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TFI Friday: 3 new indie games to discover this weekThe Nerve on her!
The Nerve on her!
I cannot promise I will keep to any kind of regular schedule on this, but I’m going to shoot for every fortnight. And I’ve got some fun ones to kick off with as well. A good varied spread. A buffet of sandwiches with different indie fillings for different appetites: fast-paced abstract runner gameNerve, atmospheric 2D action platformerOlija, and extremely chill clicky puzzle gameDown In Bermuda. Feast your eyes on them in action in the video below.
TFI Friday - These Fine Indies - Nerve | Olija | Down In BermudaWatch on YouTube
TFI Friday - These Fine Indies - Nerve | Olija | Down In Bermuda
Nerve
Nerve sort of feels like an angrier version ofThumper, if that were possible. It has a similar overall vibe, and the visuals are as impressively trippy and slightly frightening - a funky kaleidoscope of oppressive geometry.
Though, if you just read Thumper and are now well hyped for more rhythm violence, adjust your expectations a small bit. Nerve does have a pretty cool soundtrack, but it’s not woven into the game in the same way. Where the little beetle in Thumper was on a flat rail and you timed all your swerves and attacks to the pounding music, in Nerve you speeding along a cylindrical track that you can movearoundas you shoot along it. You have to memorise the hazards rather than feel the rhythm of them.
I have possibly made it sound tedious, but it’s not. Each track, which we will suppose is actually representative of a signal shooting along the nerves in a body, is about 30 seconds long if you do it right first time (which you may well do). Even if you keep biffing it (significantly more likely) you respawn almost instantly, and multiple repeated attemps won’t take you very long.
It’s a delicate balance, and you may find yourself veering into the ragequit pit every now and then, because Nerve will trick you. Obstacles will move, baiting the jittery to swerve and crash. Hence it is a test of memory as much as reflex. There are boss fights, too. These have caused me to consider that there may be e.g. nanscopic eye-scorpion robots in my blood - impossible, since I haven’t even had Bill Gates' vaccine yet!
Olija
This is possibly a bit cheaty, because you might well have heard of Olija already, given the fulsome praise that many have showered on it. This praise is not unwarranted. Skeleton Crew, a Japanese studio, have created an uncanny world of monsters and men that is a delight to harpoon your way through.
Down In Bermuda
And now for something completely different. Down In Bermuda is one of those games that is like being given a puzzle box, where you pull all the levers and make things happen, and then they happen in the expected way and you are very pleased.
The little man who got stranded in Down In Bermuda. He makes friends with a talking duck.
Sometimes this will be as easy as pulling the right lever. Sometimes you have to pull a bunch of levers or press some buttons in the right order. Sometimes you will have to chase all the bunnies in the grass back into their warrens. You will occasionally be stumped, but not for long. Every issue can be solved if you look around the island enough. It is lovely.
Also, on every island you will have to defeat a monster of some kind, typically in an incongruously violent way, which made me laugh. On the forest island, this was a giant spider. Turning the electricity on allowed the little man to put a plug in a fountain and zap that motherfucker. But it’s totally bloodless violence that represents some kind of universal justice that is still absolutely appropriate for children - like the woodsman in Little Red Riding Hood.
