Yogscast Jingle Jam 2017 (Days 14 to 16) : Chime Sharp, Back to Bed, Tiltagon, On Rusty Trails & 4 more

This post is going to be a big one. Those last three days we unlocked way too many games for me to get any rest, some of them were really good though so I don't mind. I will talk about 8 games today, actually it will be more like 7 but you will understand why while reading. Most of them are good, one in particular has even managed to become what I consider to be an indie masterpiece, you will see which one when you get to my description of it. Without further ado, let's see what the days 14 to 16 gave us !

I have never played the first Chime game so I can't tell which one is the best, I'm just going to say what I think about this one without taking anything else into account. Chime Sharp is a game that mixes puzzle and quick thinking by using the legendary mechanics introduced by Tetris a long time ago. It's a little bit off topic but I really like the name of this game that is a reference to the C# language, it managed to make me smile when I realized what they had done and I'm sure any programmer understanding what I'm talking about will smile too. Anyway, the game is really fun although being a bit too hard. Contrary to Tetris which required you to make lines to get points, Chime Sharp requires you to make quads with all kinds of pieces. The end goal is to have made quads on all the cases of the level grid. You don't have all your time though (in the main game mode that is) and you will have to act fast so that each quad made gives you bonus time. It gets harder and harder to complete each level due to this time constraint, I personally rarely got above 40% of each level before time was up. That is a problem because unlocking new game modes requires you to make at least 60% on the previous mode. It shouldn't work like that, unlocking new content should be used for difficulty, not for game modes... I only managed to try another mode because of that which replaces the timing limit by 10 lives, any cube not used for too long will make you loose one of those lives. A really good thing about Chime Sharp is its musical aspect. Each level has its own music which gets played by the positions of the pieces you placed on the grid. Sadly, those musics aren't that interesting, some of them even being unpleasing. A last bad point that only matters to me probably, I don't like the way this game handles controllers. Indeed with a controller pieces will often move from case to case without any pressure put on the joystick, it can be frustrating sometimes especially when you place a piece on the wrong spot because of that. To sum everything up, Chime Sharp is a good game despite not being perfect. Its community seems to recommend the first one though if you are really interested by this concept.

Here is a game full of potential that sadly doesn't manage to do anything with it. In Toy Odyssey: The Lost and Found, you get to play as a toy that suddenly becomes alive while its owner is sleeping. It just so happens that the house its owner lives in is a place in which supernatural events take place, all the toys become alive at night. Unfortunately when a toy isn't used anymore it becomes lost. Lost toys become crazy and try to destroy any toy that is still used and that crosses their path. Your mission is to take the toys that are about to become lost back to the base before it's too late. The game plays like Rogue Legacy in the way that it is a platformer with procedurally generated levels. By exploring the house (which means the levels), you will be able to save nearly lost toys, to free captured ones, to fight lost ones and to collect stuff on the ground that can be used to craft new gears and to upgrade your defenses. Indeed, lost toys sometimes decide to get together and attack your base, which requires you to defend it. Rat holes also exist in this game and are used to teleport between rooms. Contrary to a lot of games of this kind, you can choose to end a game without having to die. The advantage of doing this is that the rooms stay like they were and your progress in these rooms doesn't reset, even though new lost toys appear. Toy Odyssey: The Lost and Found also has a story mode, tasks are indeed required to complete if you want to help the found toys in this fight. With all that I haven't got into why I don't like this game, let's go then. It's quite simple actually, the most used mechanics are the worst ones. The movements don't seem to have any problem until you realize that the jumping mechanic is jerky and that your character walks way too slowly. The melee fighting isn't pleasing at all, you basically always have to hit then retreat and repeat that until the enemy dies. Throwing projectiles is even worse since they take way too long to get to their target. But wait, there is more ! The enemies are either overpowered or too easy to beat, none of them are balanced. In short, this game is a big disappointment to me since I was really looking forward to playin it.

Back to Bed is a surreal puzzle game taking place in a universe whose existence is clearly impossible. You control Subob which is the subconscious of Bob, a somnambulist who risks his life every night by sleepwalking. Your goal is to get Bob back to his bed on each level so he doesn't wake up or worse, dies from falling. For that, objects are placed on each level that you can move to block his path, making him rotate by 90° clock-wise. Other objects also help for making him walk above the void so he doesn't fall. After some levels, enemies will be introduced that can't cross Bob's path to avoid waking him up. The surrealist aspect of this game is really well done thanks to for example the possibility to walk on walls or different optical illusions like the Penrose Triangle one. The graphics are awesome and, once again, contribute to that surrealist vibe by making us feel like we are in a surrealist painting. To add to all that, a strange voice sometimes speak in an incomprehensible English. The only default this game has is that the surrealist vibe sometimes doesn't help to understand where to go. I often had to stop and look the map closely before understanding that what I thought to be the setting was actually a platform. Nonetheless, this game is really good and I consider it to be one of the best ones of these three days !

