Wizard Critter 64

Can you defend your cake from an on onslaught of enemies? Have a go at it in Wizard Critter 64, a homebrew game by Team Wizard Cat for the Nintendo 64. It was released on 02 Feb 2026 for the 2025 64brew Game Jam.

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password thecakeisatruth. You can also get it from Drive and check the source code on Github.

About Wizard Critter 64

This is an arcade-style survival game where you have to try and protect your cake for as long as possible. The cake is located in the centre of the stage surrounded by four rounded brick walls. Enemies spawn at the screen’s edge and try to either attack you or the cake.

You can defend yourself by shooting out red balls in any direction, Robotron style. Enemies occasionally drop powerups for you to grab, granting you either faster attack speed or a wider bullet spread.

After about a minute of gameplay, you’re granted 40 seconds of repair time. During this period, your bullets are replaced with green repair shots that give a barrier back one HP per hit.

The game ends when you lose all your lives, but if the cake is gone you have nothing to distract the enemies or tank their attacks so it becomes very frantic once you’re on your own.

A few interesting things about this game: It includes Toki Pona as one of the available languages to choose from. It’s a minimalist constructed language that very few people speak. Also, the sprite used for the life counter is called gayTwink1.png and gayTwink2.png. Just thought I’d bring that up.

Credits

Wizard Critter 64 is made by Team Wizard Cat, which consists of:

• Digi-Space Productions
• CandiedCat
• BigTimeGoat

Review and conclusion

This game is an interesting twist on the Robotron formula. It has a central objective that you need to protect and a frantic pace that is unrelenting. It offers a bit of a break by allowing you some breathing space to repair the cake’s barrier walls.

There are a few things that feel a bit off, like the repair portion of the game. It lasts 40 seconds but all you really do is stand still and repair your wall, there’s no real challenge to it. And it’s enough time to repair all you walls to max HP. Some kind of challenge that forced you to aim during these sections would have been welcome. Better yet, having repairs happen during the onslaught rather than as a separate section would have made these timeouts much more engaging.

There is also very little time to react to incoming enemies, so you really have to be on your toes or pre-aim your shots to shoot enemies before they hit the cake. I know it’s an arcade-style game that’s meant to be difficult to the point of being unfair, but it can feel a little bit cheap some times.

While Wizard Critter 64 does suffer from an issue with pacing, those are really just nitpicks. It still is a hectic bit of fun while the bullets are flying, and getting upgrades and mowing down enemies is a blast nonetheless.