The story goes, apocryphically, that a lot of the reason games in the NES era had their difficulty jacked up so high was to try and pad out the runtime — and to make sure the game couldn’t be beaten in any sort of rental period. These things were expensive to create and mass-produce, so why not make sure the audience gets their money’s worth by making sure the process of beating the game takes as long as possible? Early adventure games, in particular, feel like they took that idea and fucking ran with it: not only using its trial and error to make the game longer, but by burying every process within several layers of esotericism, writing the margin for error in invisible ink so it can take several hours before you realize you’ve made the game unwinnable, that (in an era before the internet was super widespread/commercially available) you basically needed to also buy the strategy guide if you actually wanted to beat the game. It’s kind of incredible to see it in motion, honestly, some of the straight-up dickish things done in this vein. Having to set things up several hours in advance so that you’re ready once those chickens come home to roost. Needing to go so far off the beaten track to figure out what path you’re even meant to be going down that most walkthroughs will often skip that step and start with the part where you actually progress with the game. Stuff that comes with very little warning, where, if you don’t have the exact answer at that exact moment, you get a game over, and have to go back to a previous save to get the means to prevent that from happening. That is, if you even know what it was that fucked you over in the first place.

Dark Seed, debut effort from developer/publisher Cyberdreams, is rife with this shit. The moment you start the game — after a quick bathroom break to shower and get rid of your monster headache — you must go down to your study, look at the building plans, then knock on the wall to find your house has a secret room which contains… nothing but a rope. You then must take this rope to the attic, push a chest out of the way to access a balcony, tie that rope around the balcony to then… access your own backyard. Pointless now, but two in-game days later you’ll get arrested and game overed if you attempt to leave your house by the front door. You might think you could just wait until the requisite time to do it, but, however, halfway through the game, you get forcibly arrested and sent to jail. You can get out easily, and keep your items along the way, but about 20~ mins later when you’re sent to jail again you’ll lose every item… except for three items you’re allowed to hide under your pillow the first time you’re jailed. You have to pick three specific items: one because it lets you escape the cell, the other two because they’re items you explicitly need to use both before and after you go to jail. If you don’t bring any one of these three items, you get softlocked. If something you still need later gets taken away from you during that moment, you don’t get it back, you get softlocked when you suddenly need it. And you won’t know messed up until it comes time for the reaper to collect. It’s genuinely kinda insidious. You could just wait to pick up that rope until after your adventures in jail, but you do have to go through that room to arbitrarily affect something else later on in the game, and how are you meant to know that ahead of time?

Oh, by the way, the game runs on real-time, a-la a Dead Rising or a Majora’s Mask. You wake up in the morning, and if you’re in the wrong place by bedtime, you fall asleep on the spot and get a game over. You’ve got three days to beat the game. You get to check the time by checking your watch, but, oops, that gets taken away when you go to jail. You will have to meet certain appointments by being in certain places at certain times, lest you miss it, and by doing so miss the related item, and by doing so inevitably resulting in a softlock. Going in, hearing about it, I was like "oh, so I have a set amount of time to beat the game? I hope it shows a bit of mercy about that." As it turns out, that was the least of my problems.

Which, by the way, one last puzzle I just have to talk about: on the second day, you encounter a monster on a bridge you need to cross. The only way to get him out of the way is to throw a stick off the bridge, as — much like a dog — this will cause him to rush for the stick, leaping off the bridge into the abyss. How do you get said stick, by the way? Well, on the first day, you have to buy some scotch at the store, which will then prompt your neighbour to enter the store, giving you his business card and inviting you over to his house tomorrow at six PM. When you make the appointment (which, by the way, if you assume he’ll meet you in your front yard, as opposed to your backyard? he doesn’t come, softlock) you’ll find that his idea of entertainment is making you watch him play fetch with his dog over and over again. This’ll repeat endlessly until you give him the scotch, after which he’ll down the whole bottle in one go and go to bed, leaving you free to grab the one thing (or, well, two: you also need his business card to avoid a softlock) you needed out of all of this. And then you have to do a bunch of shit right after this: getting arrested again, getting out of jail, doing a bunch of things afterwards all while the threat of Mike conking out for the day looms over your head. Legitimately the whole game is just a matter of hitting softlocks, trying to figure out what exactly caused said softlock, then keeping that in your memory bank as you run up against all the other softlocks. Which, admittedly, is a bit typical for the era, but at least its contemporaries are a little less all about that.

And usually, other adventure games from this era have something going on narratively which makes a lot of the… walkthrough-heavy gameplay worth it. Dark Seed... is a bit more give and take. There’s a non-zero amount here that I’m down with: I’m into how generally sparse and empty the areas and atmosphere are, and I also like the general horror concept of the Light World/Dark World — and how, physically, the latter counterparts the former, invoking a little bit of a guessing game as to what’s supposed to be what. I love the H.R Giger artwork, how well it characterizes the Dark World as this unnatural, abberative place that’s almost human yet at the same time absolutely not, the ways this influence seeps and infects parts of the comparatively normal Light World and in general how unsettling it feels to have it all around you: even beyond the time limit, the vibes were so off that whenever I was in the dark world I wanted to speed through what I was doing and get out as soon as possible. Other than that… there doesn’t feel like there’s much here, at least storywise. I like the idea of moving into a seemingly haunted house, discovering notes left by the previous owner and trying to find out what happened to him before it happens to you… but in practice it’s rather undone by the adventure game logic and how much of an idiot you come off as: having bought a completely dilapidated home, with broken windows, drafts in every room, a kitchen you can’t even use... yet is totally surprised at this being the case, apparently never even looking at said house before buying it. He expresses more of a reaction at finding the garage rather messy than he does at going through his living room mirror and entering a H.R Giger nightmare dimension. Barely anything about him is expounded in game — why he’s moved in, what he even does for a living, who he even is besides the fact that the game’s plot is happening to him. Most of his descriptions of what’s happening around him take me out of the experience rather than immerse me further in it, and for a game that’s as heavy on setting a tone, story-wise, as Dark Seed, that’s not particularly amazing. I feel like this game loosely… min-maxed a little, with its style and substance. While it makes good on its promise to let you play around in a H.R Giger artscape, what surrounds this is rather little, and in the end mostly feels rather lacking.

