Writer Mike Walbridge’s goal: play every Molyjam game and tell you about them. Want to know more? Click here.
262: Molydeuxsa: “A survival horror game where the enemies can only be seen in mirrors? Could add more depth by having dirty mirrors that need to be cleaned?”
You are a window-washer trying to defeat Medusa. You defeat her by swinging a sword at her, and you can see her inside of washed windows. But all the windows are dirty!
Like many of the games, this one sounds pretty stupid but I actually had fun scaling the building and progressing to the top. It even had an ending with a joke! The window-cleaning mechanic has a lot of potential use, and the game as a whole is a great prototype for a throwback to Donkey Kong.
261: Breaktris: “Imagine being able to launch a missile in Battlefield and have it hit your online friend’s car in say Burnout Paradise? This is the future”
This is a combination of Tetris and Breakout and requires two players. One player plays one game and one plays the other. Clearing lines in Tetris produces more blocks in the Breakout players’ area, but clear enough blocks and you can send a breakout ball to destroy and ruin the Tetris pattern on the other side.
Both players are competing on different terms here, and this is a recurring theme at the jam. It was fun to see the implementation but on this case, it is heavily unbalanced, surely the most difficult hurdle in playing these types of games. Still, it was fun to watch.
254: Beggar Beats Baby: “What if you could steal animation frames from other NPC’s animation cycles and give them to yourself or others to solve puzzles?”
The ambition alone of making a game based off this tweet that actually works is impressive in itself. It doesn’t solve “puzzles”, it just gives you the ability to earn points by capturing and collecting beggars, brides and babies. Once you capture one, your character morphs in and out of the respective form. Once you get all 3, you rotate from amongst all three forms and your own initial form. If you are a form that is beaten by one of the others, you can’t capture it.
Beggar beats baby, for example, so you have to make sure you’re not in baby form when you go to grab the beggar.The game ending reveals the game is about the jam itself, about the game industry’s tendency to frequently plagiarize when it could be more often be doing something different. It is not a new message, but the creative and brilliant way this message was expressed leaves me open to more preaching. Anyone who has any interest in this topic should take the five minutes needed to play this game and get to the end.
For more Molyjam games, check out Mike’s blog and the Molydeux Reveux archive.
