A collection of six classic NES titles (DuckTales, DuckTales 2, Chip ’n Dale Rescue Rangers, Chip ’n Dale Rescue Rangers 2, Darkwing Duck, and TaleSpin) bundled together. Most of these games are platformers - DuckTales emphasizes treasure-hunting in non-linear levels, Rescue Rangers features frantic two-player action, Darkwing Duck has almost Mega Man-like combat and bosses, and the lone non-platformer is TaleSpin which is instead a side-scrolling aerial shooter. Each game has received a handful of new features: boss rush and time attack modes, a single saved state slot per game, and a rewind ability to undo mistakes.

A 2D retro-styled Metroid homage. Your spaceship is damaged and you must explore areas on four planets to repair it. Along the way, you navigate levels, defeat enemies, and acquire new abilities. The game seems to be trying pretty hard to set a specific mood to make the player feel like a lonely, vulnerable human exploring an unknown and hostile world - there’s no instruction on where to go in what order and (at least early on) the enemies tend to need a lot of hits to take down while the player character doesn’t.

A classic 2D Mario platformer. Progress through a series of themed levels by moving to the right, collecting coins and powerups, and avoiding or defeating enemies.

Mario platformers in general aren’t my cup of tea. Their powerup system, wherein you get extra abilities and lose them when you lose health, means the game gets easier as the player gets better. This regressive difficulty creates a bizarre difficulty curve with a fragile balance where challenges can often be either too hard or too easy. Additionally, the worlds and characters tend to be implausible and shallow and I find it difficult to engage with them. I’m pretty confident this is the only Mario platformer I’ve actually finished, and that’s due to its short length (it is a Game Boy launch title, after all) and the fact that I played it on the 3DS Virtual Console and was able to make use of a save state.

A small, simple game with a one-note joke: you are speed-dating pugs with no explanation provided. You can choose from a list of stock questions that are filled in mad-libs style and your date’s responses have a similar format, chosen apparently at random with no consistency to suggest an underlying personality or any consequences to your own choices. It doesn’t add up to anything, either - the game just presents a series of semi-random but fundamentally samey dates. Once the novelty wears off (which happens fast thanks to the wires showing very quickly) there’s nothing else left.

A brawler with level-up mechanics starring the Justice League. Take control of characters such as Superman, Batman, and several others to explore levels, find collectibles, and defeat enemies and bosses. In each mission, you have two heroes and can switch control at any time, with the other left to the AI. The game can also be played in co-op with each player controlling one hero. Level up and spend your accumulated collectibles to improve your heroes and unlock new abilities, characters, and costumes.

A brief and fairly pointless first person game where you play the last ten minutes or so in the life of a deeply and cartoonishly disturbed person. You can piece together the rough outline of what’s going on through environmental clues and then decide whether it ends with a suicide or a murder suicide, but there’s so little context that the game doesn’t really seem to be saying anything - it’s just putting you in a disturbing situation for the sake of doing so, and not a particularly realistic one.

A charming collectathon platformer in a papercraft world. There’s a light tone, a strong sense of adventure, and an emphasis on creativity and self-expression resulting in a very similar mood to its creator’s previous work, Little Big Planet. You’re occasionally tasked with designing aspects of characters or the environment and can create your own decorations to place on the player character. Progressing through the game also unlocks downloadable papercraft PDFs so you can build game characters in real life.

A 3D brawler with light RPG elements and precision-demanding combat. You play as a samurai in feudal Japan, rendered with a distinctive cartoony style. The story is pretty light - you are literally tasked with rescuing the princess - and most of your time is spent fighting through various enemy arenas. To succeed, you do not strike first - you wait, sword sheathed, until your foe unleashes their attack which you swiftly dodge and counter. The core here is great - it makes you feel like a noble badass. It can get repetetive as you fight many of the same type of enemy and the light RPG systems require a lot of grinding to aquire currency to spend on upgrades.

A sidescrolling platformer a boy (Kick) and his robot buddy (Fennick). You play as the boy using a large gun both to shoot enemy robots and to navigate levels by throwing yourself around with the gun’s recoil. This central mechanic is promising but doesn’t seem to go anywhere interesting (and was almost certainly done better in No Time to Explain). The visuals and sound are fine but the game feels oddly unpolished - expository scenes are short and lifeless, the original Vita version has unnecessary reliance on the touchscreen that made me think the game was adapted from mobile, and the difficulty curve is nonsensical. The first hour is so simple and easy that I concluded the game was aimed at children (a conclusion supported by the bright colors, sparse story, child protagonist, and cute robot buddy) and then suddenly things got much, much harder, with incredibly precise jump arcs required in deadly areas. This would still be manageable, since there’s a teleport-you-back-to-solid-ground-when-you-would-die mechanic, but it has limited use and when it runs out you’re ejected from the level and have to restart. The game was no longer easy enough to be mellow but still not interesting enough to make it worth putting up with the punishment, so I put it down.

Made for a game jam, this is a short and unpolished 3D puzzle platformer in which you must control several robots with different abilities and use them together to progress. The title references the game’s signature mechanic - any robot you have line of sight on can be taken over by right-clicking on it, so you must position the robots and use their abilities in turn. The game does an impressive job telegraphing what each robot can do and implying a personality through its design - visually, mechanically, and musically. As a result, while the puzzles don’t feel especially new or innovative the robots are a lot of fun to use. I’d love to see this concept expanded and polished.