Which, among other problems, ultimately results in Dark Seed... not quite feeling up to par. On the art design side, it’s by and large well done. On most of its other sides, it struggles: gameplay wise it’s an experience in trying to find the one sequence of events that doesn’t end with a softlock/game over, and narratively there isn’t nearly enough there to make up for what you need to do to progress through it. While noteworthy in the context of Cyberdreams’ short stint — this not being their final attempt to bring the work of another artist into the medium of video games — in the broader context of 90s adventure games, Dark Seed... isn’t quite able to compete with some of its counterparts. 3/10.

Behold, the first open world Garten of Banban. That’s only half a joke. Every Banban after… I think 3 has placed everything around a central hub you continually return to, and this time said hub is like, this fuck-huge city with NPCs walking around, where the core areas you go to are landmarks within and such. Honestly when I entered it for the first time my immediate thoughts were ‘oh god they’re gonna make me search for a keycard in this haystack aren’t they?' but… by and large the game is rather benign about its padding. Not like it isn’t there, or anything — the game is evidently still on its quest to run out the steam refund timer by taking as long as possible to beat — but, as opposed to the endless hallways, forced backtracking and stupid platforming segments of previous Banban games, at least here things are stretched out in terms of things you can actually interact with. Minigames you have to do three times when just once could be enough. Points where you’re told to do something, you do it, and then the game moves the goalpost right when you think you’re allowed to progress. It’s still not great, mind you, but it's at least more interactive, and a bit less blatant about its intentions. If it continues down that road, then… look, it’s never going to be good, but at least an upward trajectory is… something?

And, admittedly, this is a step up. If not quite a return to... ‘form,’ it's at least trying to scurry back up to where it once was, like somebody rushing past all the enemies in a souls-like to get back to the boss as quickly as possible. There’s a genuine attempt at an atmosphere here — a focus on audiovisual elements, that… if still not making the game scary, are at least somewhat striking. There’s mood lighting. There are cockroaches scurrying across the floor. There’s background music. Creatures slamming against the walls as you’re exploring an area. There’s this one room with a wet floor where you see the corpses of these things hanging from the roof as you walk towards a silhouette in the distance and if they went with a higher saturation light it honestly would’ve worked. It’s not much, but it’s an improvement, and it gives some segments a bit more character than they’d have otherwise. Gameplay wise… it’s rather basic — and I wouldn’t say it’s like Garten of Banban 4 where it’s… honestly fun at points — but there’s some highlights. There’s a neat chase sequence where you not only have to parkour from building to building, but also figure out where exactly you need to actually go in the heat of the moment. There’s this section where you basically take an exam on how well you recognize some of the characters that was honestly a bit stressful? Maybe I'm easy to impress, or eager to be impressed, but while it’s not back on the upward curve — not yet — it's at least headed in the correct direction. Or something approximate to it. It's better than Garten of Banban 6, that's what I'm saying.

Unfortunately, there’s some new stuff here which… decisively does not make the game better for its inclusion. The drone, once again, is given an upgrade. And, once again, it’s horrible: now you can physically become the drone and fly it in first person and it controls exactly as well as you think it does. Hitting, or even just brushing a wall locks you in place for several seconds. The animation for this also forces the drone to recoil downwards, and if doing so should accidentally cause it to clip into something? Back to the start. Which is merciful, of course, but it makes even the simple act of going through a window a herculean task. Not even going into how the game will still have the drone in the last place you’d used it when you enter drone POV, forcing you to either back out and recover it or force the drone over vast swaths of map level just to get it where it needs to be. And also not even going into how one time I clipped into the wall and sequence broke the drone into another section entirely. And also there’s this one point of the game where it’s- where it’s literally just the baby chase from Resident Evil Village??? And yet they don’t understand what made the baby chase as standout as it was? The core of what makes that whole section work so well in RE8 is how simple it is: you see baby, you run back to where you came from, you pick one of the many hiding places the room provides you, and then you wait until the baby leaves. You’re not likely to die bar you actively attempting to throw yourself into the baby’s maw, which is then to its benefit: you don’t lose that initial impact of the baby just appearing through having to watch the cutscene again. Garten of Banban 7 fucks up in this regard: not only does the game telegraph hard that something’s about to barge into the room (where part of what makes RE8’s rendition work so well is how it happens out of nowhere) but there’s a full puzzle you have to do which involves summoning the drone and making it push buttons as you leap off of tables, all while you continually have to juke the baby around tables and rooms, all the while never quite telegraphing to the player what they’re actually meant to be doing. I didn’t even realize just what made the baby section work as well as it does until I saw this fuck it up, but I guess that’s one way of showing how imitation can be flattery. Sometimes you make it clear how the original is so much better.

Oh, yeah, sidenote, that rooftop chase I mentioned a couple paragraphs up? It literally begins with the threat right in front of you, and the area you need to initially get to… right behind it. I’m still waiting for that Euphoric Bros. masocore platformer, honestly. I still think that’s their true calling.

