It’s taken a while, but we kind of have that retro feel again with Goliath Depot. I say “kind of” because, although Goliath Depot certainly has that retro arcade action, it comes with some modern features that wouldn’t have existed in 1982.

First, the gameplay. You start as a fellow or lady (your choice) expecting a normal day at the computer factory, until those computers start to run amok. How to save the day? Unplug them? No! You have to slam some doors, which is not only therapeutic, but productive in this case. The soundwaves of the slammed doors stun the computers, allowing you to kick them off the screen. Once all of the doors are shut, the level’s main doors will open, allowing you access to the next level.

That’s your entire premise, but that’s all video games needed back in the ’80s. The machines attracted you with bright colors, jangly sounds, and (if they were lucky) local DJ novelty songs. They hooked you by making you believe you were just one jump away from reaching the next level, and by making those levels visually and aurally captivating. Goliath Depot has certainly done that. You just need to look at the screen captures to know exactly how this game sounds and plays.

Regarding gameplay, the controls are simple enough to figure out, but the difficulty quickly ramps up as you progress; the doors become harder to access and the enemies more aggressive. With plenty of spiky floors, icy ledges, randomly placed lasers, and more, you just know this workplace does not enjoy the benefits of union membership.

You’ll need to start timing your door slams to make sure the enemies are in the right area first, but you can stand in the doorways without shutting them to remain safe until that moment presents itself. Like most great arcade games, you’ll start to work out patterns and strategies the more you play.

There are also bosses to face every 10 levels. This creates a nice break from the typical challenge, but also severs the cord that plugs the game into its ’80s arcade outlet. Donkey Kong, Popeye, and Burger Time had no boss battles, after all.

They also had no purchasable power-ups, which Goliath Depot does. The coins you collect throughout the game can be used not only to continue your progress once you’ve lost all your lives, but can also buy you new abilities with which to start the game. For example, you can buy the ability to jump down a level without having to rely on ladders or ledges. You won’t earn enough coins to rely on all these power-ups, but you’ll know a few runs in which will be the most helpful for your style of play. And, of course, certain power-ups will be more conducive against certain bosses.

Goliath Depot’s other modern features include in-game achievements and leaderboards, which I suppose replace the recording of your initials for the next players to see. It also comes with couch co-op, which is perfect for the game’s frantic pacing.

If you’re playing alone, you can take on a speedrun mode, accept the challenge at higher difficulty levels, or randomize the levels. In other words, Goliath Depot is able to keep you engaged even after you’ve completed its initial 40-level run, which you should be able to do within a couple of hours. If that seems short, consider its $7.00 price tag, which is more than fair.

So, it’s easy to recommend Goliath Depot to fans of classic arcade games. Its modern additions and replay incentives break its ties to the games that inspired it, but will surely keep today’s gamers engaged for a longer period. Our hero/heroine may not be as memorable as Mario, but slamming doors and kicking computers at the workplace is something I believe we all can identify with.

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With a point-and-click style to it, Looking Up I See Only A Ceiling takes an unusual and exciting tone to convey mental health issues and how difficult it can be to struggle with them. However, the game does a great job at keeping these undertones subtle, allowing itself to be a fun horror game first.

Players will explore the house and interact with many objects by clicking on them. The objects help tell the story, and even the ones that don’t lead to actual game progression help give you an idea of who you’re playing as and how she lives.

This approach and mood are set up straight away; Looking Up I see Only a Ceiling starts with you waking up hungry for breakfast, and won’t let you explore many other places until you make your way to the kitchen and prepare yourself some food.

From here, you go to use the bathroom only to find yourself entering a strange hallway filled with calendars. You aren’t able to turn around, so moving forward is your only option. In this hallway you finally meet a stranger who claims to know you are, but you’ve never seen him before. He remains mostly a mystery throughout the game, but you do meet again as you start to find yourself in more strange situations.

This game is a super quick playthrough, one that can be completed in 30 minutes. There are also two possible main endings—a good one and a bad one—as well as a bonus ending. I completed both the good and bad ending, realizing the only difference was one choice you had to make. This disappointed me a little, since it felt that my options throughout the game didn’t matter as much until the very end. However, I still enjoyed the overall experience.

