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Capsule Review: Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey

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A spelling game framed as a simple RPG, with obvious parallels to Bookworm Adventures. Progress through a series of combat encounters, attacking by spelling words from the available pool of fifteen letters that replenish semi-randomly as they are used. Longer words or those with less common letters deal more damage. Enemies have their own attacks which will damage your health and sometimes confer various negative effects - including to the letter grid, such as causing certain tiles to damage the player when used. Victory earns you gems that can be used to buy a wide variety of upgrades. Each level can be played multiple times with different constraints for more rewards.

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Capsule Review: Bookworm

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A spelling game structured like a match-3 game. There’s a hex grid filled with letter tiles; connect adjacent tiles to spell a word and remove those tiles from the grid. New tiles will fall in from the top to replace them. Get more points for spelling longer words or using less common letters - high-value plays will be rewarded with bonus tiles that are worth a lot of points. Periodically “fire tiles” will drop in and will burn through the tiles below them over time - more fire tiles will appear as the game goes on and if you make low-scoring plays. Fire tiles must be used before reaching the bottom or it’s game over. Try to get as high a score as you can before that happens.

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Capsule Review: Gunman Clive 2

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A graphically-stylized 2D shooty platformer. Despite the Old West setting, the game is actually more like Mega Man than anything else. Bosses don’t grant new abilities, but you’ll be jumping and shooting your way through deadly enemies and platforming challenges to get to the boss - and don’t be surprised if robots or other anachronistic elements show up. The game is pretty short, though some replayability is added by there being multiple playable characters with slightly different abilities.

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Capsule Review: Gunman Clive

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A graphically-stylized 2D shooty platformer. Despite the Old West setting, the game is actually more like Mega Man than anything else. Bosses don’t grant new abilities, but you’ll be jumping and shooting your way through deadly enemies and platforming challenges to get to the boss - and don’t be surprised if robots or other anachronistic elements show up. The game is pretty short, though some replayability is added by there being multiple playable characters with slightly different abilities.

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Capsule Review: Beat Hazard

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A twin-stick shooter that lets you play with your own music and where much of the experience is determined by the music. You play for the duration of the specified song, the field is essentially a visualizer, your weapons fire with more speed and power (but enemies also move faster) when the music is more intense, and enemy patterns (including bosses) are determined by the way the song flows over time. Each song plays differently, but will play the same each time - meaning that every song is its own level that can be practiced and perfected. The game supports music files in a variety of formats and comes with its own set of tracks along with a few forms of internet radio.

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Capsule Review: Alter Ego

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An ambitious text adventure that allows you to simulate an entire lifetime of experiences and choices. Start at birth, navigate through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, and finally death. Along the way, choose what to do in a series of scenes - how will you react when the bully takes your toy on the playground? Decades later, how will you react when you find that the person you’re dating is married? Your decisions will have consequences that shape your personality and your future.

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Capsule Review: The Journey Of Me

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A fifteen-minute or so 2D platformer that makes heavy use of option restriction and then extensively berates the player for playing the game in the only way available.

Like some other games, it deliberately invokes common game tropes and then subverts the player’s expectations of them. In this case, the gimmick is that the player character doesn’t want you to play the game. He’s happy hanging out in his castle until the player forces him outside onto an adventure he doesn’t want. Things escalate when the player starts killing innocent creatures that just happen to be in the way, and it gets worse from there.

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Capsule Review: Time Hollow

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A visual novel with adventure game elements. You play as a teenage boy who can reach back in time to certain key moments and change history - but it soon becomes clear you’re not the only one who can alter the past. You must manipulate time to save your friends and family members from various disasters while learning who is meddling with your own history and why.

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