Aside from those notes… it’s a Garten of Banban game, I guess. A lot of the highs and lows are things I’ve already talked about previously covering the series. Its attempts at being scary, its attempts at delivering the Deep Lore are laughable at best, but in the midst of all this is this honest-to-god soap opera plotline which is honestly incredible to watch unfold, bolstered by a penchant for humour, of catching the player off guard, which… at least works more often than it doesn’t, even if here I noticed a couple jokes repeated from previous episodes. The voice acting remains as gloriously inconsistent as it's always been: pretty decent performances placed in conjunction with one of the developers speaking in monotone while constantly bumping the mike placed in conjunction with this... guy from Boston? guy with an Irish accent? desperately trying and failing to sound Australian. Gameplay wise, the modus operandi still seems to be padding, padding, padding: through making it take as long as possible to get from A to B, to having puzzles where the barrier to progress is “what am I even doing”, to hiding objectives where no player would assume they’d be. I’ve gotten the sense, perhaps, that this stretching out is on at least a little bit of a macro level as well, padding out this story as long as possible to make more games to get more $$$ from the kiddies who’re unironically eating this up, and Garten of Banban 7... does not beat those allegations — ending the plotline I thought the series was going down and cliffhanging on a completely new one. I know a non-zero amount of people here dropped after 6 for that reason, but if there’s actually an endgoal to all of this, if the games remain at least interesting in how they flounder then I’m still willing to keep going. I guess we’ll have to wait and see next time. 4/10.

I’ve never watched Twin Peaks. Not for any particular reason, mind you — I’m bad at watching episodic things and there sure are a lot of them out there — though, given just how many things it’s influenced, perhaps I should get around to it. If, in part, so I can see just how much it influences Alan Wake. It’s not like the game is lost to me just because I didn’t do the required reading — it’s not solely beholden on its references, and even if it was it still draws from other things (like Stephen King, House of Leaves, The Twilight Zone, etc.) that are far more in my wheelhouse — but it does feel like I’m missing a piece of the puzzle, knowing that it’s an influence yet not knowing how it impacts the work in question. Is it merely how the game is set in a small town with a dark secret? Is it the cast of offbeat, often kooky, often exaggerated townspeople? Is it the way the game often calls its framing into account: how it frequently calls into question whether the events depicted are real, or representative of something else entirely? I can guess, but I can only guess — I don’t even know whether that last one is something Twin Peaks even does. I suppose it doesn’t super matter, but, like, usually when I go through something I wanna learn alllllllll about it. And in the case of something like Alan Wake — where it’s operating on multiple different narrative layers, where it’s in some ways actively seeking analysis and interpretation from the audience — I liked it enough to feel like I should maybe do my homework. At least before I delve into the series further.

I’ll start with the easiest thing to talk about, if, mainly, for the sake of getting a foothold: I wasn’t expecting this to be as combat-heavy as it was. I knew there was combat, of course — that the game carried a balance between walking-sim-esque segments where you explored the town/chatted with the inhabitants vs. pretty direct gameplay segments where you fought against The Darkness — but I didn’t think, going in, that the ratio would veer so heavily towards the latter. It’s fun, though! It’s certainly much more action-oriented than survival horror — much like a Resident Evil 4, even down to the way your flashlight functions as a laser pointer for your weapons — yet sticks the landing much more than a non-zero amount of its contemporaries do. What I think sells it is its simplicity. Near every encounter comes down to shining some sort of light on them to remove their defences before using some sort of weapon to kill them dead. You don’t even need to aim for the head — bodyshots do the same damage, it’s just mostly a matter of getting them weak in the first place, making sure you have enough ammo on hand, then letting rip. There are remarkably few enemy types (you have your normal guy, your tough guy, your fast guy, your chainsaw guy, but nothing much more than that) — the diversity primarily lies in the type of encounter: are you getting intercepted from point A to point B? Do you have to battle your way through the hoard? Do you have to hold out against the horde? There are a lot of different situations you find yourself in, and through that a lot of situational tools that make each encounter feel unique, from your environment, to the things around you, to the tools you have with you.

Which, speaking of? By and large? Fun to use! Your pistol is shockingly capable: it’s accurate, it has a fun kick to it, it kills enemies in three hits, but if you don’t have the time or the ammo, you can instead use the shotgun or hunting rifle to obliterate the enemy where they stand. If that’s not enough, if you’re in the middle of being overwhelmed… man I love love love how the game just gives you its equivalent of the rocket launcher. And lets you choose how to manage its resources! Do you choose to use it now or later? If you do it now, do you know if you’re going to get more ammo for it later? If you don’t use it now, do you know if what’s down the road is even worth using it later? Of course, you can bypass all these problems by just finding enough treasure chests to make sure you have ammo forever, which…

Leads me to another thing I love: how much the game rewards exploration. The environments you explore are huge, and oftentimes have much more than the player ever has to cover. You can keep going down the path you’re meant to, and the game’s compass (once you notice it) does a good job at delineating what’s “the path” and what’s comparatively more optional, but should you want to look around, you’re rewarded in a variety of ways. If you want a little more extra story content, you can find radios lying around, pages you can read, even little Twilight Zone knockoff TV episodes the game allows you to watch in full. If you want gameplay advantages for going the extra mile, the chests/lootboxes give you more flare gun ammo and flashbangs than you’re ever going to need - and often give you one of the shotgun/hunting rifle before the level would otherwise let you have it. And if you just like exploring for exploring’s sake, you can sate Alan Wake’s addiction to coffee by finding it in the most unlikely of places. The game lets you go above and beyond, as well. Near the beginning, you’re at the bottom of a chasm, a rope bridge across from the cabin you’ve been heading to. You can go across like the game directs you to… or you can instead climb all the way back up the cliff… just to get a coffee thermos. You never have to go up there, and you never get the chance to go up there again. The game, in general, really encourages you to go off the beaten path - offering multiple incentives to entice you to do so, but not only that, the game and the level design lets you go to so many nooks, so many side routes, so many places you never otherwise need to go just to facilitate all these collectables. The world is way bigger than it has to be. To some extent, that’s commendable.