While Looking Up I See Only A Ceiling is very short, it still does a great job at being fun and getting its message across. For only three dollars, this game is enjoyable and recommended.

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In Murtop, you are the rabbit, and digging holes is almost all you do. This installation from Hiulit, published by Flynn’s Arcade, is a completely and delightfully old-school arcade game. While this game looks, sounds, and plays like vintage ’80s titles such as Dig Dug and Bomberman, it offers plenty of unique fun on the Nintendo Switch.

Here’s the “what you get” part of the review. The graphics are retro pixelated, but not so blocky that it makes it hard to distinguish what you are seeing. The images are a bit grainy, but you can still tell what the carrots are, that you are a rabbit, and that your “little bombs” are, indeed, bombs. The game is low-res, but it makes good use of color and contrast to keep up the visual appeal. As for the sounds, they are also low-res and reminiscent of the original Mario musical score. The tune is a bit repetitive, but it isn’t distracting or annoying and it evokes the appropriate feelings of whimsy and tension.

As you dig your tunnel around the playing field, each hop clears a square of the game grid. No matter how many of the squares you dig away, you can still hop around the grid along any of the border lines between squares (up/down and left/right). The controls are very simple—the left JoyCon is how you move around, the Y button deposits a bomb on the grid. By deposit, I mean the bombs come from the bunny’s poop-chute. I know it sounds painful, but not as much as being blown up when the bomb goes off. This is your only weapon, and you need to use it carefully. When the bomb detonates, the blast travels as far as the tunnel walls will allow in a plus shaped pattern (up/down and left/right). If you are still in the path of the blast, you will die and you will see your little bunny soul float up and away. As with most classic arcade games, you get three lives, so don’t worry too much.

Now that we have a feel for the nature of the game, let’s dig into the game play. It’s a bit like a maze crawler with some enemy avoidance and elimination. The rounds will provide carrots to earn points, but the real goal is to take out all of the enemy critters within 60 seconds. Don’t worry if you get hyper-focused—the game will give you a little audio cue at the half-time mark. Like the old console games, you have to successfully complete a round to move on to the next one. When you die three times, you start over from level 1. It sometimes feels a bit repetitive starting over like that, but you do get faster at the pattern of the level.

One important thing to remember relates to your bombs. These are high explosives that can kill you as quickly as the other critters in the tunnel. Your only hope is to get out of the plus-shaped path of the explosion. Here’s the catch—when you press the Y button, you drop a bomb, but the process means you can’t move for about a second. The problem is the fuse on the bomb only lasts about a second and a half. You will need to be very careful with your timing, balancing this with the time left on the level countdown. Also, you can’t use bombs above ground. There may be a baddie topside, but you can’t bomb him—you have to lure him underground and bomb there.

Murtop looks very simple, things get tricky. Not only do you have a timer for the round and a “hare’s” breadth window to avoid blowing yourself up, there are rocks in the ground you can undermine to crush your opponents. If you delay, however,  they can also crush you. Finally, if any of the other critters catch up to you, they dispatch you with one touch. Man, it’s tough being a rabbit in this game.

If you can manage to avoid all the pitfalls, blow up the baddies quickly, and maybe gather some carrots along the way, you can work your way up to earn the big prize—your initials on the high score board. As with the original arcade games, the fun is earning bragging rights among your friends. And since the price point is pretty low, Murtop is a fun arcade style addition to your and your friends’ Switch libraries.

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Mostly.

A half dozen different titles come to mind when looking at the screen captures: Donkey Kong, Popeye, Kangaroo, Burger Time, etc. Honestly, Donut Dodo pulls elements from all of them and more, some blatantly. Anyone who spent half an hour in an arcade in the ’80s is going to find plenty of familiar items on even the first playthrough, short as it will be.

The difficulty, you see, is not reminiscent of ’80s arcade games. Back then, the first level or two were designed to give you some confidence so you’d want to drop another quarter after quickly burning through your lives by level three. Donut Dodo provides no false hope.

As one would expect, the point is to clean up the screen. Donuts have been scattered about, and Baker Billy Burns needs to navigate platforms and ladders to grab them all, unlocking access to the prin… no, to the bigger donut. On one hand, it’s good we’re no longer presenting women as objects who need to be rescued. On the other hand, should they be offended they’ve been replaced by a giant donut? Homer Simpson thinks not!

