I played a couple of these tonight.
Firstly, I tried the game The Count of Monte Carlo.
This is a cute black jack game where you have to bankrupt a series of dealers. The music is not bad and black jack is fun for a while. Each dealer is meant to have a strategy, reading the comments on itch will reveal that the first dealer, Cheddarousse, will not hit if he is above 12. Playing the second dealer, a cowboy, will over draw and bust when in the high teens. The third, a vampire, will slowly raise the minimum bet (this was the best round). The forth, a gorgon named mercedes, can split their first pair regardless of the cards.
The player can also buy upgrades between rounds, but like Cheddarousse’s strategy, they are unclear and required extra reading to understand. The upgrades are also linear, you have to buy one to reveal the next.
Overall the game is cool but it just becomes black jack with house rules after a while. It’s a pain to get a dealer down to 100 chips and then suddenly have a losing streak which puts you back where you started. I think there are references to the Count of Monte Cristo but they all flew over my head.
Secondly, I tried the game NO THING.
I’ve seen this game on the Nintendo Switch eShop and often got it confused with 2064 R.O.M. NO THING is an endless runner where a text to speech voice will spout some nonsense you cant listen to because you have to be hyper focused to not fall off the platforms. The music sounds like someone trying to imitate a Yazoo cover band.
I tried to stick around for 3 levels but only made it to 90%ing the second one. This game is hard and it’s not very fun to play, all you do is turn left or right as the camera marches forward. In fact it’s so hard that they make it slightly easier if you die. This is done by reducing the amount of turns you must make. which means you just have to keep playing a level over and over until your skill level aligns with the difficulty.
Overall its a very strange combination of elements in an interesting looking game, but it doesn’t work for me. I think I’d like it more if the levels didn’t loop and the controls were more responsive.