Manygame Collection (January 2025): One Step At A Time

New year, new Manygame Collection!

New year, new games! Manygame Collection is back for January, despite a bout of writer’s block and well, general uneasiness. But games give me a different lens to see things through. And while real life isn’t exactly “number go up when you meet an attainable goal” right now, small actions do snowball into larger change.

Last month’s collection: Manygame Collection (December 2024): Fixin’ To Chill

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and scared right now, start something small. Like a weekly routine, a new hobby, or a monthly game roundup that you procrastinate on. But above all else, live, if only out of spite. Live in the knowledge that we will outlast and outnumber the racists and bigots currently tearing things apart.

Kitten Burst

Manygame Collection: A tutorial message in Kitten Burst reads as follows: CATS ARE SOLID You condense your body into a solid state to fling yourself at great speeds, like a cell phone plummeting from a rollercoaster. - This state allows you to utilize your stored TSR-uB energy to propel yourself forwards at twice your top speed.
Screenshot via Taylor Hicklen.

Kitten Burst follows Hapi—a virtual racing cat competing on a long-abandoned website circuit—as they’re recruited by a hacker named S4BR to help excavate energy for their ship. Hapi explores desolate website worlds and their digital ghosts. And the pumping soundtrack hits all the right notes, morphing from ethereal to frantic as Kitten Burst picks up speed.

Hapi trawls for energy by flying fast, collecting nodes, and hopefully not breaking anything. Kitten Burst prioritizes zooming around and exploring over the pursuit of high scores. But that doesn’t dampen the joy of weaving through obstacles at inadvisable speeds.

Hapi flies like a jet, banking and turning across three dimensions. And they get a little residual burst energy every time they fly close to an object. If Hapi uses their burst, the faster they go.

Kitten Burst’s glitchy Y2K internet isn’t just high-speed adrenaline. Each space has odd structures and chatty inhabitants, giving every biome its own push and pull. Manipulating elements of the environment requires more of a slow float than full speed ahead. And every oddball character is an opinionated delight well worth stopping for.

Kitten Burst understands that “gotta go fast” is more of a personal mantra. For each one of Hapi’s hairpin turns, there’s an equal and opposite tug towards what this desolate online space used to be. Looking and listening is just as important.

S4U: CityPunk 2011 and Love Punch

Manygame Collection: The protagonist of S4U: Citypunk 2011 and Love Punch waits for Nil, their friend with a seagull avatar, to respond in a chatroom window.
Screenshot via U0U Games.

S4U: CityPunk 2011 and Love Punch relishes the prickly conversations behind computer screens and typing itself. You’re a down-on-their-luck architect trying to make ends meet in Castor Yard, a big city melting pot for all walks of life.

In between soul-draining day job shifts, you take on freelance clients and serve as their online mouthpiece. A client will give you an objective, and you’ll need to pick through their chatroom accounts and contacts to solve the problem.

Instead of clicking options onscreen, your character cycles through choices in the traditional instant messenger fashion: furiously deleting and retyping. The translation sometimes falters with an odd phrase or two, but nothing the player can’t gather through context.

I genuinely didn’t expect a typing mechanic to pull me deeper into S4U’s narrative, but something about the act of keysmashing things out endeared me to the chosen main character and their ever-expanding network. Once they clock out for the day, they can walk down their street, make conversation at the vending machine, or simply watch the skyline. S4U: CityPunk 2011 and Love Punch treats its city like a living entity, and all the hopes and worries of the people living there.

Threefold Recital

Manygame Collection: Taiqing, a fox priest in Threefold Recital, takes a nap on a messy bed.
Screenshot via Everscape Games.

Threefold Recital follows three beastlings as they unravel strange events in the city of Bluescales. Tritana–a solemn but softhearted wolf monk–can cut the karma lines that trace the relationships between people and objects. Taiqing–a plucky fox priest–uses transmutation substances and spells. And Transia–a snake artist–can navigate through paintings and change appearances. Their character traits and abilities mesh through 2D platforming and conversation, with the occasional minigame diversion.

