We're back with another trilogy of unrelated games, one of which I bought and the other I received as part of past Humble Indie Bundles; specifically, 4 and V back in 2011 and 2012, respectively. I finished all three of these games (I'll elaborate where needed on that statement), and for the most part, I enjoyed all three of these games (I'll elaborate where needed on that statement).
Castle Crashers
Systems: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Windows, OS X, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4
Release Date: August 27, 2008
Publisher: The Behemoth
Developer: The Behemoth
Time Spent: 35 Hours, 30 Minutes - 177 Hours, 54 Minutes
First off, I put down 35+ hours at the time that I first beat the game, which, according to the date tag on my screenshot when The Squire and I first beat the Evil Wizard, was in February of this year (2026). In the five months since that time, we've put in an additional 140 hours. Although I had introduced The Squire to the game sometime in late 2024. And before that, I played it a bit with Chreekat, probably sometime around 2015, when he stayed with us for a while. So I've been playing Castle Crashers in some iteration for just over 11 years. But it wasn't until I reintroduced it to The Squire earlier this year that we got serious and beat the game with the Green Knight.
Since that time, The Squire has wanted me to collect all of the animal orbs, collect all of the weapons, and try to unlock all of the playable characters, although that's kind of where we've stopped since some of the characters can only be unlocked by beating certain levels with certain characters on Insane Difficulty. So we've spent a lot of time in the mornings playing and replaying levels. The Squire has also recently discovered the different characters available in the Steam Workshop, and I've had to limit him to selecting only one character per week, otherwise we'd end up spending 30 minutes just sifting through the same group of poorly designed characters, characters that a six-year-old shouldn't be playing as, and characters that are just a real person's face slapped on the design template.
Crayon Physics Deluxe
Systems: Windows, iOS, OSX, Linux
Release Date: 2007
Publisher: Kloonigames
Developer: Kloonigames
Time Spent: 6.5 Hours
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Back when I was putting together "The Ultimate Spreadsheet Database," I remember I came back across Crayon Physics Deluxe, a 2D physics-based puzzle game where you try to get a ball to interact/collect a star. It's actually pretty similar in feeling to Scribblenauts, but instead of controlling a character, you're drawing objects with a digital crayon to interact with a ball. Like most puzzle games, the levels start out very simply, getting the player used to the mechanics and rules, slowly upping the difficulty until the game hits the player with a puzzle that absolutely stumps them into stupid. You end up staring at the screen, trying to figure out how in the hell you're supposed to get the ball to the star, feeling like a complete idiot who shouldn't've been allowed out of kindergarten.
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Similar to a lot of games from around this time, the late two-aughts, the game operates on a star/flag basis, meaning the "better" your solution, the more flags you earn per level, and if you earn all three possible optional flags in a single stage, you earn an additional star on top of the one required to complete the stage. So if the first world, or island in the case of this game, has 10 stages, then there are a possible 20 stars you can earn: one star for completing the level, and an additional star for earning three flags. The primary feature of these kinds of mechanics is to lock access to levels down the road, often requiring the player to replay levels to better their score to unlock additional worlds/islands, because you're going to need 120 stars to unlock the final central island. There are a total of 150 stars before getting to the island, and I currently have 98.
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In my head, I have completed the "main campaign" of the game, in that I've completed all of the levels and earned stars on every level, if I consider the 120-star island an optional end-game stage. In order to collect the remaining 22 stars for the center island, I would need to look up tutorials for 22 more levels, and even then, because the game is physics-based, if your drawing differs even slightly from the walkthrough you're looking at, it can throw everything off. That feels like it kind of defeats the purpose of playing a puzzle game, if you're just going to have to follow a walkthrough to earn a flag for an Elegant Solution: a solution that uses only one continuous line; an Old School Solution: you don't click on the ball or draw any pins to essentially create a fulcrum; or an Awesome Solution: you can click this box yourself only after you have completed the other two solutions. So I called it there.
Systems: iOS, Windows, OSX, Linux, Android, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: March 24, 2011
Publisher: Capybara Games
Developer: Capybara, Superbrothers, Jim Guthrie
Time Spent: 5 Hours 18 Minutes
I feel like I would have liked this game a lot more had I played it as god intended, on an iPad or on the Nintendo Switch. Basically, a platform where the touchscreen was the novel mechanic in controlling the game, because playing this on my laptop, with mouse controls, felt like I was playing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword again on the Nintendo Switch. What I mean is that Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP was originally developed for iOS and touchscreen devices, so a lot of the mechanics and puzzles in the game were created with the novelty of a touchscreen device in mind. I felt that to really enjoy this game beyond the quirky dialogue, intriguing story, beautiful pixel art graphics, and haunting music, you had to put yourself in the headspace of someone who was playing on a touchscreen.
There were a lot of times when you had to tap specific areas of the environment to either solve or start a puzzle. Drag your finger/mouse from one thing to another in a specific order. Tap a specific place on the screen at a specific time to trigger the next part of the puzzle. In one instance, you were supposed to drag two stone statue-like figures towards the center of the screen, but since that was impossible, it took away from the significance of the puzzle, which meant that how to solve the puzzle wasn't clear, and it lost a bit of its meaning. Even battles in this game, where you had to tap either a sword or a shield at a very specific time, felt poorly optimized for a player using only a mouse. Maybe it's just me, but it felt that there was a significant difference in response times between moving and clicking a mouse, and having a finger from each hand hovering centimeters over a shield or sword icon on the screen.
The only other thing that put a sour taste in my mouth was feeling that I was only scratching the surface of the story in the game. Like I was given a primer on the characters and the world, but there was more to discover that I hadn't figured out. After finishing the game, I discovered that there were several ARG elements by way of phone numbers you could call based on the actual cycle of the moon, hidden grooves within the vinyl soundtrack, and a conclusion of sorts from a video located on Vimeo (which is no longer available, even on the Internet Archive). This made me feel left out, but I guess that's partly my fault for not playing a 15-year-old game when I first got the game back in May, 2012. Even then, the fact that needing to buy additional products to experience the full story makes me a bit salty. As in spitefully salty.
And yes, I did wait for the actual moon cycle to be accurate for two of the in-game quests, which I appreciated was a mechanic in the game. I didn't cheat.
We'll be back next month with three more games for another Game EXP Trilogy article, although with these next games, there was a little bit more of a struggle than with the previous six games in this series.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental
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