Games of the Month: wholesome baking, horror chills, and a duck on a scooter
Happy March everyone! We’re back again with our Games of the Month post to recommend you some great games from the last 30 days. This month’s recommendations come from a ton of different genres and styles so there’s a little something for everyone in here.
Minit Fun Racer
You may remember Minit as a cool top down adventure where you die every 60 seconds. You also play as a cool duck person. You’d think that a follow-up would have more combat and less scooters, but here we are. Minit Fun Racer takes the time limit mechanic and applies it to an auto-runner.
Our duck-faced friend is back but instead of questing, they’re blasting through city streets on the back of their sick hog trying to get out of town before they die. It’s surprising how much this feels like the original Minit despite being in an entirely different genre. The progression here is largely tied to metal-upgrades you buy between runs, but the sense of progression is so tightly tuned that I was constantly progressing despite dying at least once a minute. If nothing else Minit Fun Racer proves how talented the team behind it is with their ability to seamlessly switch genres with each release.
To sweeten the deal just a little bit, all proceeds from Minit Fun Racer go to charity. Currently each purchase goes to supporting Doctors Without Borders, so you can feel even better about your purchase.
Lemon Cake
Grow food, bake food, and sell food! Live the farm-to-table dream in Lemon Cake’s cozy and adorable world! When you drop into Lemon Cake you’re playing a game in halves. On one side you’re running your greenhouse, growing new ingredients to be used in the second half: cooking in the restaurant. Both halves of this are going to feel pretty familiar to folks who’ve played farm and restaurant management games, but Lemon Cake really sticks the landing. The farming’s progression curve is smooth and the restaurant never felt overwhelming.
If you’re looking for a pleasant world to fall into for a few hours, Lemon Cake is for you.
Anathema Demo
If your timeline is anything like mine you may have seen Anathema’s Kickstarter blowing up over the past few weeks. It’s a chunky first person shooter with sweet pixel weaponry, surely this would be enough to make a great game, but the devs went one step farther and made all of the dungeons randomly generated so you can loop through the demo as much as you like.
But this isn’t all that Anathema is. If the promises made on the Kickstarter are any indication, Anathema is set to become something really special with a massive faction relationship system and destructible terrain.
Tell your friends that you were on Anathema before it was cool and check out the free demo now.
Search Party
Here we go gang, another horror game that I’m too cowardly to get far into. Nominally this is a crime thriller about finding a missing child (hence the name) but in practice the plot is an excuse to put you into a nightmare maze of frights. Stylized like a SNES top-down adventure you’re hunting around for items while dodging an omnipresent killer. If this sounds a bit like top-down Resident Evil then you’re on the money. There’s some light combat and puzzle solving thrown in for variety, but I want to reiterate: This is a game about being scared. And it does a great job of it! The creativity in the scares is top notch and there’s a real tension in the hunter/hunted dynamic that pares super well with Search Party’s atmosphere.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a scarier game this month.
NUTS
Rounding out our recommendations this month is the wildest surveillance game you’ve ever played. You’re a nature researcher who’s been tasked with investigating a group of particularly strange squirrels. What follows is one of the stranger gaming experiences I’ve had in recent memory. I won’t spoil anything, but Nuts does so much with this relatively simple concept.
Visually, Nuts doesn’t look like any other game. Its art style reminds me of all the times I accidentally inverted the colors on photos as a child. It makes the very natural forest increasingly alien as more and more colors are added to the palette. It makes placing your cameras and recording gear an adventure each time –and you’re going to be placing a lot of cameras.
I had a lot of fun just exploring the world presented in Nuts. It’s a big, strange forest even outside of the game’s plot. If you’re interested in a wild story about squirrels, a beautiful forest, or just something strange, there’s something in here for just about everyone.
