“But the beauty is in the walking -- we are betrayed by destinations.” ― Gwyn Thomas
I played a couple of unique games in the last couple of weeks that have made me do a lot of thinking about what we expect from this medium, and what it's well-suited to deliver outside the experiences we've become accustomed to. I'm sure that according to some people, neither of these even qualify as games, as neither has a fail state, neither provides the player with challenge, and neither has victory conditions. If you can't win, is it a game?
Perhaps not. It may be that we need better terminology, and that labeling these "games" is a disservice to gaming, or to them, or both. But they each gave me something that I don't think any other medium is currently capable of providing in the way that they did, and that's notable to me.
The first, Dear Esther, has received a fair amount of attention from the enthusiast gaming press, largely for being a unique experience in which narrative is more important than gameplay. The battle between gameplay and narrative gets a lot of focus in games journalism, usually because game designers often succeed in serving one only at the expense of the other. In that respect, I don't think Dear Esther actually breaks the mold - it simply eschews "gameplay" in the standard sense almost entirely in favor of its story - but the relationship between narrator and audience has rarely been as interesting to me in a game as it is here.
In some respects, it's easy to pass Dear Esther off as nothing but a storybook with moving pictures, or rather pictures that you move through. The player has no influence whatsoever over the happenings on the ruined, abandoned island they're set upon. You'll walk around, you'll see what there is to see, and you'll be told a sad confusing story set to music. That's it.
That's oversimplifying, of course, but not by much. The trappings are remarkable, I'll admit. Dear Esther is one of the most beautiful games I've ever played, and if it were nothing more than a 3D environment looking as good as it does, it would be worth a few dollars to walk through. The musical score is similarly appealing, haunting and mournful. And the narration, while occasionally heavy-handed, is skilled. But in the end, you're just walking through an empty island while a man tells you a story.
But the beauty is in the walking.
Dear Esther isn't just a story - it's a place. A place with nooks and crannies and buildings and caves and cliffs, all of it lovingly crafted and there for you to experience - or not - as you choose. The story is there waiting to reward you the more you look for it. You take it at your own pace. Hear a bit of narration, then stop and listen to the music and think about it for awhile before you move on. Or rush forward because you want to know what happens next. Or skip an area for awhile, but then go back to it even though it obviously isn't the way to progress because you just need to know if you missed anything. I did all three of those at various points in my multiple playthroughs, and found them all rewarding.
"Multiple playthroughs? Why would you play through a game with no gameplay twice?" "Well, why would you read the same book twice?", he asked cheekily. But it is a valid question, and if it didn't have an interesting answer Dear Esther would be little different from an audiobook you listen to while you walk around. But it does: you don't get the whole story when you first play through the game. You don't even get the same bits of story in the same places, when you play through the game again. It's randomized, and honestly I'm still not sure whether I've seen and heard everything there is. I'll have to play through it yet again to see. If you want the story, you have to explore. Persistently and repeatedly. Your engagement has to go deeper than passive consumption, or the game won't give up what it has to offer. There are no enemies to defeat, no test of skill to overcome, but you need to be curious, and interested. If you're done after one time through, that's fine - if you want more, Dear Esther is happy to give it to you, but you need to buy in first. And that's great, and it's something no other medium of storytelling can do quite this way. It isn't the greatest tale ever told, or even the greatest one I've seen in a game, but it captured my attention and my imagination and I want to see more developers experiment with narrative this bravely. Bravo.
The second game, Proteus, has no explicit story at all, but certainly shares the same basic ethos of rewarding exploration. It's still in development (which means you can nab it for a discount, if you're interested), so I can't write about its features as a finished product, but it's basically a random landscape generator with a strong focus on visual and audio synthesis. It makes a world, different every time you play, and you wander through it enjoying the sights and sounds. The end.
It's hard to get much more different in terms of aesthetics than Proteus is from Dear Esther. There is no attempt made at realism here, and the graphics and sounds are intentionally lo-fi, to the point where I imagine they'll be unattractive to some. (Though to the game's perhaps-accidental credit, they remind me strongly of the aesthetic of King's Quest, which is always good for a few free points with me.)
