Admittedly soured myself on this towards the end because I spent too long trying to guess through the last clips without realizing there was a post-credits admin command to find the remaining ones; honestly if I didn't do that I'd maybe bump it an extra star. This isn't really a completionist game anyways so I'd definitely just end the game whenever you're satisfied with the story.

I love the concept for this game, and Viva Seifert does an excellent job changing her performance in subtle ways for each interview time cut. I think there could've been some more obscuring of the reveal though, if only because it felt too easy to jump straight to the end of the story and solve the mystery. It was still nice going back to the middle bits and getting additional context or seeing hints of how Hannah's story changes throughout the interviews, but it still felt like the central story got undercut because I may have gotten some proper nouns too early.

Maybe it would've felt fresher if I played it when it originally released. I still enjoyed it well enough, though, and if nothing else it makes me want to check out Telling Lies and Immortality even more to see where Barlow took this design approach.

I'm noticing that Frankie's games are starting to fit more with his typical thematic style of hellish monsters and demons; in this case, he takes his previous resource management game BugBurgh and swaps the cutesy insect campsite for a satanic temple and forest. It's also a much snappier game than BugBurgh, as your followers are much more self-reliant and collecting resources (coins and piety) is much quicker. It should be mentioned though that Devil Cult Party was not bound to the same restrictions as BugBurgh; the latter's theme (the more you have the worse it gets) was an important aspect of its cumbersome mechanics, while this Ludum Dare's choice (sacrifices must be made) functions as set-dressing for the game (you don't even really have to sacrifice anybody).

Instead, Devil Cult Party plays more like an idle game not bound by monetization, meaning you can unlock everything in roughly 30 minutes; your followers build monuments and programs, fight off pets or monsters, and relieve themselves at craft services as you run around directing followers as needed. (Specifically, you pick up one follower at a time, which makes it almost impossible to tackle the farther out enemies as you only have so much range to build out from your church.) There's no real examination of religious cult politics like you'd find in The Shrouded Isle; as long as you have a few juice stands, your followers will never leave and always obey your command, even if it means getting sacrificed for a summoning circle. I like it fine enough, but I don't think it sticks out much in the Frankie gameography; BugBurgh might be more tedious, but it's at least playing with the jam theme a little more thoughtfully, and its pleasant nature theme sticks out much more than another faux-horror game.

Played from an old Groupees download that constantly crashed and couldn't get past a cutscene roughly 90 minutes into the game; this was probably meant to be played on a smartphone anyways. This is apparently a retelling of the first game in the Runaway series of adventure games, with most of the story/dialogue cut out and the gameplay replaced with hidden object puzzles and minigames.

I haven't played the series this is from (and based on the writing in this I don't plan to), hidden object games aren't for me, I played this in bad circumstance (i.e. crashing), and I don't think this game is even available anymore anyway, so there's not really anything useful I can say in this review. Sometimes you just gotta check stuff off the collection. At the very least I could've done without the game making up new things you're supposed to know to interact with.

Frankie's second collab with LumpyTouch results in maybe the best game I've played for this project yet. The first-person graphic adventure format turned into a 360° bunker invasion as you fend off against a number of horrible creatures. It's more than just point & click shooting though, as you're kept busy maintaining your surroundings: lighting up candles, mopping up blood, and repairing barricades as beings continue to crawl towards you from all directions. Crucially, you can only carry one item at a time, and it takes a few seconds to swap items out; practically no actions except shooting happen instantaneously.

Given all that, it doesn't take long for things to become a frantic mess; by the time the second day starts your bunker already becomes a wreck. Pretty soon your toolbox (to fix barricades) is lost in shadow, your mop bucket is overflowing with blood, and right when you're about to light a candle a monster is already through a window, but the weapon you just picked up is out of ammo and you have to spin all the way around to reload. It's one of the most intense games I've played in a while, a true game about survival; I don't remember playing a game so relentless, so unwilling to let the player breathe. I ended up never getting past Night 2 (it's endless, but there's four Days/Nights of new encounters), but I'd still call this one of Frankie's finest works. It's a shame him and LumpyTouch didn't collaborate more, honestly.

