In my recent exploring of itch.io (something that I personally had written off as a site for sharing half-baked, hardly started projects— a sentiment I regret ever having heavily now), I found a few games that have interesting mechanics or premises that I wanna talk about. Firstly, one of my favorite games of the bunch:
Karlson (made by DaniDev)
Karlson is a first-person movement shooter that centers around having the fastest time to complete a level. While it does not have much in the way of content (though there is a full version coming out on Steam at some point), it does excel by the means of which it gives the player the options for movement. The frenetic gameplay is bolstered by a few of the additional mechanics which break the trend of most movement shooters— namely in that of momentum and damage.
Momentum is gained by running and performing parkour-based tricks— sliding down slopes, wall-running, and the likes. Damage is taken specifically from enemy bullets— the player does not take any damage from their own shots or falling. These mechanics can be combined to perform advance movement tactics such as shooting a grenade launcher shot at your feet in order to propel yourself to a part of the map much further off. This momentum can be translated to jumping momentum that (roughly) halves your speed but can still be used to get a boost across the environment— making this game much more of a competitive speed game, such as SEUM or Hot Lava.
Blake McKinnon Productions (Blake McKinnon)
Blake McKinnon Productions is (as the name says) a single person developer that creates games in a PS1 graphic style. Some of these projects include Dead County, Slay the Bells, and Dungeon of Exile— a Resident Evil-like, a first person horror game, and a first person Diablo-like respectively. They all take aspects of these individual inspirations (the fixed camera from Resident Evil, the looting and combat from Diablo, and the pursuer AI present across many of these games) and improves upon them greatly: the camera angles present in Dead County improve upon the angles found in Resident Evil in that they are never in a position in which you cannot see everything that you need to see (such as precious items on the ground), the looting aspect from Diablo is improved in Dungeon of Exile in that they are more compact but refined (i.e. loot in DoE is in a smaller pool that is more balanced), and the Slay the Bells AI is refined to envy that of the pursuer AI found in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis.
C. B. Irby 