While I stand in slack-jawed awe of the visual beauty of Dear Esther, Proteus' lack of sharp detail also appeals to me. Its landscapes feel dream-like. Unfinished. Imaginative, like something a child would draw when asked to remember a place they walked through. The colors and shapes aren't quite right, but they're wrong in deliberate and creative ways, and the soundscape of the game is consistently pleasant and interesting. I generated 4 different worlds in Proteus, and as I walked around them I watched blocky leaves fall from trees; walked through the rain as clouds passed over me; chased frogs and lightning bugs who continually danced out of my reach; stumbled across abandoned cottages and graveyards and strange stone cairns. At one point, at night (the audible crickets at night are a nice touch), I found a creepy set of statues atop a snowy peak, and as I stood among them the music swelled and the stars distorted above my head to perform an improptu light show for me. Afterwards I descended to the beach below, and watched their reflections twinkle on the sea.
So that's what Proteus is like, and I hope it'll continue to be just that as it rounds out development and nears release - a large collection of pleasant, surprising experiences for you to explore and relate, a little different every time. If it manages to get a multiplayer mode so you can share them with others, that'd be lovely, but I enjoyed it as a solitary experience as well. Was it a game? I have no idea, but I enjoyed the journey. A destination wasn't needed.
There you have it. Neither of these - games? well, whatever they are - will ask you to shoot bad guys or save princesses or score touchdowns or win races. They won't ask you to do anything but participate. Turn out the lights, put on headphones, hop into their worlds for awhile and poke around. Think. Feel. Listen.
I'm really happy that stuff like this is getting made, and I'm excited to see more of it. If you feel the same way, you can try them out for the price of a lunch. Interested? Walk with me.
Oh, this is a treat. Every once in awhile a game just shows up out of nowhere, grabs me by the throat, and won't let go until I finish it. When the game is free, it's even better.
What if I told you that somebody had taken the isometric perspective of Diablo, the sneaky murdering of Assassin's Creed, and the bouncing-madly-between-enemies combos of Arkham Asylum, and blended them all together into one experience? Would you want to play that? I'd want to play that. Good news! We can.
Brought to us by the brilliant students over at Digipen, Deity is "a stealth action game" controlled entirely by use of the mouse. Far from being a simplified or dumbed-down affair, though, it will tax both your brain and your reflexes with its deliberately limited control scheme. There isn't much in the way of plot, but the basics are these: you're a creature of darkness, harmed by light but capable of shifting effortlessly and unseen through shadow. Your homeland's been invaded by legions of enemies, and you need to sneak through an occupied castle to take down their leader. If you have to take down a bunch of grunts along the way, well, there's no harm in that, is there.
Those guards will never know what hit them.
Basic movement is standard Diablo-style click-to-run, but that's a great way to get killed fast, as anyone who sees you on the ground will start attacking you immediately. Luckily, your specialty happens to be hiding incorporeal in the flames of torches, and (like the gargoyles in the aforementioned Arkham Asylum) they're all over the place. Right-click a torch, and you'll jump to it, changing its color and hiding your presence. If there's another nearby, you can jump from torch to torch, covering large distances almost instantly.
This also forms the first half of the combat mechanic; attack a guard from behind from a hidden position, and you'll instantly kill them as well as regain some health. (Claiming a torch for the first time also gives you a health boost.) Attack a guard from the front, though, and you'll take damage. Careful timing is paramount to success.
The second, more interesting half of combat comes from your ability to "chain" together a number of jumps before needing to get back to a safe place to hide. Hold the right mouse button and left-click, and you'll set a chain waypoint, of which you have a limited supply. (Three at first, more as you progress through the game.) Any guard you hit in the chain will be killed instantly, without damage to you, even if you attack from the front. Gargoyles scattered around the level can be incorporated in your chain jumps as well for tactical advantage and extra distance, though you may not rest on them.
Torch > Guard > Torch. One less enemy, and no-one the wiser.
Chains replenish over time, and using a chain triggers a slow-motion effect to help you plan your moves precisely. Any guard left alive after a chain will start attacking you, so isolating and eliminating groups is key. As the game progresses, each level becomes a freeform combat puzzle, working out how to take down the guards without being spotted and killed. Jump to torch. Chain to gargoyle, guard #1, guard #2, and back to torch. Wait for next patrol, then chain to guard #3, guard #4, gargoyle, back to torch. Move on. It feels great when you get the hang of it, and complications like well lit (therefore deadly) areas and invincible winged guards patrolling the halls keep things from getting too repetitive.
