Note: remake "Yooka Replaylee" is announced. 73206 backers crowdfunded Capital B(ee)'s book corp "Hivory Towers" who pulls off the biggest book heist of history. Yooka & Laylee range the worlds to catch the dispersed pagies of their magic book. I sincerely recommend this 3D platformer. It plays natively on 11th Gen i5 on (Garuda) Linux, fluently with half-VSync ingame option. I miss only 4 pagies to 100%. Sadly, only XBOX controller support. Hence I use `xboxdrv -c --evdev ` with GameCube controller. Config includes mimic-xpad, silent and Z mapped to left thumbstick click. Tip: hold Y for fast dialogs. good things: - high gameplay variation (from shooting, transformations, underwater movement and flying to invisibility, even invincibility) - old school 3D platformer exploration, working controls - worlds are big, not huge - many funny references, dialogs, events - quizzes, classic minigames (8 in total), e.g. racing-, shooting-, runner- or flappy-bird-like, some with 1 to 4 players - nice animations, 3D graphics and music - manageable difficulty, no limited lives in between: - "voice effects", no verbal voicing - high number of collectibles - unlockable extended world content after first play - self-ironic about its artificial logic - gameplay-focused story with cutscenes - no co-op bad things: - repeat long boss fights after dying, no tips - many times minimal or no clues what to do, where to collect things or do challenges. At the end, finding needles in a haystack. - some pagies and pirate treasures are hard to find - backtracking previous worlds, moveset is unlocked progressively - invisible lethal world boundaries - oh my sanity, all backers in the credits missing: - 2D world maps with detected collectibles (only statistics available) - better tips for unfound collectibles (only unlockable extra with catcalling-like SFX indication) - fast travel system (you can only go back to the hub world) - pirate treasure statistics
This is a good movement-based puzzle game. Not too easy, solvable by logic thinking and little testing. I have "finished" it on Garuda Linux with Wine 8 and higher. Beware, the text display is broken in cutscenes with Wine (not with Windows). The final instructions/notes of each chapter even show no text at all. Non-ascii characters are lost. Actually, I cannot 100% it due to a bug which exits bonus level 2-5 and 2-8 after the cutscene, making them unplayable. I believe, because I finished chapter 3 before chapter 1 and 2 (better finish them in order). Story-wise, it tells a tale full of typical Asian mythology/religion. An illness god makes a boy sick. His sister searches for a legendary deity being, a guard of nature who escaped into drawings, using the appearance of a special animal which later transforms into a human. The interesting take: domestic violence. A love story heavily gone wrong, all of a sudden turned into a murderous hunt of hatred. In my opinion, the story is cute and stupid funny at times. It has two bonus stories. The romantic-gone-wrong part is weird. Do not expect a deep or logical story. If you are looking for a rich story, this isn't it. The (German) translation is rather bad, not sure if automatic, glitches at least once into Spanish or something. The English language is fairly sophisticated, so I played in German. The art is splendid. The soundtrack is amazing. It's like Asian Culture plus a memory of Ape Escape and Kahoot's countdown theme. I really bought the soundtrack because some of the tracks are so catchy. Another downside are usability flaws. Numbers are written in Japanese and 1 means "0 moves left". You can only undo three moves for a rotting rubbish reason and afterwards need to redo all of the level. All voice acting seems to be Japanese(??). I recommend the game for the puzzles. The story can be entertaining for the moment. It has nice drawings. I wish, text would be working like in other games with Wine.
Tetrobot and Co. is a terrific puzzle game without platforming. You move and swallow/spit blocks by selecting a square region in the screen. Warning! This game is almost 10 years old in 2024, lying in the lifetime of the Wii U (but never released for it AFAIK). The Linux version should be removed from GOG, it is immediately killed on startup due to a memory bug with using the X server library for Linux. The Windows version works well on Wine. Xboxdrv input is recognized, so that you can connect any controller with Linux driver to xboxdrv for playing. If you are not afraid of complex thinking, you should play this game. The puzzles are ingenious and fair. The mechanism are sometimes contrived but explorable. Suprisingly, it gets more complex than it looks like. Later levels require much thinking, looking and some testing. A blind walkthrough will take much more time due to thinking than the indicated 13 hours, I'd say 40. The last levels get hard to solve and may need 1h for solving. In few cases, good reflexes helped me to solve puzzles. Yes, the game also allows for useful glitches with certain timing of inputs (even glitching through blocks) but has one occassional bug in the undo mechanism. Annoying but undoable with the undo mechanism. There are secret in-game achievements. After 100%, I am not pursing the ones which are left, because the game does not tell you what to do. I coincidentally got the slime-related ones but it's a pretty pointless business requiring certain precision. It features great musical compositions, apparently also inspired by Nintendo classics. I heard Super Mario World inspiration somewhere. There is only one optional level at the end which is not related to logical thinking and required me to look up the Konami Code in the Internet and testing where A, B and Start would be. I warmly recommend this game. I enjoyed its presentation and challenges, therefore earning my 5 stars despite few bugs and hidden achievements.
