Happy spooky season, gamers! Wishing y’all ten-foot yard skeletons of your choosing and lots of candy. Speaking of candy, this month’s collection is all about snackable game morsels. Sometimes you just need a quick bite, and boy did October’s Manygame Collection deliver. Have fun, but don’t break too many eggs. Just trust me on that one.
Related: Manygame Collection (September 2024): Capybaras and Dungeon Crawls
What is Manygame Collection?
Manygame Collection is my way of documenting exciting games—past, present, in some cases future—that don’t quite make it to a full CMS page. These titles are deeply weird, frequently funny, and absolutely worth your time.
Grunn
Grunn leads you down a garden path until you’re deep in a thicket. Simple first-person tasks like trimming the hedges and cutting the grass give way to a strange, sprawling town where you don’t know the language. Oh, and something is watching you.
So much about Grunn’s world goes unsaid—your character’s compulsive need to garden, the slightly distended first-person camera, little details that shift from day to day. But simple routine masks something much stranger (and occasionally funnier). My partner and I spent a solid evening experimenting and theorizing about Grunn’s strange hamlet, and we only uncovered a fraction of what there is to discover.
Astrea: Six Sided Oracles
Local dice sicko goes wild for fantasy dice builder, news at 11. But seriously, I’ve had to stop myself from falling headfirst into Astrea: Six Sided Oracles at the expense of everything else.
Countless indie titles have built on Dicey Dungeons’ gameplay bedrock, but Astrea: Six Sided Oracles delivers the most complete package yet. Theming, mechanics, and progression click together just so. It’s earned a permanent place of honor in my Xbox Series X quick resume collection.
Astrea fuses traditional health and magic bars into a single counter at the bottom of the screen, the push and pull of blue purification and red corruption influencing the tools at your disposal. As long as your bar doesn’t tick all the way down in the red, your character won’t lose life.
During one run, deliberately dealing small bits of damage to my character walloped enemies even harder, turning risky Corruption die into a boon.
Winning battles means more dice for your pool, more resources to spend at the shop, and recruitable sentries to fight alongside you. But every fight has teeth. I’ve lost to first encounters just as often as final bosses. Astrea: Six Sided Oracles has so many more cards and artifacts to still unlock. I’ll keep rolling for months to come!
Gnomes and Knights
Gnomes and Knights has it all there in the name: you are a knight, and your task is to find and catch gnomes in disguise all over the low-poly world. Talk to the eccentric characters in each level to find trinkets that point you in the right direction. But otherwise, a gnome could be hiding in any mushroom, hissing and sprinting once you find it.
It’s not the most elaborate gameplay loop, but there’s joy in just wandering each landscape and cutting through foliage. With a small price tag and a multi-paneled interface that oozes early dungeon-crawler charm. Gnomes and Knights adds its own flavor to a pixelated scavenger hunt. I’ve happily tromped through mud and poison swamps alike, keeping watch for the next telltale shudder of one of my relics.
REYNATIS
The spread of an illicit drug called Rubrum clamps down on REYNATIS‘s Shibuya. Magic users on both sides of the law keep their powers hidden until absolutely necessary to avoid undue attention. But after the mandatory curfew falls, all bets are off.
Real time combat punctuates REYNATIS’s exploration and side quests. Use defensive Suppressed mode to dodge attacks and follow up aggressive Liberated mode to pummel your opponents. Timing these switch-offs is crucial to combat flow. At its best it feels like the frenzied fights of Star Ocean fused with Bayonetta’s Witch Time mechanic.
REYNATIS follows Sari—an officer in the city’s magic task force—and Marin, a college student seeking the strength to be undefeatable in magical combat, as their paths collide. As with previous FuRyu titles, broad story strokes give way to more nuanced characterization.
FuRyu continues to hone their stylistic vision into something more distinct, even if this never reaches the highs of turn-based Caligula Effect 2. But if you don’t mind a little genre indulgence, REYNATIS can be a real treat.
Egg Squeeze
The experiment is simple. Sense the egg. Squeeze the egg. Don’t break the egg. You’ve been roped into a psychokinetic experiment that stretches over three days. Click the left mouse button and hold to squeeze the egg. Easy, right? Each egg in Egg Squeeze has its own breaking point. But further information is cryptic and scarce.
Egg Squeeze uses straightforward goals to wring every bit of anticipation and dread out of a simple premise and Word-Munchers-caliber graphics. Left with little information, I quickly got in my own head about each egg’s pressure tolerance. “The last one was a longer squeeze, so this one will be long, too.” Wrong. Another cracked egg. “Okay, it wouldn’t do three short squeezes in a row.” Right conclusion, wrong reasons.
After the relative ease of day one, successful squeezes give you more and more information to parse. It could be the silly egg mascot yapping in the bottom corner, or the spinning radar in the top right. Just one more good squeeze. Just over the next threshold. Don’t crack under the pressure.
Marvel Vs. Capcom Fighting Collection
Capcom’s retro rereleases in the 2000s made even diehard fans skeptical. But Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection returns in peak form: the Switch’s hybrid system is perfect for one-on-one couch battles. The collection strikes the perfect balance of historical reverence and instant play, bundling seven past titles into a mostly easy-to-navigate menu. It feels more cohesive than past rashes of PlayStation 2 compilation titles.
Every Marvel vs.Capcom hides its latticework gameplay under sheer pyrotechnics. Flashy combos, punchy sound and animation, and yes, annoying full screen flashes make every match brisk and boisterous.
But dig deeper and you’ll discover the intricacies of Capcom’s stalwart six-button system. Marvel Vs. Capcom Fighting Collection hits the sweet spot of rewarding button-mashers and combo labbers alike. And on the Switch, it’s dangerously easy to pull out and play at a moment’s notice!
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