Also protecting against repetition is the length, which is very short - really the only negative thing I have to say about the game. It's the work of less than an hour or so on Normal; I haven't tried Hard yet, so it may provide more of a challenge, but the boss fight at the end was twitchy enough on Normal to make me less than eager to find out.
If you'd like to see how it looks in action, well, here you are:
Regardless of its brevity, I can't recommend downloading Deity enough. Creative, slick and satisfying, it brings to mind some of my favorite games while still being a little different from anything else I've played this year. Digipen frequently delivers stuff worth checking out (remember Igneous? If you never played Igneous, go check that out too), and this is a great example of what they can do at their best.
Deity is...
a great implementation of stealth gameplay in an isometric perspective.
fast-moving and challenging with extremely simple controls.
further proof that Digipen is a force for good in the world of gaming.
over too quickly, but it speaks well of it that I want more.
A little less than 200MB for the installer, Windows only; pick it up here.
"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.
First of all, if you've somehow never made your way to OCRemix, head on over right now and lose hours of your time. There's some truly fantastic work available there, all for free. Every flavor of musical interpretation you could ask for, from chiptune to big band to slow jazz to heavy metal.
Right now, though, I want to call your attention to "25 Year Legend", the album they've just released in honor of the 25th Anniversary of The Legend of Zelda.
I've loved the Zelda series for about 20 of those 25 years, and the overworld music from Link to the Past has a permanent spot in my heart as the most iconic videogame song ever written. It's just a magnificent piece of music.
"25 Year Legend" includes new takes on songs from Link to the Past, Link's Adventure, Ocarina of Time, Link's Awakening, Wind Waker, Majora's Mask, and the newest game Skyward Sword, written by a very diverse group of composers. Not every song on it is an out-of-the-park hit, but it's a delightful variety, an obvious labor of love, and free. If you have any affection for videogame music, please, go check it out.
It's been awhile since I've done a Free and Worth Every Penny installment, but Halloween seemed an excellent time to resurrect this feature (see what I did there? ...sorry), and I can't think of a better way to do it than with my favorite type of freeware: a retro-themed, hard-as-nails side scrolling platformer. Welcome to...
This is as straightforward as they come, folks. You're intrepid hero Jackie Gun. (Yes.) It's Halloween, and you're trapped in a graveyard with a bunch of ghouls, ghosts, spirits, specters, and so on. Help five trapped friendly Caspers escape from their imprisonment, and you'll be free to leave. Go.
If you don't feel like reading, the trailer is going to tell you 90% of what you need to know. Take a look.
Yes, that is Vampire Killer from the Castlevania series playing in the background. It also plays in the game, constantly. Ordinarily, I might rankle a bit at having music ripped from a commercial series plopped into a freeware title, but being as this is a clearly themed homage and Vampire Killer is some of the best videogame music of all time, I'm gonna let it slide. If it bothers you, you won't miss much by turning the volume down.
The gameplay is extremely barebones (heh. bare bones. on Hallow-- sorry again), giving you no more options than you'd expect if you were playing this on the Gameboy it's built to resemble. You can run, jump, and shoot. That's it. No items to collect, just coins for score and the extremely rare health pickup. No areas to unlock. Just one big map, a whole lot of enemies, and you.
There are some secret areas, though, which is a nice touch.
For all its simplicity, it's pretty brutal. You can take five hits before you're done for, that's all. No continues, no checkpoints. You clear this puppy in one try or you start from scratch. And you'll only find one of those precious health pickups when you free one of the five hidden spirits, so don't count on them to save you. Luckily, the game controls well and enemies telegraph their attacks and move in patterns, so it really is just a matter of learning what to expect and then executing well.
Still, you'll see the Game Over screen a lot. It isn't a terribly long game - it's all one interconnected map, no branching paths or doors - so that's a frustration I can deal with, but I certainly would have appreciated a checkpoint after saving each spirit, or at least an Easy Mode with that option. What can I say, I'm getting soft in my old age.
This is not a game trying to hide its influences.
There are a couple of minor gameplay problems that need mentioning. Hit boxes are a little bigger than you think they are at first, leading to some initial frustration as you learn how much room you need to give enemies. You need to press X every time you want to fire, which led to me getting out Pinnacle Game Profiler and setting up a rapid fire profile pretty quickly.
