Ravva and the Cyclops Curse

A game by Galope for PC, Mac, and Linux, originally released in 2019.

Ravva and the Cyclops Curse is a sidescrolling platformer starring a young owl named Ravva. Ravva’s mother was a powerful summoner who could call forth creatures to do her bidding, but she found herself facing off against the Cyclops Lord who demanded that she give over her powers to him. She refused and the two did battle… but she lost. The cyclops stole her powers and turned her to stone.

When Ravva finds her immobile mother, she vows to save her. Ravva studies up on magic and learns that her mother’s essence can be restored by defeating the cyclops and breaking her curse. She sets forth with summoned creatures of her own – which are cute and diminutive versions of those controlled by her mother – and travels toward the cyclops’ castle.

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 2019, Galope, Linux, Mac, PC, The Hidden Levels

Splasher

A game by Splashteam for PC, Mac, Linux, Switch, PS4, and Xbox One, originally released in 2017.

Splasher is a fast-paced platformer starring a purple-haired fellow who works to rescue the employees of Inkorp from their evil leader, Docteur. Inkorp is a paint factory, and paint is not only used for color, but certain paints have spectacular properties. As a factory worker, the lead character is one of many who must mop up the excess paint spilled around the factory floor (and walls, and ceilings)… but one day, our hero stumbles across a door and peers inside, and there he sees terrible experiments being performed on his fellow factory workers.

The protagonist is armed with a splatter cannon that allows him to spray water, washing away the paint on different surfaces and rescuing other factory workers, but eventually he gains the ability to spray sticky pink paint and bouncy yellow paint, allowing for some high-flying shenanigans as he dodges obstacles, splats enemies, runs up walls and across ceilings, and creates trampolines to send himself soaring through the air.

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 2017, Linux, Mac, PC, Plug In Digital, PS4, Splashteam, Switch, Xbox One

The Messenger

A game by Sabotage Studio for PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One, originally released in 2018.

The Messenger stars a ninja in the titular role who must travel through a dangerous monster-ridden landscape in order to deliver a scroll that may help to save the last remnants of humanity. In a remote village, members of a ninja clan have trained continuously for centuries so that they may hold back the demon army that threatens to wipe out the last of humankind. But legend tells of a hero who may yet save them all.

You take on the role of a slacker ninja who is none too pleased with his lot in life… training every day and waiting for the arrival of the legendary Western Hero. But things quickly go to hell and the demons invade, wiping out most of the ninja clan. Arriving barely in time, the Western Hero gives the ninja a scroll with instructions to deliver it to the sages on Glacial Peak.

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 2018, Devolver Digital, PC, PS4, Sabotage Studio, Switch, Xbox One

Desert Child

A game by Oscar Brittain for PC, Mac, Linux, PS4, Xbox One, and Switch, originally released in 2018.

Desert Child is a hoverbike racer with light RPG elements set in a visually stunning world. You take on the role of a poor hoverbike racer who is living on Earth and just barely scraping by. He spends his days racing and his evenings eating ramen, taking on odd jobs, and keeping his bike in working order while he tries to save up enough money for a ticket to Mars so he can enter the Grand Prix. Outside, the moon is crumbling, bits of space debris are constantly falling into the atmosphere, and every ship in sight is headed offworld. Earth is slowly becoming the craphole of the solar system… not unlike the worlds of Cowboy Bebop, Akira, and Redline that inspired the game’s style.

When the game begins, you are able to choose from one of four weapons for your hoverbike, including a magnum, a shotgun, and a machine gun, each of which is displayed with varying difficulty ratings. However, their usefulness isn’t apparent when the game begins, as you have no idea how you’ll be putting these weapons to use, and there’s no way to change your weapon once the game begins… so if you’re not happy with your selection, you’ll need to start over. While the machine gun seems like a pretty good choice, it uses up ammo quickly and its narrow projectiles require that you be very accurate with your shots, whereas the shotgun offers a wide spray, it can hit multiple targets at once, and its ammo is depleted slowly.

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 2018, Akupara Games, Linux, Mac, Oscar Brittain, PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One

Battle Princess Madelyn

A game by Causal Bit Games for PC, Xbox One, PS4, Vita, Switch, and Wii U, originally released in 2018.

