If you frequent achievement-tracking sites like TruAchievements and PSNProfiles, you’ll know that there are a lot of inexpensive games that offer incredibly easy achievements/trophies. Some of these barely count as games, but then there’s Ratalaika Games, a company that ports indie games from PC to console. They have a better reputation among these achievement hunters as they tend to port games of decent or above quality.
I picked up a couple of these games on thePlayStationsale at the end of 2023 and discovered people weren’t kidding about these trophies being easy. Because I earned that usually coveted Platinum trophy in two games I’ve yet to see the end credits of.
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Pow! Pow! Move Please
The first game I played was Ultra Hat Dimension, where you’ve just won an interdimensional hat-making contest, which riled up the former champion. In revenge, he brainwashed his own people, the Spluffs, to trap you in five floors of a castle. Each room is exited by finding the key and then making your way to the door, and you have to solve a floor puzzle to either find or create the correct route.
I lost quite a bit of time here. I aced early puzzles, but they started ramping up in difficulty around the fourth floor. I kinda loved Ultra Hat Dimension, even as someone who usually hates puzzle games, to the point I wish I’d bought theSwitchPort instead, as this is exactly the kind of game I’d pull out on a long bus ride. Or in the middle of the night when I can’t get to sleep.
So, with five floors, and the puzzles getting vein-popping around floor four, the only trophy requirements are for finishing specific amounts of puzzles. Your final trophy unlocks by beating 45 puzzles, which means you’ll earn the Platinum trophy on floorthree.
I was shocked when this happened. I realized the trophies were only for beating a floor puzzle not long in, but when I read 45 puzzles, I just assumed that was the grand total in the game, not just floating somewhere around the middle. I don’t have any suggestions for different types of trophies. It’s the perfect model for a game that is nothing but logic puzzles, it just seems so weird to not force the player to beat the game first.
Still, I decided to keep playing as I care far more about the game being good than I do about the trophy list. Those last floors are so hard that my progress has slowed, but I will see the top of the castle, stop this dastardly plot, and save the Spluffs!
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Insert Trophy To Continue
Then there’s Gun Crazy, decidedly the weaker of the two games. It’s an arcade throwback, a run-and-gun likeMegamanorContra. But there’s just so much stuff on screen that it was sometimes hard to see what was coming or even where I was shooting. Still, it has style to it. I particularly liked how if you attack an enemy when it’s close to you, you just punch it instead of shooting.
Like in arcades, when you lose all your lives you get a continue. The upper left always tells you how many lives you have left, and how many hits until you lose a life, but I never saw a Continue counter and figured there wasn’t one. Meaning I haphazardly threw myself into danger, believing no consequences for my actions would occur.
Instead, I died at the start of Level 3 and was told to go straight to hell. So long fucko, no freebies anymore. Not to worry though, as this final death came justafterI earned the Platinum trophy. The full playthrough only lasted 12 minutes, yet I claimed the ultimate price as well as a painful death. Maybe it was too easy, but I found out the Steam version has an achievement for beating the whole game without takingany damage, and that sounds like a nightmare for somebody else to try. I choose to be happy with my cheap-ass Platinum.
There’s no moral to this story, just an interesting happenstance. I earned two Platinums, and neither game asked me to beat them for it. Once is odd, twice is weird, but twice in a row is just kind of funny. Both games had merit, so neither wasted my time. I should get around to finishing them someday.
