Flash back

One of my favorite chiptune artists is Bill Kiley. I have no idea how I came across his work, but I must’ve been listening to his stuff for at least ten years at this point. My current method of exploring new music is to just keep a list of anything that strikes me as interesting in a notepad-ish app and listen to something from that list at almost-random when I take a shower. It’s probably not the best method, since the shower is loud and makes it hard for me to hear the music. It’s also not good for reminding me to listen to new music by musical acts I already like. Thanks go to past paste for using a Chrome extension that saved a bunch of tabs I had open when I switched to Firefox many years ago because it reminded me to listen to a Bill Kiley soundtrack album for two games: A Kitty Dream and The Valley Rule, both by a Flash game developer called Raiyumi.

Instead of just listening to the soundtrack(s?), I decided to just play the games. I clicked through the link to The Valley Rule on Raiyumi’s itch page, but because it’s so old, it still relies on the end-of-lifed Adobe Flash plugin. Too much hassle for me, I didn’t want to bother figuring out how to play it.

The other game, A Kitty Dream, is also a Flash game, but since it was hosted on Newgrounds, I was able to easily play it with their legacy player or whatever they call it.

A Kitty Dream is a chunky-pixeled 2D minivania where you are playing a Kitty who is having a Dream. You wake up in a bed and have to go around a humble map collecting power-ups which then let you reach other beds. Beds transport you to a dream within a dream where you face special challenges in order to obtain crystals. Get all three crystals and you win the game. Bish bash bosh. Those challenges range from some actually fun block puzzles to platforming/enemy-avoiding challenges.

The block puzzles are actually where I spent the most of my time, which in total came to less than an hour. Some of them require creative puzzle-solving and are probably what make this game worth playing in the final analysis. Platforming, on the other hand, was mostly unpleasant. It’s keyboard only, and I didn’t bother setting up keybindings with JoyToKey so that I could use a controller. The main awkwardness comes from your dash ability, which you can use to dash in any of the four cardinal directions, as long as you are pressing the arrow key in that direction. Within minutes of the start, the game demands you handle a combination double jump and directional dash to navigate its map and traps. It’s not particularly hard in any place, and the checkpoints are plentiful, if you remember to activate them, but it’s not particularly fun.

Some traps are quite obvious, such as rotating spikes patrolling a small section of the screen. Others seem almost intentionally tricky, such as a heart-shaped icon just sitting in the path that I initially thought was a pick-up or something. And then boom, reload from checkpoint. Everything that hurts you is a one-hit kill. The game is pixelated with muted colors, giving it the flavor of a Game Boy game, possibly played using the Super Game Boy for enhancements, so when you see the bright red heart “enemy” placed in your way, it just begs you to touch it, and then the game punishes you for it. Just a baffling design choice.

My only other complaint is that when you dash, the screen flashes dark for a split second, a too-jarring effect for such a frequently-used mechanic.

So I finally heard Kiley’s soundtrack, in action no less. And what did I think of it? Not a banger, I’m afraid. I’m used to the more up-tempo, crunchy sounds of his other albums, and this soundtrack was almost entirely ambient. I think ambient is fine, but I wasn’t expecting it here, and it is an odd choice to have HD birdsong alongside the stoic pixels of A Kitty Dream.

The game overall however is a decent endeavor and I don’t consider it to have been a waste of time. I think I’ll check Kiley’s soundtracks on bandcamp instead next time, though.