Arcade Typing Games 'OUTSHINE' Redefines the Keyboard Warrior November 3rd!

Mons, Belgium, October 12, 2022 — Developer Fishing Cactus and Publisher Plug In Digital have announced fast-paced arcade typing game Outshine will launch for PC via Steam on October 3. Glide across the keyboard and use words to trounce enemies, topple bosses, and enact your vengeance. Master the keys and use Hue’s powers wisely to accumulate points, multipliers, and a coveted place on the leaderboard.

In Outshine, players dash across virtual highways as a glowing humanoid named Hue on a quest to dismantle the Shards and their cruel experiments. Dodge traps and incoming attacks while monitoring your environment for new words to type. Input keys swiftly and precisely to unlock special moves, like the ability to unleash lightning bolts onto foes.

Customize the experience with modifiers like auto-pilot, infinite abilities, and mirror words and replay runs with new rules. Type to the top with a variety of key layouts: Qwerty, Azerty, Qwertz, Dvorak, Colemak, BÉPO, and more are supported. From menus to combat, Outshine can be enjoyed with just a keyboard - no mice necessary!

Key Features

●     Enjoy breakneck arcade-stylized typing gameplay with just your keyboard

●     Plug into a journey of retribution set in a digitized universe

●     Improve your input speed to decimate enemies, collect points, and climb the leaderboard

●     Bolt across 18 visually dynamic levels spread across three virtual worlds

●     Master new keyboard layouts or customize the experience with modifiers

●     Explore accessibility features like Open Dyslexic Font and Colorblind Mode

●     Experience the game with English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish text localizations

●     Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Polish text support is on the way!

Outshine launches for PC via Steam on November 3rd. To keep up to date with the latest information on the title, please like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to our YouTube channel, join our Discord, visit our website, and wishlist the game on Steam.

Fishing Cactus is an independent game developer based in Mons, Belgium. The company strives to showcase that original game ideas can thrive in a nation without many studios. Fishing Cactus is the creator behind the award-winning, positively received typing game Epistory - Typing Chronicles, an atmospheric adventure folded in an origami world. For more information on the developer and its portfolio, please visit http://www.fishingcactus.com/

About Plug In Digital

Plug In Digital is one of the world’s largest independent video game distributors and helps studios and publishers distribute their games worldwide on PC, cloud, console and mobile platforms. Plug In Digital supports companies like Bandai Namco, Paradox Interactive, Konami, Focus Home Interactive, Raw Fury, Curve Digital, and Nacon, and is a key partner in indie success stories like Dead Cells, Human Fall Flat, and Ghost of a Tale. For more information, please visit www.plugindigital.com

Article by: Susan N.

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Ary and the Secret of Seasons - Switch Review

Ary and the Secret of Seasons by developers eXiin, Fishing Cactus and publisher Modus Games—Nintendo Switch review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Starting off in a rather peaceful time, Ary, daughter to the Guardian of Winter, aims to set out on a journey to find out what happened to her brother who has been missing for several weeks. Told to stay put and nor do anything rash, obviously our protagonist is going to do anything but. Stealing her brother’s clothes, cutting her hair and “borrowing” her father’s Orb of Winter, Ary soon finds herself on a much greater journey as the balance of the four realms are thrown out of whack.

Like A Knight’s Quest last year, Ary and the Secret of Seasons finds itself in a bit of a comfortable “niche” spot where it manages to both evoke those nostalgic adventure days on the Nintendo 64 while still bringing modern day quality of life aspects to the journey. Having most of the core mechanics from the beginning, Ary can run, jump, climb, and swim if neebe. As any good adventure title goes, as time moves on new abilities come into play through items such as double jumping, being able to dive under the water, pull large objects along for the ride and climb up the vines to the top of a wall or platform.

Adding a bit more flair like in Seasons After Fall, Ary will be able to start affecting the environment with the powers of Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer. Integrated into the plotline, the four regions that make up this land are out of whack as the eternal climates have been changed by corrupted crystals turning summer into winter, winter into summer, spring to fall, and fall to spring. To cross through these, Ary will have to create seasoned bubbles that can melt ice, wilt vines or drain water to move across to her location.

For the most part, all of these mechanics work fairly well on their own but unfortunately when you start to mix and match a few of these together things don’t always jive as well as I would have liked. Climbing up vines for example sometimes don’t let you reach the ledge and pull yourself up instead needing you to jump off and then somehow jump back up to the platform. In other cases you have to find a way in order to get several seasonable bubbles to “play nice” with one another. Unfortunately it was more often than not a chore and getting lucky in something working than actual skill. In the simplest of terms, often it was possible to have done something right off the bat but because of how the sphere formed it led you to try a ton of different ideas instead and in the end, you just wind up doing the very first thing you tried and it worked just ‘cause.