Frankie has made a few action-RPGs at this point, but this is first stab at a roguelike, and honestly he knocked it out of the park. Its main draw is the farming gimmick, where you plant seeds you find from battle or treasure to grow berries that boost your stats or give other bonus effects. It's a fine idea on its own, and Frankie commits with the aesthetic (like BugBurgh, there's some great thematic character art, especially the crop monsters), but it's the smaller details that really make the game engaging. The farming areas function as your extended inventory, for example, and you really have to keep it organized as you go on and pick up more items; a crucial strategy is waiting to use berries to free up those inventory slots.

There's also a surprising amount of nuance in the combat than what I was expecting. Active Time Battle is a well-established system, but you're also encouraged to time your attacks as if you're performing a parry or counterattack. Combined with the different weapon speeds, it feels like an attempt to take Dark Souls-style combat into a turn-based format, and I thought it worked pretty well. Each weapon has stamina meters also, so you can't just fill up your main inventory with weapons and steamroll everything (although it does make the final boss trivial). Really my only quibble is that it's probably too easy, mainly because lockpicks are too reliable and allow you to quickly overload on items by finding chests, which are really common in certain parts of the world. That aside, I'd say this is one of Frankie's best and a standout of his many jam entries.

I also want to shout out Askiisoft's music, both for this game and for BugBurgh. It adds some really nice atmosphere to both games.

Unfortunately bounced off this one early, as I found the micromanagement of all your bug pals too tedious. I get that's the point of the game - the Ludum Dare theme was "the more you have, the worse it is" - but there's too much time spent walking between areas, constantly feeding all the bug friends you find, waiting on items to grow or build or transform. I really wish the bugs showed some more autonomy, or at the very least you could guide around multiple bugs at once so you're not constantly making repeated trips. That starts going against the jam theme, though, so you'd probably need to give some more incentive to take care of your bug friends before their morale goes completely negative. (Although this isn't really a violent game like Hungry Ducks, so you'd have to come up with something more clever. Or they can just leave I guess.)

Is it pointless to be an armchair dev (more than usual, anyway) for a game made in 72-hours for less, and would Frankie have considered all of these points if he wanted to develop the idea further? Absolutely, and that goes for Frankie's other jam projects and really anyone else's. But moreso than his other projects, this one really is hurt by not having at least one of those extra features to smooth out the base experience. (In hindsight I could have just left bugs unhappy since they didn't do anything in response, but idunno, I want to play along with the premise at least a little bit.) On a positive note, I think this is Frankie's best use of character art I've yet seen in one of his games; the junkyard bugs in particular were a delight to find.

Third in a row for demonic games by Frankie, and the second one with demon summoning. This time, you're summoning demons with household objects so you can kill them in 2D arena shooter combat so you can either eat their body parts or someone even tougher demons with your spoils. It's an effective game loop, and while it doesn't take long to see most if not all the monsters, the 7-day time limit caps the game at the right length. Admittedly it's much easier if you just consume every edible piece of demon you get, but you also miss out on some of the encounters that way so don't get too greedy.

In a surprise twist, the art of the game is actually not Frankie's this time, but was done by collaborator LumpyTouch, who also did the voicework for all the demons. They're very well done, and the gritty audio snippets help give them some extra personality. The music was done by CBoyardee, and it's his usual fine work. Also gonna note that starting with this game Frankie seems to have made the jump to HTML5, so going forward all his games are available in-browser.

The Flesh Pit and Devil Cult Party aren't on Backloggd yet, but I submitted them to IGDB about a week ago so I'll have my reviews up for those soon.

Was stuck on this review for a while because I could not get over the feeling that I had played this game before, despite not having purchased this game before. I played Stellar Nexus not too long ago, and Space Junk Scavenger is certainly the bridge between that game and Stellar Wanderer, but I don't think the mechanics are quite the same. I checked the jam build and I'm mostly convinced that I played this version of the game at some point in time, probably at least five years ago. Otherwise the memory part of my brain is just liquid goo at this point.