For all the minor kvetching I'm doing, though, I had a good time with 8-Bit Halloween. Lionsoft has put together a tight, fun little side scroller with pleasing Gameboy-inspired visuals, classic music, and well-worn but reliable mechanics. Just the thing to burn through on a late night as the last trick-or-treaters ring your doorbell. Happy Halloween, everybody!
8-Bit Halloween is...
a game that wears its influences proudly on its sleeve. And steals its music outright.
still creative enough in other ways, with challenging level design and an amusingly silly, intentionally throwaway conceit.
maybe a little too happy to kill you, but that's kind of in the spirit of the holiday, isn't it?
probably largely forgettable, but worth a spin if you want a little retro Halloween gaming.
BONUS FOR READING THIS FAR! This is not free, but man is it close and it's totally worth every penny. The Humble Indie Bundle is doing something new: you can get in on the alpha (and all subsequent versions) of the incredible-looking top-down shooter Voxeltron by paying any amount you want! You should do this. Because it's great.
"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.
So, it turns out the game I wanted to write about was waiting literally right around the corner. Which is not to say that I haven't played a lot of good indie titles in the last couple of months - I have, and a few of them I'm hoping to record a podcast about real soon. But they're also getting a lot of coverage elsewhere; this one, I didn't hear about anywhere until I was watching the trailer and then buying and playing the game.
I should be up front before I start talking about it: I have a thing for rhythm games. I'm not particularly good at rhythm games, especially Dance Dance Revolution-style ones (which will be ironic in a minute), but I find them fascinating and deeply satisfying to play, even on the low and medium difficulty settings that I usually end up stuck at.
Sequence is a rhythm-based jRPG. You can view the trailer at the linked Steam page, but I'll embed it here as well for your convenience.
You'll notice watching the trailer that the developer trades on their sense of humor a bit, and that definitely comes through in the game's writing (a blessing in my book, because if there's anything I don't want to do it's play a taking-itself-too-seriously jRPG). But it's the game's mechanics that set it apart from anything I've played recently, so that's primarily what I want to talk about.
As you can gather from the video, this is "Rhythm RPG" the way Puzzle Quest is "Puzzle RPG", in that they've taken an existing tried-and-true gameplay genre (DDR-formula pattern matching) and tossed an RPG layer on top of it. Honestly, for $5 I probably would have been pretty happy with that, especially given that the music is catchy and the story at least marginally compelling. But the battle system they've devised hooked me enough to pull several hours from my schedule in the last 24 that I really didn't have to give it, and it deserves explanation.
You don't play this DDR clone on one note track, you play it on three. One is your defensive shield; miss a note here, and you'll take damage. Another is your mana generator; there's no penalty for missing notes on this panel, but every note you hit generates a bit of mana, used to fire off spells. The third is for successfully casting those spells; every time you want to attack (or heal, or use any of the other abilities you gain throughout the game) you'll need to succeed at a note sequence. Mess it up, and the spell fails, wasting the mana for it and making it inaccessible until it recharges.
This fairly simple division of the combat into three unique tasks means you're always splitting your time as a strategic resource, trying to figure out which panel is going to give you the greatest reward. You don't want to ignore the defensive panel or you'll start taking heavy damage, but if those notes come while you're trying to pull off a spell in the casting panel, that's a tradeoff you might make. You'll spend your downtime in the mana generator building up your reserves, but ending a battle faster increases your XP multiplier at the end so you don't want to burn too much time there. It's constantly engaging without (so far, a few hours in) ever becoming too frantic to handle, and it's based on solid rhythm game mechanics that I already enjoyed anyway - combined, it's a huge win.
The story's alright. I can't say I'm exactly engrossed in it, but the writing has moments of genuine wit, the voice acting is pretty decent, and the character art has some personality, in a "this is an anime-styled jRPG" sort of way. The whole thing is aesthetically pleasing, really, through visuals and music both. The RPG mechanics outside of combat are what you'd expect: level up through battling to increase stats; craft items, weapons and armor using drops from your enemies; grind your way through a level to get the necessary ingredients to proceed; repeat. So much so boring if the combat itself wasn't fun to do, but I had enough fun grinding through battles last night to completely lose track of time, so I'm not knocking it for that.