And it’s so fascinating how much focus there is on how it plays, given, ostensibly, that it's a game that’s… primarily all about its story. Perhaps it’s a remnant of when Alan Wake was initially meant to be an open-world game with a day/night cycle — much like, of all things, Deadly Premonition — though this then makes the result… feel somewhat imbalanced, where often it feels like you’re going through looooong gameplay segments and the narrative is being left by the wayside. Not to say the latter isn’t effective, though! As… little as it feels like we spend our time in the town, I liked the glimpses of it that we got! Specifically I loved a lot of the bit characters/NPCs. They lean a little off-beat, a little eccentric, but yet never so much that they don’t feel like real people — more in that sense of, like, that one person from your hometown everybody knows who's a liiiiiiitle bit off their rocker. They’re cute, they’re fun, and I like how they turn Alan into a straight man for whatever antics they force upon him — waitress Rose's obsession with him immediately blowing his cover the moment he enters town, or FBI Hemingway's referring to him solely by other American writers. There’s other little things I like too: the Twilight Zone parodies you find on TVs around the place are fairly on point (and made me realize just how much it kind of is a more adult Goosebumps episode lmao), and the radio shows do a lot to let the world around you feel lived in, and let the writing seep in even during sections where you’re just traversing from one place to another. The manuscript pages are fun for this too: sometimes they recap what just happened, sometimes they tell you what’s about to happen, sometimes they let you know what’s happening beyond your immediate scope, and sometimes they’re just really cute bits of narrative, like the one where Alan picks up a page about him picking up a page and it enters a recursion loop. Every person you talk to, every sign you walk past, every little thing around you helps build up the world around you. To some extent this game could be a case study in how much the micro-level stuff matters in building up a greater picture.

On a macro level — the overarching narrative — it’s… certainly ambitious, but ultimately I reckon sticks the landing. The game draws from pulp novels: not just from the novels themselves, but also how the personal lives of the authors would impact their work — how a lot of these novels had writers/some-form-of-self-insert as the main character, Stephen King not even remembering writing Cujo because he was on so much coke at the time, etc. It’s metatextual, as much a story about itself, and the writing process, as much as it is about a story about Alan Wake fighting against The Taken. The in-universe manuscript the plot of the game is forced to follow is as much of a first draft as anything written, in, say, NaNoWriMo, and the game has so much fun with that: plot holes, kibble, deux ex machinae are present yet accounted for. The story will often turn on a dime, often into stock plots or cop-out endings, much in the way someone would if they’re writing to get words out with no idea of where they’re actually going. Characters or things appear, are professed as important, then will drop out of the plot entirely the moment their scene ends. Even some of the kooky characters will make sense from that lens — an author having to write something fast rather than write it well, relying on cliches that seem much less true to life once those characters start walking and talking in a 3D space. I also enjoy how much the writer makes his way into the work. I’m… not necessarily familiar with Sam Lake’s works, nor do I know much of Remedy as a whole, but I like what I see: the way Alan’s attempt at writing something other than a noir thriller results in a total nightmare of a creation process, how the game stops at a halt so that the in-universe version of a band whose members Sam Lake is friends with can play a few of their songs. To some extent, every work of writing has a bit of the author in it — their experiences, their way of thinking, the specific things they’re a fan of — and often by going through these works one gets to learn about the one who created it along the way. Metatext (or, rather, metafiction) often brings this relationship to the forefront through its continual self-analysis, and Alan Wake, narratively, shines at its brightest on this front, presenting a story that is as much about the process of writing as it is about its literal events, and in turn letting us see just a little about the mind behind it.

There’s… a couple things that bring this game down, mostly on the gameplay end. The game’s use of vehicles leaves… something to be desired: they’re often required for traversal/combat within certain sections, yet trying to use them for their intended purpose is oftentimes clunky, accidentally getting the car stuck on a surface when trying to U-turn it in the direction of the enemies, accidentally drifting it off a cliff trying to make a simple turn. Not even going into how easily it is for the camera to make you motion sick going into certain cars. While I do know that survival horror isn’t meant to be ‘fun’ by definition, a lot of the sections where the game takes away your items I felt were rather the lowlight, often feeling as if they were total crapshoots as to whether I could run through before I got wombo combo’d to death. Some levels — again, perhaps, because of the game’s initial premise as open world — feel rather too long, and often seem to be there to fill time, more than anything. The final level, in particular, has almost nothing story-wise between beginning and end, and while you can pick up pages/listen to Alan’s thoughts the plot doesn’t actually progress until you’ve reached the final section, leaving like, two hours of combat for combat’s sake in-between. I guess it’s a good thing they were able to use all those assets from when it was originally open world? It just… maybe could’ve benefited from being a little more streamlined. Or at least, in the final level’s case, having a bit more between A and B.