The platforming aspects are familiar and unobtrusive on an Xbox controller: left stick to move, A button to jump, X to interact. Each character’s skill set keeps to this ruleset, allowing the rhythm of gameplay to move in unexpected directions without leaving players behind.

Threefold Recital’s confidence in the player is its strongest asset. Optional objectives are carefully tucked away for potential discovery, dialogue choices don’t lean toward obvious conclusions. Taking every environment and conversation in is just as crucial as the platforming nuts-and bolts.

Heady Concepts

The game’s world is steeped in Daoist teachings and culture, and sometimes the translation can’t elegantly convey those concepts. Threefold Recital’s writing is best in character interactions and reflection, but stumbles when attempting to show the machinations of the larger world. Playful puns and joking asides add enough levity to keep the narrative flowing.

Threefold Recital is still a strong first showing from developer Everscape Games. It’s a contemplative and chatty look at karma’s chain of cause and effect. Despite some localization hurdles, the endearing character arcs and wide array of minigames and sidequests more than make up for the gaps. I look forward to what the team does next.

Fragrance Point

Manygame Collection: A many armed, blobby maintenance worker says, "stop! how did you get in here?" The protagonist of Fragrance Point looks nonplussed.
Screenshot via Taylor Hicklen.

The nearby space station is on the fritz. You, a little guy in a pleasantly clunky exoskeleton, have been sent in to investigate. Fragrance Point is the best kind of walk-’em-up: a weird little guy set loose in a small open world. Everything has a blobby, Y2K sheen, from the station residents’ banter to the audio-reactive bounce house deep within the station.

Your actions in Fragrance Point speak louder than words. Chirp incessantly at NPCs! Shoot adorable little lipstick bullets! Collect bits of gunk around the station! With each environmental puzzle, another chaotic tool slots into your suit. But something wants to use the station’s power for their own gain. Whether you get to the root of the problem or simply shake things up, Fragrance Point is a strange, singular joy.

Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age

Manygame Collection: Four characters battle across a lavish Art Deco stage in in Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age.
Screenshot via Maximum Entertainment.

Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age tries out a unique spin on solid fighting game fundamentals. Each of the ten characters are distinctive and the art style hovers between Streets of Rage 4 linework and a steampunky-Prohibition look. The jazzy soundtrack adds the perfect atmosphere, from the slow strut in the central bar area to more swinging compositions during battle.

Diesel Legacy’s tag-team fighter format pits teams of two against one another. Each of the four buttons correspond to an attack type. Combining two attack buttons (X and A on my Xbox controller) throws your opponent, while the other two (Y and B in my case) call in your teammate for assists or a full character swap.

Lane switching layers an extra bit of strategy on top of base maneuvers. Each stage has a foreground, middle, and background layer. Your character can move to another lane at any time by double tapping the up or down arrows. Tapping up twice moves towards the background. Tapping down twice moves to the foreground. This mental stack might appeal to more seasoned fighters, but it was overwhelming in practice. Often, I would accidentally switch lanes while trying to do a special attack.

Fast Lane

I enjoyed the style and the core maneuvers during my time with Diesel Legacy, but the three-lane-switching mechanic that underpins each round never felt completely folded into the gameplay. Certain moves can knock opponents out of their lane, but there were few situations where a lane swap would push my advantage. Darting away was more of a spam tactic to my rivals than a strategy, whether human or computer. The stellar voice acting and single-player story mode took away a bit of the sting.

Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age is wildly ambitious for an indie fighter, but ultimately the style of play just didn’t gel with me. Maybe it was overloading my mental stack. Maybe it’s because I couldn’t rally a four-player local match. But all a modern fighting game needs to establish a legacy is a small, dedicated community. I hope Diesel Legacy finds that following and refines those core ideas.

PLONG

Manygame Collection: The player controls four PLONG paddles simultaneously. File icons explode as the ball makes contact.
Screenshot via Rob Gross.

