Screenshot Saturday Sundays: awesome axe-work, peaceful precipitation, and sentient seeds

Screenshot Saturday! A day for celebrating the unfinished; the great promise of “maybe.” In other words, a Twitter tag for developers to give a glimpse of their works in progress, and for me to pick a few that look neat. Will they be neat games one day? Hopefully! But even if not, we can appreciate what they are now, which is excellent screenshots. (I know they're gifs, but alliteration is very important.) This week: a creative way to hit a faraway switch, a gentle afternoon against a rainy windowpane, and the secret life of the forest floor.

Firstly, here’s some fancy weapon usage from Totem.

Very ax-essible.

Totem is an action-adventure RPG that plans to come to Kickstarter “soon,” according to its website. Unfortunately, our hero’s ability to shapeshift isn’t quite as good as it sounds, because it “only appears…when the natural world is in grave danger.” The good news is that there’s still butterflies around, and they even match her hair neatly.

Next, some top-notch window staring courtesy of Embracelet:

I can’t tell if I like this better as melancholy or just chill, but either is good. Possibly it’s just raining because Embracelet is set in Northern Norway, which seems like a place that has bad weather. Per the developers' website, the game is planned to release in 2020, and is “a third person puzzle adventure game about family, friendship, love and loss.” Ah. So melancholy.

Finally, we zoom in on some underfoot adventures in Seedlings:

The game’s made of photography, which explains that satisfying moss realism. I’m also a huge fan of how clean that “pop!” is. There’s a demo letting you try out solving puzzles and moving through the forest as these sentient plant babies available on itch.io.

Bonus this week is some assets created for a Girls Make Games summer camp. They seem like visionary future game designers if you ask me.