The Steam spring sale is going on now, with tons of great games discounted until March 20. If you’re like me, you may have a big wishlist even though you have a bunch of games in your library already, but it’s still fun to look for some bargains on things that you’ve been wanting to play. I wanted to highlight a few games from Might & Delight, who provided me with some codes in advance of the sale. These are all pretty short games: each of them took me about 2 hours at most to complete (though there were some more things to discover in Paws that I didn’t get to yet).
The first is Tiny Echo, pictured above (currently $4.49). You are this little character with a giant eyeball for a head, and you start your day when a pile of letters arrives in your underground “office.” You gather them up in your shoulder bag, and then set out to deliver the mail. The background illustrations look like collages, lots of different scenes both aboveground and underground that give you the sense that you and your mail recipients are all very small creatures. There is no dialogue and very little interface—you just point and click on spaces you want to go, and there are various other beings that you’ll encounter aside from the recipients. There are lots of little details, too—things that will react when you click on them—and you’ll occasionally need to figure out which things to click to open up a new path or prepare somebody to receive their letter. It reminds me a little bit of Samorost, a game I played quite a while back, with little animated characters traveling through a mysterious world. Tiny Echo has a surreal quality to it—each time you deliver a letter, there’s kind of a shadow figure that takes it, and a strange little cut scene that might be a dream.
Next up is Paws – A Shelter 2 Game (currently $5.99). Shelter is a series from Might & Delight in which you play as wild animals, trying to survive and keep your family safe. I’d played the first game a while back: you’re a mother badger and you have several young badgers to raise. Shelter 2 features a lynx, and Shelter 3 is about an elephant. Paws lets you play as one of the lynx kittens instead of the mother—you start off running around with several of your littermates, learning to run and sneak and hunt small prey like birds or butterflies. But then … you get separated from your family, and the rest of the game is the adventure you have while trying to reunite with them. The game also is pretty light on interface, letting the view take up most of the screen. You have the ability to “sniff,” which makes everything go to greyscale but highlights prey in red and the scent track of your family in white. Occasionally there are little instructions that will pop up, but for the most part it’s just you and the landscape.
Pan-Pan (currently $5.99) is a little more explicitly puzzly: your little flying machine has crashed, and now you’re trying to build a new one. You run around a little landscape looking for the various parts you’ll need and bringing them back to a team of little gnome-like engineers who speak gibberish. There are lots of machines and buttons and gizmos, plus you can pick up one item at a time to carry. The graphics remind me a little bit of Monument Valley, though without the optical illusions—here, you can rotate the camera freely as you explore. I had a fun time with this one, though I did wish it were a little longer because I was having fun with it—there are some interesting creatures that you’ll encounter, and some of the puzzles were a challenge to solve.
Disclosure: Might & Delight provided Steam codes for these titles.