PLONG’s first few levels ease you into a bright, Y2K brick-breaker. But then the floodgates open. Soon you’re controlling two paddles on opposite sides of the screen, then four. Each successful hit adds more time, but each miss can be catastrophic. Fumbling one ball means missing the next drop on the opposite side.

Steering four paddles across two axes isn’t new for the genre, but PLONG’s presentation and motion make me feel each bounce, every encrypted file turning to pixel dust. And unlockable progressive upgrades are a welcome treat. PLONG feels like patting my head and rubbing my stomach at the same time: easy to learn, hard to master. It knows exactly what it needs to be, and doesn’t stay a moment longer.

OMG Words

Manygame Collection: The player lays down the tiles to form "LICKER" on the C of "CREED" in a round of OMG Words.
Screenshot via Dave.

If “Scrabble meets Balatro” is your activation phrase, stop reading this and grab OMG Words immediately.

Line up word tiles on a familiar, grid-based board to reach each level’s bronze trophy score. Shoot above that for a little extra cash to carry into the item shop. Run-defining relics and single-use boons can drastically alter your tactics for the next round, but all the items in the world can’t prevent a botched tile draw.

Boss stages introduce new wrinkles to the scoring phase. Are you prepared to lose a dollar for every tile you place? What about restricted letter usage? OMG Words ramps up the difficulty, but never in a way that feels unfair. Even when I’m absolutely trounced, I can’t resist one more try.

The Bazaar (Early Access)

Manygame Collection: Two Vanessa players, one named "taylorh" and the other named "BernieSanders," prepare to face off in The Bazaar.
Screenshot via Taylor Hicklen.

The Bazaar streamlines popular auto-battling and inventory management systems into a single, concentrated row of items. It’s so powerful that it’s broken my streak of failed live games. Ranked matches are entirely optional, so I can enjoy the asynchronous multiplayer even when I get absolutely annihilated. Which is often.

The Bazaar’s combat takes place entirely through your chosen inventory. Players start with limited board space and one free item, collecting weapons, trinkets, and run-altering skills as the in-game clock progresses.

At the end of each day, you’ll face off against another player asynchronously, their inventory frozen at that moment in time. Weapons and items on the board fire automatically, and whoever has their health whittled down to zero loses that day’s worth of prestige. On day one, that’s one prestige out of twenty. But later losses can be devastating. Draining your prestige to zero gets you a last-chance boon and one more revival. Win ten times against human players, and you’ll claim victory.

Each character in the Bazaar has their own playstyle and inventory. Vanessa, a pirate, uses aquatic items and ammo to do deadly burst damage. Boar-man Pygmalion strengthens his items with the in-game economy, making loadouts more powerful by buying and selling. And Dooley, my archnemesis, applies status effects with mechanical efficiency and precision.

Free and Easy (For Now)

The Bazaar’s gameplay absolutely sings in early access, despite the occasional server hiccup or maintenance period. But its planned free-to-play business model mostly remains to be seen. The current early access period requires players to purchase a thirty dollar founder’s pack (or in my case, get offered a press key) and choose a free starting character. Ranked victories grant players numbered cosmetic items, while additional characters are purchased with gems, a paid currency.

The Bazaar is couched in a format and business model that usually puts me off entirely: free-to-play, dedicated PC launcher, an in-game marketplace that is not yet opened. But the current absence of unranked guardrails lets me experiment at my own pace. I still have questions about The Bazaar’s long term prospects, but the same could be said about almost every upcoming game in 2025. If you want a less fiddly Backpack Hero or more manageable mayhem than Super Auto Pets, The Bazaar is worth a try.


Now more than ever, stay safe out there. No matter how harrowing and overwhelming 2025 feels, we can always start with small goals and work towards big change. That’s all for this month’s Manygame Collection!

For more indie game coverage, stay tuned to Press SPACE to Jump!

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Taylor Hicklen
Taylor Hicklen

Taylor is Press SPACE to Jump's PR and indie reviews person. He likes midrange JRPGs, fighting games, and Dicey Dungeons. Bonus points if there are good fonts. To contact him about your game or other professional inquiries, you can email him at pstjtaylor@proton.me.
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