Landfall Archives A playable museum of strange ideas

The frame is a break-in: you play a soldier arriving at a secret facility, finding a computer that can launch anything in the archive. From there the collection opens up, 23 projects Landfall and friends made since 2016 that never reached the shelves. Some are two-minute toys, some are full little games, one is not a game at all but an interactive slideshow explaining the physics behind Landfall's games. You wander, you pick a cabinet, you play. It feels less like an anthology and more like being handed the keys to a workshop where nothing was ever cleaned up.

The headline exhibit is TABS 2017, an early version of Totally Accurate Battle Simulator built on the scrapped 2.0 physics system. You field different units to beat levels, or just mess around in sandbox mode and watch the formations collapse. The Robots Forever pair take destruction in another direction: every robot part has its own health, so you can shoot an arm off and keep shooting. The sequel adds bigger and smaller robots plus randomly spawning weapons with upgrades. Physics Fighter keeps it close and personal, brawling enemies in small rooms with fists, legs and a knife while they follow their own attack patterns.

Several projects are about construction, and none of it behaves politely. Walking House Game has you control and grow a walking castle, travelling to gather resources while enemies chip away at your base. Airships 1 and 2 let you assemble a flying ship from modular parts and take it over the landscape, the second version steadier than the first. Post Game is the calm one: lay conveyor belts and contraptions to route packages into containers, earning credits for each delivery to build more. Missile Game flips it around, putting you in control of the missile as you thread it through obstacles to smash physics towers.

A good chunk of the archive is built for facing other people. Medieval America is an online physics shooter on a level that collapses as the fight goes on, so the floor itself becomes a timer. ROUNDS 3D is a 3D take on ROUNDS with its shooting mechanics and a handful of upgrades. Counts and Stakes is a top-down vampires versus vampire hunters duel where precise aiming decides it. Wrecktangels is local PvP with a time-slow mechanic and a world that breaks apart under fire, and Auction Brawl does split screen for up to four: bid on items, then use them, or any object in the auction room, to beat up the other bidders. Rounds are short, lobbies are simple, and the physics guarantees nobody's plan survives.