The levels are trickier than I initially expected, complete with traps and walls that prevented me from getting to the ladder I needed. In addition, the speed of the game is much faster than those back in the ’80s. Finally, there are no weapons to slow the enemies down, some of which cannot be avoided by jumping over them. As a result, Donut Dodo is more about strategy than skill. Levels are completed by analyzing and memorizing enemy movement patterns. It took about half a dozen tries before I got past level one, a half dozen more before I worked through level two. Level three was actually pretty easy, but then…you get the idea.

There are five levels in total, plus a bonus stage. This may not seem like a lot, but that’s the way arcade games worked (consider Donkey Kong). Like the games that inspired it, you can’t save your progress. Unlike the games that inspired it, you can’t add another quarter to continue. You can acquire extra lives, but it’s back to the start when you run out. As such, reaching the last screen becomes a giant donut of its own.

There’s more to chase beyond that. Worldwide leaderboards (three initials only—who’s going to be the funny one who writes ASS?) will give you some bragging rights, and racking up the necessary points will require some strategy. For example, you get score multipliers if you grab the donuts in the order in which they flash. This provides a challenge that’s more fun than simply going out of your way to get the bonus fruit…although those are available, too.

All of the action is presented in basic, bright, 16-bit colors against a black background, fully accented by an original chiptune soundtrack from CosmicGem. It’s perfectly done in that regard. It looks and sounds like a game that would’ve fit naturally between Mouse Trap and Joust, right down to the welcoming screens.

The speed and difficulty are a bit off, but they do increase the game’s longevity and, honestly, the hilarity when you’re watching someone play it for the first time.

At only $5.00, Donut Dodo is well worth the purchase. Playing it in 2022, I felt as if I’d warped back to the Ashland Arcade in 1982, just after some new machines had arrived (but oh no, they replaced Red Baron and Tailgunner!). I can’t say how long Donut Dodo will hold my interest, but it has earned a spot amongst all the Arcade Archive games I play when I’m feeling nostalgic. More importantly, it has me looking forward to the new machines to come.

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A Winding Path doesn’t present a challenge; it presents an experience. The game is short; you can complete it in two to three hours (but no worries about that, it’s priced accordingly). It’s also very chill. You’re not going to die if you can’t solve a puzzle right away. So, again, remain calm.

The aesthetics will help you get there. As you can tell from the included screen captures, the world of A Winding Path is minimalist: pencil and paper. All of the game’s inhabitants are stick figures…although the birds and cats are not. The structures and trees are nicely textured but often quite small. This is one of the game’s only faults; although the visual approach seems tailor-made for handheld gameplay, the dense textures and lack of color actually cause certain parts to become difficult to make out on the Switch’s screen.

Audio is just as minimal. There is no soundtrack, just the ambient sounds of leaves blowing in the wind, rain falling on a rooftop, and so on. The effect is very calming (the important thing). The conversational dialogue (text only) is accompanied by the sound of a pencil scribbling on paper, which is a wonderful touch.

The situation in the game is a bit direr than its presentation would have you believe. There’s no rain. The rivers and ponds have dried up, causing the citizens of the various villages to grow uneasy. People are hungry and unhappy, work isn’t getting done, and town relations are breaking down.

This is where you come in. As with all great adventures, an early fetch quest provides you with a special power.

This time, it’s in the form of a magic lute that allows you to call forth the rain. It’s not exactly enough to fix the environment, but you can use it to solve puzzles that open paths to the actual root of the problem. You play the lute by randomly wiggling the Joy-Con stick, creating a cloud that drops a bit of rain where you’re standing.

Something my dad has never said (but is nonetheless true) is, “rain doesn’t find the fetch quest items.” The majority of the puzzles in A Winding Path center around locating items that only become available after you’ve picked up the quest. You receive a button prompt to acquire items as you walk past them, but that prompt doesn’t appear if you’re not aware you need the item. I guess that’s like real life (I tend to let random objects lie until I’m told said objects are missing), but it means a lot of backtracking. And because your stick figure only moves at one speed, you’ll spend a decent portion of the game getting there; and, in some cases, remembering how to get there.

