It’s been over two years since I tackledPlague Inc. on iPhone. You’ll want to read that review to get my thoughts on the gameplay of Plague Inc, since I won’t be discussing it much in this review. Cliff notes: I quite liked it. Not only was it a fast-paced, fun little simulator, but the look my family had when I would excitedly declare “HOORAH! I JUST KILLED ALL OF HUMANITY!” was priceless. A bit of quiet terror mixed with cautious horror. To compound it, I would triumphantly pump my fist and then make some kind of statement like “I can’t wait to be President someday!” But, I have to admit that while making my parents contemplate whether that one night 26 years ago when their condom failed might someday bring about the end of the world is pretty enjoyable, Plague Inc. didn’t leave a lasting impression on me. It’s not a bad game at all. It’s just so sterile in its presentation and minimalistic in its play mechanics that it didn’t lend itself to “owning” me, like Clicker Heroes or even OMG Zombies did.
Plague Inc. has since “evolved” onto PC, via Steam. It’s a perfectly fine game. Of course it is. It was perfectly fine already. But, like visitors to the Creation Museum in Kentucky, I’m apparently too dense to see any evidence of evolution. There is a free Planet of the Apes tie-in that doesn’t need to be unlocked, but it’s just a barely-modified version of the game’s zombie mode. Otherwise, the same stages and unlockables are present. Maybe the “evolved” part is specific to the graphics. They’re more detailed, sure, but this is one of the few games that really doesn’t benefit at all from a more fancy presentation. Compare the following two screens. Here’s from the iPhone version circa 2013.
And this is from the Steam version, today.
It looks okay. So this should be a really easy review for me, because that’s the only change I could spot.
And that change comes at a cost of $15. That’s $14 more than the mobile version. That’s the most absurd price hike for what you actually get I’ve ever seen in gaming. While it technically meets my criteria to win my seal of approval, I couldn’t possibly recommend it over the cheaper but nearly identical-for-now mobile versions. I can’t even recommend it at this time for the $11.24 I paid for it when it was on sale in June. On the off-chance you don’t own an iOS or Android enabled device, I would still probably recommend waiting for a sale, or until the game exits its current Early Access build. New features that might justify the price hike, such as Multiplayer, still haven’t arrived well over a year after the game released (which could be as much as $6.99, not including future expansions that the game’s FAQ implies will be free to Evolved owners, maybe). All that’s left is scenario creator, which I have to admit, didn’t really hold that much interest to me. Plague Inc. Evolved is fun, make no mistake. But it’ll be equally as fun when it’s out of early access.
I know, I know. I once again didn’t realize I was playing a game in early access and now am bitching that it’s not finished. What can I say? I keep forgetting that early access is only fun when you’re talking about cats and dogs. Because kittens and puppies are awesome and cute. Unfinished indies are just fucking aggravating, and they don’t need to chew up your shoes and piss on your couch to accomplish that. Well, look at the bright side: if I told people I was playing a post apocalyptic bubble popping simulator on my phone, I would be dismissed as a typical “casual” gamer. All hail the PC master race!
Plague Inc.: Evolved was developed by Ndemic Creations
Point of Sale: Steam
$11.24 (normal price $14.99) welcomes our new brain worm overlords in the making of this review.
Plague Inc.: Evolved is Chick-Approved, sorta. My rule for earning my seal of approval is to enjoy a game. I did, so it wins it. I’ll give it a more hearty endorsement when the game is finished if the multiplayer is fun. Also, Plague Inc.: Evolved will share a spot on the IGC Leaderboard with its mobile version.
Two things annoy me about NOT A HERO, this month’s (well, technically last month’s) challenge from Indie Riot. First off is the all-caps name, which implies that you’re supposed to scream it out. “What are you doing, Cathy?” “NOT A HERO!” “What are you screaming?” “NOT A HERO!” “Um, yea Cathy, we sort of figured that out when after you pissed yourself when that spider crawled on the wall ten feet in front of you.” More annoying is NOT A HERO has an insane amount of potential, and although it can be really fun, it’s nowhere near as good as it could be.
NOT A HERO feels a lot like a mid-late 80s coin-op action title. Not any game in particular (though I did get some Elevator Action vibes from it) but one that would blend in mechanically from that era. Of course, it also has the required-for-indieness gratuitous violence that used to be awesome but is now expected and bordering on passé. And I say that both as a fan of violence and a practitioner of it, much to the dismay of my boyfriend, who is sick of having the whip marks washed out with rubbing alcohol. My point is, I think your average gamer is too desensitized by this point. The novelty of a violent 8-bit game wears off faster than a sneeze. And not the kind of sneeze where you have to roll up a piece of tissue into a spear and wiggle it around your nose to make yourself sneeze, because sometimes that takes a quite a while.
I laughed, then I cringed, then I laughed some more.
Which is not to say the violence in NOT A HERO isn’t awesome. There’s one point where you have to lead Bunnylord (the rabbit-man thing calling the shots) through a level to meet with a guy who responded to his peace-offering by decapitating the cake he presented him, because quirk. When you get the mayor to him, he starts to beat him in a way that’s funny and satisfying. Then it goes on too long and becomes awkward, like the game is trying too hard. THEN it goes on even longer, to the point that it starts being funny again. I love gags like that when they work, because it’s so rare when one is pulled off correctly. While the humor is hit-and-miss, when it works it’s amusing in a way many games with the retro-paint job often fail to grasp. NOT A HERO misses more than hits, but the hits are genuinely funny.
Nobody can accuse NOT A HERO of lacking personality. Or restraint. The humor can be very funny and the violence can be very spectacular. But, as a game, NOT A HERO struggles quite a bit. First off, the cover-based shooting mechanics quickly become boring. Enemies take cover, poke out and shoot. Getting enough quality shots off slows the pace down far too much. The game has a ton of different weapons, so why does the action feel so samey with every new floor of enemies and every new mission objective? Even worse, I can’t imagine a single player making it through the game without giving up on shoot-outs altogether and using the tackle / finishing-move option to dispatch nearly every enemy. It’s faster paced, relatively easy to pull off, and ultimately more satisfying. There’s probably a blowjob joke in there somewhere but after an hour of trying, I couldn’t find it. Anyway, the action initially sounds fine, but when the best option for dealing with the mechanics is to do the stuff that allows you to clear it as fast as possible, you might want to consider if a mistake was made along the line.
And then you hit the parts where you have to wonder if enough play-testing was done. The absolute worst part of NOT A HERO is jumping out windows, which in later stages becomes essential to clearing stages. Some objectives require puzzle-like planning and strategy, so it gets especially annoying to reach the end of a long stage and die because you intend to hop out a window and crash through the one directly below it only to fall to your death for the fifth mother fucking time. When exiting a window, you’ll often want to go through the window below you, but instead the game will launch you straight forward in a free-fall to the death. Even trying to heel-toe it at the base of a window doesn’t work all that great, because you’ll just end up dashing back into the room you just tried to exit. Mind you, many objectives in the game are based around a tight time limit, so having to fight a control mechanic that succeeds and fails almost seemingly at random takes the joy and fairness out. It was as if NOT A HERO was trying to bring the Hokey Pokey back, only it’s more like the Brokey-Croaky. You try to inch out the window, inch back in, and inch back out, do the brokey-croaky as your character falls, that’s when you start to pout.
