Gamebox 2.0: Games of October 2024
This October the Gamebox 2.0 gave us a few tricks and plenty of treats. We got to reunite with some old friends on the baseball diamond for Backyard Baseball ’97, went Beyond Shadowgate for the sequel to the NES adventure game, combined tactics and deck building in Dark Sky, and unleashed our inner Bridezilla in Lethal Wedding. Check out everything we played this month below.
Dark Sky (Zach): From Ganymede Games and Midwest Games, Dark Sky is a new deck-building RPG adventure game. On the peaceful mining planet of Wolf Prime, a mysterious evil force attacks the planet, sending every ship in orbit crashing to the surface and cutting off communication. You control a ragtag group that sets out to determine what is happening and save their planet from invasion.
The game plays out via an isometric perspective, like in games like Diablo, as you move the leading party member, Squib, around the environment. When you encounter enemies, the game goes into a side-view combat mode, using decks of cards and the grid-based battle system to take down foes. Each party member has their decks and specific abilities, and your position and the enemy’s position are crucial to winning. Actions have effects like Push, which lets you push an enemy one grid away, and you can use this to shove them into obstacles or other enemies for more damage. You have a certain amount of energy each turn to play cards, each with a specific cost. Movement is free, and you need to analyze where you need your party to be, move them, and then use the cards. You also have information on what your enemy will do, like Into the Breach, so you can also plan and try to avoid, or at least minimize, the damage coming your way. The battles offer a great blend of strategy with multiple factors to keep in mind; each battle is an interesting new challenge.
After each battle, your party levels up, and you can earn points to upgrade your cards, adding new perks or attributes. There are also vendors where you can buy new cards and build a deck that suits your playstyle, whether you prefer smaller attacks, more significant attacks, defense, or something in between. The game also features a well-written story, and it’s not rogue-like like so many other similar games, so you are keeping your progress and building as you go. The characters are all fun and interesting, and there’s some entertaining banter between missions, but it can also get serious if it needs to. The game also has a great look that distinguishes between cartoony and serious. If you’re looking for a deck builder with some great strategy and an interesting RPG story, check out Dark Sky now on Steam.
Lethal Wedding – Demo version – (Chris): Weddings are usually high-stressful events for the spouses-to-be. Many things have to go right to pull off a perfect ceremony. But what happens when a gang of deadly criminals crashes the party and the bride is fast on the draw? Mega Cat Studios wants players to unleash their inner bridezilla or momzilla in Lethal Wedding. This retro-style shooter stars Joanna, a dressed-up bride waiting for her groom to arrive. But a gang of criminals have kidnapped the groom, which leads to Joanna arming herself and eliminating the uninvited guest, one blast at a time.
Lethal Wedding is a retro-style top-down shooter that closely resembles Lucasfilm Games’ Zombies Ate My Neighbors. Players can pick Joanna or Shelly, the groom’s mother to venture around the wedding venue to find the missing groom. Joanna and Shelly start with a simple weapon at the start of a level but can pick up new weapons. The weaponry is the usual machine guns, pistols and shotgun items, but there are powerful gag weapons like a magician hat that rapidly fires rabbits and a rose bouquet that leaves a small explosion. Some weapons are better to cover small or large distances or help with crowd control in tight situations. The game encourages the player to switch up their weapons to save ammo for tougher encounters.
The player can dodge roll, which comes in handy to avoid stray bullets and surprise melee attacks. Enemies will spawn repeatedly from all sides, making every room an ambush if the player is not prepared. All the enemies have different attack patterns; there are jester clowns that let to get up close, masked ninjas that dash with knives, and football-padded goons that charge up for a killer tackle. If two or more enemies are on screen, be ready to dodge roll around a bit.
Like Zombies Ate My Neighbors, each level is a sprawling maze that the player must navigate about and complete certain objectives. Usually, the objectives are collecting keycards, defusing bombs, or reaching the end point of a level. You want to be quick and deadly in this game as the player’s performance is graded and rewarded with points that can be used for upgrading weapon stats. This increases the damage and adds special effects to weapons, giving them a sharper edge to their efficiency. Players can further test their skills by taking on level-specific challenges called “vows”. These vows will reduce the player’s health, limit their weapons, or a strict time limit. Completing these challenges offers a multiplier of reward points. However, failing to finish the selected vow means restarting the level again!
The latest demo gives a preview of a hilarious story that is filled with comedy and violence. If you thought Lethal Wedding’s plot was Die-hard-esque, so did the developers. Lethal Wedding is a game that pays homage to many references without sacrificing much of its strengths. Aside from the silly plot, the gameplay is a solid recreation of classic retro shooters with lots of charming character designs. If you are a fan of retro shooters, get yourself invited to Lethal Wedding when it comes to Kickerstart this November 4th.
