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Super Adventure Hand (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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One of the great things about the Steam Deck, especially with Heroic set up so it can seamlessly work with my GOG, Epic and Amazon game libraries, is the huge number of free games I manage to accrue and actually play. Super Adventure Hand was a recent one, free on Amazon Gaming, which I’d stumbled over on the Switch eShop as “eeeer, dunno”. Can’t argue with free though, can you.

And, I’m glad I didn’t pay full whack for it. There’s nothing especially wrong with it, it’s just a bit dull. It starts off with you, as an arm and hand, having the arm severed and kidnapped. You then have some mild platformy and simple puzzley levels to work through in order to get it back.

As a hand, you can grab things like handles and switches, climb up most walls, and “flick” baddies (which are mostly feet, the natural enemy of the hand, apparently). Platforming mostly involved flinging yourself across gaps and grabbing on to the other side, although moving, rotating and intermittently electrified platforms made this a bit harder. Puzzles are often of the “drag boxes to the right places” variety.

There are a few levels which differ from these two staples, such as a couple where you drive a car for some reason, a handful (ha) where you have a skateboard (sadly without any Techdeck fingerboard tricks), and some where you have to rescue mini-hands.

As I said, the game is fine. The wonky physics and sometimes pushing the stick forward flips from “climb up” to “climb down” mid-climb can both be a bit annoying but near instant restarts and mostly generous respawn points mean they’re not really an issue. No, the main issue is that it’s just a bit boring. Ten minutes in and the quirkiness of having Thing to control wears off and you’re left with a pretty generic, and somewhat short and easy, platformer.

Flufftopia (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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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?

Samsara Room (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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NameSamsara Room
DeveloperRusty Lake
GenrePuzzle
PlatformPC, Mac, iOS, Android
Release DateFebruary 2017
ModesSingle-player
LanguagesEnglish
WebsiteRusty 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.)

StarBoy (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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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!

Pear Quest (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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If you look at the screenshot, you’ll see that everything is very small. This is not, as I discovered having spent a long time trying to change it, a bug, a zoomed out setting, or a screen resolution issue. It is, in fact, intentional. The entire “map” is visible for the duration of the game, and everything is supposed to be tiny. And, on a Steam Deck, almost impossible to discern what is going on.

But I managed it. It’s a sort of direct-control point-and-click adventure game, in that you move your little… group of pixels around the island and interact with… other groups of pixels. You pick stuff up. You solve puzzles. You do a bit of light platforming. Eventually you get the keys to open the path to the pear and “win”.

By far the hardest part of the game is just being able to see the stuff on the screen. I get Sokpop’s style choice and I expect on a 24″ monitor this would be fine, but oh boy was it eye-hurtingly tricky. Don’t let it put you off though – if you’ve the screen for it, it’s great!