Bipedal Studios Game Collection — The Popgeeks Review

Bipedal Studios, a game development team from Buenos Aires, has produced several puzzle games for retro consoles — and this month, they’re bringing them all to physical carts at once. The Bipedal Studios Game Collection consists of six games across three systems, but don’t feel overwhelmed. This evening, we’ll be reviewing them all.

First up is Anctrayal for Game Boy and Return To Anctrayal for NES. This is a pretty fast-paced puzzler that combines the block-pushing mechanics of Sokoban with the relentless pace of Snake. You are placed into a room with multiple boxes, and after being given a couple seconds to take in the layout, you’re tasked with pushing them all into their proper holes. This is easier said than done because your multi-segmented character never stops moving! You can only turn at 90-degree angles, and if you run into a wall or any other obstacle, you must start the whole level over. To make matters worse — you guessed it — you’ll gain another segment with each block you correctly place, and eventually you’ll become your own worst enemy.

You have to think quickly to play Anctrayal, and you WILL have to replay each room several times. Some of the later levels contain paths so narrow that there’s really only one solution, and you’re unlikely to get it on your first try. The Game Boy original contains just twelve levels, but each of them will take you some time to complete.

Return To Anctrayal is more of the same, only in color, on a different console and slightly bigger. We don’t just mean the screen size: every object in the game is now 16 by 16 pixels instead of 8 by 8. This is due to the NES’ own limitations…since it can only display eight sprites horizontally (without flickering issues), a snake made of sprites wouldn’t work. Every object in the game is instead a background tile, and since the NES can only separate color by 16 pixel squares…that’s why it’s so big. However it’s not a hindrance…the game plays the same.

The NES Anctrayal is either shorter or longer than the Game Boy Anctrayal depending on how you look at it. It has just ten original levels compared to the Game Boy’s twelve, but after completing the levels once, you get a false ending and the stages repeat at a quicker pace, a la Ghosts and Goblins….putting the actual number at 20.

If Anctrayal is too frenetic for you, perhaps the next game on the list, R-G-Bleek, would be more your speed. You play as a tiny creature who lives in a CRT monitor and has to arrange red, green and blue pixels in a specific order. If such a being existed in the real world, he’d have to do this sixty times a second, but in this game, he can take his time.

On each stage, you are given a pile of randomly arranged RGB squares and must rearrange them under their specific categories, indicated at the top of the screen, to advance. Gameplay is a bit like Wario’s Woods mixed with a sliding block puzzle or a Rubik’s Cube. Bleek can only move one block at a time, he can only move a block he is next to, and he can only move them vertically one square — and then he has to get out of the way or the block will fall on top of him! It’s slow going, but you can work at your own pace. The sense of constant urgency in Anctrayal is completely absent here — there is no time limit and no blocks are added to the stage. As you progress, though, each stage will have more blocks in it.

The last — and at the same time most plentiful — offering is Galacard. The bundle gives you three different versions of it: Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance. Unlike the two versions of Anctrayal, all three Galacards are the same game, so the one you choose is really up to personal retro handheld preference. However, if all Game Boys are the same to you, then go with the GBA version — it has some extra modes the other two don’t, and the music is nicer.

Galacard is a card game in which you’re the lone Earthling sitting at a table populated by five aliens. You each have a hand of six cards, with every card bearing one single-digit number and one of four shapes. Each game is six rounds long, and on each round one player lays a card down from their hand. The other players can’t see what number is on the card, but they can see the shape.

Once every other player lays down their card, the one with the highest number — that matches the first shape — is the winner. That would make the strategy pretty simple, were it not for one curveball: the Power Card.

The Power Card rests in the middle of the table and has one of the four shapes on it. But if you have the highest number with the Power Card shape, that number supersedes the other in importance. The strategy then becomes: do I play my highest-number card for the round’s shape, or do I play the Power Card shape?

I found it pretty difficult to win a game of Galacard, even when the required number of rounds to win was set at 1. It seemed like every time I had a high number for the round’s shape, someone else would play the Power Card shape. And when I did play the Power Card shape, some other alien always played a higher number than me.

The 8-bit Galacards are just the vanilla game, but the 16-bit Galacard Advance can be played two other ways: Deluxe Mode, in which the last starting player’s shape becomes the Power Card shape for the next round, and Advance Mode, in which the Power Card shape changes constantly. Deluxe Mode is the best way to play, I feel — the changing Power Cards add a bit of unpredictability (and fairness). I excelled the most at Advance Mode, but that’s because it’s too easy to stop the Power Card roulette on the shape you want to play.

Yet I still kept losing…apparently if you win five hands, and you set your goal to winning ONE, you still lose??

The Bipedal Studios Game Collection contains a good variety of puzzlers in one package. Each of them are totally different and scratch separate forms of the puzzle-game itch. Want something short and reflex-demanding? Play Anctrayal. Want to take your time instead? Pick R-G-Bleek. Need something in the middle? Go with Galacard. But you can’t go wrong with any of them.

The Kickstarter campaign, which will be active until April 6, can be found at this link.