Screenshot Saturday Sundays: Ghost gutting, phantom friends, and sand dune skimming

Screenshot Saturday! A wee moment out of your weekend to look at what game developers are working on at the moment. It’s also Devtober, a challenge for developers to "focusing on building up good working habits, where you spend every single day of October working on a game." (I would argue that good working habits include breaks, and while consistency is good, so are days off. Still, it spoils us further for work-in-progress hashtags.) This week: a tiring afterlife battle, a ghosty new pal, and some quick-flying planetary exploration.

‘Tis the season for ghosts and ghouls, so let’s start with just that, courtesy of Grimm’s Hollow.

Grimm’s Hollow is an in-development freeware RPG “about reaping ghosts in the afterlife.” That does indeed sound like tiring work. You can keep up with Lavender’s adventures until the game’s as-yet-unscheduled release via the developer’s blog.

Friendlier ghosts are about too, at least in Shadow Of Aya:

According to their website, the game is a top-down RPG about “hope, loss, and what it takes to keep a promise,” and there’s a demo coming in December. It also features a very pretty…skull-mountain-volcano? I’m into it.

Finally, here’s a very satisfying video to shake off the spooky:

Exo One is a gravity manipulating, alien-planet-exploring adventure game coming to Steam “soon.” Pip wrote about it a few times, including after playing a demo at EGX Rezzed which she seems to have enjoyed quite a bit, including in ways that don’t easily come across in video format.

The trailer is decent as giving you an idea for how the worlds look and what you might see if you look over someone’s shoulder but it’s not really able to convey how the game feels and that’s where you find the real attraction. Y’see, the joy of it – at least when I played it – was in learning to read the terrain and working out what would give you speed boosts and exactly when to make your little spacecraft bear down on a slope to build momentum, then when to let go so it would use that momentum to zoom up an incline or perhaps into the air for you to turn it into a disc, skimming through clouds.

Bonus this week is another moment of satisfaction, this time via some enemy kiting: