WRIST LOCK!!!

Download for Windows:

Itch.io

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Game Jolt

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Glorious Trainwrecks

You and your opponent place a hand on either side of a computer's mouse. Or on the keyboard's arrow keys. Or on the left thumbstick of an X-Box controller. The goomba-like baddie is the only thing that you can move back and forth at first, and the initial goal is to get your lumberjack to jump on it. Once this happens, your lumberjack becomes powered up, and they are the ones under control of the mouse, or arrow keys, or left stick. What now? Bounce off the opponent's lumberjack X amount of times to reduce their lives to zero and win!

The baddie is a devious little creature however, and though it may look stunned after being bounced off of, it's merely waiting for an opportunity to strike. If a player's character lands in the same place that it is stunned, it will spring back into action, putting on an evil face and using its monstrous energy to drain their OUCH meter. And that's not counting (pun intended) the fact that it will blow up in one last ditch effort to take the lumberjacks out once the match timer reaches zero (that's the pun "pun intended" was referring to).

Wrist Lock!!! has repeatedly been referred to by myself as a local multiplayer, tug of war, platform fighting game. Part of this is simply because that's the best way to describe the game. The other half is because, at least subconsciously, including as many genres as possible in its description seemed like a surefire path to securing the most downloads possible. I'm writing this the day after I officially released the game, and I will tell you: it didn't work.

The scope of Wrist Lock!!! was originally much larger, intended to be a Mario Party or Wario Ware-style game where there were multiple kinds of tug-of-war mini games for players to fight over, each with its own theme and end goal. I'm still fond of a lot of the ideas I came up with for that version of Wrist Lock!!! and may revisit the concept at some point. For now, though, I think the game that exists now is the game I needed to make first. A small game that's still fun enough in its own right and just customizable enough that you can toy around with it and come up with new ways to play it. A game that stands on its own and also as a proof of concept, to show this is a worthwhile idea that's worth expanding upon.

Wrist Lock!!! is the second game of mine to feature an exclamation point in the title and the third game overall (as of 08/26/2022) to have a punctuation mark in its name. Will this trend continue? Yes, actually; I already have another game I plan on making whose name is going to include punctuation marks. Though it will break the trend slightly by featuring punctuation marks that aren't intended to finish a sentence. Come to think of it, the punctuation mark in question (that itself isn't a question mark, to be clear), has been used in one of those three games' titles as well. Observant readers will be able to figure out what it is...