We’ve fallen into some new games as the Autumn season begins for the latest Gamebox 2.0. We tested our dexterity in Flick Shot Rogues, took on dirty jobs in the grimy shooter Pigface, scouted for supplies and lost souls in Above Snakes, and more. Check out everything we checked out in September below.
Flick Shot Rogues (Zach): Developed by Butter by the Fish and published by Noodlecake, Flick Shot Rogues puts a fun new spin on the roguelike genre. You play as a crew of pirates who find themselves on an island full of treasure but also deadly foes. You pick two members of the crew for your run, each of whom has a different effect when they get flicked and impact enemies. If you’ve played board games like Ice Cool, Flick Shot Rogues incorporates that sort of tabletop dexterity gameplay. Each turn, you choose which hero you want to flick, then set up the path and power. Once launched, your character careens into the bad guys, causing impact damage plus whatever effect you might have equipped. You can cause burning damage to enemies and any enemies they hit, drop bombs on any enemies you impact, and more, and you can set up some extremely satisfying chain reactions where several enemies get blown up, shot across the board, or careen into a cluster of other enemies. There is an excellent level of control for your flicks, with fine-tuning available on the shoulder buttons if you play with a controller, and you can see exactly where your shots will bounce and where your character will end up.
You have to be careful about where you end up, though, because the enemies get a turn, and they can cause area-of-effect attacks that can damage you if you end up inside the area, or do attacks like blast a laser across the screen that will hit you if you happen to end up in its path. There are characters with golden bases that need to be defeated to clear out the other, lesser enemies, and you’ll also encounter massive bosses that will require multiple hits to take down. The game boasts a great look that combines cartoony aesthetics with the feel of tabletop board game pieces, and there’s plenty of humor and variety in the characters you can choose from and the enemies you’ll encounter. One of your characters, for example, The Froggomancer, can create an army of frogs to use in combat. The game progresses like most other roguelikes in the genre; you’ll make a run and go down a path with branching choices that include battles with enemies, shops to purchase upgrades for the run, random events, and more. When both characters are defeated, your run is over, but you can unlock permanent upgrades that will help you progress farther in the run next time. Flick Shot Rogues is a super fun spin on the roguelike genre, featuring chaotic yet satisfying gameplay that effectively blends a tabletop-style dexterity game with roguelike combat. It’s now available on Steam, and a demo is also available, giving you a good taste of what the game has to offer.
Above Snakes (Chris): Square Glade Games and Red Deer Games have partnered to have Above Snakes make its console debut on September 4th. At a quick glance, this may appear to be a cozy western survival sim, but it’s got some unexpected bite. The soft visuals and vibrant colors create a calming atmosphere. But before you wrap a blanket and play, Above Snakes’s fun mix of action and management systems will keep players from feeling too comfortable. Set in an alternate period of the Wild West. Above Snakes puts players in the role of Aiyana, a Native American pioneer, as she tries to rebuild her community after a strange green meteorite unleashes an undead force. Aiyana will have to forage for supplies, reinforce her surroundings, and restore some sense of order in a lawless wilderness.
The Wild West already has many dangerous ways in which inhabitants can perish. Freezing weather, bandits, and scarce food sources made it a constant struggle to survive in the unexplored lands. With the added undead roaming around, the fight for life takes on a menacing new purpose. To prepare Aiyana for any situation, the player must monitor four gauges of Aiyana’s primary stats: Fatigue, Thirst, Hunger, and Sanity. Performing a task consumes points from fatigue, which determines the number of actions Aiyana can perform in a day. This can be recharged by napping or sleeping, slowly recovering from fatigue at the cost of time. There are some items that can quickly restore some fatigue, but they are not commonly found without some effort. Thirst and Hunger are similar to fatigue, but can be quickly restored by consuming food on a regular basis. The wilderness has plenty of raw ingredients, but collecting them uses fatigue points. Lastly, the stress from encountering the undead and unsavory characters depletes Sanity points. Too many stressful moments can reduce Aiyana’s reaction, and she has to find space to recover.
Another unique mechanic of building up the environment is the player’s ability to manually shape the world. Collecting resources unlocks new land tile pieces, which can only connect with matching terrains, with a few tiles that allow multiple terrains to overlap. This makes every instance of the game unique to each player’s design choices, allowing the player to freely edit the world as they see fit. This encourages players to experiment with different setups of homesteads, crafting spaces, and even travel paths. You don’t have to follow a traditional open layout, so you can connect tiles like dominoes for specific designated zones. There are also unique tiles that can be dropped and removed once Aiyana has completed a task on them. This involves fetching specific items or completing a bounty on a bandit, which earns coins that can be traded with merchants. The game allows players to explore and focus on small objectives at a casual pace, without providing much indication of the order in which tasks should be performed. However, as Aiyana strives to do better in her area, the truth about the strange events becomes clearer.
Above Snakes is a fun blend of farming, mining, and active combat. I really enjoyed the pacing of the different activities. There is plenty of material to collect and craft, and gathering the required items is fairly straightforward. No long-winded fetch quests to turn one item into another type of item that requires hours to grind. Players can casually build up their supplies until they are comfortable facing off against the lethal threats, so there isn’t an urgency to go straight into fight mode at every encounter. The various configurations and strategies make the gameplay immersive for gamers who want to be as creative as possible throughout playtime. You can spend a little or a considerable amount of time building up the living spaces, which ultimately benefits you during long treks across an expanding grid. Above Snakes is a great survival sim with addictive gameplay and a comforting presentation that allows you to lose yourself for hours while exploring. Above Snakes is now out on PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
PIGFACE (Zach): Developed by titolovesyou and published by DreadXP, PIGFACE is a gritty throwback shooter that should appeal to fans who enjoyed games like Manhunt back in the day. You play as Exit, a woman who has done terrible things, who is forced to do even more when she’s kidnapped and has a bomb drilled into the back of her head. Under threat of detonating the bomb, Exit now has to do jobs for a mysterious caller, usually involving traveling to a grimy locale and killing everyone on-site. Each stage is an open sandbox with multiple approaches, allowing you to choose whether to be stealthy or go in full force. You can acquire an arsenal of both ranged guns and melee weapons, using funds you gain for completing each mission. Each stage typically has one or two primary objectives, along with a bonus that provides additional funds upon completion. There is also special equipment, such as Kevlar vests and masks, which all have different perks that will grant you more damage, hold more items, move faster, etc.