But maybe that’s good considering the game’s runtime. And is a purposeful walk ever time wasted (especially when it apparently prompts pseudo-journalists such as myself to write as if they’re creating motivational coffee mugs for an Etsy store)? The backtracking also assists with the collection of hidden dew drops. These aren’t required to finish the game, but they will incentivize completionists to take a little more time exploring or to dig into a second playthrough.

They also get you hats!

With hardly any instruction or hints, there may be times when the path forward is not very clear. Remain calm. Talk to people. Return to the areas you’ve already visited. None of the puzzles in this are so oblique that you need a walkthrough or pure luck to find them. When I was stuck somewhat early in the game, I found that simply walking back to a building I couldn’t previously enter was all I needed to do.

As for whether you can remain calm during the skill-based games, I don’t know. One such “puzzle” requires you to hit moving targets to beat the local archery record. That’s 9 out of 10. OK, but you’re also told there’s a special prize if you get 10 out of 10. Calm or not, I’m too impatient to be a completionist, it seems.

Even these skill games fit in with the general vibe of A Winding Path. Keep things simple, talk to people, explore, and have some fun by challenging yourself. There are problems out there, but we can take care of them if we work together. Is that true anymore in real life? It sure doesn’t seem like it.

But I do know the important thing is to remain calm.

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Very simply put, Lone McLonegan is a point-and-click adventure game. You’ll walk around to ask questions, collect/interact with some objects, and solve some puzzles to reach your goal. That goal is, from a 30,000 foot view, to regain your title as the most wanted outlaw in the land. You just got demoted to number two, and you’re a bit salty about that.

Beginning by casting a critical eye to the graphics, I’m pleased to report the game provides a good visual experience. The overall look is a cross between a cartoon and a pop-up book. Considering the nature of the game, this is an appropriate path. Lone McLonegan is a bit on the clever side with a dash of silliness thrown in for good measure.

The game doesn’t take itself too seriously, and even includes a little fourth-wall-breaking humor. To go along with the visuals, the background music is what might be called cliché western with fiddles and banjos. Again, no worries here because the music is well done and fits the lighthearted feel of the game.

The controls are pretty simple, as there isn’t much to do except move the cursor and press a button to interact with something. There is an additional feature where a button press will toggle between looking at something, grabbing something, talking to someone, or kicking something (that last one is more handy than you might think).

When you engage NPCs in conversation, you get the standard choice of responses one expects from this kind of game. Some of the responses you can select may cut off certain paths of action, but don’t worry, you can always re-engage the NPC and get the same set of questions all over again. This feature is actually very handy as it lets you explore every type of option open to you. I hear you asking, “What’s so special about that? Why is that handy?” I’m glad you asked, because it brings us to the other side of the review coin.

This game has a weakness that revolves around the puzzles and game progress. The first tasks you complete in the game involve taking a stagecoach to town so you can rob the bank. Along the way, the stagecoach experiences some technical difficulty—its wheel fell off and the driver is stuck under the coach (you know, just another Monday morning commute to work). You have to walk the rest of the way into town, meet the mechanic, and secure help for the stagecoach driver. After securing assurance of help, surprise—nothing happens about the wheel (again, like real life car trouble). Instead of getting to finish what you started, the game shifts gears to the bank job, but there is no segue to let you know this is what’s going on.

Likewise, the puzzles can be a bit esoteric. This is where the NPC dialogue reset becomes very handy. You can, and will need to, explore almost every option from every NPC to connect all the dots to figure out what you need to do and then do what needs to be done.

Clear as mud? Once you settle into the mode of exploring everything and going back and forth several times between locations and NPCs to collect items and information, the puzzles become a bit clearer. It takes some extra time, but it is not a drag. It would probably be a bit faster and less likely to be frustrating on another platform (a PC with mouse control, maybe), but how quickly do you want your game to be over, really?

Lone McLonegan: A Western Adventure does a good job of not taking itself too seriously while at times acknowledging it’s a game. It isn’t the best fit for the Nintendo Switch format, and it could use a little polishing with the puzzles and story progress, but it’s still a hoot. All things considered, $9.99 is a good deal.

By the way, say “Hi” to the dark stranger in the doorway of the general store for me, will you?

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