This Game Lets You Punch Aliens In their Jerk Faces

Dead Space. The X-Files Game. Mass Effect. All of the best video games have aliens in them. The problem with those games, though, was that they made space aliens seem too sympathetic and nice. They were too complicated. When I was growing up, we knew what space aliens were all about: They come to crap up your field, abduct your livestock, and mess with All-American family man Richard Dreyfuss. My heart gets going just thinking about it. Not on my watch.

Cropped distills all of my thoughts about those invaders from space into the most condensed form possible. You play as a farmer with a floppy hat (the Universal Farmer?!) whose field has been taken over by the crop circle-creating monsters from beyond the stars. Cropped allows you to do the only thing that makes sense: You punch them.

I would never suggest that this game was complicated, and it's best if you just play it for five minutes, but the core of it is incredibly strong. There are "lanes" of crop circles that you can travel down, and you punch the aliens who are in that lane. They quickly attempt to surround you, and you can jump into another crop circle to make sure that you aren't killed. However, it doesn't seem to me that you can win; the aliens always get you in the end.

Cropped is a great little game jam experiment that I would love to see made into a larger, deeper project. After all, it is the first game that really understands space aliens. It understands that you need to punch them.

You can download Cropped for Windows and Mac at itch.io.