The game is old-school in both its graphic style and difficulty. It evokes 90s shooters, such as Quake, and features a simple UI that primarily displays your ammo and the number of healing morphine syringes remaining. The game’s difficulty is also straight out of old boomer shooters, as enemies can whittle you down to nothing quickly, especially the ones who are also armed with guns. There’s plenty of gore, and there’s some solid impact from both the melee weapons and the guns when you take out enemies. The game is currently in Early Access, offering five stages to play through, with potentially more stages to come, as well as other improvements that the developer may decide to implement. What is already evident in the early access is a cool and solid budget title that nails the retro gameplay and doesn’t bloat the experience. If you aren’t sure about the title yet, you can check out a preview grimy and violent world of PIGFACE on a demo build on Steam.
The Farmer Was Replaced – Release Build (Chris): Working with artificial intelligence has always been a new and exciting prospect since the Space Age first made robots and computers more mainstream. James Cameron’s The Terminator also introduced a new fear about letting A.I take over too much control. For a happy medium, learning small bits of computer science and programming logic can help people view their fear of the future in a more positive light. Developed by Timon Herzog and published by MetaRoot, The Farmer Was Replaced is a fun and educational game that utilizes gamified goals to make coding more approachable for players of all skill levels, helping them engage with programming challenges in a visual and interactive manner. Using a simple language based on Python, the player is tasked with creating an automation process for farming drones. The game showcases the core programming concepts, presenting them one at a time in a clear and structured manner. However, it won’t show you all the detailed coding needed to create the instructions, so finding solutions is a big puzzle-solving mechanic. Similar to real programming, there is rarely a single solution to solve an issue, and it rarely remains in the same design over time. You’ll need to account for new requirements, adjust the logic, and hopefully avoid rebuilding a significant amount of core work.
Players without coding skills will need to practice the basics to understand the logic flow and refine their algorithms, especially if they are not familiar with object-oriented programming languages. The first ten challenges offer players brief previews of scripting routines and decision-making that enable the farming drone to navigate the fields efficiently and harvest crops effectively. Lessons and challenges build from one another, so you can’t jump into complex instructions without building a solid list of functional code ahead of time. Since I have experience in software development, I quickly ran through the task that first gave me a refresher on the basics, but the later task requirements required planning and code review before I even started typing.
The Farmer Was Replaced simulates the real-world experience of thinking like a developer, always keeping code clean to make it easy to read, while not being too strict, so that you can adjust for change. I enjoyed the restrictions on not relying on plugins and tools to help jump to answers, forcing my brain to recall previous steps and review my next choice. The game’s presentation is simple but sufficient to translate the player’s efforts into visual actions and unlock new programming operations to improve their code base. If you are a gamer looking for a fun way to learn some coding fundamentals, The Farmer Was Replaced should be a gateway title to help you start thinking like a developer. The Farmer Was Replaced will be leaving early access and will have its full release build this upcoming October 10th.
Otherskin (Zach): From developer Game Atelier and publisher FDG Entertainment, Otherskin is a new third-person action game set on a deadly alien world. A dangerous “corruption” is spreading across the galaxy, and the source is the planet Vandermire, which was the home to an ancient race known as the Magna. You play as Alex, who is the 13th “Space Crusader” and is sent to the planet on what is believed to be a suicide mission. Her mission is to explore the planet and survive as long as possible, so her AI-enhanced suit can gather information and hopefully help the next Crusader last longer and maybe someday figure out a way to stop the Corruption. Something unexpected happens when Alex discovers she can absorb alien DNA, granting her “Morphs” that enable her to acquire abilities such as insect wings or create creatures that behave like bombs. The game feels like a throwback, in a good way, to an older style of action game from the PS2 era. This doesn’t feature roguelite elements or Soulslike combat; instead, you have simple yet effective melee combos and a variety of ranged weapons, which you can seamlessly switch between. Each area of Vandermire is accessed via a central hub, and you unlock new areas as you progress.
The combat feels solid, and the shooting, especially, is excellent, with an interesting mechanic for reloading where you can melee an enemy when low on ammo to refill your weapon instantly. You gain upgrade points that you can use to upgrade your abilities and unlock new ones. The “Morphs” also add a fun twist on the gameplay, as you usually find two abilities in each area that you’ll have to use in conjunction to progress through the stage and solve some puzzles. Morphs, such as insect wings, emerge in multiple stages, but some unique and interesting ones become more pronounced the further you progress. The stages are designed to take full advantage of the Morphs being used, and they feature some excellent movement and platform challenges, particularly with the more advanced Morphs. After you complete a section of the game, the morphs are removed in the hub upon returning, and their power contributes to removing more of the Corruption and unlocking new areas to explore. The world of Vandermire is a fascinating sci-fi realm, filled with bizarre environments, ancient ruins, and deadly creatures. By blending old-school design with imaginative new ideas, Otherskin delivers a satisfying sci-fi adventure that’s definitely worth checking out. It’s now available on Steam, and a demo is available for those who want to try out the main game.
