Onion Time: In which I talk about my favorite indie publisher
I’m a simple man.
I have two games on my phone. If my cousin asks what I got she has two options:
Downwell and Million Onion Hotel. I can talk at length about the former but for now let me talk a bit about the latter.
Embed in the video above you’ll find all you really need to know about Million Onion. It’s a match game where you race against the clock to rack up points. It’s great. You see some cutscenes in between stages a la Pac-Man, and every so often you’re met with a boss fight where you send legions of armored onions to attack said boss until they’re wilted beyond recognition. It’s one of my favorite games to play, but I’d be lying to you if I said that I play this game everywhere. In fact there’s really one place I play Million Onion, and you’ll probably be grossed out but you deserve the truth.
Million Onion is a bathroom game.
Japan’s already ahead of the curve on the bathroom game market, but in our solitary ways we tend to treat toilet time as a moment of reflection….A short period where we can contemplate our existence and pour focus on the day ahead.
Don’t be a prude now, we know what you do in the bathroom. You look on your phone! You check twitter. You send that text, and before you know it you’re on your way out…I hope you washed your hands because trust me staying clean and healthy is mucho importante in these trying times. I don’t have great cell service at a particular texmex place in my area so my only choice is to play games…it’s on brand though if you ask me.
Million Onion Hotel is one of the best games on your phone today, and you’ll find more games like it if you head on over to publisher Onion Games’ website.
Today dear reader I want to talk about three games in their catalog, so without further ado let’s get on with the show. . . .
MON AMOUR
As of writing Mon Amour is Onion’s latest project, and it seems it’s all been slowly creeping up to this boiling point of a game. You can call it a flappy bird clone, but in reality it’s a spiritual sequel to a minigame in Love De Lic and AsciSoft’s seminal cult RPG “MOON”.
The writing’s kind of on the wall here just from watching the trailer. You play as a little fella who’s set to be wed to the princess of some…land I guess. The entire procession gets kidnapped, and you have to float and smooch your way back to her, all while rescuing the guests of the wedding. In a lot of ways this game could be a critique of rampant infidelity poisoning the sanctity of marriage, because every ten or so levels you unlock a brief cutscene in which the protagonist is implied to be engaging in sexual intercourse with the rescued girls (and guys). We love a bisexual cheater.
You can purchase Mon Amour for Switch and PC for less than a meal at McDonalds, so there’s no real reason not to play it. It’s good fun.
DANDY DUNGEON
In Onion Games’ “beefiest” title yet you play as the subtitular Yamada- a burnt out corporate checker working for a king that has all the pieces. In search of a better life you quit your soul sucking game dev job and decide to go indie. You can really see the writers projecting their feelings into this game, and it makes it all the more beautiful. It’s a dungeon crawling…puzzle game (?) in which you gear up, trek through the dungeons in short bursts, and get loot. Originally a mobile game Dandy Dungeon’s PC and Switch ports still hold some of that pick up and play flavor, so if you got it then opting out of the PC version and going for Switch is the way to go- though I suppose you can get the same “feel” by playing DD in a small window while you queue up in a multiplayer game or something.
FFXIV x Dandy Dungeon collaboration coming soon?
MOON: REMIX RPG ADVENTURE
Here’s the big one.
.
.
.
2020- SUMMER
The pandemic took a toll on all of us.
I had just moved into my apartment when all of this went down. I had nothing in terms of food so I went to the grocery store to shop and there was only organic and vegan food. I heard an older woman murmur something along the lines of “This is what socialism looks like” while I went through what little bread options they had.
I didn’t eat meat for a while. Not because it wasn’t there, but because I didn’t want to purchase what a family would need instead. I punished myself for months.
Unfortunately for me I worked at that same grocery store, so day in and day out I would wake up, go to work, go home, spray my clothes with Lysol and go to sleep. In between were the usual chores like eating and bathing, but for a good while games stopped being “fun”. August rears it’s head and Moon finally comes out in English 23 years after its initial release in Japan. I was relatively excited for it. tim rogers did the localization (he also did the localization for Million Onion, Dandy Dungeon, and possibly Mon Amour) so I was interested in that more than anything. Aside from the script I was looking forward to seeing the game that inspired Undertale. People like to call games like Lisa, Omori, and Deltarune “Quirky Earthbound RPGs about depression” but there’s probably more Moon in those games than anything else.
You play as a little boy who gets sucked into a videogame he was playing before bedtime. You’re not the hero, but just an onlooker who walks around talking to folk, trying to make sense of everything. You soon learn that the hero of this RPG he was playing is in a sense, kind of a psychopath. He kills lowly monsters for EXP, barges into people’s homes raiding their dressers for “armor”, and is just generally a weird man.
What follows is story about love, compassion, and understanding. It’s the “Anti-RPG” for a reason, and I don’t want to tell you too much because a game like this is worth it’s weight in mystery. it’s available for Switch, PC, and PS4.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
2022- January
I never finished Moon.
I will finish it Soon.
