Blame the title on the ten character minimum for topic titles. I know I intended to only review RPG's here, and nothing in this game is relevant to what we're doing, but it's a game I love and periodically return to, and I thought I'd give it a plug.
Website:
http://autofish.net/clysm/art/video_games/seiklus/Game Engine: Game Maker
Seiklus is a freeware platformer I first discovered on Home of the Underdogs (I'd link to it, but the original site is gone, and there are three different revivals of it, all in various stages of development.) This game apparently polarizes people; on one of his webpages, the developer quotes several bad reviews of Seiklus. I get the feeling he thinks it's funny. Anyway, the premise of the game is you are a little dude who has been separated from your little girlfriend by an asteroid, or something, and you have to find your way back to her (hey, there are worse premises. A plumber rescuing a princess, anyone?).
The focus of this game is on exploration ("seiklus" is an Estonian word that means "adventure"), and therefore, Seiklus has one very unique feature: you don't die. There are no monsters, no hit points, no battle . . . you get the idea. There are, however, little colored fuzzy things that you must collect. There are also "medallions" that you collect, some of which have no apparent purpose, while others are very useful, indeed (my favorite is the one that makes a fish follow you around in the water. Useless, but cute, much like me). There are also some things that will set you back a bit, and they can scare the crap out of you (well, startle you, really), but you still don't die.
Admittedly, there are places in this game that are
very frustrating, and there are times when you will repeat areas for various reasons, and I sometimes don't know how much of that is the player, and how much the game.
But patience and persistence will be rewarded. Some areas are fairly straightforward, and some require a good deal of hand-eye coordination. There are a couple of puzzle-y things, but it's really more about exploring than puzzle solving at the end of the day.
The graphics are hand-drawn and very simple. The character you play as is, like I said, a little dude. A glorified stick figure, if you will. And yet it all works. It's quite charming, in it's own way. There a few graphical hiccups that I noticed on my new computer (some of the graphics, especially animations, displayed with a black box around them that wasn't there on my old machine), and I don't know if it's that my graphics card is meant for Windows XP, and I have 2000, or if this is one of those games that just works better on old machines than new. The music is chip music from various composers, because the developer admires chip music and wanted to introduce people to it. Some of it gets annoying, but there are some areas where it sets the atmosphere very nicely.
To sum up, if exploring is one of your favorite parts of playing a game, you should give this a try. It's not going to appeal to everyone, but it's very enjoyable for those of us who can appreciate it.