qrth-phyl
qrth-phyl falls in the class of games like Lumines or Space Invaders Extreme that offer simple, familiar mechanics, carefully tuned and immaculately presented. It’s a love letter to snake-like arcade games, with easter-egg tributes to the genre’s innovators. You alternate between snaking around the outside of rectangles or rectangular prisms and free-movement 3D snaking inside those prisms. The idea of 3D snake worried me initially, seeming like a potential camera disaster, but the implementation is rock solid and I haven’t had a death that didn’t feel like my fault. Playing well increases “corruption,” which increases the difficulty of the proc-gen levels but offers more dots and a higher chance of encountering the treasured blue dots, which turn your tail into dots for you to consume like Pac-Man CE:DX’s satisfying ghost trains. The dynamic difficulty system persists between runs, and it feels like one of the best such systems I’ve encountered, quickly dialing in a consistently engaging level of challenge.
– Real player with 4.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Psychedelic Abstract Games.
I absolutely love this game. The aesthetics are working great for the retro-arcade style. The controls are responsive and the game is challenging. Also the hidden sequence adds yet another dimension to the game (pun not intended).
I got this game years ago on IndieGameStand. That store doesn’t operate anymore and I had the only .exe file I managed to download before they went out of business. And here we are, qrth-phyl finally safely in my steam library.
I’m looking forward for future updates. Maybe VR support could be nice?
– Real player with 3.6 hrs in game
Anomalies
SUMMARY: A graphical toy to make weird, surreal spacescapes and the oddities that inhabit them, from playing with sliders to just randomziing items. On top of that, you get odd soundscapes that play along. A way to just mess around, or a way to create relaxing - or disturbing - backgrounds on your computer or tv display.
Anomalies is a graphical toy that some may call a glorified screen saver - fortunately it’s both!
Basically you can randomize or set a bunch of parameters, that then make surreal spacescapes that you can watch while strange music plays. Depending on your choices, you might watch stars circle by as you observe a nebula, be caught among strange particles, or hover in front of a bizarre tentacular space creature. Or a combination.
– Real player with 31.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Psychedelic Music Games.
This is a really interesting piece of software. It is good to have around to either dip into casually or have a longer session. There can be some nice surprises. I just came up with a not very spectacular creation from the visual point of view, but it has a very nice ethereal sound. Tweaking parameters and hunting and rummaging are great fun. I have got some more choices of wallpaper too.
– Real player with 26.0 hrs in game
Return Home
The reactive difficulty keeps the game challenging as you improve.
Great game, and very replayable.
– Real player with 17.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Psychedelic Abstract Games.
Blinding little score attack game with a great soundtrack and a devious auto difficulty mechanic.
Check it out.
– Real player with 6.2 hrs in game
Dungeons of Clay
Good fun. Not to difficult. Good for a quick brain flush :D
– Real player with 28.9 hrs in game
If you find the background distracting, turning off all the graphics will fix that issue.
Each run takes about an hour and a half. The difficulty I would rate 3/5, so if you are skilled at all with roguelikes it will probably take you only 2 to 3 attempts to beat the game.
Nice change of pace, good game!
– Real player with 2.6 hrs in game
The Catacombs of Solaris Revisited
really nicely made trippy little toy.
But without an objective or context, $12 is pretty steep for what is essentially a fancy visualizer. It only has a couple of features that the free itch.io version doesn’t, and imo they don’t exactly warrant such a high price tag.
My advice: search for and download the original free version, and if after playing that you think “oh hell yeah I’d pay $11.99 for more of THIS”, then by all means go ahead. (I did for what that’s worth.) But without further updates, a point to it all, or a lower price, I can’t recommend everyone or anyone buy it.