Beyond Shadowgate (Zach): Picking up from the classic “MacVenture” game Shadowgate, Beyond Shadowgate from Zojoi and GrahfMetal Games is a sequel based on a design document from the 8-bit era that the creators of the original have finally realized. Taking place 35 years after the events of Shadowgate, you play as a fenling (basically a hobbit or halfling) named Del Thornburrow. Locked away in the dungeons below the capital city of Kal Torlin, you free yourself but are thrust into a quest to restore the rightful king to the throne and stop a new evil from destroying the kingdom.
If you’re familiar with any of the MacVenture games, either the original Shadowgate, Uninvited, or Deja Vu, you’ll feel right at home with the GUI and gameplay of Beyond Shadowgate. Your location is shown in a large window, with your inventory to the right and your map and action at the bottom of the screen. There are specific points on the map that you can travel to from each “room,” indicated by squares, but often, you must open doors with a key or solve a puzzle to proceed to the next screen. The gameplay is true to the originals but may be a bit clunky for players new to this game style, as you have to do things like “Open” doors before moving through them. A new system of hotkeys lets you quickly choose an action without having to click on the bottom buttons.
The world feels much bigger than the original Shadowgate and is, in fact, 5x times larger than the NES game, with various environments to explore and puzzles to solve. The game does a great job of easing you in and showcasing new features, like timed threats that need to be resolved quickly, or else you’ll face the game over screen. These include closing a door so you can hide from guards or unlocking and jumping through a trapdoor. It’s sometimes a bit tricky to figure out precisely what the game wants you to do in these “action” sequences, but there is a generous checkpoint system that usually puts you exactly where you were or only slightly back from that point. The graphics perfectly capture the spirit of the original games but with added flair, like animations and borders that reflect your environment. The writing is also top-notch, with great descriptions of the places and people you encounter and a morbid sense of humor, especially in explaining the horrible ways you can die. If you’re a fan of the MacVenture series or are just looking for a great, old-school adventure game, Beyond Shadowgate is a must-play. It’s out now on Steam.
Backyard Baseball ’97 (Zach): A PC classic for 90s kids, Backyard Baseball is back with a remaster of the original 1997 game from Mega Cat Studios and Playground Productions. Released earlier this month for the game’s 27th anniversary, everything you loved about the original is back, including one of video gaming’s greatest athletes, Pablo Sanchez. You can play a single pick-up game or participate in a league and try to eventually bring your team to the Ultra Grand Championship of the Universe. In either mode, you choose your squad from 30 neighborhood kids, all with different strengths and weaknesses. Some players have bonus perks if they are on the same or opposite team of certain other players like twins playing better if they are on the same team.
There are several different fields to play on, with the surface and layout affecting how the ball will bounce and how fielding works. The game has a deceptively simple gameplay style that can offer some strategy and depth. All the action on the field is controlled via the mouse, whether you click to swing the bat while hitting or picking a pitch and then choosing where it goes while pitching. While batting, you can choose from three stances and power levels while batting, from a bunt to a home run-seeking power hit. Pitching offers up two different hooks and slow and fastballs. If you meet specific criteria, you can earn powered-up hits and pitches, like a super slo-mo ball or an elevator pitch that starts low and flies up. It’s a brilliant balance between being easy for kids to understand and keeping it interesting for older players.
One of the things that made the original so beloved was how much personality and charm was packed into it, and the remaster retains all of that. All of the players are distinct and fun, with specific catchphrases, unique animations, and intro music when they come up to bat. The original game was developed by Humongous Entertainment, who developed charming and funny adventure games like the Putt-Putt, Pajama Sam, and Spy Fox series. There’s also the play-by-play commentary that adds even more flavor to the game. If any of that is not your liking, you can turn some or all off. You can skip through most of the animations with the ESC key to make the game progress faster. While the animations are charming, they slow the game’s pace.
Another minor issue is how errors work. You can turn errors on or off, but they seem to be a more than usual occurrence if they are turned on, with players missing easy catches or tripping on the way to the ball. New features that didn’t exist back in 1997 include cloud saves, leaderboards, and Steam achievements, and the new game fully supports the Steam Deck and gamepads in addition to the original game’s mouse functionality. If you were a fan of Backyard Baseball back in the day, this remaster will take you back to the 90s, and it plays exactly how you remember it. You can get Backyard Baseball ’97 on Steam now, and Backyard Soccer, Backyard Football, Backyard Baseball 2001, Backyard Basketball, and Backyard Hockey are all getting remasters soon.