Imagine your character doing the Goofy “YAAAAAHOOHOOWEEEE” noise as they fall to their death. At least that makes it somewhat tolerable.
If you think my hammering on this window thing seems petty and nit-picky, maybe you’re right. Especially when the rest of the play control isn’t that bad. I mean, other niggling little annoyances happen, like trying to slide out of danger but instead getting stuck in an animation where I’m capping someone with my finishing move and taking cheap damage as a result. But the window thing really sticks out to me because it’s such an essential part of the gameplay and there was no excuse for it to not be done better. Crashing through windows is a fun idea. I push my family out windows all the time and envy them as they roll off our roof and into our poison-oak bushes, because it just looks so damn exciting. And I like the concept and mission objectives for NOT A HERO a lot. The way levels are laid out makes some of them feel like surprisingly deep puzzles. I like puzzles, and it’s rare when a satisfying shooter has them. I’ll agree with other critics that the lack of variety in graphic design can be a bit exhausting, but I played NOT A HERO in shorter sessions, so it took the edge off that a little bit.
All those little control issues that pop up, one big one and several much smaller ones, make me think that NOT A HERO really could have used some more honest feedback from playtesters. To be clear, NOT A HERO is a lot of fun. Even exhilarating at times. That’s why I’m so annoyed by it. I hate games that don’t live up to their fullest potential. Clean up the play control and I think you would have the kind of indie that catches on like wildfire and goes down as something other games should aspire to be. Instead, NOT A HERO is simply a solid, fun title that people will enjoy for a few hours and forget about a week later. I could live with that if I was a cynic looking only for a temporary distraction. As someone who dreams of finding games that maximize their talent to the fullest, I really feel I have no choice here but to award NOT A HERO my seal of approval.
And then shoot it in the kneecap.
And then saw off its pinky fingers with a rusty hacksaw.
And then tie its testicles to a car battery and playfully zap it for a few hours.
And then dip cotton swabs in pepper spray and shove them in its ears.
And then take a smoke break because this torture shit is exhausting.
And then do the old thumb and screw method, because that always looked fun in the movies.
And then introduce it to my pet grizzly bear, Fluffy. Watch out, she’s horny.
And then load a buckshot with pellets of uranium 238 and take out the other knee.
And then make it drink Clamato, because fucking gross.
And then see how many times you can vivisection an arm using only a chainsaw.
Oh don’t get pissy with me, NOT A HERO. You started it!
NOT A HERO was developed by Roll7 Point of Sale: Steam
$12.99 is exploring the viability of running for office on a platform cleaning up the city using old ladies packing heat in the making of this review.
NOT A HERO is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.
Early on in Dyscourse, after your plane crashes and you’re stranded on an island with a “quirky” cast of survivors, you salvage a yellow and black hexagonal disk from the wreckage. For some reason, they name it “Disky” and proceed to treat it like Wilson from Castaway.
I don’t get it. That’s not funny.
See, the Wilson joke worked in Castaway because (1) Tom Hanks cut his hand and left a bloody hand print on the volleyball that looked like a face (2) the ball’s brand name was Wilson, which is an actual name real people have (3) Tom Hanks was alone and had nobody to talk to, so he had conversations with the ball. Disky doesn’t look like anything, even a disk. There’s no face on it, or anything remotely resembling a face. And there’s nobody on this planet named Disky. And there’s six people to talk to. Nothing about this joke works. It’s just dumb. Dumb isn’t really funny just by itself when you use it in dialog. A video of someone doing something stupid is funny, but in writing, you need a punchline. In most of the story paths I took in Dyscourse, there was no payoff to the joke. It’s just, hey, let’s pretend Disky is a person, because QUIRK! However, in one of the story paths, an attempt is made to pay it off by making the group treat Disky like a deity. At this point, the writing transitions from clumsy to trying too hard.
See that little yellow and black circle on the right? That’s Disky. In the immortal words of Edna Krabappel: pretty lame, Milhouse.
There’s really not a ton of things wrong with what little there is of Dyscourse’s gameplay. In fact, it’s done exactly the way I like choose-your-own adventure games to be. Once you finish the game, you can go back to any the previous days you’ve finished so that you can choose a different option and have the game play out a different way without starting all the way over at the beginning. Where the path deviates is always very clear, so you won’t have to replay one spot multiple times until you figure out the winning formula for getting a different version of the plot to open up. If you’re going to do a game like this, that’s the way you should do it. That doesn’t actually mean the story is told properly, though. Sometimes characters die whether you’re around them or not, leaving you to feel like what little control you have isn’t really enough. If it’s not that, it’s the characters are all stereotypes who don’t really get a chance to develop. In my first play-through, I had no idea Teddy was a weird conspiracy theory-type. But then the end credits implied that he was. Teddy died quickly when I left him to drown while trapped under a tree, but still, there should have been enough time to allow this characterization to come through. So in my next play-through, I tried to get to know him better. The only good that came from this was I stumbled upon the one gag in the game that made me laugh: Teddy spent decades trying to gain access to military secrets to discover what happened to his long-lost brother, eventually getting a job in.. the mail room!
I said he got a job IN THE MAIL ROOM! Get it? No? Eh, fuck it. You had to be there.
The gameplay is fairly limited. Talk to people, click on things, choose an option from a menu, and see what happens. Games like this are dependent on sharp writing to carry them. For what it’s worth, the majority of critics seem to disagree with me about Dyscourse’s writing, which makes me wonder if stuff like Disky is some sort of reference to a deserted island show like Lost or Gilligan’s Island that’s going over my head. But it’s not just the jokes that I felt don’t work. All the transitions from story beat to story beat felt clumsy.
“Damnit guys, Piggy broke the glasses! Would you get away from that fucking hog’s head and give me a hand over here?”
For example, in one section, it starts raining and you have to decide if the group will bail in search of a cave or stay put. I chose to look for a cave. But, before the search, I also had to choose whether or not I would grab the supplies, which at this point consisted of two bags of pretzels and a signal flare. Members of the group hastily shouted at me that WE HAVE TO LEAVE NOW! WE DON’T HAVE TIME! Which was mind-boggling. Why did we have to leave right then? What was the rush? I could have bought the sense of urgency if the game had presented us with something to be nervous over. It didn’t. Not only that, but those supplies? They were right FUCKING there, just a couple of feet away from where I was standing. You could see them! It’s so logically brain-dead that I’m wondering if this is another possible joke that went over my head, or some kind of social commentary on mob mentality. I felt that way every time the plot started to move forward, the motivations and dialog feeling tacked on and rushed through.
Dyscourse is a tough game to review, because this is one of those eye of the beholder games. You’ll either be charmed out of your socks or you’ll be bored. You’ll either laugh your ass off or you’ll cringe. There’s not a lot of middle ground. A lot of people like the art style. I didn’t. I thought main character Rita looked like an anamorphic scarecrow made of wood. I thought Teddy looked like 1910 Frankenstein. The character models were just bizarre. To put it in perspective, my boyfriend created this picture. Can you tell which is a character that’s actually in the game and which is a Garbage Pail Kid that he photoshopped in?