– Real player with 6.2 hrs in game
I do think that the price is a bit high for a game where you just walk around and look at weird stuff, but the way this game is made is very cool, and very trippy, and jhbakjbAIjhy8qwuyowqghbwqbgukqwyhbqgwkuyhgbqhqbhqwbA AN HA AHN AH aH hah a ha baH ja jna
– Real player with 3.6 hrs in game
EXPOSURE, a game of camouflage
A game of camouflage where you can’t see yourself. Change colors to hide, dodge predators, and survive intense bosses in the abstract wilderness of stealth non-bullet hell. Lose the ability to see where you are, and learn to feel and know where you’re going.
EXPOSURE and CAMOUFLAGE
Being out in the open is unsafe. Avoid detection to survive. Switch between light and dark forms to camouflage, but careful: you won’t be able to see yourself either.
Entrancing World
Begin defenseless, but evolve into something greater. Progress through different branching paths across 11 procedurally generated areas. Disappear into the psychedelic minimalist design and atmospheric soundscapes.
Intense Bosses
Each area introduces new predators and parasites. Everything is much more powerful than you, but everything has a weakness.
Features
Collect all the Fieldnotes. Beat the Daily Challenge. Discover the fastest routes. Shoot ‘em up without shooting. Bullet hell without bullets. See without looking. Die and evolve.
Jigsaw Jolt: Neural Style 1
Features one hundred jigsaw puzzle images enhanced using AI style transfer. This gives each image a fun, quirky, and unique look. The puzzle images are specially selected to provide the high saturation of detail needed in a jigsaw puzzle.
The puzzle program has an open approach which allows you to find your own fun and customize the experience to best suit you. You are not limited to a specific progression path, or way of doing things. You can mix and match features to get the most fun and challenge out of your puzzle solving adventure.
The puzzle program uses a standard maximized application window rather than a fullscreen display. This makes it ideal for solving puzzles while also using your computer for other tasks. Whenever the puzzle screen loses focus any dynamic and timed elements are automatically paused, and will resume again when you switch back to the Current Puzzle tab page.
How To Use The Puzzle Program
To begin solving a puzzle, just click on one of the puzzle images on the Puzzle Selector tab page that is displayed on program start. The puzzle will be generated and displayed on the Current Puzzle tab page. You can customize the features that you want for the puzzle on the Settings tab page. The Help tab page provides you with all the information you need on customizing and solving puzzles, and on managing the program.
Most controls within the program also have quick-help buttons ‘?’ next to them which provide pop-up help information about the nearby control. This makes it easy to get the information you need, right when and where you need it.
You can find the buttons that let you switch between tab pages at the top of the screen. Next to these you will find a row of control buttons that give you control options for the current puzzle, let you save and load puzzles, and let you quickly exit the program.
Puzzle Program Features
Save and reload puzzles. Once a puzzle has been saved it will be autosaved once per minute and whenever the puzzle is closed. You can also set puzzle files for completed puzzles to be automatically deleted.
Save and reload puzzle settings profiles. You can have as many of these settings profiles as you wish. This allows you to create your own challenge modes, and easily switch between them.
You can select the number of pieces you wish to have in each puzzle. 24 to 216 piece puzzles are available.
Puzzles are generated on-the-fly when a puzzle image is selected. The puzzle is created using vector drawing techniques and the amount of randomness used can be controlled via the Settings tab page. This lets you customize the look of each puzzle.
Move puzzle segments (single pieces and interlocked multi-piece groups) around by clicking on them with the left-mouse button to pick them up and to put them down again. You can also hold down the mouse button to drag and drop puzzle segments. Once a piece is picked up it is considered to be captured and dynamic elements are turned off for the piece. If a segment is dropped near another segment that it can interlock with then it will do so.
Two workspaces are available to solve the puzzles in. You can switch between them using the right mouse button. Puzzle segments can be easily picked-up and dropped from one workspace to another and you can complete the puzzle in either workspace.
Pieces can be set to optionally be manually rotatable. The pieces will be randomly rotated when a puzzle is generated and can be manually rotated using the mousewheel. Pieces will only interlock once both they and their interlocking piece are at their correct rotation.
Puzzle pieces can optionally be set to move dynamically, rotate dynamically, and attempt to evade the mouse pointer when moving. They can also be set to make random direction changes to prevent clustering.