And it's $5. Five dollars. Less than that if you get it while it's on special on Steam. It's crazy - literally insane - to think that Duke Nukem Forever released at ten times the cost of this game (though of course you'll be able to find that one in cereal boxes soon enough). Go check it out. Sadly there's no demo at this point, but again. Guys. Five bucks. I love you, indie developers.
I've let this place get a bit dusty, haven't I. Sorry about that.
Life got a little crazy over the last couple of months - well, crazier than usual, it's been a crazy year - and I just haven't felt much like writing about games. I've still played a few, and managed to knock out a couple of podcast episodes over at Immortal Machines, including an interview with the writer of Bastion that I'm really proud of. (Bastion is utterly fantastic, by the way, and if you haven't played it, you should. It will undoubtedly end up in my list of the year's favorite games.) More of that's on the way, I hope - I'm working my way through the last part of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and want to record an episode all about that; also, there's been a weird surge of indie tower defense variants that I want to do an IndieCast about.
But there hasn't been much writing, and I do feel bad about that. Like exercise, it's a habit that can be hard to restart once you've let it lapse, and it seems to get harder the longer you let it go.
There's a lot of big AAA titles right around the corner, of course - Battlefield 3, Skyrim, the PC version of Arkham City, the PC version of LA Noire - and I may wind up having something to say about those. Torchlight II continues to torture us with its lack of a release date, but they seem pretty adamant that it'll be out this year, so by definition it must be coming soon. It's been a very good year to love games, both small- and large-scale.
You know what I've actually been playing this week, though? Mage Gauntlet on my iPhone.
I don't talk much about iPhone games on here, maybe because I feel like they get covered pretty well by the internet at large already; between TouchArcade, SlideToPlay and following the right folks on Twitter it's hard to miss a good release (and there are so many that I could never keep up). In fact, even with Mage Gauntlet, rather than try to review it I'll just point you to the review over on STP, because it says pretty much everything I would. It's a game that'll hit a really sweet spot for anyone with fond memories of 16-bit action RPG's, but I think it's worth checking out for anyone with an iDevice. I will leave this trailer here for you to check out, because everybody loves trailers.
So if you've got an iPhone, iPad or other iThing, I can't recommend that enough. Check it out; it's on sale through Sunday. The other games by Rocketcat - Hook Champ, Super QuickHook and Hook Worlds - are also great fun, though in a totally different vein.
I could write a huge post about all the iPhone games I think are genuinely great, and how as a platform I think the iPhone really is leaving Nintendo and Sony both in the dust, much as I love my 3DS and its predecessors. At some point perhaps I'll do that. For tonight I just wanted to get the site out of mothballs and post something. Hopefully I'll have more offbeat freeware and indie stuff to talk about soon. Have a good weekend, everyone.
Don’t stop running. Don’t look back. That ship is behind you, it’s always behind you and it’s always getting closer. If you stop, you’re done for. I don’t know what they do to people in those ships but I know I don’t want to be in one. Don’t stop running. Keep moving. <switch.> Take those turns tighter, you’re slowing down every time you go around a corner! How many creatures are chasing me? It was four, but I think it’s five now. Can’t spare the time to check; if one of them catches me it won’t matter. Don’t hit the spikes. Don’t slow down. Keep moving. <switch.> The last jump was impossible, yet here I am on the other side of it. Don’t look down don’t look down don’t look down! Gotta keep moving up. The exit is somewhere up there and the fire below me isn’t going to put itself out. Just thirty or forty more impossible jumps to go. Easy, right? Keep moving!
Another Ludum Dare competition (the 48 hour game dev marathon from which we’ve pulled several of our previous featured games) is in the voting stage, this time with the theme of “Escape.” It was initially my intention to do a round-up of some favorites for you to check out this week, but then I realized that there are almost six hundred entries to this round of Ludum Dare(!), and I spent all morning Sunday playing Flee Buster. As soon as I’m done writing this, I’ll probably be going back to play it some more. [Edit: Actually I just kept playing it while I was writing.] So I guess I’d better just tell you about that one, and call it a success.
ChevyRay’s take on “Escape” is a pulse-pounding tale of three very different characters in terrible peril. In the first, a man flees from the tractor beam of a giant spaceship, running and jumping through traditional platforming levels as fast as he can. The second switches to a top-down maze of tight corridors where a tiny ship must navigate around deadly spikes and evade an ever-increasing number of pursuers. The last mimics the final level of a Metroid game (or, if you prefer your game references a bit more casual, Doodle Jump, I suppose), as a nimble frog leaps higher and higher out of the grasp of a rising flame.