All of that's mostly tangential to what I think of this game, but it's worth looking back to its jam build and seeing what changed to make Frankie decide to charge $5 to play the fuller experience, something he didn't do for his other updated game jam projects. For the most part, you can see the evolution of the design between the two; most of the major elements are presented in the jam build (the graphical style, the loop of exploring asteroids or ships for parts, several of the weapons and enemies), but the premium version reworks the map so there's actual progression: you start in an enclosed area with only a few spots to check for parts, and then can progress further out once you upgrade your ship more. There's also a shop (and thus economy) and much more emphasis on weapon management, something that's surprisingly difficult even on normal difficulty. It's no doubt Frankie's most developed and (crucially) released game up to this point; its large and reasonably dense map combine with tense navigation to make for an engrossing few hours (and unlike Frankie's previous A Growing Adventure, that time felt much more fulfilling).

It's worth mentioning, however, that this isn't really a complete game. The (presumably) last area, the mother ship, crashes the entire game at a certain point, meaning you can never collect all the ship pieces you need to beat the game. Similarly broken (at least for me) are the homing missile power-ups, as I could never add them to my inventory; on the other hand, I never found an area that required using the anti-heat/cold defenses, nor anything resembling those elements at all beyond a couple weapons. And since I'm on the subject, the pricing feels very off for your basic three weapons, which makes it very hard in the late game to restock. All this suggest a game that at the very least would be considered "Early Access", maybe one or two updates from a full 1.0 release; technically it's at 0.3, but regardless I don't think Frankie is going back to update this any time soon.

Generally I'm reviewing games I've already bought or were given, so price never comes up as an issue; I don't think it matters much anyway, since people know how much they're willing to spend for who's games, and PC game prices in particular are always in flux. For this or my Siactro projects, I haven't even played a game worth more than five bucks. But of all of Frankie's games I've been able to play, I'm not sure why this is the one that's got a price tag on it. Any context on this choice has long since been buried, and unless I'm mistaken, it's not the only jam game by Frankie to get updated after its original release. The simple answer is probably that it just got farther along than any of Frankie's other released projects, but there's still a part of me that wishes it was the Definitive FrankieSmileShow Game, something really a cut above the rest. It's close to a great game, but it's not quite that. (And honestly, I remember Stellar Nexus being better, so I'm looking forward to revisiting it having played this now.) Maybe one day I'll get to play his RPG he's worked on for over a decade and get that feeling.

For now though, it's worth giving Frankie the 5 bucks for this game; he deserves much more for all the freeware he's made over the years anyway.

Feels like a throwback to Frankie's oldest work, given that Sluggy was one of his first characters and it shares the accappella sound and music with Finsworth (albeit not nearly as aggressively loud). His previous reboot attempt with Sluggy played more like an early 90s DOS platformer, but this takes a more explorative approach, even moreso than Dream Hopper from a few years earlier.

Aside from the audio, this game fits in the same category as flash games like Hamumu's Robot Wants series or Insidia: fine but disposable micro-Metroidvanias. You're not getting any ground-breaking platforming (and frankly there's a lot of enemy oversaturation in certain areas), but it's fun for the 20 minutes it takes to explore the world and get to the ending. Frankie actually went as far as making a Steam Greenlight page for this game, but like with other jam games it never really went anywhere; in this case, I think that's perfectly appropriate.

Nearly missed this one because it wasn't listed on itch.io and Frankie didn't link it on his Tumblr until a year after the jam had taken place. It doesn't help that Global Game Jam has also been a pretty poor archivist of its own entries, though fortunately this one's still readily available online, at least for now.

Frankie and co. took a novel approach with this fishing game by having the player use their caught fish as bait for bigger fish, or to consume as additional strength. (I'm no fishing game expert, so if there's other games that use this exact type of mechanic I would love to know them.) It makes for an engaging game loop that's bolstered well by the random events like the fish dating game and the giant jellyfish (that unfortunately crashes your game on capture). I also found the writing in this game much more palatable than Stellar Wanderer; the cynicism works better as a sadsack protagonist struggling to find happiness in their yearly fishing ritual. It's a shame the jam team never came back around to working on this game, but what's here is a great little fishing title.

