cactus

Cactus declassifies Ultra Mission

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Everyone’s favorite painter of cognitive dissonance, Cactus, has just revealed his latest opus, a sort of dark and droll puzzle-Robotron called Ultra Mission.

Your task is to rescue the hostages through any means necessary. Use WASD to move; use the mouse to aim. Left click is shoot; right click is kaboom. You can destroy pretty much anything. The trick is to destroy the right things, and avoid being destroyed in the process.

As a Cactus game, it’s pretty tough and tends to reward thinking outside the box (as it were).

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Gideon Simons’ Rise: Sea of Static

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Or, if you will, “An Invader’s Traumatic Platform Experience”. This is a curious one. Inspired by a game jam about experimental graphical styles, Run, Dino! Run Like the Wind! designer Gideon Simons (aka QuiteOddGames) has blessed the world with an art platformer that seems to borrow more than a page from La La Land’s warped psyche and then runs that vibe through Jeff Minter’s personal indexing system.

The soundtrack is a constant, irregular hiss; the landscape is made of cubes and small dots. The dots are basically spikes; touch them and you die. You walk on the cubes. As you walk and jump, the landscape subjectively shifts and melts around you. Bits will bend up to become land; bits that were land will bend down off the screen entirely. Sometimes when you jump a pocket will form , surrounded by spikes. Scurry in before you land and the world’s “jaws” snap shut on you.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Daray Manning’s Baggage

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Undoubtedly Rockford Illinois’ premiere indie game developer, Manning betrays his Cactus/biggt heritage, as well as a touch of Eugene Jarvis, in his skewed-n-crackly platformer study Baggage. The game is one of those hardcore S&M things, where you die a dozen times just to work out how to get past an obstacle. The generous aspect is that modern indie convention of infinite lives and just trying again without a pause. Yet the game does a good job of instilling a certain dread, both though its difficulty and through its presentation.

Just about every line could use a carpenter’s level, resulting an a dissonant Dutch angle effect. Likewise, every solid surface is filled with an ever-changing static and the background (and sometimes the foreground) is filled with an ominous orange fog. Your character is tiny; the levels are comparably large on the screen. Each has a sort of strange, one-straw-short-of-familiar shape to it. Ostensibly helpful text scrolls across the screen, though it spends more time taunting or giving inane protips or generally being bleak.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Cactus takes you to Norrland; reservations open

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Space Fuck! and Krebswelte designer Cactus has joined Messhof in the realms of insane public display art games.

Last Friday, Cactus debuted the Swedish love letter Norrland at an art exhibition at Kulturbygden in Sollefteå. The game seems like an inscrutable collection of minigames that illustrate various aspects of Swedish life and culture, filtered through the mind of Cactus and a sort of Atari-meets-Grindhouse visual scheme. Wonder at the hunting, the fishing, the sexual uncertainty.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Cactus’ Krebswelte updated

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IGF Nuovo Award winner and Space Fuck! designer Cactus has released an update of his older… well, maybe the best term is roguelike platformer, Krebswelte. In Krebswelte you jump and aim and shoot; every bit of the level geometry is destructible (though it slowly refills, to prevent you from painting yourself into a corner); few objects are helpful, though treasure allows you to buy weapon upgrades, all the better to destroy your world.

The levels are randomly generated; as in a roguelike the only constant is an increase in difficulty from level to level, and only a single life to die… sort of. Usually. There are a bunch of quirks that make exceptions to the rules, and they’re best found for yourself.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )