Welcome back to Manygame Collection! It’s been a hectic month: international travel, a week of seasonal crud, and a slew of interesting releases to cover. Getting mildly sick is a great way to narrow down what games truly hold my attention. This month’s five selections run the genre gamut, but one way or another they all stayed on my mind. Enjoy!
I’m new here. What’s a 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.
Related: Manygame Collection (August 2024): Shake, Battle and Roll
SunnySide
I fell in love with SunnySide from the opening cutscene: a resident tending to livestock floated by, but the texture didn’t fully load on one of the cows, giving them a pixelated, bug-eyed look that was instantly endearing. Semi-realistic 3D assets fuse with anime-inspired character designs, so it can be a bit much. But it’s all sincere, and it’s all SunnySide.
You’ll spend an introductory sequence texting from a shattered phone screen because your character can’t afford a replacement. Even their impulse purchase of a long-abandoned piece of farmland in the rural Japanese countryside is a last minute Hail Mary for a different life. There are no inheritances or kindly relatives here, just a sibling who freaks out from afar. Finally, a backstory for the rest of us.
SunnySide is filled to the brim with new approaches to farming sims and life sims, even if the resulting aesthetic takes getting used to. A new neighbor is aghast when you suggest using a watering can–we have water hoses now! And there’s plenty to explore beyond your patch of land. SunnySide’s approach to mechanics and world building leads to texture pop-in and other system hiccups. But who cares about graphical fidelity when I’m having this much fun?
Crossy Road Castle
Crossy Road Castle immediately jumps into the action. With two button presses, you and up to three friends are climbing up the tower of your choice. Directional buttons or analog sticks move. A button or trigger jumps. No preamble necessary.
Early levels of each tower ease players in. But scale enough procedurally generated floors and the cute voxel sheen reveals its teeth, turning even the most compact stages into frantic deathtraps. Only one player needs to clear the level for your entire group to survive, easing some of the sting. Boss fights break up the sharp platforming, testing pattern recognition and endurance.
Crossy Road Castle has blossomed with its full console release, finally becoming the best pick-up-and-play version of itself. Only the dual currency hints at the game’s Apple Arcade past. You can spend your collected gold and purple coins on characters and hats, microtransaction-free.
Crossy Road Castle slots in perfectly where your friend group’s Jackbox or Fortnite fatigue used to be, giving momentum and direction to your next gathering. Every 100 floors cleared unlocks a new tower, but otherwise there’s only the joy and immediacy of voxel animal platforming. Sometimes that’s all you need.
SWOLLEN TO BURSTING UNTIL I AM DISAPPEARING ON PURPOSE
Swollen to Bursting Until I Am Disappearing On Purpose is a free RPG Maker offering with a singular, unsettling vibe. You are a postal worker in the small town of Vomit, delivering packages on your coworker Kick’s last day on the job. Oh, and a flying saucer just crashed nearby.
Your immediate goal is to deliver four parcels around town, but other residents and oddities raise more questions. Instead of traditional RPG combat, you collect various “effects” and milk them (yes, milk them) at one of the many cow machines that serve as save points. If your level is higher, you win. If it’s lower, you lose. Simple as.
But other moments in Swollen to Bursting are not as clear. The mysterious pit under a cafe oven, the unsettling openness of the moors, and every enemy variant untethers the game further from its initial coziness. And if the menu’s content warnings are anything to go by, I haven’t finished descending into its maw.
I Believe In Capybara Supremacy!
Once a year, I’m gripped by the urge to revisit my childhood virtual pet: an LCD dinosaur with a vague interface and the propensity to poop until it perished. I Believe In Capybara Supremacy! curbs that nostalgia by offering me something even better: a virtual pet that only demands a single session from me.
Manage your capybara’s happiness, food, stamina, and sleep meters or face its world-destroying wrath. Gameplay is simple: walk around in first person, feed your capybara, pet it, and play minigames with it to level up. The higher the level, the more attention the capybara needs (and more accessories are available to unlock).
There’s no save function, so I Believe In Capybara Supremacy! can be as short or as long as you want. While some of the Steam reviews assume something sinister at play under the hood, all I see is an indie developer finding their voice bit by bit. And hey, 99 cents is much cheaper than the used Tamagotchi market.
Elrentaros Wanderings
Elrentaros Wanderings doesn’t quite live up to its pedigree. But it’s still a sturdy action RPG with visual novel elements layered on top. Producer Yoshifumi Hashimoto—creator of the Rune Factory series—brings his signature deliberate pacing and aesthetic to a smaller-scale dungeon crawler, even if the end result feels more insubstantial than breezy.
Your character falls asleep in class, only to wake up in an unfamiliar fantasy world. Determining which world is real and which one isn’t is the main intrigue of the story, but never to a point that demands real investment. Villagers and classmates behave in pretty standard ways, the gaps showing more easily without Rune Factory’s open-ended framework to scaffold things.
After getting their bearings and talking to the residents, your character their weapon and venture to a nearby cave. Action combat is simple and brisk, like if Dragalia Lost was had less mobile game economy rot. Most enemies are easily dealt with, but lower floor bosses demand more attention with harder hits and tricky attack patterns.
If you’re after a simple and pleasant gameplay loop, Elementaros Wanderings fits the bill perfectly. Bite-sized dungeon runs are the perfect length on Switch, just enough fuss to pop in and pop out. Elementaros Wanderings drastically scales back compared to its producer’s past lineage, but that could be a boon for gamers with limited schedules.
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