2D GAME OVERVIEW
Teslagrad is a puzzle-based adventure platformer that centers on the use of electricity and magnetism, which is perhaps a bit unsurprising given the inspiration from Nikola Tesla, a pioneer in the fields of electricity and magnetism, as well as several other areas of engineering. The game focuses not on Tesla himself, but rather on a little boy – who bears some resemblance to the inventor – who must use the power of Teslamancy to safely traverse the mysterious and dangerous structure known as Tesla Tower.

The game begins with a father – who also bears a resemblance to Tesla – walking along the road with a child in his arms and some kind of device strapped to his back. When he reaches his home, he nervously hands the child off to his wife and continues on. A year passes, and a group of red-clad men, vaguely Russian in appearance, show up at the house. Taking the part of the little boy, you exit from the rear of the house with your mother urging you onward, away from the men who are attempting to capture you.

As you run through the city, rain falls, washing over the buildings and sidewalks as somber music plays. You have no offensive abilities, so you stick to the rooftops to avoid detection, and run away when you are eventually spotted. The world is dank and grim, with streetlights glowing near European-style homes, power lines strung between them, and a giant tower looming in the background with what appears to be a fire burning between the houses and the tower. Here and there are propaganda posters espousing the virtues of the red-clad military force.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Two Brothers is a narrative-focused action-RPG with a rather odd tale to tell. Roy Guarder is a scientist, inventor, and philosopher who embarks on a quest to search for the remains of a lost civilization of aquatic people. He and his wife set out across the mysterious Cursed Lands, a place so dangerous that it has gone untouched for more than 700 years.

The game begins with Roy and his wife climbing to the top of a mountain to reach Dry Bone Summit, the last known location where the lost civilization was said to have lived. Soon they encounter a gigantic fish, apparently the last of its race. Roy moves toward the fish but steps on a switch that activates a trap, sending out an arrow that kills his wife.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Ultionus: A Tale of Petty Revenge is – as the title suggests – a tale of petty revenge. Selena S, hero of the galaxy and disliker of overcoats, is updating her “Spacebook” profile while returning from her latest galaxy-saving mission. Upon doing so, she is promptly trolled by a fellow known as The Space Prince, and so she swears to enact her revenge by fighting her way through seven enemy-packed levels so that she can raid his palace and kick him in the crotch.

As far as plots go, it’s about as throwaway as they come, although this was to some degree intentional, as the developer modeled the game after computer-based action titles of the late 80’s and early 90’s. In games of this era, story almost always took a backseat to the action. Those that did provide a story generally only offered motivation for the hero of the tale to fight his or her (but usually his) way through countless enemies.

Everything here, from the story, to the visuals, to the scantily-clad heroine is inspired by these action-based titles, offering colorful worlds, enemies in need of termination, and a strong but unnecessarily well-endowed heroine wrapped in revealing skin-tight spandex.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
In SteamWorld Dig, you take on the role of Rusty, a steambot whose father – a miner – has recently passed away and left behind a mine filled with valuable treasures and ancient mysteries. You roll into the robot populated Wild West town and assume operation of the mine, discovering your father’s body in the first few minutes of the game. From there, you begin digging for yourself, armed with only your father’s pickaxe and a few minutes of fuel for your lantern.

At the start of the game, Rusty isn’t a terribly capable miner. He can use his pickaxe to dig into adjacent dirt in four directions while standing on the ground, and he has a 1x jump. In addition, he can wall slide and wall jump, and repeated jumps allow him to scale vertical shafts… a skill which is very necessary, as the only way to sell accumulated ore and purchase upgrades is to return to the surface.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Ninja Senki is a very traditional action platformer, harkening back to the glory days of the NES and GameBoy, where boys were boys and games were tough and all the best strategies were found in the pages of Nintendo Power. The story is as simple as they come: “Kinuhime was killed by a ninja demon. Now Hayate has become obsessed with revenge. But can revenge bring her back?”

You take on the role of the ninja Hayate who must travel across feudal Japan to avenge the death of his love. You are equipped with the standard 8-bit ninja skillset… a jump, double jump, and infinite shuriken.

You have a high 2.5x jump which can be extended a bit further with the double jump. In addition to jumping again in midair, you may also initiate a double jump while falling, which is used as an advanced technique to get Hayate between low overhangs and bottomless pits. Interestingly, the ninja can also perform a double jump after touching water, which opens up a small number of challenges where you must repeatedly jump across a body of water which otherwise acts as a bottomless pit.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Tiny Barbarian DX is a game about... a tiny barbarian… specifically a barbarian based on the series of Conan the Barbarian stories written by Robert E. Howard. While the barbarian is labeled as tiny, the character itself isn’t significantly smaller than the enemies he faces – and he’s certainly much more muscular – but his size in relation to the screen is quite small. The game is a platformer with sword-based combat.

When you boot up the game, you find the barbarian at the top of a hill with an endless horde of ever-tougher enemies ascending to meet him. This sequence is actually impossible to beat – although you are free to replay it to see how long you can survive – and it acts as an introduction to the main adventure. Once you have been defeated, the title screen appears (or you can just skip straight to it) allowing you to begin the game proper.

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.