These guys really need your help.
On their own, any one of these three would be a suitable diversion, but probably nothing terribly special. They’re solidly designed levels with the same sort of muscle memory appeal that games like Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV have - you can feel yourself getting better at them each time you fail and try again - but it wouldn’t be nearly so compelling without the hook. Flee Buster’s hook is that you only control each of these characters for a few seconds at a time.
In addition to the time pressure of being chased and needing to constantly press forward while avoiding each level’s hazards, a tiny bar at the bottom of the screen measures the time you’ll have to control each scenario. When it runs out, you’re thrust immediately into the next one, no matter what’s going on at the time. (It will, mercifully, let you land if you’re mid-jump when it runs out.) This means that at any given time you’re not just thinking about the character you’re controlling; you’re thinking about the one you’re about to control. And you’re thinking about leaving the one you’re controlling in a safe position so that once you’re done controlling the third character and you come back to this one, you’ll be ready to proceed. It’s a maddening, slightly insane loop, and it’s great. The need to think contextually about three characters while reacting to the immediate circumstances of one adds just enough complexity that the game feels a bit cerebral as well as reflex-driven, making success that much more satisfying.
I hope you like this screen. You'll see it a lot.
Of course, success will be hard to come by, should you come by it at all. Flee Buster is tough, and will sometimes punish you in ways that feel unfair. A single mistake with any one character means game over for all three, and while the game is short by design it does mean that you’re pretty much going for a perfect run, and only that, right from the start. There are tokens strewn along the path in all three levels, which serve as a scoring mechanism, but I can’t imagine any but the most dedicated will want to replay the game to get them all after completing it with less than 100%. There’s also a noticeable disparity in the amount of player agency in the three scenarios: the top-down ship level has enemies you can “trick” a bit, and power-ups to pick up that buy you extra time, while the side scrolling and vertical jumping levels rely solely on perfect platforming. That's not really a complaint - they’re designed to be different - but it would have been nice to see more depth in the precision platforming sections.
Still, for a free game designed over the course of 48 hours, those are absolutely negligible issues. Flee Buster is a tight, addictive experience that requires nothing but your web browser and some free time (though I did end up using a gamepad, as my skills with the arrow keys aren’t what they used to be), and you should definitely check it out. The aesthetics are effective but very simple; this one’s all about the gameplay. Congratulations to ChevyRay for knocking out a very solid little game with a clever concept in almost no time at all; I wish him luck in the competition!
Flee Buster is...
a tightly controlled, clever mix of several classic gameplay styles.
extremely unforgiving, but fast and short enough that it usually doesn’t feel punishing.
stressful; it develops a surprising amount of tension in a very short period of time.
a game I will probably never 100%, but I will beat it. So help me, I will.
Maybe you will too. Flee Buster works everywhere Flash does, so head on over to ChevyRay’s website and find out!
"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.
I tossed up links to this stuff on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc etc, but it certainly merits a mention here as well: last week saw the release of some really great Indie RPG's, for prices that can only reasonably be called stupidly low.
Dungeons of Dredmor is a game I've been looking forward to for months, after interviewing the developers on the Immortal Machines podcast back in February. David and Nicholas from Gaslamp Games were hilarious to talk to, and it was clear that they wanted their quirky sense of humor to be front and center in their game. I'm pleased to say that from my first few hours with the game they certainly succeeded; Dredmor plays like a combination of Nethack, Quest for Glory and Monty Python, and that's a pretty brilliant blend. It's remarkably user-friendly for a roguelike, but it'll still kill you at the drop of a hat. Oh, and it's less than five dollars. So there's that.
Here's the trailer. Give it a look, and if you like it, your money will be well spent.
The other two started life as releases on XBox Live Indie Games, but just showed up on Steam for even less money than Dredmor: Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World. Very much also in the "comedy RPG" genre, they play like classic Final Fantasy styled 16 bit RPG's, only funnier. I haven't spent much time yet with Cthulhu Saves the World, but here's the story pitch: the mighty Cthulhu awakens after eons of slumber, ready to rain madness and terror upon the Earth. Then a wizard curses him and steals all his powers, and the only way he can get them back is to become a hero. If he wants to destroy the world, he needs to save it first.
