I think Atopes brings a lot of really neat ideas to the table. The game kind of exists in this meta space, where the developer breaks the fourth wall and points out that you're playing a video game. You have to go through the files to change out Anima's game cartridge, and they constantly have you messing with the innerworkings of your computer to progress. It reminds me a lot of OneShot, which does really similar tricks with text documents and moving your window around.

The games that you play in Atopes are pretty much all charming, but also really simple. There's a cool puzzle platformer called "Rainbow" that I would genuinely play more of if there was a full game. And "Bunny Chronicles" is this short shmup where you progressively get stronger with each time loop. There's some really neat ideas in here. They even have you read through a book and mess around with the links to progress. Everything here is passable to really cool, but nothing overstays its welcome. I wasn't huge on the RPG game at first, but it definitely grew on me towards the end. And I guess I can see the appeal of a game like ";", but it felt a little too math heavy for me.

I don't want to spoil too much about this game, but it's definitely one that I think people should play all the way through. It took me a lot longer than I expected, but I'm happy that I saw it out to the end. There's clearly a lot of passion put into this, and it's really cool that this is totally free.

Reviewed on Apr 22, 2024


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