Um, can I use a lifeline?
Again, eye of the beholder. Given the sheer number of satisfied backers Dyscourse has (even holding the scroll button down, it takes quite a while for them to finish up in the end credits), obviously this style has its audience. The gameplay does too, though if you’re expecting something like Don’t Starve, keep looking. Dyscourse is a choose-your-own adventure title. Rudimentary fetch-quests and often meaningless point-and-clickery. The stock characters are dull. The Animal Crossing style gibberish they speak gets annoying really fast. I never found myself invested in their plight, and as anyone who has read my Walking Dead reviews knows, when that happens I get a little homicidal. I successfully killed off a couple of members of the party, sometimes without trying, but even that felt oddly unsatisfying. You can sum up my experience with the fact that I eventually decided to commit suicide by giving up a spot in a sleeping bag to the two other survivors while trekking up a mountain, because she was that fucking boring, and the people I was with were boring. Really, if I had actually been stuck with two people like this in a survival situation, starving, freezing, beaten-up? Yea, I would have rather been dead. But even that didn’t work. I survived the night, though one of my hands had frostbite and fell off. My first play-through ended shortly after, and I’ve been struggling to work up the willpower to unlock other story paths ever since. It’s nearly 2AM as I write this, and I’m kicking myself for not grabbing a screencap of Disky when it first popped up, because that means I have to go back and play some more, and I don’t want to.
Dyscourse isn’t terrible. I didn’t hate it. Not even close. I don’t like to use the term “not for me” because it sounds like a huge cop-out, but it really wasn’t for me. I wouldn’t have even bothered playing as far as I did, but it was this month’s charity challenge game from my buddies at Indie Game Riot (the good news? $14.99 will be donated to the Epilepsy Foundation by them for me reviewing this). It comes back to the writing. Some critics have called it witty or sharp. I thought the jokes fell flat, the dialog was Death Valley levels of dry, and the concept as a whole was pretty tired. Mileage on that seems to vary greatly. Throw up a YouTube video of the first chapter. Did you laugh? You might like the game. Did you not? It doesn’t get any better the further you make it in. Meh, I don’t know what else to say. Most people liked it. I didn’t. Please don’t burn my house down, fans of the game. After all, Dyscourse is about discourse, the implication being polite is the way to go.
What’s that? You liked the game but also arbitrarily murdered members of the surviving party, the same way I did? Well shit.
$14.99 kept holding out hope we were stuck on the same island with Green Arrow in the making of this review. That way we could have killed and eaten him.
My misadventures with Kerbals began a couple of weeks ago. Its beta first releasing about a week before I started Indie Gamer Chick, Kerbal has finally “completed” the working-the-kinks-out phase of its existence and is now considered an official release. I actually bought it as a gift for my boyfriend around Christmas time with the intent that the two of us would have our own version of the space race. It was in that spirit that I took the evil approach to things, shoving my Kerbals into the most unspaceworthy of contraptions and telling myself they did horrible, horrible things so that I could sleep at night with a clear conscience.
My first ship, which blew up as soon as I ignited the thrusters. The Kerbal I condemned to death in this hung the toilet paper roll under-handedly. That’s a kill’in in my world.
Unlike Brian, who decided he would play the tutorials and missions so that he could know what he was doing, I decided to just spend the next forty hours or so messing around in the Kerbal’s sandbox mode. Just me, an extensive warehouse of parts, and the titular Kerbals. A race of Muppet-looking frog things so cute and innocent that they’re practically asking to be blown up by sadists using the most exotic firecrackers in gaming. The building interface is pretty good, but could use less sarcastic descriptions of what specific parts do. Launch controls and figuring out how the little globe thing you use to track your position in the sky are more complex to learn, though again, there’s a tutorial. Psssh, tutorials. Did Louis Armstrong have a tutorial when he landed on Mars? Hell no. So I strapped some rockets to the cockpit, fired up some Steppenwolf, and in the name of science, I pretty much committed Kerbal genocide.
But, that does grow old quickly. So, after ten hours of doing things like “accidentally” forgetting to deploy the chutes once my contraptions had failed to break orbit (kidding, I didn’t actually include parachutes, but I didn’t want the Kerbals to know that), I decided to actually, you know, make an effort and shit. I still avoided the tutorials. I wanted to see if I could break the barrier of space on my own. It took me several hours to pull it off, but once I did, it was one of the happiest moments of my gaming life. I wasn’t expecting that. The amazing sense of accomplishment, so sincere and authentic that I got a little teary eyed. The Kerbals even survived the trip! See, I’m a Kermanitarian.
Despite this looking like Earth, Kerbal’s solar system is not actually an accurate model of our solar system. Earth is now called Kerbin. The Moon is called Mun. They should let you rename all the stuff. Maybe you can. Maybe it’s in the tutorial. I’ll get to it just as soon as I land on the Sun. Or Kerbol as it’s called in the game. Kerbol. Kerbin. Yea, that won’t get confusing.
Once that progress was made, I was doing all kinds of neat stuff in no time. I even was able to launch a capsule clean out of the solar system (which, um, yea I totally meant to do that or something), breaking the sun’s hold on it and pretty much leading to a whole lot of nothing. Sort of disappointing. Movies and TV had taught me that if you’re an astronaut and you aim for a planet and miss, you end up in a wacky adventure meeting aliens of improbable humanoid shapes. Here, you just sort of drift away. I left the game on over night to see if a comet or something would hit me. That didn’t happen either. As it turns out, this is a lot like actual space: mostly empty and surprisingly difficult to collide with something on purpose or by accident.
It all culminated for me (at least up to the point where I stopped to write this review) on a mission to try to land on the Moon. Again, I planned a one-way-trip, because I was taking baby steps. And because I’m “an awful person, and you can quote me on that” (thanks Dad). Now, I consider myself a reasonably smart person. So when everyone watching me launch the mission did so with a smirk on their faces, I was assuming they just figured I would miss, like I had a couple dozen times before then. Figuring the problem was my choice of music (I wasn’t creating Warp Drive after all), I switched up to some Sinatra and lifted off. Using the seriously complex to the point that it will intimidate many people right out of trying trajectory system, I finally lined up correctly and was pointed straight at the moon. I was cheering myself. Everyone else still had the weird smirk. Oh well, the joke would be on them.
Sadly for the Kerbals, I found the one place in the universe where there’s no Subway for them to eat at.
Success! I entered the orbit. “That ought to wipe that stupid look off your faces” I said as I watched my descent and prepared to activate the chute. 3.. 2.. 1.. deploy.
“What air do you expect the chute to catch? It’s the Moon. There’s no atmosphere.”
“…………………….. oh right.”
Splat.