As a whole, though, that doesn’t fully detract from near everything this game has going for it. From how well the gameplay does the action horror formula — doing a lot from what little it has, and just from how much the game world encourages and rewards random exploration — to how well the story functions both as a metafiction and as a narrative in its own right, to even the most minor of things: I legit did the Leo pointing meme when I heard, of all Nick Cave songs, Up Jumped the Devil playing on a radio in the woods. It’s not quite a tour de force, and it was much more of a cult classic than a blockbuster when it released (given it released right next to Red Dead Redemption), but… to an extent, that feels appropriate. Something that goes in as many different directions as this does I think works best as an unsung darling. Besides, Twin Peaks, as beloved as it was, didn’t do too well in the ratings either.

…I think. Don’t quote me on that.

(8/10.)

From a game I remember fondly to… a game I don’t remember at all. The next stretch of games here are almost back-to-back-to-back in terms of how often I returned to them, how representative they were of my memories frequenting Nitrome.com, and then there’s also Magneboy, which… I probably played, but certainly not enough to leave any sort of impression, especially compared to what’s around it. Not to say it doesn’t compare to them, though! This is more of a straight puzzle game compared to anything else (so far) in Nitrome’s oeuvre, but it’s neat to see just how well their tendencies translate from one genre to another. Your goal for each level is to use your power of magnetism to get from the start square to the end square, but the number of things you interact with to fulfil that end varies level by level. From tiles that you pull towards you, from tiles that you pull towards them, to tiles that create bridges across the level, to portals that you can enter and/or send blocks through, there’s a real ebb and flow to the way the game handles all its disparate mechanics. I especially like how the first level to introduce a mechanic will usually take it easy on you… then immediately throw something much harder, giving you the basics of the mechanic before asking you how that mechanic fits in with everything else in the game. It’s decently cerebral, manages to avoid the typical puzzle game trap of becoming too complicated for its own good, and that feeling when you finally realize what you’re meant to do and complete the last couple of steps in quick succession is unparalleled. It’s probably the first 50-level Nitrome game where that length… almost feels justified. I’m… a bit unsure whether this game really needed enemies/a health bar — they were often just kind of an annoyance at best and felt rather superfluous to the systems already there — but aside from that this is a solid way to spend an hour. I can’t quite remember how many more puzzle games Nitrome did after this — I don’t think they really started popping up until the year after this — but for a first-ish foray this isn’t half bad. Can’t wait to see more.

The first sequel to a previous game! And, more than that, the first new release since I first became aware of the site (Dangle doesn’t count, it didn’t quite occupy the same brain space as this game did). There was a good bit of a drumroll on Nitrome’s end in the lead-up to this game’s release, and I can see why: even beyond its status as the very first sequel, this breaks the ground in a ton of ways. There are animated cutscenes, a Super Mario World-esque world map, you can customize your character's skin (and, at one point, even create your very own balloonsona), and there are even multiple save slots in the menu. This was truly something special within the context and scope at this stage of Nitrome’s lifespan, with features that even games later down the line wouldn’t have, and even though the first game was fucky when I tried to play it with Supernova I’m hoping that with the two-year gap might mean that this’ll still be beatab-

oh um

this loading screen for the intro is uh

going on forever, huh

okay refreshing puts me on the world map and lets me play the first level let’s- oh that’s just the same loading screen

uhhhhhhhhhhhh

So I tried playing it on Nitrome.com. I got stuck on a loading screen. I tried playing a HTML5 port another site made. I got stuck on a loading screen. I tried doing the same things on a different browser. I got stuck on a loading screen. Not knowing what else to do, and not wanting to give up on even playing the game, I found a dump of all the raw .swf files for… a good percentage of Nitrome’s flash games, downloaded Adobe Flash Player via an archive link, and… holy shit it ran like a dream. Genuinely. None of the lag present in either the Supernova emulation or the HTML5 ports. It played the same way in 2023 as it did in 2007. Honestly, running into these issues might have been best for the long run: while I fretted at the idea of not even being able to play a game (and such a landmark one in Nitrome’s history) due to technical issues, what it led me to means I don’t have to deal with any of the kerfuffle over what poison to pick between the emulated original or whatever HTML5 port exists. Thank god.

Especially because it meant I could play… what's easily the first truly great Nitrome game so far. It plays exactly like the first game: use the mouse to blow a fan and guide a hot air balloon to the end without touching any other walls or surfaces or enemies. It’s simple, but after a gentle difficulty curve the game starts to show its teeth. Precise movement (knowing when and how hard to blow the fan) is required if you want to make it through the level, and the little bonus objectives in stars do a lot to customize the experience: do you want to play the level the normal way, or do you want to take on all the little extra challenges so that you can do the bonus levels after? Either way, failing just once will send you back to the beginning of the level, in a way that’s absolutely brutal but in a way that leaves you ready to take on the challenge again. The game goes against Nitrome’s ethos so far in that enemies and obstacles are generally one-and-done, but this works to its benefit: levels primarily defined by one obstacle and how you navigate around them, and really neat designs that show up, play around the constraints of the game in generally neat ways (I especially liked all the obstacles that reacted to the fan) and disappear before they wear out their welcome.

The game knows how to balance its difficulty, giving you tough, genuinely stressful levels (there’s one in particular that's the equivalent of an autoscroller and even despite beating it first try I was fretting about how one twitch or mistake would send me right back to the beginning), before then easing up the throttle, giving you a chance to relax, calm your nerves, let you believe you’re good at the game for a bit before it ramps back up again. And in the midst of this you’re treated to this loud-coloured, retraux artstyle brimming with charm, both through the enemy designs and all the facial expressions — giving you new balloons is a genius reward for completing levels, and honestly if it weren’t for wanting to do them all anyway, seeing which little guy I unlocked next would’ve been the perfect motivator for doing even the post-game bonus levels. I dock it a bit for some fucky physics and some… maybe stinker levels, and it’s clear that Nitrome’s first implementation of boss fights… leaves something to be desired, but otherwise… yeah: this is Nitrome firing on all cylinders, and the first of their efforts, I’d say, that’s truly a cut above all the rest.

