only be destroyed by deflecting their missiles back at them. In fact, it’s entirely possible to complete the game using only the shield and not firing a single shot.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Full Bore is an action-puzzle game about boring boars… not uninteresting boars, mind you, but rather boars who bore… or pigs that dig if you prefer rhymes to homophones. At the outset, you are able to select between a boar named Frederick or a sow named Hildi, although the goals for both are the same. You will be traversing a block-based subterranean environment in search of gems, solving numerous environmental puzzles, and perhaps learning a bit of the history of the boar world. Boar lore, if you will.

The game begins with your favored hairy beast napping in a pastoral glen and shortly thereafter wandering into a clearing. A few seconds later, the ground literally explodes beneath your feet and you fall deep, deep underground. You awaken to find yourself in a highly technological area, which acts as a tutorial area to explain your movement abilities.

Once you learn about basic environmental navigation, you discover a rocket that promises to launch you out of this strange area… except that it crashes on the way up, landing you inside the vault of a very large and powerful boar who runs the Full Boar Mining company (and who employs shortsighted moles as clerical support). He immediately accuses you of stealing all of the gems in his vault, and sends you to work in the mines to fulfill your restitution.

At this point, you are given no further direction, and you are left with a large sprawling world before you waiting to be explored. Free exploration is atypical among puzzle platformers, as developers tend to slowly introduce new mechanics, and lock players into areas where those mechanics are used before allowing them to move on.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Foul Play stars Baron Dashforth, playing himself in a stage production telling the tale of his own (possibly exaggerated) life, a decades-long adventure spanning the world, the underworld, and even the ocean depths as he repeatedly saves humanity from the assault of daemons. Joining him in this stage show is his faithful companion and chimneysweep, Scampwick Steerpike. The duo puts on a spectacularly large-scale show to delight and amaze their audience.

The aesthetics are what set Foul Play apart from other brawlers, and even other games employing a stage/audience theme, such as Nin2-Jump and Black Knight Sword. The entire game plays out on a (unrealistically large) stage, with each play beginning in Dashforth’s study before the backdrops are folded down and moved away to reveal a new setting.

New scenery is brought in by the use of ropes and pulleys, and even the occasional not-supposed-to-be-onstage stagehand moving things about. Since this is a play recounting Dashforth’s adventures, you are not actually fighting pirates and monsters, but rather actors dressed as these characters. In a humorous nod to this, most of the more elaborate costumes feature openings that allow you to view the actor within, further selling the theatrical aesthetic. On larger objects like horses and moving machines, you can see the feet of the actors protruding from beneath the props.

Unlike most brawlers, defeated enemies can’t simply blink out of existence, but rather must wait until the scene changes or the performers move away before leaving the stage. However, they don’t always wait, as performers are often seen lifting their heads from their prone positions to check on the onstage antics, and even going so far as sneaking offstage while the scene continues… or being dragged off with a long hook.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Völgarr the Viking tells the tale of a Viking who is brought back to life by Odin to defeat the evil that has spread across Midgard. It seems that a dwarf named Fáfnir was so greedy that he eventually transformed into a dragon. No longer satisfied with his hoard of treasure, he began wreaking havoc across the land and built a magically protected tower that even the gods could not enter. Odin sees the plight of Midgard and decides to resurrect Völgarr, a great warrior who died after defeating hundreds of enemies laying siege to his homeland. Völgarr must defeat Fáfnir and his minions, and restore peace to Midgard.

It is fitting that Völgarr’s tale begins with his resurrection, given how generously death is rendered upon him. The game is inspired by classic arcade titles like Ghosts ‘n Goblins and Rastan, where a well-earned death encouraged the player to drop in an additional quarter to continue. The game’s opening area even duplicates the layout of Rastan – including club swinging enemies, flying enemies (bees instead of bats), and a breakable block leading to a lower area – and adds an additional nod with a familiar-looking corpse. Like the games that came before it, Völgarr the Viking offers simple controls, tight design that puts these mechanics to the test, and nearly insurmountable odds that require the player to use every tool available to him in order to survive.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
In Null Divide+, you control a ship which is running dangerously low on fuel, and you decide to enter a large – and apparently abandoned – space station to scavenge for the supplies you need. Of course, it turns out the station is far from empty, and dangerous enemies await you around every corner. Fortunately, the station also contains a number of upgrades which allow you to defeat said enemies and explore ever further.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Valdis Story: Abyssal City is an expansive action-RPG with a deep combat system, a robust skill tree, and a unique magic system. The game features a detailed history and setting, numerous towns filled with NPC’s, a wide array of environments to explore, and no small number of enemies and boss encounters along the way.

