My goodness, the overall quality of the games made for GBJAM 4 was ridiculously high. It was exceptionally hard to pick my 5 favorites, but I did it anyway. I’m hardcore like that.
Trappy Mine (Unity Web Player, Windows, Mac)
Mining games are all the rage these days, aren’t they? Well, this a much more arcadey affair than most recent examples of the genre, and there’s no crafting in sight. Trappy Mine’s all about descending quickly and scoring big. You dig downward as the screen steadily moves upwards, breaking blocks with your pickaxe and blowing up whole sections of them (and sometimes yourself) with your bombs. There are booby traps down there as well as treasure, and death is frequent. This is a perfect game to play in short bursts, honing your skills to get higher scores.
Adrift (HTML)
You’re lost somewhere in space, wandering aimlessly. You’re not helpless; your ship’s fore and aft thrusters still work. You’re not completely directionless; arrows appear to indicate nearby planets. You’re not alone out there, either; each Little Prince-style planet is occupied by one or more sentient beings, and they all have something to say, either to you or to each other. Their words, whether witty, ambiguous, or profound, plant the seeds of stories that you can expand upon in your mind. These snippets of alien dialogue can inspire some very human emotions.
Legend of Basement (Windows, Mac, Linux)
So your cat, Navi, ran off into the basement and you go chasing after her. It turns out that there’s a lot more basement down there than you might have expected. In fact, it’s a labyrinth of stone passages and it’s full of surprises. You can track Navi’s paw prints, collect her, and go back upstairs, but that’ll only get you one of the game’s ten endings. Ignore the cat and go on an adventure, instead. Poke around in the dark, find a sword, and go fight some monsters in what becomes a miniature Legend of Grimrock-esque dungeon crawl. Can you find the tenth and “best” ending? Can you fulfill…the prophecy?
Defender 88 (Flash)
This game is unrelated to the classic arcade game, but it’s similar in the intensity of the combat and the sheer amount of stuff moving around onscreen. You pilot a submarine tasked with defending a trio of underwater generators that bob around in your little patch of ocean. It’s rather peaceful until waves of giant, hostile jellyfish show up with one thing on their gelatinous minds: the destruction of your generators. I don’t know why they hate the generators so much, but it’s not your job to question why; it’s to shoot jellyfish until they die. You’re armed with a mounted machine gun, which you aim using the mouse (something that you couldn’t have done on a Game Boy), and with torpedoes that pack a wallop but are limited in supply. Luckily, you can restock them and repair your sub by visiting your base on the surface between jellyfish assaults. You’re also fighting against your sub’s momentum and dealing with limited visibility due to all the bubbles and bullets. It feels just right for a firefight underwater, giving this arcade gem a splash of realism.
AXUO (Flash, Windows)
You’re a little eyeball hopping around an isometric landscape of blocks, just trying to reach the glowy one on each level. It’s slightly reminiscent of Qbert, but it’s a take-your-time puzzler rather than a real-time actioner. There are no enemies; your only foes are the cubes and yourself. As you hop from one block to another, the one you left disintegrates. You can pick up blocks that you don’t touch and carry them around, then lay them down in empty spaces to bridge gaps. To make your navigation more difficult, some blocks have additional characteristics, such as spikes or immobility. It’s a fairly simple system that allows for tons of complexity to be layered on. If new levels kept getting added, I feel like I could keep coming back to this for a long time.
SO MANY more great games came out of the jam; these are just the five that most struck a chord with me. I highly recommend browsing through them and playing as many as possible. What are your favorites?
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