…I wonder, now that I have Flash Player, if I could go back and actually beat the first game…?
























































(nope)

Y’know, I probably would’ve added some checkpoints if my levels were marathon-length slogs with constant one-hit-kill obstacles that supersede the lives system already in place, with buggy mechanics where I can be affected by, say, an enemy blowing wind when I’m not even on the same plane as them, borked controls where I can literally be clicking the bottom of the screen and my spider will still move upwards into an enemy, constant leaps-of-faith where I need to know what’s ahead to make the best decision, and level design where I’m constantly fighting against the game to move forward, but I guess also “if you hit an instant death trap because you were trying to play with the physics in a physics platformer you have to go back to square one” doesn’t really seem like that big a deal compared to everything else. It starts off okay, and relatively simple, even if some of the more technical things are evident immediately, but once things feel a need to get more involved and complex it gets intolerable real quick. I spent, like, half an hour on the first nine levels, found a couple of them to be straining but otherwise bearable, then level ten took like, a whole 40 minutes of making it several minutes in, dealing with all the fiddly stuff, then hitting a one-hit kill or accidentally moving backwards into an enemy. I thought, maybe, like, this was just a low point and that the game would become better once it got all that out of its system. It didn’t. I found out level 11 was even more of that shit and decided, maybe, this wasn’t worth my time. Cowardice, I know, but having beat my head against the wall for 40 minutes only to find that there were more walls made me figure that I’d gotten enough of an impression. I looked at playthroughs of the remaining levels and even watching them felt too tedious for me to wanna stick around to the end.

The first Nitrome game I ever played! Not for long, though. I'm fairly sure when I found the site I didn't even beat the first level of this before bouncing onto Skywire and Frost Bite, and now, having actually gone through it for the first time… maybe it was for the best that past me didn’t. The core of the game is that it’s a collectathon platformer with a main mechanic of jumping from planet to planet — the gravitational pull and the traversal through the landscape almost make the game feel like a traditional side-scrolling platformer… except that platforms, in this case, are circular, and centre gravity around them as you jump. While it starts well enough, the game starts to show its warts as it goes along. Individual levels veer loooooong — like, 5-7 minutes just to complete it — and not for good reasons: most of what you do after the halfway point is just stand around waiting for planets to come near you, or stand around on moving planets waiting for another go to try and the one star you need to get to complete the level. This could be bearable… if dying didn’t send you riiiiiight to the beginning, forcing you to do the entire process from step one each time. This is even worse given how finicky the platforming can be, or how cycles can sometimes work out that sometimes there’s no way to escape taking damage and the fact that the player jumps upon taking damage can randomly undo progress or immediately lead to more damage and, as a whole, this game… does not feel polished. Or particularly fun to play, after a point. Wouldn’t call it the worst so far, but for the first game I ever played from this company, for the game that, however indirectly, led me to obsessively follow the website (and, in a way, led me to become as active on the internet as I am today)… man, past me could’ve done better.

do have to shout out the music tho

Skywire is a game where you use the arrow keys to move a gondola across a linear path, avoiding all the obstacles in your path in hopes of getting at least one of your passengers to the end of the stage. What initially seems like mostly a matter of proper timing soon, however, betrays a fairly complex system revolving around gravity, and how that impacts your momentum: the path curves up or down, the former causing your gondola to move slower, the latter causing you to rocket forward, even if you’re not holding that specific direction. Soon it becomes a matter of controlling your momentum — knowing how long in advance you need to start climbing something, knowing when exactly to start slowing your roll so that you don’t accidentally veer directly into another obstacle, and, sometimes, knowing exactly when you can abuse i-frames to gun it to the end. Its simplicity is complex, and the varying obstacles are mixed and matched in a way Nitrome is clearly adept at at this point. There are… technical issues — obstacles that spawn right on top of you in a way that’ll force you to lose a life unless you explicitly know they’re coming, obstacles with funky hitboxes that at points guarantee you lose a life when the level forces you close up to them — and there are some levels which are, like, three minutes of waiting for obstacles to go through their cycles (which if you mess up sends you right back to the beginning) but as a whole this is definitely the first game I’d consider to be above 'pretty good': just really solid execution where its quibbles don't hold it back as much. Plus! Iconic music! And uploaded to YouTube with decent recording quality this time! Can’t wait to replay the sequel and remember just how it iterates.

While not the first Nitrome game I played, nor the one that drew me to the site in the first place, this was the first game to really hook me in (pun unintended). While Space Hopper hadn’t held my interest, this one had: leading seven-year-old me to spend his entire period in the computer lab trying to get as far as he could, eventually compelling him to play the other games on the site: both within the (much, much smaller) backlog at the time, and actively awaiting for new games to release so I could play those as well. Sixteen (fuck I’m old) years later… this holds up! While I didn’t particularly remember anything about the level design — the little snapshots in my head all seemed to be from this game’s sequel, actually — I was surprised to find that playing this again did unearth some memories, my brain in particular adding the exact same mental lyrics to the background music as I did when I was seven years old. I don’t think this was exactly the exact nostalgic experience I was particularly expecting — I think I’d have to reach 2008’s output to really get the ‘oh my god this was the thing I used to play while I was a Childe!’ brainworms — but it was neat to revisit this.