Battle Princess Madelyn is an open world action-adventure that takes its inspirations from Capcom’s Ghosts ‘n Goblins / Ghouls ‘n Ghosts series, placing the player in the role of an armored knight – with an exaggerated running animation – who has access to a variety of infinite-ammo projectiles, faces off against undead creatures and other such monstrosities in dark and spooky locales, and gets stripped of armor after taking damage and is reduced to fighting in just underwear. However, unlike the famous GnG series, this game stars a female protagonist, and instead of chasing after a damsel in distress, the brave knight is on a mission to avenge the death of her pet dog, Fritzy, who accompanies her in ghost form, while also saving the world from mortal peril.

Development of the game arose out of a conversation between the game’s creative director and his daughter, Madelyn. Christopher Obritsch was playing Ghouls ‘n Ghosts when his daughter asked if he could put her in the game so she could fight the famous “Green Head” boss at the end of the first level. Chris and his daughter are apparently big fans of the series, as Chris previously developed the GnG-inspired Insanity’s Blade and lists Ghouls ‘n Ghosts as his daughter’s favorite game to watch him play. Since Chris couldn’t insert her into that game, he offered to make her a game of her own where she could be a knight, to which she responded that only boys could be knights. In response, he asked what color the knight’s armor should be. His daughter requested pink armor… and so Battle Princess Madelyn was born.

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 2018, Causal Bit Games, Hound Picked Games, PC, PS4, Switch, Vita, Wii U, Xbox One

Squirm

A game by Alex Carpenter for PC, Mac, and Linux, originally released in 2018.

Squirm is a lo-fi platformer with light metroidvania elements. You take on the role of a fellow with a rat for a friend. One day, after awakening from a nap, you notice that your rat friend has disappeared, and an odd-looking Samaritan informs you that he has gone to see the “big dude”, and asks why you haven’t done the same. And so you set off on your adventure into the dangerous world of Squimlia, which is filled with unusual enemies and lots of spikes, along with a number of oddball – and occasionally foul-mouthed – NPC’s who add a bit of flavor to the experience.

The game consists mostly of interconnected single-screen environments, and the player is killed instantly when touching any dangerous obstacle or enemy. However, upon death, he is respawned to the room’s entrance, and all of his progress remains intact… killed enemies remain killed, and destructible objects are still destroyed (although a quick reset option lets the player restore the room to its original state if needed). This makes death frequent, but the penalty for dying is quite low.

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 2018, Alex Carpenter, Linux, Mac, PC

Speed Brawl

A game by Double Stallion Games for PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Switch, originally released in 2018.

Speed Brawl is set in London in an alternate 1888 where the British Empire emerged victorious in a war against insect invaders from the moon, and Queen Victoria led efforts to rebuild the city. With the help of Hugo Wells, the Selenites were defeated and their queen killed, and so Wells himself assumed control over the army of insects. Under his command, the drone-like creatures were enslaved and ordered into labor, which ushered in an great industrial revolution, allowing the middle class more time to pursue activities of leisure. To meet this need and placate the masses, a gladiatorial sport was introduced where the strongest warriors would fight against insect enemies in arenas, with victory allowing them to move up the ranks into more difficult tournaments. This sport came to be known as Speed Brawl.

As you may have guessed, Speed Brawl is a brawler with a heavy focus on speed. Players enter a sidescrolling arena with a pair of fighters and must bash insectoid enemies into oblivion as quickly as possible, with par times for each course. Simply surviving from one end of the level to the other isn’t enough; players need to move efficiently and make strategic use of their more powerful abilities. Each event awards gold, silver, or bronze medals based solely on speed, and getting higher medals unlocks better gear to enhance the player’s strength, defense, special attacks, and secondary abilities.

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 2018, Double Stallion Games, Kongregate, PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One

Gunmetal Arcadia

A game by Minor Key Games for PC, Mac, and Linux, originally released in 2017.

Gunmetal Arcadia is the follow-up to Gunmetal Arcadia Zero. The original game was a straightforward action-platformer with gameplay reminiscent of the sidescrolling action sequences found in Zelda II. Gunmetal Arcadia, on the other hand, has a roguelike structure that sees players sent back to the start of the game upon death, with procedurally arranged environments and random loot drops altering the course of each run. Both games share the same aesthetics, with four tilesets representing each of the four geographical areas, chunky 8-bit low-color visuals, and an authentic-sounding chiptune soundtrack. The game also has an optional CRT-style display mode.

