LMNT

My eyebrow was raised skeptically upward upon reading the description of LMNT.  It claims to pay "respectful homage" to a bunch of genres, claiming that it has "the best of all worlds."  Quite an extraordinary claim, LMNT, and extraordinary claims warrant extraordinary evidence, so let's see what you've got.

Yikes!  I haven't seen a file size this big since Crazy Cross!  Guess we're in for a wild ride, kids.

My next warning came when I saw the name the devs were working under.  "Senioritis."

Lo and behold, this game is a mess.  I only got to the second world before it became too painful to carry on.

The first problem is just that this game is, to quote Dr. Steinman, ugly.  It's almost as if each texture was designed by a different person who had no idea what the rest of the game looked like.  Colors are bland yet conflicting, the textures blend together at a distance, the particle effects are nightmarish and it's all just a pain to the eyes.

The controls are stable, I guess, but the level design is so frustrating that the brief satisfaction of mounting a platform is swiftly overcome by the rage induced by getting knocked off by one of the most annoyingly designed enemies in existence.

If there's one thing this game does right (and I think there might be only one), it's conveyance.  Yeah, remember that old gem?  There's no mandatory tutorial and everything is explained to you through the mechanics themselves.  Gold star for that, but a rotten egg sprayed with Febreeze is still a rotten egg.

Even though the game teaches you what to do, doing those things is unsatisfying due to frustrating and often self-contradictory design.  So no, this game does not offer the best of all worlds.

That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay focused

Links
Everything, so nothing: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=18583

Leshy

Leshy is another one of those games that is reliant on the player having aI  mouse rather than a good ol' fashioned trackpad.  I know this is kind of my fault, I mean, what kind of serious PC gamer doesn't have a mouse? But my damn laptop keeps breaking anything I plug into it, so until I get motivated enough to send this baby to a repair shop, I'm not going to be a great judge of this game's quality.

I did manage to scrape by using the scroll function on my trackpad for a little while before it got way too annoying.  In that time, I discovered a simple game with tight controls, decent aesthetics, and a cool concept.  Your goal is to collect spheres; for every 10 spheres, you can grow a little bigger and shrink a little smaller, thus opening up more areas of the map.  This is one of the most creative and ingenious gameplay mechanics DigiPen has offered me so far.  It gives the world a sense of vastness when you're small, making the feeling of empowerment that you get from scooting across previously treacherous terrain with your mountainous size all the more satisfying.  I can only imagine how fun this game would be if I had a mouse.  After all, it responded beautifully to any kind of input I successfully managed to give it.

Try it out for yourself if you have a mouse.  I betcha it's one hell of a time.  This is the most reluctant seal of approval I've given yet, since I'm basing it on something I haven't experienced, but I can tell that this game is very well made.  Good job, guys.

Links
Big balls, little balls: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=24627

Law of the Sea

Much like me without coffee on any given weekday, this game crashes on startup.

Links
meh: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=470