Game: Densen Suzume
Developer: yuyyai
Where I found it: X

This game is about taking pictures of birds that land on power lines. You have three pictures total initially, and the more birds you capture in each picture, the more points you gain. There are 12 stages and each stage requires more points to clear. It takes a few seconds for exposure to fully happen, so you have to hold down the button in the same position and hope the birds don't leave while that's happening, once that time is over the picture is taken and the birds fly away as a result, but more come back soon after. There's no time limit for each round, just the number of pictures you can take as a resource. Between levels you choose one of three upgrades, which generally give you more points in various different conditions, though some upgrades add power lines, alter the number of birds that appear, etc. In between rounds you can also buy fixed upgrades, the first one I bought was decreasing the exposure time, when you max this it makes taking a picture instant, which makes everything easier.

I enjoyed this game a lot, I would definitely classify it as a high quality game just waiting to be discovered. There are multiple reasons for this, let's go through them one by one. First, it's a well-scoped game, it's both simple to make and simple to expand with new gameplay. The scoring system is easy to grasp along with all upgrades, and more importantly, I can imagine a Balatro-like scoring system here that would fit perfectly, although other scoring designs would also be easy to hook in. This flexibility, a design that is both good but also open to expansion, is the kind of idea that is most valuable. Kenta Cho's Knight vs. Pawns also had this property, which is why I was able to take it and transform it into something else that worked somewhat well.

Second, the main mechanic is "rectangular AoE attack," it's capturing objects within a rectangle that you can place with your mouse. This mechanic feels good in the context of an action-based game, but it also feels good outside it, because the fundamental action of "encapsulating objects within a border" is some kind of instinctual drive in humans. I personally like it because one of my favorite skills of all time is Elementor's Windfield from FlyFF, which is a long-range targeted rectangular AoE that has a chance to slow enemies it hits, you can then use it to engage in hit-and-run AoE levelling, which means going to high-level areas, hitting enemies with it, and having them never reach you because they're all permanently slowed, if you ever make a pathing mistake though you die instantly and lose XP because to make this worth it you have to go to really high-level zones and kite like 50 monsters at once, it's pretty fun and I spent a good portion of my youth doing this exclusively, so I guess I have a soft spot for similar mechanics in other games, however they appear. A little different one that this reminds me of can be seen in this tweet:

Even though this is a very different game, it feeds off the same instinctual drive and is thus the same idea of "encapsulating objects within a border." This one is also similar to an alternative SNKRX design I was thinking about earlier this year I think, of using the snake to capture enemies within the loop you closed, but I never got around to actually making it.

Third, and the most important one, it gave me a game idea. I got a pretty clear picture of a game I could make based off this one, and that already makes this little experiment worth it on the first day. It is perhaps true then that there are lots of good designs just waiting to be discovered out there... Lots of them reach me via Japanese twitter interestingly. Either way, I liked Densen Suzume by yuyyai.