#WeeklyGameMusic: Main Theme (To The Moon)


Returning back to indie games, this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic is the main theme from the narrative game, To The Moon, developed by Freebird Games. The music is composed by the main developer themselves, Kan R. Gao. It’s an oddly optimistic track for a game surrounding around a creepy, privacy-intruding technology.

To The Moon is an interactive story starring Dr. Eva Rosalene and Neil Watts handling a dying wish of an old man named Johnny Wyles. As the title implies, Johnny wants to go to the moon…or more accurately, wants to believe he went to the moon. Naturally, Eva and Neil’s memory-rewriting machine takes care of exactly that: they can adjust Johnny’s past memory to cause a chronological domino-effect of other memories to be adjusted with this new detail. When the duo asks why Johnny wants to go to the moon, though, he answers he doesn’t know. Faced with such ambiguous details, the two attempts to rummage through Johnny’s past to find what convinced him to go to the moon, and what they can do to change his (internal) history.

Gameplay-wise, To The Moon contains very little interactivity. One can explore in an RPG Maker world and talk to characters to learn more details about side characters (and Johnny’s wife). Collecting the right thing, or speaking to the right person continues the plot of the story. A very simple game with a move-at-your-own-pace story and no lose conditions.

To The Moon is available on Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android, PC, Mac, and Linux via Steam.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Turn Back (The Beginner’s Guide)


Note: this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic is a pretty big spoiler for the indie walking simulator, The Beginner’s Guide. This blog post itself will keep spoilers to a minimum, but if you want to listen to the track, proceed with caution. Besides, the game’s brilliant, so take this as an incentive to play it soon!

Turn Back, written and performed by Halina Heron, puts a neat bow to the deep story one walks through in The Beginner’s Guide. Everything Unlimited Ltd.’s follow-up to The Stanley Parable takes an unexpected direction: where as Stanley sets up a meta narrative commentary about games, The Beginner’s Guide is a commentary with no fourth wall to begin with. It’s a bold decision from the developers with a huge pay-off at the very end; an experience you don’t want to miss!

(Before getting into the game itself, I had trouble adding the rest of credits for this track anywhere else, so here it is: Turn Back is published by Ryan Roth, and its lyrics were written from both Halina and Davey Wreden himself.)

The Beginner’s Guide is a game where its gameplay is extremely easy to describe, but its narrative is much more complex than it first appears. It’s a classic, hour-long walking simulator where one explores the world through typical first-person controls. And indeed, the first level is a lightly edited copy of a map from Counter-Strike, as famed indie game developer and narrator of this game, Davey Wreden describes its history. According to Mr. Wreden, this remixed level is created by another experimental developer, Coda, and encourages the player to explore other games Coda has made. Aaand that’s about as far as I’m willing to introduce about the story.

The Beginner’s Guide is available on Steam for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Blue Chair (Cloudberry Kingdom)


Let’s get those blood pumping with this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic! Blue Chair, composed by Blind Digital, is one of the many fantastic themes composed for Pwnee Studios’ procedurally generated platformer game, Cloudberry Kingdom. The indie game’s extraordinary algorithm can generate both reasonable Super Mario-like stages, and Kaizo-level, controller-breaking ridiculousness.

Oh no! The evil king, Kobbler, has kidnapped the fair (…and sarcastic) Princess! And to add to the insult, he stole the infinite level generator orb as well! It’s up to a brave…tired…middle-aged hero named Bob to save her.

You know…

That same, bland, sexist plot again.

Obviously poking fun at the usual paper-thin Super Mario plot, Cloudberry Kingdom plays like the Nintendo classic, but with more focus on flow rather than precision. The platformer’s algorithm always calculates at least one plausible path, meaning a lot of the levels are generated with constant movement in mind. To further add variation to the play, the game provides many different control variations, including inclusion of double-jump, jetpacks, Sonic-like momentum-based movement, no-gravity, always-bouncing, etc.

Another innovation the game provides is actually having a demo-mode where an AI demonstrates how to complete a level. This is particularly impressive when one drastically ramps up the complexity of the game to generate levels that are absurdly difficult. One would think like Nintendo’s assist mode, this would help the player to understand the level better, but…

Cloudberry Kingdom is available on Windows via Steam, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and the Wii U

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#WeeklyGameMusic: AIN’T NOTHIN’ LIKE A FUNKY BEAT (Lethal League Blaze)


Need a little more funk this week? We’ve got you covered! This week’s #WeeklyGameMusic is from Team Reptile’s Lethal League Blaze. The highlight? AIN’T NOTHIN’ LIKE A FUNKY BEAT, composed by Hideki Naganuma, of Jet Set Radio fame. Definitely keep those ears peeled, because the moment you blink, you’l-

Lethal League Blaze is a fast-paced, innovative fighting game that’s shockingly easy-to-learn (even simpler than Super Smash Bros.!), yet hard to master. First, the iconic weapons each selectable cast member wields cannot be used to hit the other opponents directly. Instead, the objective is to hit a PONG-like anti-gravity ball into three (or less) other players like a baseball. Players who gets hit will lose health: when it reaches zero, it’s game-over.

But wait, there’s more! The move-set all characters share — strike, bunt, and throw — effectively acts as rock, paper, and scissors: useful for catching your opponents off-guard. Furthermore, each time the ball gets hit, it’s velocity increases. Meaning as time marches on, the ball will get faster, and the matches become less predictable. Lastly, every character has their own special, which spices up the way they hit the ball in unexpected ways. Utilizing all these tools effectively should help you overwhelm your opponents!

Lethal League Blaze is available on PC, Mac, and Linux via Steam. It’s also available for download and purchase on Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Finally, the game has quite a following, including competitive tourneys. For more info, I highly recommend checking out Akshon Esports’s primer on it.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Lone Survivor (Lone Survivor)


It’s been a couple of weeks now since you’ve locked down in your own apartment. How long can you go like this? To ease your mind, you turn on your favorite music collection, “#WeeklyGameMusic.” Superflat Games’ melancholic theme song for their game, Lone Survivor, plays. A fitting theme by composer and game designer, Jasper Byrne.

As you settle down, you think to yourself, where does it all begin? It started with a contagious infection. At first, it was just on the news. But you then hear a friend of a friend catch it. Then your neighbors. And now it’s just you. You, a lone man with a surgeon mask on at all times so as to not catch the virus. All of your friends, now violent monsters…

You snap yourself out. No! Focus on surviving through this terrifying apocalypse! What do I need to do? Well, obviously, you need to collect some food. With monsters infesting your neighborhood, that’ll mean stealthily crawling through every nook and cranny to find what limited resources you can find. Fortunately, you have a pistol to incapacitate the monsters. It’s not much, since you’re a bit short on bullets…and said monsters are probably your friends…and you’ll probably lose your sanity shooting them…but it should help.

Well, you have to start somewhere. Saving at the bed all day isn’t going to get you anywhere. Time to open the door, to the sanity-slipping outside world…

Lone Survivor is available on PC and Mac via Steam. It’s also downloadable on Playstation 3, 4, Vita, and Wii U.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Lovely City (Lovely Planet)


#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music. I’m excited to introduce to you all Lovely City, composed by one of my favorite composers, Calum Bowen. This absolutely jamming track is from the hectic (and Indian!) first-person action game, Lovely Planet.

Lovely Planet is a fast-paced first-person shooter and platformer where all red enemies needs to be eliminated before touching the goal pole. Despite the simple premise, cartoony world, and lack of story, the game is actually designed as a speed-running game. Much of the appeal of the game is optimizing your route to beat your prior–and the world’s–score.

Lovely Planet is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux via Steam.

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