Nefarious Plans, 1920’s Glam, and Teenage Flimflam

Dangerous High School Girls is a highly unusual game; set in a rather forbidding girl's high school in the 1920s, you lead a team of girls investigating a series of accidents, and surviving the often-nasty hazing you get from other girls. It is, thus, a story-driven game, but the actual gameplay is almost boardgame like; indeed, the graphics are purposefully designed to look like a vintage game board, and overcoming opponents doesn't rely on combat, but instead on a series of minigames that represent, in some sense, fibbing, taunting, exposing secrets, and making power plays.

Each girl has four attributes –- glamor, rebellion, savvy and popularity -- and each helps with certain techniques to expose the town's corruption "like layers of spoiled paint hidden under fresh."

The storyline guides your exploration, and most events trigger a confrontation –- your girl's skills against her opponent's. Your girl will snag up to three allies among her classmates, each with a different distribution of stats. When you're in a confrontation, you'll select the appropriate girl to deal with the situation, advancing the story if you win. If one of your girls is defeated, though, she's retired from your party for a fixed period of time. In a particularly nasty twist, the gals can pick up "boyfriends," which essentially take the hit for the young lady so that she can stay in the party if she's defeated.

Amoeba Shmup

Singularis is a sort of shmup for amoebas. You play Proto, a protozoan with the unlikely ambition of becoming the most powerful being in the universe. Initially, you can do nothing more than move (which, in the default control scheme, you do by choosing direction with the mouse and pressing the Up arrow to move forward, or the Back arrow to move back). Later on, you gain additional abilities, including cilia to let you row yourself forward more quickly, and -- I did call it a shmup -- a gun. Or if you prefer, the ability to shoot destructive viruses at enemies.

Insect Warrior Tactics

Remember a few years ago when there was a spate of animated movies featuring bugs? There's a reason for that, actually; it's fairly easy to animate chitonous creatures in 3D, since the body sections are rigid. And it's also fairly easy even for an indie developer to use 3D, if what they're animating are bugs. Which no doubt was one of the reasons Wahoo/NinjaBee chose insects for the heroes of this title. The choice is a fortuitous one, though, since it lends itself to the developers' light humorous touch -- which was very evident in their earlier (and excellent) tycoon game, Outpost Kaloki.