The story begins with two ships battling each other in an icy sea. On one ship are our four heroes and their crew, and the other is a ship filled with demons. Our heroes board the demon ship to do battle, but are surprised by large whale-like creatures that rise up from beneath the depths and sink the ship. After the shipwreck, the game begins with one of the heroes who discovers that he (or she) has fallen down into a city below the sea and has been separated from his crew.

Our hero sets out to track down his friends and crewmates and to learn more about this strange underwater world. Beyond that, the narrative tosses around more than a few proper nouns and convolutions, occasionally clouding the details of major events. One thing is clear, however: the people below the surface have a different way of viewing the world than those above. These folks believe that anyone from the surface is either an angel or a demon, and their land is filled with wild and dangerous creatures known as ferals. Beneath the surface and away from the sun, these underdwellers have lost the color in their hair, and they rely on ancient “mana heaters” to keep their cities warm, lest they freeze over.

A selection screen shows four possible characters, although only two are available at the start: Wyatt Goibniu and Reina Gaius. Wyatt is the more capable of the two when it comes to melee combat, as he carries a sword with a considerably longer range than that of Reina’s fists, although she makes up for this shortcoming with her proficiency in magic and use of supplemental accessories. Given how tough some enemies and bosses can be, players who favor melee combat will be better served by Wyatt, and even then they must make deft use of their combat abilities if they hope to survive.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
The name Rktcr is a disemvoweled conjoining of the words “rocket” and “car”. The game features a rocket powered vehicle traversing a number of complex subterranean environments, and gameplay is entirely physics-based. That’s not to say that the game offers a few physics-based puzzles here and there, or that the action is interspersed with isolated sequences where you might shove over a pile of blocks to watch them roll and tumble down a slope; rather, every bit of the gameplay centers on the player’s understanding of how the rktcr works and how it physically interacts with the environment.

At the start of the game, you create a team, customizing three characters and a rktcr. However, customization is done in a fairly strange way in that it is driven by the names you provide… By typing a name, your character begins to cycle through a number of visual styles, changing clothing, ethnicity, gender, etc. with each typed character. Even upper and lower case letters affect the look, cycling through dozens upon dozens of possibilities for the characters, and a number of visual themes for the rktcr as well.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Most beat ‘em ups see players scrolling slowly from left to right, beating up a few thugs, and then continuing their leisurely stroll through Face Punch Village looking for the next band of ne’er-do-wells in need of a knuckle dance. Aces Wild: Manic Brawling Action!, on the other hand, takes the battle to the skies with high-speed punching, heavy knock-backs, and no small amount of air-dashery.

The game’s intro tells a tale of a ninja-filled island that hosts a battle royale every 15 years in order to determine the land’s mightiest warrior. Beat ‘em ups tend to have pretty cheesy throwaway backstories, and this game is no different. However, it also combines the nonsense with a reckless disregard for punctuation, making it difficult to parse the thing into any kind of logical meaning.


Apparently, the winner of the Maximus Circuit gets a cash prize and wins the rights to the Wilder Ninja Clan’s land. For the last 500 years, the Wilders have won the competition (so they’re apparently fighting for the rights to their own land). However, Rex, an heir to the Wilder Clan, has fixed the game so that he will win, and he intends to sell the land to a company known as Ruter Corp. But there’s a second heir named Ace Wilder, and he’s going to fight everyone and show them “true maniac fighting!”

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Magicians & Looters is a Metroidvania title, featuring a group of three wizard apprentices who must rescue their kidnapped teacher. The game begins in the Wizard Keep, a floating fortress in the clouds, which acts as a home for the wizards and a school for those aspiring toward magical greatness. At the start of the game, the keep’s security is overrun by creatures known as the Morg Men, led by an evil wizard named Lord Skree.

However, the flip and not-so-bright students hardly notice that the place is under attack, and things go wrong very quickly. Their teacher is abducted and they are tossed into the castle dungeon. Fortunately, being wizards, they decide to make use of their powers to escape. Unfortunately, they’re not terribly good at magic yet, and warping out of the dungeon causes the trio to be separated.