That kind of sells itself, doesn't it?
Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World can be had together in a bundle pack for under three dollars! If you're even remotely interested there's pretty much no reason not to do this.
The best news is, to listen to the blogs and Twitter feeds of the developers, they're having huge success on Steam with these absurdly low prices. They've consistently been near the top of the best sellers list since release, and it seems like the whole thing has exceeded their expectations. I wish them the best; this is precisely why I love the indie scene so much.
I'll leave you with the very amusing trailer for Cthulhu Saves the World - if you want to see the Breath of Death VII trailer too, it's here.
As I'm sure you noticed by the title of the article, I am abusing my column's purview a little bit this week, and writing about a game that is not strictly freeware. You can download it for free, and at the very least you should absolutely do that, because it's brilliant. But it's technically a "pay what you want" affair, which means developer Joost van Dongen is hoping you'll like it enough to cough up a few dollars, and if you do he'll give you a little extra content as part of the bargain. I'm hoping you will, too, and I'm here to tell you why. So what am I asking you to buy?
...Not a terribly evocative name, I'll grant you, so some preliminary explanations are in order. Proun is, first and foremost, a racing game. It is also a pattern recognition game, but the primary objective is getting to the finish line as fast as possible, preferably before your opponents.
You may notice it looks a little different from most racing games.
The method by which you accomplish that, though, is likely a bit of a departure from most racing games you've played. Gone are collisions with other racers. Gone are drifting and tight cornering. You are locked solidly to a predetermined course, and the only task before you is to avoid the obstacles in your way as you speed down the track.
It will still be some of the most difficult racing you've ever done.
Before I talk more about the mechanics, though, I want to gush for a moment over how absolutely stunning Proun is. Frequent readers of the column know that I'm a sucker for simple, clean, stylized art, and I think Joost's work here is nothing short of marvelous. The world of Proun is built from entirely abstract structures that never stop being fun and playful while they ruin your perfect run and draw strings of obscenities from you as you hit restart yet another goddamned time. Everything looks elegant, clean and graceful, as though Joost had taken the aesthetic of Mirror's Edge, stripped it down to its even more bare elements, and crafted a racing game from the pieces. The little touches and bits of polish aren't skimped on, either, with the way it can handle a near-infinite number of transparent ghost racers for you to compete against on future runs, or the way your racing ball "de-rezzes" a bit when it gets too close to an obstacle.
And the music! Oh man, the music. Tell you what, let me just show you some video, because you need to see this thing in motion before I talk about how it plays.
Right, so, the mechanics. As I'm sure you gleaned from the video, you're locked to a cylindrical track that never branches off - it simply runs straight from the start to the end, with you and your opponents along for the ride. The landscape / obstacles (one and the same, really) sit attached to the track, forcing you to constantly swing around it to avoid them as you hurtle onwards. The less you swerve, the faster you go, so keeping to a straight racing line benefits your time... but the faster you go, the harder it is to see what's coming and avoid it.
As I said in the introduction, it does become a bit of a pattern recognition game, especially as you reach the higher speed levels of the game (there are four, starting at "Fast" and going up to "Speed of Light"), but the patterns are consistent, recognizable and fun. Sometimes, making tight 360 degree rotations around the cylinder will get you past a set of obstacles; sometimes a tight slalom is required. Since you can't collide with your opponents, your only real enemy is the track, and beating the track yields immense satisfaction.
Oh yeah, also, split screen local multiplayer.
If I have to knock the game for anything, it's only the things I wish it had that it doesn't. I'm not sure how online multiplayer would work out in a game requiring such twitchy reflexes, but I do wish it had it. And Mr. van Dongen's website and highscore servers have been a bit crushed by the game's popularity, requiring him to issue a patch for it temporarily taking out the highscore functionality (and the website linked for the game is a temporary one, Proun-Game.com being down).
Still, what's here is fantastic, and I haven't even gotten around to trying the user-made levels. According to the between-level info screen, this project represents six years of Joost's spare time, and he's selling it for whatever people think it's worth. Including nothing, but really, it's worth a fair chunk more than that. But don't take my word for it. Go find out for yourself.