So yea, I killed a couple more baby Frankensteins, but I did so in the name of science. And fun. Kerbal is a ton of fun. It’s what you make of it. I put a lot of time into it, and I’m not even close to being done. In fact, it’s one of the most rewarding, and at times exhilarating experiences I’ve had. It didn’t even matter to me if NASA or the ESA says it’s the bee’s knees. Kerbal works as a video game. Just note the following:
1. It’s not intuitive. It makes no attempt at being so. It will take some time and effort to get past the learning curve. This is apparently true even if you’re not a stubborn ass like I was and use the tutorials.
2. It really does aim to be a simulation of space travel. Real space travel is slow, involves precise calculations, and the journey can involve a LOT of downtime. The game does have a form of fast forward, though even this can be too slow once you start venturing to the outer planets.
3. Kerbal has addictive potential somewhere between Tetris and weapons-grade cocaine.
With that, I must venture back to the drawing board, as I do want to put a Kerbal on the Moon. Or, if I want, I also can play the most horrifying version of Missile Command ever conceived with all the failed missions I have now orbiting the Sun.
And thank you all for sticking with me through my first 500 indie game reviews. Here’s to the next 5,000!
Kerbal Space Program was developed by Monkey Squad S.A de C.V. Point of Sale: Steam
♫♫ Whose that crying while somewhere up in the sky? Crashing to the Earth with a fiery sigh. Just when you think I might start care an ounce.. I start to giggle when their bodies bounce.
Do the Kerbal Countdown! And send their asses to the air! (And send their asses to the air!)
Just do the Kerbal Countdown! For science do we dare! (For science do we dare!)
Don’t be afraid when Cathy blows it from start. Just take comfort that you won over her heart.
And do the Kerbal Countdown.. FIVE.. FOUR.. THREE.. TWO.. ONE! ♫♫
Um, in the making of this review.
Kerbal Space Program is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard
Update 5/9/19: White Night has been delisted from both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 stores. It’s available still on Switch and Steam.
This is the latest challenge from the gang at the Indie Game Riot, who matched my White Night purchase price ($14.99) as a charitable donation to the Epilepsy Foundation. I buy the game, they match the price, everyone benefits. Except my brain, because given their selection of games for me, I’m starting to think they hate me.
In the interest of fairness, I should concede that I almost certainly never had any chance of liking White Night right from the get-go. This is for a couple of reasons. I never got into horror games. As a child, my parents didn’t let me play M rated games. I guess they didn’t want me to grow up cussing a blue-streak or making obscene jokes. The results speak for themselves. By time I was an adult, I had epilepsy. Horror games are meant to be played in the dark, with all external lighting turned off. That’s the biggest epilepsy no-no there is. But, White Night was mostly done-in for me by relying on fixed camera angles. I hate those. My first Resident Evil was #4. Also known as the one that ditched the fixed camera angles in favor of, you know, anything but fixed camera angles. You’ll notice almost nobody talks about the first three Resident Evils as the pinnacle of the series. Resident Evil 4 was so good it made the first three retroactively bad. More outdated than natural aging should have made them, and that’s almost entirely on the fixed camera angles. I get the point of them, especially in horror games. Like a theme park dark ride, they direct your attention in a specific direction to optimize the terror when something scary comes into view. The problem with that is, it compromises optimized gameplay for stylized storytelling. Games aren’t movies. Gameplay should always be paramount.
And, in the case of White Night, the graphics style does not mesh well at all with the fixed camera malarkey. This gets proven nearly every time something is introduced that’s intend to drive the plot in some way. There’s a scene in the second chapter where you’re in a dining room (I think it’s a dining room) and the game’s plot takes over: a ghost girl who needs your help. She appears suddenly and then walks through a door. When she does, the cinematics take over so you can see her walk through the door. You then return to the fixed camera you were at, and it’s almost impossible to figure out which door she just went through. The game is drawn in black and white graphics and the gimmick is most of the game is shrouded in darkness.
Here’s an example of how the puzzles in the game don’t work in a logical sense. See the statue casting a shadow on the grave marker? There’s a key hanging where the shadow is. It’s not an Indiana Jones type of thing where moving the shadow of the statue activates a mechanism that reveals the key. No, the key is apparently just hanging there (you can even feel it before you move the statue) but you can’t actually claim it until you move the statue and can see it. Oh COME ON! It’s right fucking there. It’s just so damn silly that it breaks immersion right off the bat. This is literally the prologue to the game and the concept is already ruined. Sigh.
It doesn’t work as a play mechanic or a storytelling device. Hypothetically, the player character saw the ghost and knows which door she went through. That’s why it’s scary. Because holy fuck that was a ghost! But the player can’t tell which door she went through, so the plot grinds to a halt once again while you stumble around slowly, lighting matches to illuminate dark areas and clicking every object hoping to make the god damn slow-as-radioactive-decay story unfold just a sliver more. This breaks immersion, because in a cinematic experience (like White Night strives to be), the guy who, again, just saw a fucking ghost crying for help and walking through a door, would know which door she went through and follow her. In the game, the players are left to stumble searching for the door that the character himself saw. Are we scared yet? No, really, we’re just bored.
Oh, and by the way, the door she went through? It was locked.
Other technical issues get in the way. Even the simple act of clicking on shit to examine wasn’t handled well. The game kicks off with a car crash that injures the main character. I’m not sure if he spends the whole game limping around, but at the point I quit (which, granted, was very early in), he staggers with all the urgency of a murderer being dragged to the gallows. The limping animation leads to making lining up with stuff that you need to click a needless exercise in frustration. I’ve slammed the examine when the magnifying glass appears on-screen, only the dipshit you control was still dragging his leg in the animation and thus by time the game acknowledges that you hit a button, the character is no longer in position to examine the thing in question. Normally I would label this “lag” but it’s not really lag. It’s just bad design.
I don’t want to call it “Style over Substance” because that implies the game’s creators made a conscious decision that the gameplay could be mediocre as long as the art work was striking (and it is). I think White Night is a victim of the development team knowing how to play their own game and forgetting that you develop games for everyone else. Like an expectation that players will play the game the way the game’s creator does. For example, save points are notoriously spread far apart. In theory, this is done to heighten tension, making players practically pray that they come across one so that all the progress they’ve made isn’t lost. In practice, players just make a tiny bit of progress, return to the last save point they found, then venture back to make a little more progress, rinse, repeat until they stumble upon a new one. Thus 10 minutes worth of gameplay takes an hour to complete. I’ve never seen a game where that’s an option and most players opt to just risk making it to checkpoints. That’s especially true with White Night, because the game unfolds so fucking slowly, with miserable play control, that fear of having to repeat the tedious activities is more terrifying than any jump-scares or creepy atmosphere the game can throw at you.
Lighting matches doesn’t protect you from the more aggressive ghosts, but they’ll be removed as threats by electric lights. This leads to two things. First, some of the light switches “look dangerous” and thus your character won’t push them, because of course he won’t. I mean seriously, what a pussy. He’s being stalked by killer ghosts who are only scared of electricity. He’s locked in the house. And it’s just a fucking light switch! Again, all the stuff designed to keep tension up or be a “puzzle” is handled so poorly that it breaks the immersion. In a horror game, immersion is all you have. You break that, you’re left with nothing. And second, it leads to players hugging the fucking walls searching in vain for a light switch that simply does not stick out enough, and then when you find it, it doesn’t work. Who wants to play hug the walls? White Night is a wall-hugging simulator.