The game features three playable characters. While it starts you as the long-legged Vienna, and even goes so far as to make you choose one of the three characters in the early going, the fact is that all three are equally integral to the story. The opening levels see you playing separately as each of the characters until the three are eventually reunited. At that point, you gain the ability to swap between them at any of the checkpoints.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
While many gamers may recognize the Rayman name from the Rayman Raving Rabbids series, the limbless hero has been around quite a bit longer than that, originally appearing in a 2D platformer known simply as Rayman in 1995, at a time when mainstream 2D gaming was about to go into a decade-long hibernation. The game was developed by Ubisoft Montpellier and was a pretty decent (and pretty tough) platformer that separated itself from other genre entries with its gorgeous visuals, smooth animations, and excellent soundtrack, made possible by a new generation of CD-based hardware.

Rayman also has the honor of being one of the few 2D franchises to make a smooth transition into 3D. Rayman 2 represented some of the best 3D platforming of the day, giving genre forerunner Super Mario 64 a run for its money. Another sequel, Rayman 3, was developed by the Ubisoft Shanghai team. While it wasn’t as mechanically solid as its predecessor, it retained much of its charm, including some very funny and strange comments from John Leguizamo who provided the voice of Globox (seriously, he has idle dialogue where he stands around talking about how he wishes he could have babies).

Ubisoft Montpellier intended to revisit the series with a new platforming entry, but after experimenting with the motion controls of the recently unveiled Wii system, they decided to develop Rayman Raving Rabbids instead. Rayman himself was sidelined in favor of the maniacally daft Rabbids, and platforming was removed in favor of minigames. The Rabbids series continued with the Rayman prefix for quite some time before eventually dropping the Rayman name altogether with the 2009 release, Rabbids Go Home, making it appear that Rayman had been entirely supplanted by red-eyed space bunnies.


However, in 2011 Ubisoft Montpellier went back to its roots, not only bringing Rayman back as the star of his own game, but creating an entirely new 2D entry in the series with Rayman Origins. As with the original release, the studio sought to separate it from other games on the market with strong visuals and animations, and a unique soundtrack. The studio used a tool known as the UbiArt Framework, which made it easier for artists to create and animate detailed characters and objects, creating a game that could run at high resolutions at 60 frames per second.


Rayman Legends is the follow-up to that game, and once again sees Rayman and friends charging through detailed worlds filled with colorful enemies. The game takes place 100 years after the last, as Rayman and his friends lie sleeping in the woods. In the meantime, dark forces have once again overrun the land. Their friend Murfy wakes them up (by smacking them out of a tree) and lets them know what has been happening. Apparently, 10 princesses have been abducted by a nefarious villain, and hundreds of Teensies (magical long-nosed blue creatures) have been captured as well. Rayman must journey through dozens of levels, rescuing imprisoned Teensies, completing challenges, defeating bosses, and freeing each of the princesses (who then become playable characters).

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Hammerwatch is a top-down dungeon crawler inspired by the likes of Gauntlet and more recent hack and slash titles like Diablo. You choose a character from one of four classes – paladin, wizard, ranger, and warlock – each of whom has different abilities. You can set out on your own, but like Gauntlet, the game is best enjoyed with friends, and you can gather a brood of up to 4 players for online or offline hacky-slashy action through the depths of Castle Hammerwatch.

At the start of the game, you select between three difficulty levels and pick a character from one of four classes. The character you choose will impact your starting health and mana levels, your offensive abilities, and the upgrades that are available to you.

The paladin is a melee fighter with high health and average mana. He has a short range sword attack and the ability to dash forward quickly to slice through groups of enemies.

The wizard has high mana and low health. This character can rapidly toss fireballs at short range and can emit a wide blast of fire to deal out fast damage to nearby groups of enemies, although this ability consumes mana quickly.

The ranger is average in health and mana but makes up for this with long range arrows which he can fire all the way across the screen (and even a little ways offscreen). His arrows also penetrate enemies, allowing him to wreak damage across long lines of foes, which is common given that most enemies hone in on your position once you are noticed. He can also drop a bomb to damage small groups of enemies.

Lastly there is the warlock who has the highest health of all classes and a sizeable mana pool as well, but has a very small melee attack. His magic attack allows him to toss balls of energy at a medium range.