What we've been playing – old twin-sticks, caves, and ink

19th April 2024

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week: twin-stick shooters, caving, and ink.

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.

Spelunky, P.C.

On a whim I did the Daily Challenge in Spelunky the other day. It has been years since this was a regular feature of my life. I had lots of Spelunky nerves, a reminder I hadn't played in a while: the toothy plants made me shiver, and a door in Jungle with spike traps on either side was enough to make me doubt my abilities.

What I soon remembered, though, was that each Spelunky run is a chance to tell your own specific story. I missed the key in the mines despite carrying the locked chest quite a distance, so I decided to load up on bombs and blast my way to the Black Market. That didn't work out because the Jungle was a total frog-fest. I made it as far as the Ice Caverns, which is pretty good going for me, avoided death by jellifying ray from the huge alien ship, and then died, of all the things that could have killed me, by the little alien that had parachuted out of a downed UFO. It didn't take all my life, but it bounced me into the abyss.

Two things: 80k and change was enough to get me the 26th slot on the leaderboard, which I take as a sign that the game's community is drawing in a bit. Also, as I quit out I wondered to myself if I'd ever died because of those little aliens before? It might have been a new event for me. Spelunky: the game that keeps on giving.

-Chris Donlan

Inkbound, PC

I've been looking for roguelikes/roguelites to scratch my RNG itch, and after watching the Hades 2 teaser, I decided to try a couple of similar-looking games. Inkbound really caught my attention, and the combination of turn-based gameplay with the strategic placement of characters is a pleasant surprise for me.

What I like about Inkbound is the paradoxical simplicity of the game mechanics and the complexity of them. It feels like a strategy game and a puzzle game mixed in one. You can easily see what you're supposed to do, but doing it involves finding the right balance between defense, utility and offence.

The artstyle is also a strong-suit of the game in my opinion, or maybe I just like Inkbound so much I'm becoming biased.

-Gab

Really Big Sky, PC

Here's a question: can you remember the first games you played when you properly got into PC gaming? I got in quite late, about 12 or so years ago, and there's a special halo around my first PC-only experiences.

King among them is Really Big Sky, a twin-stick shooter that I fired up today because I saw it lurking on Steam and it was a tiny download. What a game this is. It's a scrolling twin-stick, and the big gimmick is that you can reverse your craft and drill through huge planets for power-ups. All good fun. But what I love most is the sheer visual splendor. The things you collect from downed foes look like scatterings of blossom, while the radioactive effects that are laid on when things get hectic make me feel like I'm being dragged into a Black Hole.

So many cool ideas are scattered throughout the entire game. The upgrade screen is a best-in-class, and there's a lovely bar chart breakdown of how you did. I still expire on that one multi-engined boss I just cannot defeat, but there's a sense of potential here which is partly due to great game design and partly because, for me, this was one of my first stops in a whole new world.

-Chris Donlan