Summer is here, and so is another edition of Manygame Collection. As for why it took this so long, well… I’ll get into it a bit later. But if you’re in games media and really struggling this time of year, it’s not just you. Hell, if you’re nowhere near a video game and struggling, I’m with you. Enjoy these seven summery games. (And a pretty frank summary of how I’ve been doing. Get it? “Summery” sounds like—)
Creature Keeper
Creature Keeper slyly pokes fun at monster-collector conventions in its early hours. Your excitement to become a creature keeper is tempered a bit by your irritated mentor. Instead of setting off on a grand adventure, you’re tasked with cleaning up patches of weeds around town. Meanwhile, one of your friends is stung by every bee in a mile radius.
But soon, local creatures shift from territorial to unnaturally hostile. You’ll have to befriend them with their favorite food and note their attributes down in your bestiary. Each creature has its own elemental affinity and skill tree to help you in real-time fights. Combat mixes careful attacking, dodging, and monster management without ever feeling overwhelming.
This, in addition to the expressive pixel art and text, makes Creature Keeper a delight to play, even when the menus feel one step too convoluted.
YOUR HOUSE
YOUR HOUSE follows Debbie going from an oppressive boarding school to an enigmatic mansion, revealed to her via invitation. She’ll have to puzzle out the mechanisms of the house—a keypad on the front step, a puzzle box in a closet—and learn more about why she was called to its doorstep. At the game’s best moments, I felt the same thrill of older Flash-based escape rooms and the Rusty Lake series. At others, it felt like running in place.
There are times where YOUR HOUSE’s presentation is undeniably stylish and the writing is mostly sharp. Voice recordings Debbie finds in the house are authentically low-fidelity, but sometimes I had to rely on the captions to understand what they were saying. It’s definitely not the stellar voice cast’s fault, but rather the audio engineering for particular audio clips.
But there are others where the presentation hindered the speed of puzzles. Often I would know the solution, but would have to cycle through multiple fixed animations to get to it. YOUR HOUSE is a flawed but ambitious attempt from a small team.
Interlude One: How to Lose A Month and A Half
- First, realize that it’s early April.
- Watch your husband’s stress levels rise along with tax season. Absorb some of it.
- Play games for review when you can, but mostly try to make sure he eats and sleeps. Tell yourself that even one bullet point written down is progress.
- Tell yourself you can do this. Remind yourself of your professional obligations in an extremely niche industry.
- Fall behind.
- Next, take on some of your husband’s clerical duties to even out the workload.
- Be gently nudged about your volunteer duties and admit that you cannot get around to them this month.
- Remember everything you still have to do with the client website, the business bank account, the upcoming workshop. Wonder if you’re just kicking a series of cans down the road forever.
- Sink into a depression nap.
- Work more. Help around the house more. Have that undercurrent of guilt eat away at you during downtime. Slowly chip away at the volunteer obligations.
- Look at the list of games to review on your marker board again. Realize May is almost over. Panic. Loop back to the first paragraph. Sleep badly.
Related: The Computer Takes My Job
Cats On Duty (Xbox Series X)
Cats On Duty chucks adorable voxel cats onto the battlefield to wage war against zombies. If this sounds like a popular plant-based franchise, mind your business. You’ll match rows or columns of gems in real time on the left side of the board (again, mind your business) to gather enough materials to deploy your cats on the right.
Cats On Duty’s difficulty curve feels great so far, even if the process of placing a cat on the board initially confused me. But even a solo run scratched that matchy, tower-defense based itch a certain major gaming subsidiary seems unable to deliver. And if you have a more left-brained friend, it’s a perfect split between careful resource management on one side, and lane-based chaos on the other. And on Xbox, couch co-op is built right in!
Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion III
Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 is simultaneously exactly what is says on the box, and much more than you may have bargained for, in classic Strange Scaffold fashion. J.J.’s reluctant excursion into a dinosaur-infested mansion quickly shatters the fourth wall. What does it mean to be a flawed creation moving through a B-movie plot left on the cutting room floor? Like it or not, J.J.’s about to find out.
“What if a Match-3 about hokey dinosaur fiction made you FEEL things” sounds like a rejected Peter Molyneux bit, yet the team behind Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 pulls it off. The turn-based match-3 gameplay hovers between breezy and tense, and the wild narrative swings mask an all-too-real industry weariness I feel in my bones. Turns out that making shit is hard. Who knew?
Interlude Two: How to Second-Guess Your Career
- Watch games media both fracture and consolidate. Lose track of the weeks where another talented outlet or studio is abruptly shuttered, sending another wave of seasoned professionals who don’t deserve this into a shaky job market.
- Apply for more jobs with in-person interviews.
- Get turned down for a floor assistant position at an office supply chain (worried you’ll be “too bored”).
