Gunpoint is an indie game being developed by PC games journalist Tom Francis. If you read PC Gamer like me, you’ll probably know him for his writing more so than his game development skills. Nonetheless, he seems to be doing a pretty good job of creating his first game. In it, you play a spy who has to break into office blocks, hack computers and take out guards before making a daring escape, quite often by leaping out of a third story window. But that’s not even the best bit. You get a gadget called the Crosslink, which basically lets you rewire any electrical device to almost any other in the building, allowing for some very creative puzzle solving…
In the video below, Francis explains how the game works and shows off some of the unique ways to solve some of the missions. With the crosslink, getting through a locked door can be as simple as rewiring the door’s locking mechanism to a lightswitch. Flip the switch, and bingo – you’re in. But it can get hilariously more complicated than that if you want it to. Guards will patrol floors, and you can predict their movements by changing various switches around. If you turn out the lights on a floor, a guard will automatically attempt to turn them back on, so you can use this time to escape while he’s looking the other way, or take him out from the shadows. But why not set a trap, so that when he flips the lightswitch back on, he gets smushed by a nearby door? All that is possible, and it looks hilarious when you pull off carefully laid plans like that.
He was aiming to have it out by Christmas, but it looks like its been delayed unfortunately. Still, the game is set to be free when it comes out, so I have no problem waiting a bit longer.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
Fighter Ace was a free-to-play Second World War dogfighting game. You just logged in, spawned in a big sky with about 20 or 30 other people and shot the shit out of each other. It taught me that the Japanese Zero was one of the greatest fighter planes of WW2. Sure, it was lightly armoured and went down easily with just a few direct hits, but it was so manoeuvrable, so fast and agile that it could take on pretty much any other plane and come out on top.
Hades is a great example of a coffee break game. You can play through a single run within 30 minutes, but if something comes up and you have to stop mid-run you can save and quit in whatever room you’re in and continue later. As the father of a toddler, I find this particularly appealing these days. I like to squeeze in a quick game during my baby girl’s nap time, and since I never know exactly how long she’s going to sleep for, I need games that can be played in short bursts. I’m starting this new mini-feature series with Hades, because you’re almost always guaranteed to have a good time, no matter how long you play for.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
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