There’s not a single concept that White Night has that I feel works the way it was probably envisioned. The game gives you matches that you must use to stay in the light. You can carry 12 at a time. If you run out of matches, you die. If you can’t get a match lit in a dark area fast enough, you die. That can be problematic when you’re trying to light a match but the character is either caught in an examination animation or even a movement animation that you can’t even see. I’m guessing it’s done to be realistic, because real people would struggle to light a match in a haunted house where ghosts will fucking kill you if you aren’t able to spark the thing up. THIS ISN’T REAL LIFE! It’s a game! And besides, when the ghosts actually kill you, the death animation looks more like a mildly annoyed person trying to shoo a housefly away, not a scared-shitless person having the life force sucked out of them by a god damned mother fucking GHOST! And why the hell are the ghosts in the game instakills? And why are we even doing the ridiculous save stuff? And why in the blue fuck are matches in limited supplies? White Night has a very old, first-gen 3D horror mentality. It ignores all the major advancements in-game design that have come about over the last twenty years. A lot of people say Resident Evil 1 was scarier than Resident Evil 4. Fine, maybe it was. But horror games control better today than they did in the PS1/Saturn era. Can’t we find a healthy middle ground between good gameplay and real scares?
That’s the real shame here. White Night might actually be a really scary video game. I played it in a room with four grown men and my mother. We all had a couple “fucking game got me!” BOO moments. But typically those resulted in me dying, followed by dying several more times in a row. Then more dying. You die a lot. This is mostly because, for some reason, when a ghost spots you the movement gets even weirder and more limpy than normal. If a ghost catches you, you die. You can run away, but while doing so, you have to compete with horrible play control and the possibility that the fixed camera angles will change. Again, because of the all white and black style and the darkness versus light gimmick, the layouts of rooms are confusing at best. Often, it’s not even worth attempting to runaway.
Going off the percentages of players getting achievements for completing the second chapter, a shocking amount of people quit playing White Night at some point on the second stage, and I’m amongst them. This game is awful. Look, even scary games are supposed to be entertaining. While the game is interesting to look at, a game shouldn’t make it so easy for players to give up and quit. White Night frustrates with archaic fixed angles, clunky movement, bad play control, confusing layouts, a slow, somewhat uninteresting and far too vague story, and annoying instakills that make you replay all the annoying things. No, as someone who completely missed the fixed-camera era of horror gaming and HATES that style, I probably never stood a chance to like White Night. Was this review fair? I feel it was, because if you’re in the same boat as me, with no nostalgic affection for that style, White Night is clearly not for you. Playing White Night is practically a war of attrition, and it is in that sense only that it succeeds. I wave the white flag.
I’m guessing Parallax would have looked really spiffy using Oculus Rift. I figured that’s what it was designed for. I was wrong. The developers just wanted to make a visually striking first-person maze-puzzler that didn’t suck. Mission accomplished there. The concept is a fairly basic “find your way to the goal by opening the pathway to it” style puzzling. I’ve never found this style of puzzle to be particularly challenging. It’s just a matter of reverse-engineering. It’s still satisfying, I suppose in the same way not getting stuck in a hedge maze and starving to death or being featured on Fox’s Most Embarrassing Rescues: Caught on Tape is. She said wearing her “As Seen on Fox’s Most Embarrassing Rescues: Caught on Tape” tee-shirt. Hey, don’t judge! I got separated from my parents, got scared, and started to cry. It’s not nice to mock either. It was a long time ago. Okay, fine, it was three weeks ago. But I’ve grown up a lot since then.
I kept waiting to be attacked by the White or Black Spy. It never happened. That makes me so Mad.
Parallax’s biggest problem is it stays basic too long. Which benefited me for reasons I’ll get into later, but everyone else will experience a game that only scrapes its potential. The game feels too tutorialish, willing to try to bend brains but only in baby steps. There’s two scaling problems common on the indie scene in games that don’t attempt to be punishers. The first is the Sine Curve Problem. This is where the difficulty feels stop-and-go (see Thomas Was Alone). The second is the Lazy Slope Problem. This is where the difficulty does technically scale properly, but does so in such a slow matter that the game risks getting boring. Parallax suffers from this. When it brings out more challenging or novel play mechanics, such as timing puzzles or especially anti-gravity stages, stuff that the game should have been based around from the start, you’re already sort of tired of the whole concept.
I should point out that this isn’t a problem if you play the game the way I used to play puzzles games before I started IGC. I would knock out a couple of puzzles and then quit for the day before I burned myself out. Puzzlers can be exhausting, especially when their visual stimuli is kept to a minimum. I like playing games like Parallax. I dislike reviewing them, because I have to sort of plow through them as fast as possible so that I can move on to my next review. I don’t think logic puzzles like these lend themselves to an all-day play session. Not in the same way that, say, Portal does. Stuff like Parallax is more in line with the daily crossword puzzle in a newspaper. I like doing those, but I wouldn’t want to sit around all day doing them. It would get boring quickly.
Unfortunately, for me at least, I was spared from doing that with Parallax for the worst reason. Although epilepsy is an every-present issue in my gaming life, motion sickness has always been a rarity for me. For whatever reason, Parallax left me folding over my chair, feeling like I was about to toss my cookies all over the floor. The last time this happened to me was Marathon on Xbox Live Arcade, so it’s been a while. And this is before stages with gravity tricks and pathways that feel like the loops on a roller coaster. That was the first time in my indie gaming life I had to literally put the controller down to avoid caking it in my own vomit. Results won’t be typical, but be warned, if you’re prone to motion sickness, you might want to avoid Parallax. I normally am not, and this one got me. In fairness, I’ve heard no complaints elsewhere.
I call this the “I didn’t like having working eyeballs anyway” color scheme.
Parallax doesn’t really do anything bad, so it’s sort of hard to critique beyond the opening stages lacking the best (or in my case, most stomach-churning) aspects of the game. I liked it. I’m just sort of over the whole two-tone visual thing. It was cool at one point. It’s been done to death and it’s exhausting to the point of sucking fun out of the experience now. But, Parallax is a solid puzzler. If you’re looking for a decent first-first brain bender, give it a shot. I mean, I can’t anymore unless I want to puke all over the place. Note to self: don’t play this before meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister.
$9.99 frequently walked off the ledges while playing, which actually does sound semi-common when playing the game in the making of this review. Not a deal breaker. There’s no consequence for it.
Parallax is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard
Cosmochoria is not finished yet. I don’t mean it’s buggy (though it is). I mean literally, the game is not finished. The final boss fight and a proper ending have not yet been included as of this writing. It’s weird to me to review a game that isn’t complete. But, Cosmochoria costs money ($9.99 to be exact), and you can purchase the early, near-complete build I’ve put over twenty hours into right now. What does $10 dollars get you? A glitchy, often slow grind-a-thon that left me cursing in frustration and annoyed with myself for breaking my “no Betas” vow.
Also, it’s a lot of fun. I mean, duh. I wouldn’t have put twenty hours into a game I thought was garbage.
