The Patchwork Heart
Peach was an exhausting project, and it took much longer than A-J Games expected. The developer cooled off by tossing together what seemed like a simple, brainless game. It consists of three maps, one tile set, a character with basically no animation, and no grand plan behind its design.
The character is a golden orb; for variety, and just to dink around with an unfamiliar technique, it emits motion lines when it jumped. The result is a kind of neat trail effect, which also serves as a secondary attack. To set the levels apart, the game plays around with palette swapping. To further break up the sameness, which could make the game confusing in places, every surface that the player touches also turns golden. This allows the player to sort of leave a trail, as well as generally establish a sense of ownership over the level geometry.
The game borrows monsters from Zark; since they monsters are mostly body parts, they drop pools of blood when defeated. Harking back to a secret from Wolfenstein 3D, the pools restore energy whenever the player touches them. Given the sharing of resources, the game a tenuous story connection to Zark.
Aside from a weird super-jump gimmick, that right there is the game. In retrospect, despite the lack of effort, it’s probably the most playable and progressive of the bunch developed for RSD.
