Review: Island of Falling Stars

A gameplay screenshot of Island of Falling Stars.

 As far as 3D creepypastas go, newcomer Goerge's marathon entry is pretty standard fare: it stars a defenceless Lyra recolour who wanders about her dreamscape and collects glowing rocks, only for things to get progressively worse as she does so. We've seen this before, of course, but does Island of Falling Stars live up to its comrades?

You know the drill.

Magic Hexagon


 As can be gathered from the game's announcement on Tumblr, Magic Hexagon is basically an open source clone of Super Hexagon with pony cutie marks, placing it under the "barely pony related" category. There's not really much to offer for feedback here without either essentially reviewing the original or commenting on the developer's taste in libraries/programming languages, although it would be nice to have some more variety when it comes to songs (the creator is looking for a musician though, so that might be resolved in the near future), along with pre-compiled OS X and Linux binaries in the near future.

 In case you're interested in contributing to the project or compiling it yourself, you can check out Magic Hexagon's GitHub repo at https://github.com/meh2481/magichexagon.
- Tuxxy

Luna's Letter


 Jach Marsdonpone (primarily known as the developer of No Guns in Canterlot and A World You Should Not Know, now a member of Silly Mare Games) decided to make his own entry for the marathon, and it basically came out as a more boring version of My Little Hang Glider. You float like some kind of really fat duck, touch colourful balls and fly past the occasional incoming projectile with your boost (the aforementioned floatiness prevents you from simply dodging them like in most games). Also, those pretty clouds? They constantly obscure your vision and the interface, rendering the latter almost utterly useless a lot of the time.

 So...yeah, it'd probably be for the best if you skipped this one. Jach's other games are much more entertaining (even if they aren't quite as pretty as this one, which I'd say is probably the most visually appealing game in the marathon), so why don't you try them out instead?
- Tuxxy

Demo: Lyra and Bon Bon Save the World

Lyra and Bon Bon Save the World

 The brainchild of Supertrentyguy, Lyra and Bon Bon Save the World is a fairly standard side-scrolling platformer/shooter with some absurdly huge jumps and mostly offscreen action, since spamming bullets on the first few levels will usually take out most enemies before you even see them. Still, with fixed controls and better level design this could make for a rather entertaining fangame, although I doubt it'd ever end up matching something like Megapony.

Celestia's Cake Golf Adventure in Space

Woo, cake.

 I was pleasantly surprised to hear that futzi01 would be participating in the MLGD marathon; this odd little game of interplanetary golf is probably one of his better recent creations (most of which were unfortunately a tad dull). It starts off well enough and introduces some interesting gameplay mechanics as it goes along, but suffers from a massive difficulty spike partway through the game that would make bring the chosen undead to his knees. This probably has something to do with the game's being created within several days and there not being too much time for playtesting, so it's still pretty impressive: just don't expect a superbly polished experience.

Battle Royale: Forward to the Past


 Xinef's main entry into the marathon also proves to be one of Silly Mare Games' first forays into multiplatform development; no longer will users of Unix-like operating systems have to run their games at abysmally low framerates. Even those of you who don't care about such things should still enjoy this fun little deathmatch game, especially since Xinef is planning on adding online multiplayer in a future update (whereas for now you'll have to either find someone to play with or exploit the AI's shortcomings).

 I'll probably review this once they add online multiplayer, but if you can find a friend to play it with I'd highly recommend giving Forward to the Past a shot.
- Tuxxy

Super Ethical Shipping Climax Demo

(Tumblr)

 Billing itself as a SFW-ish parody of shipping-centric visual novels, the Super Ethical Shipping Climax demo is an awkward jumble of borrowed vectors, annoying placeholder music and plenty of fourth wall-breaking dialogue. This might sound bad, and from several perspectives it leaves a lot to be desired, but to be honest I rather enjoyed this weird little MLGD Marathon entry in spite of (or perhaps partially because of) its shortcomings. Perhaps that's what the developers intended in the first place?

 Since this is only a demo there are several missing endings and whatnot, although I hope they leave in several of the blank scenes in which the narrator laments their lack of a visual artist.
- Tuxxy