In these cases, Ary’s adventure could have used a bit more polish as separately, using just one seasonal sphere works just fine, the platforming for the most part works fine until you bring vines into the mix as there’s no real mechanic to jump off of them and the combat? It’s simple but it works fine. Throughout the world, Ary is going to have to defend herself and she can do so with coffee cups, wooden or mechanical swords, sticks and a variety of other objects for flavour. The weapons themselves didn’t really seem to do much of a difference so a wooden spoon was an obviously legitimate choice when fighting hyenas that have invaded the lands.

Like a lot of other adventures, Ary’s is not one of accumulating experience points and leveling up. Instead, there is a sensei that can teach Ary new abilities such as being able to cause more damage, being more agile while in combat, do more damage while parrying a blow and a few other little things. The main issue with this is that it costs money, and money, can only be found in chests so when you are only getting 13 to 56 coins, it’s going to take a while to be able to buy these training sessions especially when the cheapest is 200 coins and then jumps up to 400. Having enemies drop a bit as they respawn could have really helped in this department especially since the large chests were rare and sometimes? You could even get a big fat “0” coins in a chest. Already rare enough to find, giving me nothing really irked me especially with how hard it was to get to.

The adventure isn’t all about how well it works though. While yes, you’ll be spending your time running, jumping, climbing, and changing the broken seasons around, this is still the journey about family and not giving up on one that was lost. Even with the world thrown out of whack and her brother missing, the narrative is still light and fun with plenty of nonsense to make one smile which helps ease a bit of the more mechanical issues that Ary has while going through the trials to basically save the world.

Now unfortunately, there are currently loads of glitches with Ary's adventure from parrying not working to glitching through doors, walls and other things making you need to reload the title over and over again. While I could never figure out why the parrying would come and go, at least you could dodge in the meantime. As for the other? It could be brutal as the cost of progress was annoying especially since, and the last major issue is this, even if you've saved, it doesn't mean everything you've done has saved. Often it would be close enough but you would have to do it all over again.

Summary

So overall, while Ary and the Secret of Seasons does need some patches to fix some rather large issues on the Switch, the adventure itself is light and fun even if it doesn't really do anything new. This isn’t exactly a bad thing as what it sets out to do it does well, but, until it gets patched be warned that you may have to do the same thing a few times over.

Score: 7.5 / 10

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Algo Bot - PC Review

If you're a part of the admittedly small group of people that is attracted to the idea of a "programming-puzzle" game, leave your expectations at the door. All done? Good, let us proceed.

AlgoBot is a charming and quirky puzzle game that puts you in control of a fairly basic robotic AI in charge of menial tasks related to ship labour. All of the humans are frozen for deep-space transport, and it is your job to… essentially fix the problems that you created to begin with. It's not much of a story, but it is a basic premise to get you started, and it's generic enough to let you fill in as much as you need to tackle the scores of puzzles that are to be arrayed before you.

While the idea is that you solve these problems with 'programming', the reality is that you aren't truly programming anything. Imagine playing through a level of Mario Bros where you have to put all of your button-presses in at the beginning of the level, then hit play and watch it play out before your eyes. If you did it correctly, you advance… and if not, then you restart and adjust your command queue with no penalty. It's rather much the same premise as the old DOS and early-windows era game series; The Incredible Machine, if your hand was stuck to a certain track.

The difficulty is easy if you're a procedural-minded person, and fair if you're just a puzzle nut, with added complexity and maneuvers thrown in just when you feel like you've attained 'mastery' with the last command put in. The commands are varied to let you do things like advance forward, turn 90 degrees, turn 180 degrees, press a button, pick something up, drop something, Wrapping this all up into a visual package is a fairly simple UI. It doesn't need to be complex, and it's all done in a way that uses images instead of words to transcend language-barriers.

The music and sound effects are spot-on, but for a puzzle game, that really doesn't really say all that much, and they're both fairly forgettable… but we all have different music preferences, and we all have different things that help put us in the puzzlin' mindset.

Now what isn't forgettable about this game isn't the story, or the gameplay, or even the music. No, it's the dialogue. The narrator/guide of the story, a smarmy robot that goes by PAL. PAL has a dry sarcasm that took me off guard when I first played, and I enjoyed every single interaction with the pest, even when he was telling me how I had messed up my command-queue.

In short, this is a fun game, and it's easily worth what they're asking for it. Just don't expect any programming.

Game Information

Platform:
PC
Developer(s):
Fishing Cactus
Publisher(s):
Fishing Cactus
Plug in Digital
Genre(s):
Puzzle
Programming
Mode(s):
Single Player
Other Platform(s):
NA

Source:
Provided by Publisher

Article by Marc H.

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Algo-Bot Kickstarter info

Logic/puzzle game Algo-Bot has been rolled out to Kickstarter by development team Fishing Cactus. You can go directly to the Kickstarter here if you are curious about it. Here is a bit more about the upcoming title.

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