A little Pico-8 game which I picked up from itch a while back, Explorers has you boating about a randomly generated archipelago, finding treasure, meeting other people who you can try to convince to trade with you or help you, and sometimes stealing their boats.

The aim is to complete your map, which you can do by visiting everywhere, but you can also fill it in more quickly by asking the people you meet about where they’re from or have been and they’ll draw some of it for you.

It isn’t particularly complicated, but it’s an incredible example of what you can do with Pico-8!

Obviously the reason I started playing this is because of the absurd name. How I came to own it in the first place, however, is a mystery. Was it free on Amazon? Did I get it in one of those itch.io charity bundles? Ghosts? Who knows.

CCFWTBT is a platformer where you, as an acrobat called Belle (along with her pet bell called Chime) have to rescue her boyfriend who is kidnapped by an ex-friend. It plays out like a 8-bit title, different levels, tricky platforming, bosses, and so on. You use Chime as a sort of boomerang that can activate things but also help you reach places higher up. Getting used to Chime and how to use it took a while.

Between levels you have a map you can freely navigate, with various places to visit like an inn and a town, where characters give you side missions. Most of these involve revisiting levels once you’ve obtained extra items or abilities. This was one of the reasons that I got a strong Shantae vibe from the game, which is no bad thing. It’s not as good as games in that series, but it’s better than the vast majority of these retro-styled platformers.

I loved the cast of characters and their relationships. There’s a fun twist near the end regarding the kidnapper too (which I won’t reveal) which meant the game was a fair bit longer than I was expecting. I didn’t complete every side mission but I did a fair few of them, and (of course) completed the main game. If I didn’t have such a huge backlog of games I’d probably go back and mop up some more bits but, sigh, time, eh?

What if Vampire Survivors was a chop-chop, dig-dig game? As in, as well as auto-attacking swarms of enemies with increasingly more powerful weaponry, you also plant crops, mine ore and catch fish? Well, Pesticide Not Required answers that question.

As with other Survivors-type/Bullet Heaven games, there’s the usual kill things, get XP, go up levels, spend points on mostly random updates, and repeat. Only here, in order to progress, you have to buy seeds at the end of each day and plant them, keeping them watered until they’re able to be harvested. At first this is tricky as you’ve limited tillable soil area, plus you’re dealing with all the baddies, but you can unlock helpers who can plant and water on your behalf, and you’re able to purchase extra planting spots too.

This addition set of chores really changes the gameplay a fair bit, as you have to specifically go to areas of your garden as well as just avoid baddies, or you won’t progress. Is it better than Vampire Survivors? No. But it’s well worth playing. Oh, and if you’re wondering, I class it as complete because I completed every scenario in every season.

Un Pas Fragile is a short narrative game about a frog who wants to do ballet. As all frogs do, I expect. It plays out over a few days, where you leave your house, get the bus, go to ballet school, and do some ballet.

Of course, other people (er, animals) are not as accepting of your life choices as you’d like, so you get laughed at and bullied to begin with, meaning that you have to do some simple interactions with them each day to try and win them over. Then, when it comes you giving your final ballet performance in the game, your new friends (assuming you’ve made some) all make up the audience.

It’s pretty simple, but very sweet.

I maintain that I am not really a fan of sokoban type puzzle games, and yet somehow, I seem to enjoy them. Perhaps it’s just when there are crate-pushing puzzles in otherwise crate-push-free games that I don’t like?

In any case, A Monster’s Expedition was one of the ones I did enjoy. You are a monster, who navigates islands which seem to make up a sort of Museum of Humans, as there are many artefacts (sometimes amusingly mislabelled as to their purpose) to be found. The game, however, isn’t about finding the artefacts – it’s about finding a way to leave the islands completely.

To do that you have to reach a ferry, and to reach the ferry you have to complete crate-pushing puzzles on each island in order to open paths, build log bridges, or make rafts to get around. Of course, they’re not crates you have to push: they’re trees.

You can chop down trees, then push the trunks as logs. If you push them sideways, they roll until they hit something or fall in the water, and if you push them lengthways they flip up on end and then over onto their side again. These, plus the double-height trees and some rocks, make up the majority of the puzzles and they’re all about trying to get logs into certain positions on each island to progress.

It’s simple, although many of the puzzles are not. Later on, you discover a few meta-puzzles, where there’s a collection of islands to solve, but not just to allow you to move between them – you have to make way for a log that needs to traverse the islands and bridges you’ve made too, which may mean the solution you had originally may not be enough for the log as well.

A Monster’s Expedition is a nice little (well, not little – it’s bloody huge) brain-scratcher, with a bit of humour and some fiendish puzzles. Oh, and if you’ve bought the itch.io Palestinian Relief bundle, you already own it!