Last week, Mike and I discovered that we had both been looking at the same game with an eye towards writing it up for this feature. Naturally, it only made sense to tag-team it, so we hopped on Skype late at night, and Free and Worth Every Penny After Hours was born. This will be an occasional variant on our standard format; we talked, we wrote down what we said, you get to read it. We hope it's informative, or at least amusing.
Eric: ...We are now theoretically recording words. I’m going to verify that.
Mike: Okay.
Eric: You can never really trust these things.
Mike: Computers are not trustworthy.
Eric: No. They are built to deceive us.
Eric: We are in fact recording, or so says the file.
Mike: Alright. Rad. So.
Eric: So.
Mike: You like video games, right?
Eric: I like video games.
Mike: Do you like to play them?
Eric: I do. I like to play free video games.
Mike: Do you like to play free video games that are called Sky Island?
Eric: Well, I only know of the one.
Mike: The one. But have you played it?
Eric: I have! Well, I haven’t played all of it. I’ve played through level seven.
Mike: I don’t know what level I’m on, but I got stuck. I eventually figured it out. This game is kind of a mind-fuck, would you say?
Eric: I would say that it’s a little weird. I’m a bit frustrated right now. I’m playing it while we’re talking…
Mike: As am I.
Eric: ...so there will be moments where this conversation either stops or makes no sense or who knows. I don’t at all like the combat mechanic. In fact, I think it’s really terrible.
Mike: And by combat mechanic you mean the "getting the dudes over the little moon icon"?
Eric: Right. Right. So we should probably talk a little bit about the mechanics of the game first.
Eric: Sky Island is kind of like a poor man’s Fez.
Mike: I’ve seen some screenshots of Fez, so I feel like I know what it’s all about. But, what’s Fez all about?
Eric: Well, Fez and Sky Island are both two dimensional puzzle platformers where you control a little dude who’s running and jumping left and right, up and down on a bunch of... well, platforms. And your running and jumping interaction with the world is entirely in 2D. Where the puzzle element comes in – in Sky Island this is done by clicking and dragging the mouse and in Fez, I dunno, cause I haven’t played Fez – essentially you can freeze time and rotate the world.
Mike: So this game operates on 4 planes, do you know if Fez does or is it more than that?
Eric: I think Fez is thirteen dimensional? I don’t know.
Eric: This is actually a little funny, and a little weird, and I don’t know how I feel about it. I heard about Sky Island over on the Indie Games Blog at indiegames.com; they wrote it up as one of their browser game picks – spoilers, we get some of our ideas from other blogs.
Mike: Spoilers, I get all of my ideas from other blogs.
Eric: But the creator of Fez actually showed up in the comment thread on indiegames.com and kind of crapped all over Sky Island.
Mike: Nooo.
Eric: And I don’t know how I feel about that.
Mike: I don’t feel good about that at all!
Eric: I don’t want to overstate it. He said, "This thing plays nothing like Fez and falls into all the traps we took very painstaking efforts to avoid. So, you know, don’t think that this is Fez." Which, alright, sure I guess. But I didn't think this was Fez. I thought this was Sky Island.
Mike: I was operating under the same assumption.
Eric: That’s the name that they put on the game.
Eric: We should probably talk about what the game is though, as opposed to what it is not.
Mike: Yeah. One of my friends who doesn’t have the largest vocabulary, when I showed this to him, he said it was like Mario but gay.
Eric: .....?
Mike: And then when I told him to mess around with the mouse he went, "Whoa my god." So there’s nothing new here as far as platforming goes. You jump on things, you jump over things, you collect things, but being able to move around in space and reorient yourself in space is a lot of fun.
Eric: It’s legitimately difficult too. You definitely need to think in a way that you might not have while playing other similar platform puzzle games. Where I don’t know where I come down is whether or not the game is challenging because of its design, or just because of some of the weird quirks of its execution.
Mike: I guess this is a good time to bring up the combat again. To kill a bad guy, what you have to do, you have to rotate the platform he’s own so that he ends up facing the camera on top of an icon on the platform. Actually being able to do that is kind of a feat. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass. I think that I just now figured out how to do it, like, I can do it without randomly spinning the world around for five minutes, but...
Eric: It’s a simple idea, but doing it should be simpler.
Mike: Yeah, I don’t think I should have to spin around for five minutes before I get the hang of killing one dude.
Eric: I like the concept behind taking this 2D world and spinning it into 3D and showing me the different sides, but I kind of hate the way the logic of the game positions me when I do it. Because it always assumes, if you can picture – and to someone reading this, this might make no sense, but once you play the game you’ll know what I’m talking about – If you picture looking at a table, but you’re only looking at that table from the side so you only see it as a platform... the game always assumes that your character is on the closest edge of the table.
Mike: Oh yes! This is an important thing to mention!
Eric: No matter which way you’re spinning the world, your character will always end up on the closest edge of the table, and depending on where things are positioned elsewhere in the world, that completely changes where you’ll end up when you’re done spinning. So you need to spend, in my opinion, a little too much time tweaking your angle and spinning around to find which side of this 3D object you need to be at the "front" of when you’re done spinning.
Mike: Now at the same time, there are some neat moments. You know those little blasty cannon guys you need to avoid at some points? I guess the best way to put it is, you can avoid this trap without actually moving your character.
Eric: Right, because you just spin the world until you’re on the other side of it.
Mike: Yeah. It’s kind of disorienting; it’s kind of cool. Like, the first time I did it, I didn’t know exactly what I was doing, but, once again, once you get the hang of it, it’s a neat way to traverse a 3 dimensional world.
Eric: For sure.
Mike: Although it might have helped if they explained it better, or implemented it better.
Eric: Another thing I liked a lot was the ability to spin the world while you’re in mid air. Which essentially means that in addition to always figuring out which side of an object you need to be on, you can also end up essentially jumping off a platform and then spinning the world such that a different platform ends up under you. Which is kind of infuriating, when you’re just randomly spinning saying, "What, what do I need to do? I don’t understand. This is pissing me off." But also really satisfying when you figure it out or luck into it or whichever way it happens to go.
Mike: I think a lot of lucking happens. But it’s funny, the first time I played it, a lot of lucking -- well, it was all lucking.
Eric: It’s a technical term, lucking.
Mike: Lucking, yeah. The next time around though, I dunno, it was like it had sort of settled in my brain a little bit. The stuff that was at first like "bluuuuh" was a little more intuitive this time around.
Eric: You know, while we’ve been talking, I’ve made it to level 9, so I’m getting the hang of it a little more. I’m having fun with it. I’ve probably put all of 40 minutes into it at this point, and who knows if I make it through the full set of levels. I’ve got another six to go. But, it’s different. It’s interesting. It’s visually pleasing.
Mike: Yeah, Sky Island, I think we talked about it enough. Did we not mention anything?
Eric: I don’t think so. I think it’s a pretty neat little game. It looks nice. It’s kinda working my brain in a new way and I always appreciate that. And it’s free and, if you have Flash, you can play it so, you know, you should.
Mike: Right on. I agree.
Eric: Sky Island by Neutronized. Go do it.
Mike: Go play it.
Eric: Alright.
Mike: Cool.
"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.