Smelter is a perplexing fantasy version of Bible Eve, Adam and the forbidden fruit. I finished 100% with Wine-GE-latest (Garuda Linux) and GCN controller. Upside: Music, animations, visual design, translation, is amazing. The story is intriguing, even if quickly clear, you're helping evil to conquest the world. Smelter gears to metroidvania-like platforming. Don't avoid it because of the building. The slow down of progress can be annoying but it's easy to get into. The gameplay concept is very good, a lot of gameplay variety (mixing ideas of other games) and a large set of great action moves. Story is driven by finding allies, evil bosses and opponents in unrelated side stories in each of 3 areas. Button remappings exist but mess up controls (maybe Wine-related). Downside: It pushes you to try hard. I didn't like some controls (e.g. binary acceleration, vertical wall jump), bad for precision challenges with instant failure. You must find and beat them for skill updates. Keyboard not recommended. Having to switch between 3 different skill sets on the fly makes it harder too. Later stages can be infuriating, ridiculous. Levels are too long, unable to skip revisited parts. Some boss attacks are not obvious first. Others must be memorized before you can beat bosses. It's a periodic surge of attacks. I rather dislike the skill progression. Looks like freedom but there is a partial order between levels, constraining your skill progress. Better health is only obtained by increasing soldiers (building). Some helpful skills are only obtained after beating hard levels. I had to find all secrets and optimally build on all area to have max health, only for the final level. Sadly, actual story is uncovered only when beating the debilitating final level, quickly & confusing. Those who give up after repeated attempts, will not get the story. I recommend Smelter for everyone with some gaming exp. and if you are willing to keep trying hard challenges (see online videos).
I am using Garuda Linux. I had only few issues with native games so far. In this case, material colours are not shown and since the game consists mostly of simple colour shading with one colour, almost everything was black, except for the sky or an environment texture on the windows. Text is rendered though. I could not solve the problem, not even by downloading and trying with Steam runtime. The Windows version worked. I can see all the colours. I noticed, the game is quite heavy or unoptimized despite simple graphics. Mouse delays were small enough when I selected "middle" graphics quality. I noticed a lot of input and animation related bugs. At the very beginning, I could not rotate the camera before I took the first directional step (also on Linux). I can tolerate weird looking animations and the frequent "man" exclamation when they talk with each other but the movement with WASD is kind of curvy. I was able to play until the main character Sid… sat on his scooter to drive to his parents and the dashboard was shown but I was stuck in that scene. No buttons and no mouse could be used. The story itself was mediocre (middle) up to that point of time I played. It's an author who needs money and lost his creativity for some months. Check for yourself. Gameplay has been to walk through a 3D place and interact. At least the way of presenting it, walking through the home, then looking and interacting with the computer screen (a computer inside the computer), answering emails, checking the web browser, had some immersive immpression. The menu options are bad, it's a misnomer. It only shows you an image of the controls + two mutable sliders with music and SFX volume. Button remapping is not available on Linux. It's a modal small window before the game loads on Windows. The game is not un-interesting but since the demo is not working (which is rare), I cannot buy the game.
Want to know, how it's to be a pre-school teacher?! This is how and in this demo, you only take care of four children! It's a chaos but it made me smile. It makes me understand the pre-school teacher crisis in Germany better, just that these pre-school teachers seem to be invicinble to any sort of dirt and illness. My current office room is next to our toilet. It means incredible immersion, smelling the poop from the toilet in that moment when I had to clean up the brown spatters from the diaper change. The game idea is hilarious and you can play alone or with up to 3 friends. It's a management game, therefore I was skeptical first but controls are easy. You get points for doing pre-school teacher work and for keeping the room clean. The stress level wasn't high in the demo. I did not achieve the best score in cleanliness but helping children is more fun(ny) than I thought. It kept me busy. It was not hard for me to get into the flow. Graphics are quite okay, using an cartoon-like visual design. Also audio. The demo is quite short. I only remember it having three rooms. But it has usable indicators and keyhints. The game runs fine on Wine with Garuda Linux (just the internet browser did not open for showing the shop page). I give this a 4.5 of 5, -0.5 because it was not immediately clear that you can only nlavigate using WASD and space in the menu and it has no game related options. Luckily, I didn't feel like needing to tweak any performance settings. Not being able to set custom keybindings adds some inconvenience. If you haven't a standard QWERT-like keyboard, you need to switch your keyboard Layout in your OS or use another key remapping program. Input Remapper is pretty good on Linux. But creating the config needs extra time. Controls are okay in the demo but I smell, it could get more annoying in more stressful situations, that you use the same key for collecting and dropping things. If you press too early or too often. Game is quite okay.
