In a sea of coattail riding Vampire Survivors clones, it takes something for one to stand out. HoloCure did this by being free. As in, completely free. No cost, no IAPs, no paid DLC. Free. That, and it came to my attention via a recommendation from Gaming on Linux, who I follow because apparently I’m a Linux gamer now what with the Steam Deck and all.

Anyway, the game. it’s Vampire Survivors only with anime girls and cute baddies. Apparently, all the characters you can pick are VTubers but I neither know of them nor do I care, because I’m just here for the gameplay. Which, thankfully, is excellent.

Of course, it’s very much like That Other Game. You have swarms of baddies and you attack automatically. When you kill them they leave XP capsules, and when you level up you get to select a new weapon to add to your arsenal or upgrade an existing one. Eventually you become a walking death machine, have bosses to face, and the difficulty ramps up. Same as Vampire Survivors.

The differences, aside from the characters and baddies, are pretty small. The main one is that HoloCure is properly twin-stick. You still “auto-fire” like in VS, but you can choose in which direction independently of the direction you’re moving. Levels are also shorter, generally. In VS, at 30 minutes Death comes for you and the level ends. Here, you get an end of level boss at 20 minutes, and the level only ends when you or they die, which can take some time. Most of the weapons are different to VS too, but a lot of them are just analogues. There are a few really bizarre ones though, like the potatoes that bounce around the screen.

So it’s different but the same in the ways that make it fun. What is really different is the Stardew Valley/Harvest Moon-lite side-game it has going on. Outside of playing the normal levels, you have a house you can visit and furnish, with a little farm to grow crops, a pond to catch fish, and a pen to hold, er, baddies that you have hired to farm coins for you. It’s not very in depth, but once I completed the main game (as in, had successful runs on each level and unlocked all the characters) I spent an inordinate amount of time on it.

HoloCure is an absolute bargain.

Frog’s Adventure is a hop-and-click adventure game that first came to my attention via John Walker’s Buried Treasure site. As a result, it’s how I found out about Sokpop and after someone Very Kind in the ugvm collective sent me a copy of it, I bought the rest of the Chill Adventure bundle because they all looked great. For some reason, it wasn’t the first one I played though.

John explains the game much better than I can so I won’t say much more than it was funny, cute, has really lovely crayoned graphics, and has some great animal characters in it.

Yes! Another little Sokpop game!

This one has you boating between tiny islands, upgrading your little boat, defeating skeletons, and following treasure maps to get items which will help you destroy a huge sea monster.

The controls are a little fiddly, and it was only by accident I realised you could swap which side of your boat you could fire a cannon from (which until then had meant sea encounters were unnecessarily difficult), but like the other Sokpop titles it’s a sweet little adventure with cute graphics and a simple, solid bit of gameplay.

Yes! Another little Sokpop game!

This one has you boating between tiny islands, upgrading your little boat, defeating skeletons, and following treasure maps to get items which will help you destroy a huge sea monster.

The controls are a little fiddly, and it was only by accident I realised you could swap which side of your boat you could fire a cannon from (which until then had meant sea encounters were unnecessarily difficult), but like the other Sokpop titles it’s a sweet little adventure with cute graphics and a simple, solid bit of gameplay.

Another Sokpop game! This one is a tiny Metroidvania where you’re a robot and you have to, well, explore and collect nuts and bolts and fly a little spaceship.

Upgrades include a body (you start as just a head!), a gun, the ability to go in water, and so on. It’s all quite cute and has frogs in it. It’s got chunky graphics which remind me a bit of Atari 2600 games aside from a few bits where they have big, more modern bits which is a bit odd, but it doesn’t affect the gameplay.