Honestly I have very surface level experience of Doom (played the first couple maps of the first two games) and haven't played any custom WADs before. For all I know everything shown here could be just baseline Doom modding (or even just typical late game Doom stuff), but I would have no idea.

With that said, I think this probably falls in to the typical designs you'd expect from Doom: dark hallways with barely visible enemies, item chambers that open floods of demons once you grab the new gun, an enemy bomb shelter where you have to clear them out from the windows, a gigantic courtyard with the largest and most vicious of enemies, and the obligatory open deathmatch arena/courtyard filled to the brim with demons that spend half the time just killing each other. The Doom gamefeel is designed to go down smoothly no matter what, but those latter two sections took up most of my time and ultimately I couldn't be bothered to get through yet another cyberdemon fight in such an enclosed space. (It was midnight and I was getting sick of those damn skulls swarming me when I'm trying to fire rockets.) The hidden blood river section was at least a cool secret side path (again that might be typical for custom Doom WADs but whatever), and there's a pretty strong, creepy ambiance to the whole map thanks to the music.

One of these days I'll play through the Doom games. And then I gotta go through the Cacaoward WADs. Oh god, I gotta stop giving myself more projects.

Games like this are dangerous to my brain, because suddenly I spend a whole evening finding every square of this map and end up not feeling very good about that. That's my own fault, really, but I'd argue that part of that compulsion comes from the fact there's no real friction to exploring any part of the world. Enemies don't move at all and only attack if you attack them or an adjacent enemy/chest; the sole exception are the archers that have a 2-square radius of range, but since the world is constant, you can just avoid them until you've leveled up your stats enough to withstand their attack.

Overall the stats feel weirdly balanced in this game. Other than HP, your base stats increase very slowly, but you can easily get temporary boosts around the world; that means your attack and defense are either tediously low or overpowered, since (again) there's nothing stopping you from collecting all the gold and power-ups you need to stack up your stats and one-shot the various boss enemies. I know it's easy to play armchair developer for a jam game, but the enemies really needed to be more proactive in fighting the player; even bosses like the cyclops could easily be avoided since you can just walk around to grab the treasure behind it. (Granted, there's no real ending to this game, so it's hard to say if avoiding enemies was an intended feature or not.) If you really wanted to get nutty, you could have monsters activate abilities when their tile is revealed, which would also make the reveal timers do more than just stretch out the game time.

I'm not going to fault a game jam for not having its mechanics or (god forbid) stats perfectly tuned. But I wish there was just a bit more direction in how I should be exploring or leveling up, just so I don't fall into bad min-maxing habits that only cause me to resent the game I just spent 2 extra hours on.

In Frankie's post-mortem for their last Ludum Dare entry (Honko's World), he discussed how his entry's connection to the contest theme (Connected Worlds, no pun intended) was lost as areas in the game were cut and reworked due to the time constraints. It seems in response, his entry to the next Ludum Dare would fit the theme of "Entire Game on One Screen" to a tee: an entire 2D Zelda-like effectively played out on the map screen, with shadowy dungeon areas to boot. Unsurprisingly, the game scored 7th place in the theme category.

Like Honko's World, I ended up not finishing this one, though I feel I explored much more of the world in Tiny Adventure at least. It lacks checkpoints also, but in this case it feels appropriate as part of a learning process; it's got the old-school sensibilities where it's very easy to die quickly if you're not careful. That also comes through in how there's no direction where to go, and no instructions for whatever items you end up finding, if there even is any purpose beyond collecting them. However much direction you need in a game like this is going to determine how much you get along with it, and it doesn't help that you're going to be squinting the whole time just to see what you're doing.

If there is a goal, it's to slay the cyclops at the center of the map (which I only accomplished by abusing the janky boundaries a bit), but you seemingly can't enter the castle behind it; I thought I might have missed a step, but watching Frankie's dev timelapse video makes me think he wasn't able to finish it in time. That's easily waved away by its 72-hour development time, though, and otherwise this game is impressive for how much was packed into it in such short time. It's still available to download on its archived LD page: http://web.archive.org/web/20150106170039/http://ludumdare.com:80/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=1892