I flootipoo with this game on Garuda Linux using Wine 8.2 staging. The "real-time strategy-action" first deterred me and I am glad for the demo. I noticed this is a fleshed out platformer game with low-threshold empire building on a map. The gameplay is fun. I dislike RPGs for having all these stupid numbers and overthinking with dexterity-devoid leveling systems. I dislike Metroidvanias for being forced for being so constrained in which secrets I can find early on. I dislike pure strategy games for overthinking where most mechanics are dismissable. Not so much in this game. Health bars are used. You learn new moves on the way. The amount of enemy health were right. Does not require more than 3 hits to remove them. Despite the 16-bit looks, it plays like a very modern game which it is. Animations make Eve dynamic, German translation is very good and music feels right. The story is a strange fictional mixture of japenese culture with biblical creation story elements. The free falling theme seems so common in japanese stories, does it show faint? Early on, it contains meta-level text which can confuse or make me smile, and combined with a portion of usable illogic. Down there, Smelter is your cheeky powerful egocentric unicorn owl armor. It often felt like my allies were the evil guys and smelter was confined for an actual reason. Is the initial room supposed to be a green hell? Is smelter a lucifer? I deduce 1.5 stars for the controls. Heck is it HARD to play this game on keyboard and find a funtional mapping. The implemented wall jump move is the most frustrating part. It's easy to be stopped or hold by ceilings because wall jumps are vertical, leading to unforgiving mistakes when speed counts. It made me rage. There is also too much instant death at some points. Otherwise, it's fun to play. The moveset is sophisticated enough and moveset progression is fast. The demo is quite long so after multiple levels I stopped investing more time before the full game.
Why only Windows demo? But runs on Garuda Linux using Wine 8.2 staging hassle-free 😎. Notable usabilty. Key-hints are shown. Translations are available and good. Features many controls alternatives to consider different device setups and preferences (e.g. I have no natural middle click). Allows for mouse-only play, even for character movement (button presses can be faster). Has various menu options for fine-tuning speed of controls to best fit. Good navigation in 3D space with 2D mouse controls is a difficult problem and IMO they did better than the typical CAD tool. Of course, not perfect. It's slow and somewhat clumsy but not unexpected from my side. I am surprised how this game comes close to the feeling of real-life LEGO building than other LEGO games I have played. It gives you lots of freedom in how you make the bridge or the wall. Focus is on fun and not optimal resource-constrained logic thinking. Please, anyone complaing about your mismatching keyboard layout, learn to use a computer. You can easily switch keyboard language and map buttons in any relevant OS. I like the presented concept. The protagonist explores a larger world consisting of connected fine detailed LEGO-only environments, and needs to occassionally build things to progress (bridges or a stabilizing wall) in a subgame challenge style. (Just ignore the of the area) The dialogs and story is silly, goofy in a playful and hilarious way, suitable for a LEGO game. I like how they made the robot head speak in non-sense riddles using nerdy words. A salient negative point is the cheap looking design of font and text boxes in contrast to the 3D environment. Lack of manual camera control during walk is bad. Erratic brick movement could be removed by anchoring the mouse in the brick's barycenter and using its full volume for placement. Maybe building is easier with controller, did not test. I likely can point out more pros and cons in a 2nd reception once I played the full game. Made me buy!
Played the demo on Garuda Linux using Wine 8.2 staging and had no single problem/glitch. Options are usable and not overloaded. German display text/subtitles are good. I know, it's in the title, but I really did not expect to be escaping through an infinitely recursive world. For me, this demo was a unique stunning experience. I am blown away by how this world repeats itself. It's a 1PP platformer-like game with 3D controls, running/jumping, carrying and throwing cubes into blue pupils, 360-rotating camera. It has 2 additional world transformations which are used to change pathways for progress. Rooms follow seamlessly onto one another. Players need to make use of the recursiveness like throwing the cube through the left window, walking through the energy barrier and picking up the cube on the right side. The very first part is somewhat creepy, finding myself as the protagonist in his gloomy living room about a dozen years in future from now. How can this dude survive his lack of vitamin D? Before the game actually starts – heck, the game is actually a game inside the game!, for recursion's sake, smelling like they could intend a loop – I needed to interact with all content in the room, before I could turn on the game. I was confused that I needed to trigger monologs of other talking beings 3 to 6 times in sequence, such as with Behemoth (a cat like in "The Master and Margarita") or Elrich (the 4-armed eunuch musician made of cracked porcelain), to achieve progress. Themes are somewhat neutral towards religions and world views I think. The overall visual design is quite confounding me, interesting. It makes heavy use of symmetric and recursive patterns, such as the Menger Spronge in a caleidoscopic arrangement. Puzzles are not straight forward. It needs a bit of exploration but basically, the space repeats intself infinitely. The futility of going on the run ("seeking the distantness" as the German says) becomes gradually evident. I recommend and purchase it.
