🏖️ peaches & backpacks

🆕 On the Shelves

👸 Princess Peach Showtime

Like Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Princess Peach: Showtime! appears to be packed with big, stage-changing moments.

I really enjoyed the latest Mario game, Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

It was perhaps the best 2D version of the game to date. Of particular praise was the multiplayer mode, making it feel like all players influenced how the level progressed and the team’s success or failure. (In other words, think back to Sonic 2 where the 2P joypad could be used to control Tails… though often useful, the character did not have much agency in the game.)

Mario Wonder gives each player agency AND each player can choose their character based on how difficult they want the experience to be. For example, some characters are essentially invincible.

Not sure what to expect of Princess Peach Showtime, but if Nintendo are putting as much work into this as they have in their last platformer, we’re in for a treat.

🎒 Battlepack Battles

A PvP inventory management auto battler! Buy and craft powerful items, then carefully arrange them in your backpack.

I played a demo of this recently, but it seems to be getting a full release on Steam this month. It’s a kind of roguelike puzzle game… thing—definitely a genre I enjoy.

📡 On the Radar

🐙 Palworld

Palworld came out in early access in January. It’s like Pokémon but if Pokémon really leaned into the “enslaving of animals” vibe that permeates the game.

🛒 Supermarket Simulator

In a world where people would rather be unemployed than work as a clerk in a supermarket, there is a wild irony that this game is blowing up on Steam…

🃏 Balatro

This game is making the rounds in all the big review sites and podcasts. A rogue-like deck-builder game (two of my favorite genres) with lots of replayability. Frank Lanz has likened it to being Elon Musk on ketamine, which is a good thing, maybe… Made with Love2D and LUA programming language! (PICO-8 uses the same language)

🎮 In Rotation

🧩 Flipart and the games on Puzzmo

I’ve been playing many puzzle games recently, mostly of the sokoban variant (more to come next month), so the term “puzzle” has been something I keep my eyes open for. The Puzzmo website is a wonderful collection of puzzles that might be familiar to the audience here. Specifically, the following two games, which were enormously successful mobile games by Zach Gage:

• SpellTower
• Really Bad Chess

Wait. I looked into the site more. The whole site is created by Zach Gage!

🪱 Can of wormholes

A sokoban like puzzle game where you have to get a worm into a hole. That’s the most basic overview I can give.

Without giving too much away, some verbs that also come up: cut, roll, grow, push, flip, devour (oh, and I’m only 50% through the game).

Another really ‘a ha’ moment is that the spaceship you find yourself in is also worm that can be controlled!! Meta!

👾 Oblivion Eve

This is an absolutely beautiful rogue-like action platformer.

The developer has squeezed some really interesting mechanics into this tiny game. Leveling up, directional air dodge, smash attacks (like Smash Bros.) and powering up like a Super Saiyan in Dragonball Z.

—James York