Gunmetal Arcadia once again stars Vireo, a member of a race called Tech Elves. There are two factions of Tech Elves at odds with one another, with the Gunmetal Vanguard focusing on brute strength and the Seekers of Arcadia focusing on agility. Players may choose to align themselves with either faction, which allows them to receive discounts at the affiliated shops (with the trade-off being higher prices at opposing shops), or they may choose to remain independent, which grants players with a currency bonus at the start of the next run.

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 2017, Linux, Mac, Minor Key Games, PC

Save me Mr Tako: Tasukete Tako-San

A game by Christophe Galati for PC and Switch, originally released in 2018.

Long ago, wise and peaceful octopuses were Earth’s dominant species, but that ended with the rise of humanity, who hunted the cephalopods for food. Eventually one octopus rose up and formed an army to rid the world of humankind. In Save me Mr Tako: Tasukete Tako-San you take on the role of a plucky octopus named Tako-san (Mr. Tako). Tako-san’s brother (Bako) is a hero of the octopus army, and Tako-san is pulled into the war against the humans, but during his first battle, the army overtakes a human vessel and casts their princess into the water… and Tako-san casts off his armor and dives in to save her, putting him at odds with his own kind.

The game is designed to look like a Game Boy title, with several classic references – including a few nods to the Kirby series in particular – with the game’s cutesy animations, a star that pops out when you land from a high jump, and a character who dons a sleeping cap and dozes off during his idle animation. Players can also stop and press DOWN to scroll the screen downward and get a better view of their surroundings, as was done in a number of classic Game Boy titles due to the limited screen resolution.

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 2018, Christophe Galati, Nicalis, PC, Switch

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon

A game by Inti Creates and ArtPlay for PC, PS4, Vita, Switch, 3DS, and Xbox One, originally released in 2018.

There’s no arguing that Castlevania has left a lasting mark on the gaming landscape. The series introduced players to a gothic landscape filled with classic monsters, the regularly-resurrected Dracula as its main villain, and a lineage of whip-wielding heroes with stiff jumps to push back evil for another 100 years (assuming Drac could ever stay down for that long). The series continued to break its own rules by introducing light RPG elements in its second outing, followed by a prequel that offered multiple playable characters, and then a revisitation of the original story of Simon Belmont that introduced new gameplay mechanics… and that’s all before the series went on to establish the basics of the now-well-trodden metroidvania subgenre.

While there are innumerable games that have pulled their influences from the metroidvania era of Castlevania, far fewer have drawn inspirations from the early games in the series. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon is one such game, delivering an experience that is so close to the early Castlevania games – Castlevania III in particular – that a few sprite swaps would make it impossible to separate it from the real thing; it looks and plays like a modern update to the classic series.

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 2018, 3DS, ArtPlay, Inti Creates, PC, PS4, Switch, Vita, Xbox One

Furwind

A game by Boomfire Games for PC, originally released in 2018.

Furwind is a colorful platformer starring a fox, who carries the unlikely name of Furwind, as he embarks on a journey to save the people of Moontail village from a villain known as Darhûn. Moontail was once under the protection of four ancient beings, but one day Darhûn, the strongest of the ancients, decided to rise up and overthrow the others… but in the end, he was defeated and locked away. A thousand years have passed since that time, and a Darhûn-worshipping cult has decided to free him from his imprisonment and loose him on the world.

Furwind, serving as the chosen hero of the land, rises up to put a stop to all of this, venturing out into the surrounding forest, defeating monsters, rescuing imprisoned villagers, and reawakening the spirits of the other three ancients to gain new abilities. Along the way, he earns money to purchase upgrades and slowly opens up new sections of the forest to explore.

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 2018, Boomfire Games, PC

Strange Flesh (NSFW)

A game by Greatest Bear Studios for PC and Mac, originally released in 2017.

Sex in video games has been around almost as long as the medium itself, with the first examples appearing in the early 1980’s. There have been more than a few sex-focused titles released in the ensuing decades, although they have generally been of lower quality than their mainstream counterparts. Perhaps the best known games oriented around sex are those from the Leisure Suit Larry series, which has seen numerous iterations on home computers, and even some on consoles, but none of these games are terribly explicit.

In general, mainstream publishers have shied away from games with mature sexual content as the core gameplay focus, but recently distribution services like Steam have begun to allow more explicit content, despite years of prohibiting such games on the platform in an uncensored format. Still, the most explicit games tend to appear outside of primary distribution channels, often being offered directly from developers’ websites or via adult websites, and often available for free. Many of these are browser-based games that don’t require players to download and run programs on their machines.

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 2017, Greatest Bear Studios, Mac, PC