Tiltagon is very short and this description will be too since there isn't much to talk about honestly. I don't know why but I like this game a lot, I actually bought it a while ago when it was on sale and finished it quickly. This game is made for mobile, the concept for mobile being that you have to tilt your phone so the ball can roll just like with the old Labyrinth which is a game I played a lot back then. Despite having way too flashy colors, Tiltagon manages to keep the player thanks to its high difficulty (at least if you are looking to get all stars on the levels) and its soundtrack full of energy. The ground is hardly ever horizontal which means your ball will not always have the same speed. The really good part of this game in my opinion is its survival mode which will make you roll from a part of the ground to another one before the one you are on disappears. All those parts come from the classic levels, with some being exclusive to this mode. If you want even more challenge the hard survival mode will make you lose if you touch anything else than a platform. This game is clearly not a great one but it is really enjoyable, just give it a try !

Stop everything you were doing, this game is pure gold ! I was dumbfounded by how good it was. I actually had already took a look at it in the past but decided against buying it because it seemed messy, how wrong was I ! On Rusty Trails sadly is one of those games that can't show their full potential through trailers. In this game, you get to control a cute robot that lost its house in what seemed to be a meteor shower. Remembering that he has a warranty on its house, it decides to go ask for a new house to the robot that sold it the warranty. Unfortunately, the place has been closed ever since the manager left without coming back. The little robot therefore has to go further and further to find the manager and get a new house. In On Rusty Trails, nearly nothing is told by text but with visuals instead. In this robotic universe, two people coexist without liking each other: robots (in red) and creatures (in blue). After the first world, you will find a costume that allows you to switch from being red to being blue. It's important because those people like each other so little that they built platforms of their color on which you can only go if you are of right color ! This concept is exploited brilliantly all the time in the game with lasers and missiles coming later on. It kind of made me think about Outland which is another platformer playing with color switching mechanics that focuses on fighting more than actual platforms. Your robot will never fall from the platforms since it is apparently magnetized by them, allowing it not to come off them. Regarding graphics, they are really good, there is nothing bad to say about them. I couldn't find anything bad about this game and it is as of now my biggest discovery of this calendar. Be aware though that it is short, it took me about 3 hours to complete it.

Let's leave the cloud On Rusty Trails put us on and smash right to the ground with Offensive Combat: Redux!. This game is awful, it tries desperately to be funny but never manages to even make you smile. It must really think it is funny judging by how focused on shitty taunts the gameplay is, one of which making you fart on your enemy. Let's stay in the negative, even though we are going to stay in it for the whole description, to quickly talk about the graphics. They are awful, they burn my eyes. The user interface is really ugly too, it looks like the one you can find on free browser games. It probably is because this game seems to have been a free browser game before but, even knowing this, a lot of games have been and yet managed to do something good for their remaster (Aces of Spades: Battle Builder for example). The multiplayer had some people connected which surprised me. I must admit that it was fun to play for the first 10 minutes but then got really boring. However, I realized while playing that a lot of maps were ripped off other games. If you want to play alone, two modes are available. The first one is just a deathmatch with bots that only aim at you, the other one is a survival mode in which waves of bots must be killed before they enter your base. Those modes aren't really interesting. In short, don't waste your time downloading this game, there are so many more games out there that deserve your time.

I'm sorry but I will not be able to describe this one for you. It's quite simple why actually, it is only playable on local multiplayer with at least two players. I will try it on my next LAN but until then I can't really forge an opinion on it. I would have loved to even play with bots but it doesn't seem to be possible. Mimic Arena seems interesting though, it plays with the concept of mimics which seem to be lines you must follow from one goal to another without getting killed to get a point. The graphic style gives the game a futuristic vibe which is probably what they were aiming for. I can just hope the game will be good when I get to test it !

Spectrum doesn't have any story, it just is a platformer, nothing more. There is nothing wrong with that but it requires the gameplay to be good enough to compensate for the lack of everything else. And indeed, it is ! You get to control a spectrum with the four arrows of your keyboard. Your spectrum is attracted by gravity so going up will be hard and you will go down quickly. Levels contain three obstacle types. White obstacles are harmless, pale obstacles inflict one point of damage when you touch them and vivid obstacles simply kill you instantly. Scattered in the levels are some light balls that can be collected if you want to fully finish each level. Those will also be useful to get one of your three life points back. More than 80 levels are playable, which is not much even though the difficulty increases consequently with time spent. The only real problem I could find with this game is that its soundtrack is absolutely awful, to the point that I had to play mine instead to really start enjoying the game. The game is quite good and made me remember Flappy Bird on its first levels even though it gets away from that quickly.

What a post ! I can't feel my hands anymore ! I'm happy that I could talk about some of these games that didn't manage to get popular when they came out despite their undeniable quality. With this post it seems that the leak I was talking about last time can be confirmed. I'm still going to keep making these posts though since I said I would. I'm sorry if some parts didn't make sense, there were a lot of games unlocked for this update and I had to rush it sadly. Anyway, see you next time !