Some of the other things on our minds when we weren’t doing everything else
ANTHOLOGY
Super Rare Mixtape: Horror Edition bit.ly/deadtape Horror games are ten a penny on Steam and particularly Itch, so during a mid-October store trawl it’s probably harder to find something that doesn’t Apocryphauna go bump in the night. It’s a rare treat, then, to find a properly curated selection of scares in the form of Super Rare’s latest mixtape, which includes 30 hand-picked indie games and eight demos (with extras such as developer interviews, OSTs and concept-art galleries), all contained within a cassetteshaped USB drive. Each of the games we’ve sampled so far is at least unusual and at best genuinely worth your while. Card-collecting adventure offers an affecting mix of earnestness and humour, while the seemingly wholesome Bonnie’s Bakery isn’t quite as out of place among this haunting company as it initially appears.
VIDEO
Sumo Rewind Pt. 2 – OutRun 2006: Coast2Coast bit.ly/blueskiesforever Sumo Digital is celebrating its 20th anniversary by taking a series of trips down memory lane, inviting staff to play through its back catalogue. Naturally, we’re drawn to the studio’s finest hour: the arcade port that is officially the 95th best game of Edge’s lifetime. We’d welcome a deeper dive, but this short video captures what makes it so special. In making you “unquestionably the fastest thing on the road”, Coast2Coast transforms you into a veritable force of nature – albeit one brought down to earth by your partner’s demands in the gleefully silly Heart Attack mode.
WEB GAME
Fix Your Mother’s Printer bit.ly/turnitoffandonagain We’ve all been there: a relative is experiencing computer issues, and you’re the closest thing they have to free tech support. Geoffrey Golden’s witty browser-based visual novel is essentially a playable Zoom call, capturing the exasperation of guiding a bewildered parent through the process of resolving a technical problem (preventing the protagonist’s mother from printing an important document in this instance). As you proffer solutions, you’ll see the family dog appear in the frame, while responding to personal questions that perhaps say more about your own state of mind than the character you’re playing. By the affecting conclusion, you might be tempted to give your own mum a bell (while looking up PC World’s number just in case she has
