Category: Platformers

Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan

  06/22/2025       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

This is a cute kids’ game of the “experimenting with nonviolent gameplay” genre. It reminds me a lot of both UnderTale and my own Flawed Crystals. The overall structure is essentially, “What if when you spared enemies in UnderTale they joined your party?” A set of recruited enemies are drawn randomly from a deck in each round, and you can summon a certain number per turn. Outside of battle, you can level up your friendship through the standard video game relationship strategy of bribing them with gifts and food.

The plot is a standard Saturday-morning-cartoon-esque premise: An evil monster has drained all color from the world because he wants to remove the hero’s “rainbow heart” and make everything conform to normalcy. If that sounds like very queer subtext, you may be surprised to learn it is actually queer text; the protagonist is textually nonbinary, and many of the recruitable characters are gay or nonbinary and explicitly struggle with queerphobia. I’m pleased we have gotten to a point where kids’ media can discuss this stuff outright instead of needing to obfuscate everything behind metaphor and allegory.

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   Platformers, Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games     

QuickRecs: Surgery Edition: Part 1

  10/22/2025       Act      4 Comments

I had the fortune to have to undergo a bilateral masectomy in June, so I’ve spent months barely able to do anything at all. I’ve played a lot of video games. Enjoy the forthcoming waves of game recs. Not a lot of pans though — the bad ones I played were mostly just boring and bland, not really bad in a way that was interesting (with one notable exception, which I may get to later). I may put up blurbs on the curator page later just to remind myself what they were. Anyway.

Also these got long and aren’t really “quick” anymore but whatever I’m not splitting them now.

Inside: Unholy Heights, Deiland, Wavetale, A Monster’s Expedition

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   Adventure, Farm Sim, Indie, Platformers, Precision Platformer, Puzzle, Recommendations, Sim, Sokoban, Tower Defense, Video Games      , , , ,

QuickPans: Extremely Quick Edition

  11/30/2025       Act      4 Comments

I play so many bad games, but the sins of the bad games I’ve played over the past 6 months are largely of the boring and bland variety and don’t seem any more interesting to review than they were to play. Nonetheless, here they are with a sentence or two about why I disliked them.

I originally thought this post would be far longer but it turns out there’s a good deal of games I marked as disliked that I just straight up don’t remember.

Inside: Little Wings Deliveries, Newt One, Planet of Lana, Bugtopia, Grapple Dog, Spells and Secrets, Flooded, Jusant, Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles, One Lonely Outpost, Kamaeru: Frog Refuge

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   Adventure, Deckbuilding, Farm Sim, Idler, Indie, Platformers, Precision Platformer, Puzzle Platformer, Roguelike, Sim, Video Games      , , , , , , , , , ,