2024-05-08: Obscure Stuff I Played Recently (2024): The Squeakuel

This is your regularly scheduled reminder to play Sally Can't Sleep. Also, these five cool games!

Pangolin Cassowary

Pangolin Cassowary is a comfy physics platformer about the titular pangolin cassowary duo navigating various open-ended levels, collecting savoury snacks, capsule toys, and bus passes to progress. The two have a Banjo Kazooie arrangement, with Pangolin riding on Cassowary's back. But Cassowary can't jump, only punt Pangolin at some chosen angle and fly to them after they uncurl from their bouncy ball state. It's not a challenging game in any respect, visually, narratively, or difficulty-wise, but it's still satisfying and offers quite a few "aha!" moments as you figure out various mechanical quirks to find secret items and complete extra challenges.

Three Verses

A short, free narrative game, which controls somewhat like a grid-based dungeon crawler, but there's not much combat and it's not particularly difficult. The game is about the style, the writing, and the vibes more than anything else, and it's absolutely dripping in the sort of surreal retro atmosphere one might expect from an LSD Dream Emulator inspired game.

Hatch

Another short game, this time a first person climbing platformer. It's fundamentally a very simple game - climb up any diagonal surface, avoid the sun, and that's it - but that mechanical simplicity is enough to last the game's runtime. It's one big navigational challenge, manoeuvring yourself around the increasingly precarious tower walls with nimble jumps, supported by a thick atmosphere of loneliness and desolation. The music, the visuals, the narrative, the gameplay, they all help create the feeling of a harrowing and almost spiritual journey, and doing a remarkably good job. Unfortunately the game suffers from having very limited options even for an indie game (ie, none), leaving you with a frustratingly narrow default FOV and uncapped framerate, as well as a fixed mouse sensitivity. Still worth playing though, especially considering the very low price.

Pseudo-Haunting

The word of the day is: atmosphere!
Pseudo-Haunting is another game by the venerable ApeHardware (whose game Detuned was featured last year), a prolific developer of experimental, oblique, and unique horror games, this time taking particular influence from classic survival horror. You play as a slow, shambling main character who can summon and control a fast-moving ghost, and through their combined skills you'll explore a winding map, solving puzzles and busting ghosts along the way. The worst thing I can say about Pseudo-Haunting is that it is, sometimes, quite frustrating. Not only does saving take consumables on difficulties above Easy, but save points can be quite punishing in their placement, and the sloooooooooooow pace of the main character makes backtracking and redoing sections after death a little painful. But cope with a little difficulty and you'll get a beautifully atmospheric horror experience with harsh, foreboding audio design, striking visuals, an interesting narrative, and some genuinely unique gameplay. ApeHardware's games can feel uncompromising at times, but there's a real auteurial spirit behind them that's hard not to admire.

Fremdganger - The Cheating Demon

Wow, what a wonderful surprise this game was. I was honestly a little apprehensive to play it after seeing the generic looking RPG Maker screenshots, but I'm glad I did - it's clever and creative and, honestly, very well executed for the janky budget indie game that it is. There's not much more that can be said without spoiling some entertaining reveals, so consider this a "just trust me on this one" recommendation.


To be honest, I've been a bit bothered by what "obscure" actually means recently. I'm writing this blog mostly for myself (and my three loyal search engine crawler fans), but my standards for what qualifies a game as obscure or niche or whatever have been rising steadily over the past year until I reached a state where most of the things I play get disqualified, either because they have a triple digit review count or because some youtuber or streamer played them for a little bit or because they got a feature in PC Gamer. Kinda just ranting here at this point, but it's been on my mind as I pick out games for the RICK ZONE. Most of the time you'll ask someone online about obscure game recommendations and they'll tell you to play Spelunky or Dwarf Fortress or Sekiro, which has annoyed me to no end in the past. Oh well. Not everyone can have such cool, hip, refined, sophisticated, underground taste in games as me...