It’s another Rusty Lake joint, like Samsara Room from the other day. It’s very similar in style, only the setting this time is, as the title might suggest, a hotel.

But not an ordinary hotel, oh no. This is one where a number of distinguished animal guests have been invited to attend several consecutive evenings of exquisite meals. Meals where one of the guests is the main course each night.

Your job is to kill each in turn, using standard point-and-click, escape room style mechanics. Poison a drink, behead an animal, that sort of thing, but how? By finding items and using them in clever ways in each one of the guest bedrooms. There’s the usual spotting patterns to trigger things type puzzles, finding keys, and so on, but with a macabre twist. It’s like Lord Winklebottom got a bit cannibally.

Button City is a cute little game about a fox who makes friends at a local arcade and becomes a member of a four player team of players of some sort of MOBA called “Gobabots”. The main plot is about trying to stop the arcade from being closed down, but there’s also story about the other characters in the game, many of whom have personal issues to overcome, and you can collect new robots to use as your avatar in the MOBA. Plus, you can actually play this team game and beat others to win prizes! The arcade also has a simple car racing game and a Dance Dance Revolution style machine you can play on (and challenge other characters at).

Much of Button City is spent doing simple fetch quests or helping folk out with tasks, like babysitting or passing notes between tenants in a block of flats, but the central Gobabots tournament also takes up much of the gameplay.

It’s full of quirky characters and sometimes very silly humour (a highlight being the Moustache Club), and I love the art style even if many of the reactions and expressions of characters appear to have been lifted directly from Animal Crossing. There’s a lot of depth and backstory to many of the animals you interact with and this gives them a lot of personality which really comes through even in the relatively short time the game lasts – around 6-7 hours.

It’s a clicker game! With cute fluffy things and you have to make all the fluff coins! You know how clickers work – click and collect coins, use them to buy things which collect them faster, and so on. There’s not much more to it than that… until… well, that’d be spoilers, yes?

Name	Samsara Room
Developer	Rusty Lake
Genre	Puzzle
Platform	PC, Mac, iOS, Android
Release Date	February 2017
Modes	Single-player
Languages	English
Website	Rusty Lake

Another rummage in my itch.io library, and up came this game. “Rusty Lake?” I thought. “Where have I heard that name before?”. Turns out, they also did The White Door, which I remember liking. Why not, eh?

It’s more abstract than that game, with very little in the way of words to help you. It’s essentially an Escape Room game, only something something something psyche something? I don’t know – there’s some symbolism and you turn into odd creatures and you have to collect shells or candles to get to the next room. Which is the same as the current room, only it’s like a parallel universe.

There are several of these room variants – like an upside down one and one where objects float in the air. Sometimes you need to solve a puzzle in one version of the room to make something happen in another version, so in that respect it’s a little like a very simplified and less brain-melty version of Gorogoa. That’s not a negative comment, I should point out.

I got stuck a few times, but it only took about an hour and a half to complete. That might sound short but that’s not the point, and it’s free. Free! Bargain.

(Oh, and check out that info box up there – WordPress AI created that for me. Not sure I’ll keep this sort of thing on other posts, but I’ll try it out for a bit.)

While having a rummage through the various itch.io charidee bundles I’ve bought in the past for something to play, this caught my eye. I think it’s the way it’s superficially a bit like Minit and Gato Roboto, although it’s not really much like either of those games.

What it actually is, is a short platform, all in black and white, with a lot of wall jumping and some puzzles. These puzzles are mostly of the type where you have to take an object from one place to another, but often will be complicated with the main gimmick of the game – the way blocks appear or disappear when you light them up.

You see, there are various lights around which do this job, but sometimes you have to power them (or un-power them), and sometimes you have to charge yourself with a glow from a creature so you can leg it across some “invisible” platforms before the glow wears off.

It’s pretty clever, and a shame there’s not a few more levels because the full depth of this gameplay mechanic could be easily explored much further, I’m sure. But, y’know, it’s cheap and stuff so can’t complain!