Rotating forcefields can be enabled for pieces. These will have small gaps in them to allow the mouse pointer in past the forcefield so that a piece can be captured. If the mouse triggers the forcefield then the piece will be locked while the mouse pointer is over it. You can also change the rotational speed of the forcefield to change the difficulty.
You can enable a health ring for the mouse pointer. This will decrement in health while a puzzle segment is picked up, forcing you to optimize the puzzle solving process. The health and health scaling are both customizable. The health meter applies a soft-limit on solving a puzzle that still allows you to complete the puzzle if you run out of health. If you want to use a hard limit then just close the puzzle when the health runs out.
A countdown timer is available to create timed challenge modes. The amount of time allowed is customizable for each number of pieces. A grace period is applied when the puzzle is created or loaded and after returning from a pause. You can combine this mode with the forcefield mode by optionally applying a customizable forcefield detection penalty. This applies a soft limit similar to the way the health meter works.
For some extra help in solving a puzzle you can set the completed puzzle image to be displayed as a faint image in the background on the puzzle screen. This feature can be enabled and disabled at any time.
The program will automatically pause dynamic and timed elements when the Current Puzzle tab page loses the focus. To pause, just switch to a different tab page, or to a different window.
Note that, due to the high number of optional settings combinations, you may find that you need to tweak some of the health meter and timing values to create challenge modes that work best for you. You can save the settings profile you create and reload it at any time once you have it set the way that you like it.
Miles of Cubes
OMG I LOVE YOU!!! I’ve been looking for a infinite ski slalom type game for over a month now. And this! This is want I wanted, and didn’t even know I wanted.
– Real player with 3.0 hrs in game
BullyBall
At the end of the day your opinion of ‘BullyBall’ isn’t going to be down to the game as such, more your opinion of what you expect when you pay just £1.69 for a game. This bow and arrow game sees you shooting balls that are constantly moving towards you. You get a lot of healthy hearts at the start of the game and the chance to win more in terms of powerups. But that is it. The ball are flat 2D items and there is literally nothing else to this game other than a high score. I get that £1.69 isn’t a lot of money, but even at that price point, I wish this game was free. I simply can’t recommend this one at the moment, but with some improvements maybe that will change.
– Real player with 0.1 hrs in game
HyperRogue
Here’s finally my review of Hyperrogue, probably my favorite game on Steam! :)
In a nutshell, Hyperrogue can be described as a minimalist tactical roguelike in the hyperbolic plane. So, what does that mean, specifically?
First of all, it’s a minimalist roguelike, and there is no equipment, and no items except for Orbs (basically spells) which are often activated upon pick up. Hyperrogue is turn- and grid-based, and combat rules are simple: Every attack is guaranteed to hit, and is usually deadly - for monsters as well as for the player. As a roguelike, it has permadeath. To avoid accidental player deaths, the game prevents you from performing actions that immediately result in your death, though there’s a hardcore mode for the more confident players.
– Real player with 728.2 hrs in game
I’ve played this game for over a hundred hours and I’m still not quite sure what to say about it! It’s certainly a weird one. But it’s a brilliant, good kind of weird that certain types of gamers should really check out.
HyperRogue is a mind-bending game of chess that takes place on a world that’s quite unlike our own. The object of the game is to collect as much treasure as possible without getting one-hit killed and succumbing to permadeath (as the ‘Rogue’ in the title might suggest) but… navigating the world is a challenge unlike any you’ve ever met before. You know how, in real life, things appear smaller as they get farther away? Like how the horizon only looks like it’s a few feet long to your eyes, when in reality it spans miles? As it turns out, on a hyperbolic plane, this effect is compounded: the horizon is much, much longer than it would be in real life. Two paths that appear near to one another will take you in completely opposite directions. The world is structured in such a way that is impossible for your poor spatial senses to intuitively understand, so scrolling something off the screen will mean that it’s probably lost forever unless you’re keeping close track of landmarks.
– Real player with 638.5 hrs in game