Cosmchoria’s concept sounds like it belongs more in a big, blockbuster 3D space epic. You’re a little astronaut that plants seeds on planets. Once you’ve planted X amount of seeds (depending on the planet’s size), the planet becomes terraformed. Terraformed planets restore your health and give you a special treasure. The map is randomly generated, giving you 50 planets. The act of planting seeds, or other “building” options feels a little like an RTS or time management game, but really, Cosmochoria feels more like the evolution of late 70s/early 80s coin-op action titles. Gameplay is super-fast-paced, which juxtaposes the slow grind of acquiring money and leveling up your character. A variety of stats can be built upon (don’t upgrade your movement speed past 3 out of 5. Just, fucking trust me on that), but getting good enough to feel strong and able-bodied feels like it takes too long. Weirdly enough, once I passed a certain point, before my stats were half-way upgraded (buy an upgrade that doubles the money you collect to speed this up), I was suddenly able to make massive progress and finish building my character in just two rounds worth of play. That tells me the upgrade system was like the dragon with dandruff: not scaled properly.
Terraformed planets always get occupied by Cheech & Chong. At least that’s what it looks like.
Give me a second while I figure out if that joke makes any sense. I think it does. Hear me out. Like, if a dragon has dandruff, it would shed scales instead of flakes, right? Dragons don’t have hair. Well, most don’t. European ones don’t. Okay, so that joke won’t make sense in China, but then again, dragons don’t exist so I can make up any rule I want about them. If I say they have dandruff, they have dandruff. If they have dandruff, that means their scales are bad, or not proper. So the joke works. By that, I mean it makes sense, not that it’s funny.
I’m now told jokes are supposed to be funny too. Sorry. I’ll try harder next time.
Lack of trying hard wasn’t an issue for Cosmochoria. It goes overboard in trying to be quirky, aloof, 4th-wall breaking. While there’s a plot in place and a nifty little twist ending, I never got too deep into it. The writing isn’t particularly memorable, and the arcade-style action doesn’t exactly lend itself to the meta-storyline it was aiming for. That’s fine. The action here more than makes up for it. There’s a nice variety of enemies and a wide range of ways to fight them. So why do I wish I had more ways to fight them? You can only bring a single gun (guns are also unlocked with money) on any campaign you make, and there’s only three kinds of offensive-oriented bases you can build. A wider variety would take the edge off of the repetition, which does wear a bit thin. It would also lead to more complex strategies. Cosmochoria is a bit on the dumb, stupid, overly-simple side. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very capable of loving simple-dumb, and its #91 ranking on the IGC Leaderboard as of this writing ain’t too shabby. But it feels like this is more of a proof-of-concept than a fully realized game.
Enemy and especially boss designs aren’t exactly inspired. This one looks more like an advertisement for deodorant.
Most of my issues with Cosmochoria got patched out while I was playing the game, so my relevant complaints are fairly limited right now. The controls are adequate, though selecting specific tasks off the menu ring sometimes felt sticky and unresponsive. The utter clusterfuck of enemies attacking you all at once deep in the game can be overwhelming. And there’s annoying little slime-blob baddies that are only a couple of pixels off the ground and require you to point downwards to kill them. That doesn’t sound too bad, until you remember that all action takes place on spherical surfaces and thus you have to be close enough to risk taking damage to defend yourself against these little bastards. Then again, almost all enemies announce their presence to you by damaging you in a way that you never had any potential of avoiding. The damage they cause is often miniscule, but it adds up quickly when you have over a dozen different enemies attacking you all at once. This all while you’re trying to plant seeds or set up bases. There’s clear-all bombs that wipe the screen clean (without giving you money or points for the enemies that die) but they also clear out any bases you’ve laid down. Well, in theory. Sometimes I would panic, detonate a bomb on a planet I had a ton of bases on, the bases would disappear………. and then keep firing at enemies. Huh?
Actually, the “Huh?” inducing glitches benefited me as often as they hindered me. There’s a nifty exploit where you can stop your character’s movement dead in its tracks while in space simply by pausing the game and unpausing it. Without this, I don’t think I would have beaten the game as easily as I did. I can’t imagine playing the game without it, though I’m guessing it will be removed in later builds. Or there’s the one time I happened upon one of the dragon bosses, which had gotten stuck in one of my Easter Island-like statue bases and died without causing me to so much as break sweat against it. And I lost track of how many times enemies clipped their way through the planet geometry and were stuck indefinitely, which I think prevented similar enemies from spawning and attacking me (or at least it seemed that way). This was awesomely beneficial. Cosmochoria isn’t stable, and it probably won’t be for quite a while, but the charm and enjoyability are undeniable.
Some of the glitches are totally meaningless. Like this one. Before you can plant seeds on a planet, you have to plant a flag first. You only get one flag per planet. Only this time it gave me two. Weird. Didn’t hurt or help or do anything. But it also shows how unstable the game can be. Totally random mechanical glitches happen constantly. Like, almost every play session.
I liked Cosmochoria. For all its buggery, there’s something quintessentially gamey about it. I think the development team behind it would have thrived in the golden age, where glitches became features and those who could exploit them ruled the arcades. They would have turned out stuff like Robotron or Defender. Maddening action titles that were anything but fair, but you still had to play them because they’re so entertaining. I actually whine a lot about games that aren’t fair, which means Cosmochoria makes a hypocrite out of me. If you strip out all the glitches, you’re left with a game where enemies hit you before you even have a chance to realize there is an enemy present. But, it’s fun. So I guess the rule when making an unfair game is, you probably shouldn’t do it. BUT, if you do it, at least make sure it’s fun. Cosmochoria is fun.
Haunt the House: Terrortown is sort of like that old GameCube title Geist, only it’s not a first person adventure, you can’t possess people, and the game doesn’t fucking suck. It’s not great either. Like Geist, the concept seems like it should lend itself well to a video game, but there’s not a whole lot you can do with it. Unlike Geist, the game doesn’t attempt to pad out a shallow, low-mileage concept. Haunt the House can comfortably be finished in under an hour. That includes the free Christmas-themed DLC. No, this doesn’t mean it qualified for Short Subject Saturdays. Being able to hypothetically finish something in under twenty minutes doesn’t make it short subject. You can beat Mario 64 in under fifteen minutes. Tell me with a straight face that makes it short subject.
There’s actually a lot of objects to inhabit in Haunt the House, though I’m not certain how some of them are supposed to scare people. In the DLC, you can possess a bulb on the Christmas Tree and make X-Wings attack it like the Death Star. What the fuck? How is that scary? “Oh shit people, GEORGE LUCAS IS HERE! RUN!”