Alec Meer over on RockPaperShotgun has this to say, and I don't think I could put it much better, so rather than the standard bullet list here I'll let him sum up:
It’s (very) short and simple and pretty much only does the one thing, but it makes me want to use silly superlatives such as ‘life-affirming.’ I’ve felt like I’ve been in a bit of a games black hole this last couple of weeks, because I’ve only played the so-so likes of Dungeon Siege 3, Alice 2 and Duke Nukem 4. They’ve all got something to recommend them (and, to varying degrees, the opposite), but they didn’t exactly fill me with THE WONDER OF VIDEOGAMES. Proun does.
Proun is Windows-only and carries a hefty (compared to most things we write about here) 330MB footprint, but it's worth every byte and every penny you choose to give it. Go race.
"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.
As an unapologetic fan of the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, I was a little disappointed - though not particularly surprised, I suppose - to hear that On Stranger Tides is apparently one of the weaker of the four films, and not worth rushing out to see for its opening this weekend. Still, seeing as the world does not appear to have ended, we all need something to do, so let me suggest that you discard one nautical adventure for another. This one won't take as long as seeing Johnny Depp yearn to be in a better film, and will cost you considerably less.
Originally submitted as an entry in Ludum Dare 19 (theme: discovery), The Wager is a randomly generated exercise in risk and reward, placing you on a Sid Meier's Pirates!-esque ocean map and challenging you to rip as much profit from it as possible in a limited timeframe. As per the title, your arch-nemesis Sir Lester Marwood has entered into a gentleman's wager with you: each of you has a year to explore as far as you can, hopefully bringing back holds full of loot and valuable information to sell. Whichever of you manages to bring back more than the other will get the spoils of both. The game is on. Set sail!
This island could hold plunder, or peril.... is it worth the time to explore it?
A bit similar to Strange Adventures in Infinite Space and other randomized, short-form map exploration games, The Wager populates its map with islands full of treasure and trouble for you to discover, and lets you choose where you'll invest your limited time. The actual core gameplay mechanic couldn't be simpler: when you come across a new island, you are given a prompt telling you how long it would take you to explore it. If you choose Yes, that number of days are counted off and you gain the benefits (and potential consequences) of your exploration. If you choose No, you keep sailing. Repeat until out of time.
Of course, that alone would quickly comprise a recipe for tedium even in a very short game, so a few other subtle choices and constraints are presented to keep you on your toes. A diminishing "supplies" meter and an increasing "disease" meter limit how long you can remain at sea without visiting a port. You can pay to upgrade your ship and mitigate these concerns, of course, but then that's money you won't have in the final scoring. Returning to your main port will also let you sell information about the islands you've visited, which will cause them to be colonized and turn into ports themselves which you can use on subsequent sailings. Whether you choose to spend your precious time and early earnings on investments in hopes of maximizing your future profits (or stockpile right from the start and hope for the best) will impact your bottom line... and at the end of the year, that's all that will matter.
Coal! Nice. Don't know about that offer, though....
There's no question that in large part The Wager gets by on quirky charm rather than deep gameplay, but it has a lot of that charm to spread around. Random events like the one depicted in the screenshot above throw some tricky wrenches into the works mid-game, and are fun to read even if they really boil down to a 50/50 chance of helping or hurting you. (Just wait until you meet Mr. Crackers, the Wonder Parrot.) The dastardly Sir Lester Marwood regularly sends you correspondence evaluating your progress, and his snide tone greatly increases the satisfaction of soundly thrashing him. Oh, and the music is great, perfectly fitting the "adventure on the high seas" theme and routinely calling the Monkey Island games to mind.
Considering that the game was originally developed in 72 hours (the limitation on all Ludum Dare entries - from their site you can download the LD version or an expanded one, which is the one I played), I'm really impressed with what Peter Silk and Kieran Walsh of Surprised Man put together here. It's straightforward, it's funny, it has 3 difficulty settings to pit yourself against, and it doesn't overstay its welcome. Bravo, gents. More like this, please.
The Wager is...
charming and clever without being complicated.
clearly inspired by games like Sid Meier's Pirates! and Monkey Island, which is worth a lot of points with me all by itself.
not much more than a diversion, but a very pleasant one.
the most piratey fun you can have this weekend for free.
Windows only, about 15MB. Pour yourself a glass of rum and take it for a spin.
"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.