Speaking of the game itself, though, it… almost feels kind of like a spiritual successor to Feed Me than anything else. You’re a mountain climber, rather than a venus fly trap, but the core gameplay feels quite similar, in that it’s a platformer where your main ‘tool’ allows you to click on a platform to propel yourself towards it, with most platforming challenges requiring quick and skilful use of your grappling hook, and most enemies differ in how they happen to interface with it. While it starts simple, it gets surprisingly involved, with later levels having individual sections longer than earlier whole levels, and with some particular setpieces being enough to give me a game over all on their own. It’s finicky, in places (which, sidenote, do not play the HTML5 version of this, literally you cannot collect extra health or lives) and perhaps a bit bare mechanically, but I’d still say this is fairly solid: if you’re looking for something to take 30-45 minutes of your time, and you don’t know anything else in this dev’s catalogue — like I had, so many years ago — you can’t really go wrong with this as a first choice. God knows it managed to hook me in.

Little history lesson: this was a quick ‘time waster’ (in Nitrome’s own words) made within a month or so to celebrate the Christmas season. When their next game was released the following March, the hyperlink for this game disappeared from the site, rendering it inaccessible (unless you had the direct URL) for several years — a period which included my entire time frequenting the site. Now that I’m back, and now that this lost game (or, well, lost to 8-year-old-me, anyway) has resurfaced, I’ve now been able to discover that it’s… pretty okay. You’re tasked to find one given Christmas present out of the pile below you while under a timer — one that ticks down perpetually, with five seconds awarded for each correct guess. While it starts off easy, it becomes much harder to find the outline of the specific item you want: items on screen will start being placed sideways or upside down, the game will introduce new items that look rather close to ones you’re looking for (ice skates/socks, violins/wine bottles), and the thing you’re looking for will be planted in a sea of identically coloured items, making it harder to find the specific item when it’s layered under several others. It works well for what it is! It’s just that what it is maybe isn’t the kind of thing that especially excels at wasting my time. I could see somebody (meaning: a younger me) making more of a go at it and making a real attempt at a high score, but on my end… I got the vibe the first time around. Didn’t feel the need to go back for more.

The other Nitrome game inspired by Lemmings! Unlike Sandman, though, you instead use your mouse to physically draw on the level, providing ways for your Lemmings to make it through the level, both directly — drawing lines to act as platforms to get them across a gap, or walls to change their direction — or by using it to influence something in the level: drawing a wall within an enemy to cut it in half, or turning the line you draw into a makeshift fuse to blow up a bomb. Each new obstacle brings a new way for the player to interface with the draw tool, and the game does a great job at mixing and matching all these different elements: never letting anything drop by the wayside, never making any given obstacle feel overdone. Combine that with level design which at times feels both frenetic and cerebral, a genuinely cute artstyle, and with some truly banger music, I genuinely think this game’s super charming. There are… issues, of course — there are some real finicky hitboxes, and one of the core mechanics where your lemmings must reach several different exit flags (and your progression through the game is gated behind a certain number of lemmings hitting the flag) seems to… straight up not work: so long as you get one little guy to an end flag, it seems like the game lets you through no matter what. They’re minor things, though, and in the case of the second one it just seems to make the game more friendly: if you’re willing to try to forgive some 17-year-old-flash-game jank, and you’re down for an experience that’s… more meaty than any of the other Nitrome made before this, I recommend it! Definitely my favourite of their 2006 output.

“Hey, what if we made Mario Kart, except also all the cars had guns and could shoot each other? Except also the A.I doesn’t care who wins so long as the player doesn’t so only ever target you? And also if the player gets shot they stop moving for a bit which leaves them in a perpetual cycle where they can’t meaningfully get ahead of the pack because the rest of the pack keeps stunlocking them? And also what if the player could never really do enough damage to kill any of the other tanks unless they actively threw the race to do it, meaning that all this mechanic ever amounts to is that the player's car has a health bar and also the comeback AI can red shell you at any time unless and only unless you can get an early lead and maintain it? What if we also made the game control really badly? Where turning is ridiculously slippery and will often cause you to careen into a wall? Where acceleration is non-existent and whether you’re moving fast or moving slow feels super arbitrary? And where the controls are force-bound into a setup that’ll cause intense pain to anybody right-handed where trying to move forward will forcibly scroll the page up in the HTML port we make 16 years later? What if we also didn’t have things common to other racing games like difficulty levels, a minimap on the screen so you can tell what’s ahead, or some sort of multiplayer so that it isn’t solely the player getting ganged up on by the AI? Wouldn’t that be great?”

Having gone through… so much of Nitrome’s back catalogue over… oh wow it’s been a year at this point? time fucking flies, man. But anyway what strikes me is how little I stuck with a bunch of these games — and, in particular how little I played of their… pre-2008 output. In hindsight, it makes sense: my ability to access the internet pre-the-age-of-ten was limited to whenever I’d completed my work early in the computer lab, or whenever we went through the back fence to my aunt’s place every Friday afternoon. Oftentimes I’d go full weeks in between playing games — not to mention how different computers would mean different save files, resetting my progress to the beginning each time — and oftentimes those gaps often meant I had some new toy that took precedence over the Nitrome game I’d already gone through: a new Poptropica island, maybe, or some new website like Crazymonkey.com or the Bubblegum Arcade. My impression is, a lot of times, I’d pick something up, give it my best shot, then never play it again, save for a couple I’d return to, a couple (like Frost Bite or Hot Air 2 or Off The Rails) that stuck around my memory. But even then, there was nothing here I was super gung-ho about beating, nothing here I’d super try to revisit.