I guess I enjoyed Haunt the House. I mean, there’s just not a lot to it. You enter objects, you make them do something scary. As people become more terrified, you get the ability to make objects do even scarier things. To win, you have to get people so pants-shittingly scared that they flee the stage. It’s actually very family friendly, which is probably why I didn’t fall in love with it. It’s a children’s game, with just enough play time to hold their attention for an hour. I tested this theory on Brent, a friend’s ten-year-old. And then I became one of those people. You know, those people who can’t tell what forms of entertainment will be enjoyed by which age groups. The ones that buy Barbies for thirteen-year-olds, or complex LEGO sets for five-year-olds. At ten years of ages, even Brent was too old to really get an appropriate lark out of Haunt the House. I forgot that kids these days have access to shows like Walking Dead, and their video games are an orgy of terror and violence. I thought maybe I had been wrong about the kids will love it stuff, but then I tested it on seven-year-old Kelvin. He thought it was jim dandy awesome. Also, I’m using the terms like “jim dandy” and “kids these days” to describe anything. Christ, how did I get so old and out of touch so quickly?
Can adults enjoy Haunt the House? Sure, but they’ll mostly just complain that it’s too short, too shallow, or too kiddy. I liked it, but I wasn’t exactly disappointed when the game ended in less time than it takes to watch an episode of House of Cards. Hell, I even found a game-killing glitch in that short time. On one stage, one of the women you have to scare was somehow stuck running a loop on a staircase. She would get to the top of the stairs, then teleport to the bottom and run up it again. There was no way to get her out of it, and it rendered the game unbeatable. The only work around was to quit out of the game and come back. When you do this, all your progress is retained but the woman will be somewhere else on the stage. Just keep her away from the stairs. And other issues abound. When a person is terrified to the point that they’ll leave the stage, sometimes they don’t exactly take the best pathway to do so. It reminded me of Carlton’s freakout from Fresh Prince. The AI has one job: leave the fucking house. It should be more efficient at doing so.
This is the spot where the girl got stuck in the staircase. Or did she? Maybe developer Tom Vian was trying to show the theory of space and relativity, showing that if you travel faster than the speed of light, you could end up causing an endless loophole of misery and repetition. This is actually one of the best uses I’ve ever seen for gaming to explain the laws of theoretical science and natu.. oh never mind, it was just a glitch.
Is it fun? Yea. Is it on the wrong platform? Yea. I know it came out on PlayStation Mobile, but really, it belongs on Wii U or 3DS. Is it over priced? Ohhhh yea. $4.99 is too much for a game with this little going for it. But if you’ve got wee ones or you can grab it for under $2, Haunt the House isn’t bad by any means. Had I realized Haunt the House was a game best suited for the under-nine set, I wouldn’t have played it. Haunt the House wasn’t designed for me. It was made for children. I’m a sophisticated adult. One who hides clips of a Japanese children’s television show in every review she does, but, um, what were we talking about?
Haunt the House was developed by SFB Games Point of Sale: Steam
$4.99 yelled at kids to get off my lawn in the making of this review.
Haunt the House is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard
The Fist of Jesus is based on an independent short film, and it probably should have stayed there. It’s another game that I would consider a novelty title. Without the presence of Jesus, I’m almost certain this title would have been received with universal negativity. As the port of a mobile game, the fighting mechanics are extremely limited. One button does all the punching and kicking, while the other face buttons trigger special attacks that would normally be activated by an on-screen button. Because there’s only one button for attacking, there’s no combos or advanced moves to pull off. Just mash the button until the person you’re punching is dead. Alternately, sometimes your punches randomly stun the enemy and make a meter appear. Press the meter at the correct time and you’ll unleash one of three finishing moves chosen at random. The finishing moves are the same for both Jesus and Judas, and the novelty of watching Jesus rip out the heart of a zombie gets old pretty quickly.
Question: why would ripping the heart out of a zombie kill it? It’s a zombie. Its heart doesn’t even beat. Oh, never mind. I remember now. It’s because we need to have screenshots and videos of Jesus ripping out someone’s heart and holding it up triumphantly like he’s Mola Ram so that people will want to buy the game.
The movie Fist of Jesus is fifteen minutes long. I put fifteen hours into Fist of Jesus: the PC game. That wasn’t enough to finish it. I’m stuck on the level 50 boss, which is an encounter with a giant octopus, because why not? By this point, you’ve already fought it a couple of times, but this time around, it’s ultra spongy. I never got killed against it. Instead, I died when time ran out. Here’s where Fist of Jesus shows its ugly mobile roots. The game is too padded and has too much emphasis on grinding. I *did* level and money grind quite a bit before I got to it. I had found the perfect level to do so and thought of myself as quite clever. I was wrong. Despite having gained an extra five or six levels doing this, I wasn’t remotely close to beating the octopus on stage 50. Even with 500 seconds, AND even after I had spent a couple of hours screw-grinding my XP, AND even considering that I hit it every single time it poked its head out to open itself up to attack, AND even considering that I had purchased all available upgrades, AND had unlocked all the XP based upgrades, AND purchased the right to start the stage with a gun, I could only knock down three-quarters of its lifebar before time ran out. That’s simply too damn spongy a boss for a game with fight mechanics as shallow as a puddle of spit.
Like many ports of mobile games to PC, I think the developers of Fist of Jesus made a mistake by porting the game straight to PC without optimizing the controls or the mechanics for the platform. The game would have had more value if they had taken advantage of the more advanced capabilities PC has to offer. Slightly more complex fight mechanics, a larger variety of attacks, or especially the ability to play this co-op would have helped Fist of Jesus greatly. The rush to port the mobile game to PC feels a bit lazy. I controlled the action with an Xbox One controller, but needed to switch to the mouse and hold the left button down to scroll the map. There’s an on-screen indicator that dialog could be skipped, but I was unable to do so with the controller or the mouse. These are all niggling annoyances, but I couldn’t help but wish more effort was put into this game. Especially since so many people would buy it just for the novelty value.
To anyone who is offended by this picture, I just want to point out that some people might be offended by your beliefs. You know, according to your religion, the penalty for not combing your hair is God will kill you AND be very angry with your neighbors for letting you be such a slob. I’m not kidding. Look, it’s right here.
And really, that’s what Fist of Jesus is about. I never got the feeling from it that it was meant to be a good game. It’s a novelty. “Hey, look, there’s Jesus kissing Judas to bring him back to life, like he’s Sleeping Beauty. There’s Jesus ripping the head off a zombie. 9 out of 10! Eleven gold stars! I can’t wait to show this to my friends!” I don’t get it. The whole “taking a character out of their element is funny in and of itself” joke wears thin so fast, because once you’ve seen Jesus rip out one heart, you’ve seen the entire punchline. Hey look there’s Jesus, doing something very un-Jesus-like! L out L! But really, people have been doing the same gag with Jesus for decades now. South Park had him as a main character on the show, and gave Satan the Disney Princess song in their movie. Is sacrilege funny by itself anymore? Apparently so, judging by how many people liked this game. And maybe as a fifteen-minute-long movie, the joke works. But I think games need to be something more. This one is normally priced $9.99 too. That’s just too damn expensive for a fifteen-plus hour game where the gag stops being funny about five minutes in.