- Get turned down by a local reptile zoo (found another candidate).
- Hear nothing from a regional massage chain.
- Walk out of a sketchy local business that turns out to be a multi-level marketing scheme. (These are just the in-person close calls you remember.)
- See hundreds of other online and remote applications dissolve into thin air.
- Get professional help revising your resume. Set up a freelance website. Print business cards. Consider going back to school.
- Build up your credit score.
- After another period of radio silence, get contacted directly by a recruiter. Freak out a little bit.
- Double-check and verify everything. Are they real? Is the company real? Do the linked URLs match? Does scanning the code in the email header pull up anything weird? It all checks out.
- Spend the weekend mocking up a presentation and tweaking your resume. Decide to assemble something about gaming industry trends. Search for a reliable video source about games outlet layoffs, then get blindsided by hateful gamer-chud thumbnails with AI-generated, blue-haired crying employees.
- Spiral a little bit. Check if you’ve already taken your antidepressant that day (you have).
- Pause for a deep breath, submit the application, and hear absolutely nothing back. Try not to take the psychic damage personally.
- Wonder, not for the first time, what is wrong. Is it the visible limp? Are you not masking enough? Sleep badly.
Herald: The Interactive Period Drama
Herald: The Interactive Period Drama packs juicy narrative choices into a 19th century nautical voyage. Devan Rensburg—or my version at least—enlists onto a merchant vessel to journey away from the blue-clad confines of the Protectorate. But even the close quarters of the Herald has a hierarchy, and Devan is as close to the bottom as it gets.
Your choices will steer him toward peacemaking, rabble-rousing, or somewhere in between. But between the unorthodox passengers on the ship and a captain too nosy for his own good, conflict is brewing on the high seas. Devan will soon learn that petty squabbles can spiral out into bigger consequences.
Conversational and action-based choices are a perfect mix of establishing Devan’s tone and genuinely branching the story. The expressiveness of the 2D character portraits during conversation adds further dimension to great voice acting work. Even the sharper edges of 3D environmental geometry have a charm to them. I just know I’ll devour all four courses of Herald: The Interactive Period Drama’s historical narrative feast.
My Little Universe
My Little Universe‘s console port further streamlines its mobile game predecessor to an amusing, if somewhat empty-feeling, resource-collection loop. You steer a bulbous orange guy around a low-poly planet, crafting tools from various resources.
You can interact with the world by tapping a button or toggling on auto-actions in the main menu: get close enough, and your little guy will whack anything in range. Tools extract resources faster, which unlocks more of the map, which leads to more tool upgrades and… Well, you get it.
After crash-landing and making your way through a tutorial planet, you uncover more planets to mine, new resources to gather, and even boss encounters. But even though the console port largely excises the ad-supported, in-app purchase network of its mobile predecessor, it feels strangely hollow to play.
After the initial salvo of machinery, crafting, and map-expanding, later planets simply add more layers of enemies, additional resources, and friction. My Little Universe feels wide, but ultimately shallow. Ultimately it’s more suited for a lazy day in than my gaming diet.
Game Over: A Musical RPG??
Game Over: A Musical RPG?? is an irreverent, solo-developer jaunt through a conventional RPG that starts glitching out. You, your brother, and a childhood friend, venture forth to figure out why. The goofy conversations and running gags slot right into Undertale’s legacy, with village residents trusting you with an incredibly risky business idea, among other oddball tasks.
The game’s musical portion didn’t play as nicely with me. Environmental puzzles can be purely audio-based, with no other visual feedback and lots of back-and-forth involved for those (me) without perfect pitch. And the traditional buttons-and-lanes segments, hearkening to Guitar Hero sessions gone by, didn’t feel snappy enough. I swapped from keyboard to controller and back again, never quite feeling comfortable with either set of controls.
Jake Houston’s first commercial solo effort has all the charm an indie game enjoyer could ever need, and maybe with time they can hone in on the gameplay elements, too. Luckily, I’m an easy mark for a silly story, and Game Over’s tale might just be goofy enough to carry me through.
Interlude Three: How to Keep Going
- Watch family and friends grow. Sometimes this means growing away from you. Hug them while you can.
- Make plans for the indeterminate future. Board more trains out of town.
- Remind yourself that you have loved ones, good coworkers, a semi-stable rent situation, and resources.
- Find a strange sort of comfort in your insignificance. Check if you’ve taken your antidepressant (you have).
- Convince your housemate to get the five-pound box of the really good tortilla chips at the grocery store.
- Take healthier naps.
- Type out this article one strangled sentence at a time.
- Still believe there’s a place that needs you. Even now.
That’s all for the summer edition of Manygame Collection! I’ll be back in September with another roundup. For more indie game coverage, stay tuned to the site. Take care of each other.