Until this one: Dirk Valentine. I can’t begin to tell you just why this game was what kid me latched onto, why this one was what truly began the process of making him a Nitromehead — iirc my family didn’t get access to home internet until, like, January 2009 at the earliest — but god it got its claws in me. It was my first exposure to steampunk, and with no Horrible Histories to tell me otherwise, this was just what I assumed the Victorian era was like. It was my first exposure to the Wilhelm Scream, and even back then eight-year-old-me knew that was the funniest shit ever — he’d shoot enemies that weren’t even in his way just so he had a chance to hear that soundbyte again. He loved the core gameplay conceit: how the chaingun you wield is both your main way of fighting enemies and your main method of getting through the level. He loved bouncing shots off the walls, he loved making those weird webs of ricocheted chains that he could jump up and climb. He loved all the mechanics the game kept introducing, all the enemies, all the ways they impacted the chaingun. It gave me the brainworms, long, long before that word even entered my vernacular… yet I was never able to beat it. I made it far, near the end, but there was always one level I couldn’t beat. I was eight, I was nine, I was ten, and I’d keep coming back, keep thinking maybe this would be the moment I was good enough of a gamer to get through my plateau, but it never came to be. I’d reach whatever level it was that walled me (I can’t quite remember but it was probably Control Room 1) and I wouldn’t be able to beat the game before computer time was over, before next week gave me something else to fixate on. It was… certainly important in the context of my history with flash games, yet I never actually beat it. I never actually saved Queen Victoria from the evil Baron Battenburg.

At least, not until today.

…Playing the game again, in 2024, with whatever wisdom the past sixteen years have or haven't given me, what I’ve realized is that this is a fairly major step forward, at least in the context of Nitrome’s progression as a studio. This is their first game to have a proper story — or at least, more of a story than a ‘congratulations, you beat the game!’ screen and maybe a quick intro cutscene — your mission control’s consistent chiming in doing a lot to lend a sense of context and gravitas to your actions, even if, perhaps, his dialogue could’ve used some commas. I like, too, that the background changes as you go outside the fortress to inside then back to outside again: it’s baby steps compared to some of Nitrome’s later stuff (simply adding a filter to the outside background and then taking it out again), but it helps lend a sense of overall progression as you fight through the titular Fortress of Steam. Beyond that, a lot of what kid me found fun about it still applies today: how cool it is that your gun makes this both a shooter and a platformer, all the cool things the game explores with that mechanic, and how… frenetic the game grows to be, especially near the end (kid me’s dreams to beat this would’ve been absolutely doomed, lmao). I’m still fond of all the sounds you make as you do things: the screams the enemies make when they die, the extremely bitcrushed voicelines as you get a game over or pick up a healing item, they all lend so much character. I think perhaps the boss battles felt rather basic (and a bit of a crapshoot as to whether you get hit upon entering the arena or not), and in general it’s… easier to softlock yourself in a bunch of levels than I feel it maybe should be, but as a whole this was a blast. Perhaps it’s not fully polished to the point where I could call it one of the best Nitrome games nowadays — moving the mouse to move the camera was… rather rough, the recording quality of the music wasn’t that great and there were a non-zero amount of points where shooting the chaingun didn’t feel like it maybe should — but if any game has done enough to earn the right of pet favourite, it’s this one. God knows how much past me loved this. And I reckon he would've been happy to know that I eventually got good enough to finally clear this, even if it, uh, took a good bit longer than he presumed it would.

Nitrome’s second racing game! Much better than the first one! …Not much to say, otherwise. This is a game that’s evidently meant to be played multiplayer, and the fact that this can go up to four players yet at the same time can only be played on a single keyboard perhaps speaks to why it feels… rather limited, compared to the games surrounding it. You move your UFO around the track by tapping the boost button over and over again, you turn to try and avoid hitting obstacles or falling off the course, you complete three laps and win. There are only three courses, only two unique obstacles, and not even any AI UFOs to race against — doing the game singleplayer merely has you racing against the clock, which leaves a game that’s… effectively ‘done’ in ten minutes. Evidently, this was more meant to be something endlessly replayable — something for whenever the eight-year-old me had free time at the computer lab and four friends all willing to play Twister on the keyboard — though even then I’m not sure this has enough here to return to after a couple runthroughs of each of the racetracks. More like a demo for further multiplayer capabilities — and, perhaps, for the non-zero amount of racing games Nitrome would make after this point — rather than something that really stands on its own.

It’s wild what banal memories from these games rush into my head the moment I play them again. I didn’t remember how exactly this game played, or whether this was one of the games I beat back when I was a kid, but I heard the main theme and I saw these anemone decorating the ocean floor and that unlocked something I… don’t think I’ve thought about since before I was ten. Like I just remember seeing those things dotting the bottom of the level and being so amazed and weirded out about how much they looked like brains that they buried themselves somewhere into my long-term memory. Kind of insane. And the game itself is pretty fun, too! You point and click your submarine to move it both under and over the ocean, trying to avoid enemies, trying to find treasure, and using your depth charges (rather reminiscent of Toxic’s bombs) to clear the way, being able to fight back against enemies but only if they’re directly below you. There’s a fun diversity of levels: ones where you have to effectively find your way through a giant maze, ones where you have multiple valid paths through, ones with one path, yet optional objectives you can take if you wanna get more points, and then ones where it’s a tight squeeze and you’ve got to go through the gauntlet. Combined with the ways the game mixes and matches with different enemies, distinct mechanics, you get a rather solid little undersea adventure, that, unlike… a good amount of similar games this dev has made doesn’t become a massive slog in the second half. Perhaps because they… apparently patched this so that you get double the health (which might be why using i-frames to gun through the last portion of a level worked as well as it did) but either way it shows a pretty good amount of iteration and forward progress, and, as we leave 2007 and enter 2008, shows a good bit of promise for the output ahead.