Fist of Jesus is a game. As a game, it just isn’t fun. I can’t stress enough, I spent hours grinding, and there’s no challenges left for me to do except beat this boss. But, what I’ve done isn’t enough to beat the boss I’m on. I have to go back and grind the same small handful of enemies, using the same handful of weapons, until I have enough strength to beat it. Or I can quit and play a better game. Yea, the shock value will never wear off with certain people. My parents are practicing Catholics, and my mother walked in on me playing Fist of Jesus. The look on her face was priceless. I don’t think she could have been more disappointed in me if she had walked in on me getting an abortion. But what’s in it for you if you have nobody in your life to offend with this? One of the dullest brawlers I’ve played and a one way trip to Hell, which will probably be spent playing Fist of Jesus.
Fist of Jesus was developed by Mutant Games Point of Sale: Steam
$4.99 (normally priced $9.99) said “The Fist of Jesus” was the wrong name for this title. It should have been “The Power of Christ Compels You to DIE!” or something less generic in the making of this review.
Two-for-one special today. Two games I probably shouldn’t have played in the first place, as I’m not the type of person who enjoys games that have nothing else going for them besides extreme difficulty. As my father put it, some people break bricks with their bare hands, while others plop on the couch and watch the Karate Kid.
First up is Love, which I think beats an XBLIG by the name of Dark as the biggest violator of the Google Rule I’ve ever encountered at IGC. The Google Rule states that when you type a game’s name into Google, a link that points to the game should be within the top 5 results. Call it a hunch, but I suspected that there were more than five sites that dealt with the subject of love ahead of the game. I did search. “Love” by itself has the game’s steam page as the 175th result. I’m actually kind of surprised it came up that quickly. Now granted, “Love Indie Game” resulted in the 4th link pointing to the game’s Steam page. But I stand by my point. It’s a lazy, uninspired name. I’m of the belief that if a game’s name is generic, with little thought or effort put into it, most gamers will assume the game itself will be generic, with little thought put into it. I have no idea how much thought was given to the gameplay, but what is here is pretty generic.
The hook is, you have 100 lives to finish the game, but to take the sting out, you can lay a checkpoint any time, any place. Otherwise, the design is very minimalist. No enemies to kill. Just dodge, jump, wait, jump, jump, jump, dodge, jump, wait, jump up the trampoline, dodge, wait, jump, repeat. It’s been done to death, and unless you either have exceptionally inspired level design (Love doesn’t) or a novel hook (ditto), you’re going to bore most non-masochistic players. And the whole dropping checkpoints thing can screw you royally during some stages. Like one where you hop on platforms that you then steer. If you set a checkpoint and then die, the platform stays where it’s at, and you fall to your death again and again until you run out of lives. Then again, only an idiot wouldn’t figure that out and lay down a checkpoint during this section. Cough.
Not one of my proudest gaming moments. (Screenshot is of Love)
And there’s Hyphen by developer Marc McCann of FarSpace Studios. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve been friends with Marc for quite a while. But being my friend doesn’t really help devs when it comes to me reviewing their games. Do I display bias? Only if you count applying Neosporin to them after I nail them to the cross. What are friends for?
Hyphen is a spinning-stick game, similar to the Irritating Stick, which was later expanded upon by Nintendo in a series of Japanese-only games for the Game Boy Advance and GameCube called Kuru Kuru Kururin (which I was told after I wrote this also came out in PAL regions. That doesn’t help us Americans much). Maybe I’m spoiled by that series, but Hyphen feels like such a step backwards for the concept. Like Love, you can place your own checkpoints down, though there’s a limit on how many you can use each stage. That’s pretty much all it does different. Sigh.
This obstacle is used semi-frequently in Hyphen, and it’s annoying as all hell every time. (Screenshot is of Hyphen)
Hyphen is designed with one thing only in mind: drive players mad. The challenge is so incredibly extreme, with so little margin for error, that I just couldn’t get into it. And again, the formula for this series has been around long enough that anyone making an indie based around it simply must either add new ideas to the concept or have extraordinary level design. Hyphen does neither. In fact, it takes away some conventions in a way that only serves to make the game more frustrating than it should be. Like not being able to make the stick rotate faster. At times, there are projectiles fired at you, and not being able to speed up the rotation means you have to manually dodge those projectiles. But, you don’t always have enough clearance to do so.
I lumped these two games together because they both demonstrate the lack of what I call “Glorious Victory.” It’s my term for the idea that one of the most rewarding aspects of super-difficult games are those rare times where you clear a stage on your first attempt. We’ve all had such moments. Imagine being multiple worlds into Super Meat Boy. You reach a stage after burning approximately two and a half trillion lives, and then by the grace of God, you finish a stage on your first attempt. You jump out of your seat, looking around you as if to say “HOLY SHIT, DID ANYONE ELSE JUST SEE WHAT I DID? FUCK ME, I’M AWESOME!”
Many players live for such moments. But if a game is designed around blind leap-of-faith platforming or trial-and-erroring where the errors are almost certainly unavoidable, you deprive players of those opportunities without giving them anything positive in return. For example, look at this leap that Love wants you to make.
You can’t see where the spikes are below you. You have no idea what you’re leaping into. You don’t know if you’re supposed to just fall straight down, fall to the side, or what. Not dying here on your first attempt is based completely on random chance.
When random chance factors in, that takes the glory away from not dying on your first attempt. You didn’t make it using your skills. You just lucked out. There’s no glory in luck. So many indie devs simply don’t fucking get it! They think it’s about the dying. No. Punisher gaming is at its best when players don’t die.
Hyphen is guilty of this too. Like in this spot of the game. Sometimes Hyphen has bombs scattered throughout the map. When the bombs blow, they scatter projectiles. Now, the point of Hyphen is to get from Point A to Point B as fast as possible. You’re on a timer. There’s a sense of urgency. So when you see the bomb, a player’s instinct will naturally be to move past it and get away from it as fast as you can. So here I am moving past the bomb.
And here I am getting trapped in a section where I have no clearance to dodge out of the way just as the projectile from the bomb is about to kill me.
This “GOTCHA!” moment is going to probably kill the overwhelming majority of players on their first attempt at this stage. I would actually be surprised if there was a single player who made it past it on the first attempt. Now granted, some people like games like this, and you can still get satisfaction when you finally beat a stage. But because you’re going to certainly die from that projectile, the possibility for a “Glorious Victory” is taken from players. Gaming at its apex should have as many chances at being exhilarating as possible. Marc just took one such chance away from players, and gave them nothing in return, except for frustration.
There are players out there that don’t complain about this type of level design. But I think the majority of players probably would prefer games to be skill-based, not luck based. Deaths in gaming should because the player failed, not because the game gave players a no-win situation. Jesus Christ people, did you learn nothing from Star Trek? The Kobayashi Maru test wasn’t fun for anyone!
Love was developed by Fred Wood. Point of sale: Steam. $2.99 didn’t love it in the making of this review.
Hyphen was developed by FarSpace Studios. Point of Sale: Steam. $7.99 said that price is an outrage, a practical stick-up in the making of this review.
Plague Inc.: Evolved was developed by Ndemic Creations
Plague Inc.: Evolved is Chick-Approved, sorta. My rule for earning my seal of approval is to enjoy a game. I did, so it wins it. I’ll give it a more hearty endorsement when the game is finished if the multiplayer is fun. Also, Plague Inc.: Evolved will share a spot on the IGC Leaderboard with its mobile version.
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