Month: July 2020

A surreal, beautiful puzzle platformer. Based on basketball.

Page 22, Game 10: BasketBelle by onemrbean

You’re a young fella living in Paris. You love playing basketball with your dad — and your little sister, Belle. One day, when you’re retrieving an errant shot, little Belle wanders off. Naturally, you go after her … but ominously, you keep running into strange, shadowy monsters.

Better find her soon.

Actual gameplay quickly turns into a series of platformer puzzles where the goal is to put the ball in the hoop. Purely from a gameplay perspective, it’s … fine. Played better, played worse. It doesn’t always do a good job of laying out its fundamental mechanics. For instance, your movement is severely restricted when you have a ball in your hands; if you jump, you HAVE to shoot the ball, which seems like a weird choice for a jumping game. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to keep a hold of the goddamn thing after I landed so I could jump up somewhere and put myself in a position to get it in the basket.

Some puzzles rely on you shooting the ball from a particular spot or trying the same thing that didn’t work several times in a row. Solving those levels never felt satisfying; I didn’t feel clever, I felt lucky. I felt like I’d accidentally stumbled into the solution just by pure flailling.

And yet.

This game just feels complete, in a way that a lot of the games I’ve tried simply don’t. It feels and sounds warm and whimsical. The intro where your father teaches you the basic moves had me hooked, and just playing around with my little sister gave me a stake in the story.

It just works, dammit.

It took me a half hour or so to play the story to completion, and that felt about right. Even if I got a tad annoyed here and there, BasketBelle never wore out its welcome.

And that swoosh payoff at the end of each level when I finally made it past the monster (or monster’s digestive tract) to bang home that shot satisfied me from the beginning of the game to the end.

If BasketBelle sounds at all interesting to you, I can definitely recommend giving it a look.

Code, code, in my machine
What is the next game we shall see?

Page 22, Game 18: A Mother’s Love by Jake Bhattacharyya

“A solo journaling game about humanity, sacrifice, and artificial intelligence.”

Ah, another game where I’m probably going to be willing to look but not actually play. Some of those have looked pretty cool.

A promising early draft of a stealth/horror game, but definitely a ways from being finished.

Page 17, Game 24: Spectres of the Cold by Daniel Savage

You’re a small, horned child whose home has just been burned — by your neighbors. Apparently, your mother wasn’t quite human, and the other villagers didn’t appreciate that. You’re alone, in the woods, looking for the ruins where a spectre who can speak to the dead is believed to dwell.

To get there, you’re going to need to do some sneaking around. The ruins are patrolled by what appear to be werewolves, who will kill you on sight.

Luckily, you can focus your mind into mind-bombs, which destroy them. Temporarily. They’ll be back in a moment. Step lively.

This games feels like a rookie developer’s early outing, so I don’t want to go too hard on it. There’s nothing about it that actively pissed me off. Unfortunately, the game just doesn’t work all that well. Everything about it feels choppy and clumsy. The game clearly shows the eyelines for the werewolves, so you can gauge when you can try to get by them … roughly. The highlighted “I can see you” zones ignore walls, but the ACTUAL sightlines don’t, meaning you can’t completely trust what the game is telling you. Also, when you crouch down, your head is obviously much taller than the shorter walls — but crouching behind a short wall makes you invisible. It’s hard to really get into the game when I don’t know whether to believe what it’s telling me visually.

Also, the story just wasn’t working for me. It gets off to a hell of a start, no question, but when the game commands me to run away, I don’t appear to be running away from any actual danger; everything that wants to kill me is as of yet in front of me. Why are there werewolves patrolling the ruins? Does my status as half-beast-boy mean nothing to them? Are they just as prejudiced as the villagers who killed my family? Or are they naturally this violent? If so, the mob might have had some legit concerns if these guys are accurate representation of Mom’s side of the family, you know?

Why do I have mind-blast powers? Why does my mind-blast destroy werewolves, but only temporarily?

Where am I going? Why am I so desperate to get there? The werewolves CLEARLY do not want me wandering around their turf.

There’s no save mechanism, so you have to finish the story in one sitting. I didn’t. First time, I had to set the game aside to do something else, and it wouldn’t start back up when I came back. Second time, it simply glitched out.

It isn’t a dreadful game, but it definitely falls well short of being professional-grade. Ah, well. Hopefully the dev has better projects in them.

Perhaps like this one:

Page 22, Game 10: BasketBelle by onemrbean

“Experimental Basketball Adventure”

Sportsball, but wacky?

I’m in.

If I were a right-wing douchebag game developer looking to troll lefty activists, this is the game I would make.

Page 2, Game 14: Tonight We Riot by Means Interactive

This is not to say I think the game developer ACTUALLY IS a right-wing douchebag getting their troll on. I think this is earnestly meant as a piece of power-trip catharsis for protesters and the protest-curious. But if you were to tell me “Actually, bro, I’ve been following the dev’s personal Twitter feed and it is MAGA AS FUCK,” I’d be like, “Yeah, I can see it.”

This is a side-scrolling beat-em-up, loosely in the style of Double Dragons or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The legit interesting twist on this one, though, is that you recruit followers to your cause (by standing outside the appropriate buildings and pressing the “recruit” button). Soon, your isolated radical has become a leader! The people are united! And they are there to take back the streets!

And by “take back,” I mean “kill cops and wreck shit.” That’s your goal; wreck stuff, kill cops. In the early stages, the cops don’t even attack you unless you attack them first — and if one of the disposable mooks following you around gets close enough, they absolutely will throw the first punch. This gets less true fairly quickly as the game progresses, but fuck me, by that point, after all the cops we’ve brutally murdered, I kinda don’t blame them for being a little trigger happy. I don’t think it counts as paranoia or excessive force when they really ARE out to leave you beaten to death in the street, you know?

You gain weapons as you go — sometimes hiding within all those delightfully smashable crates, sometimes just hanging out in the middle of the street. Some people might be suspicious of piles of bricks sitting right where a protest might be headed. But are YOU gonna overlook what is clearly God’s effort to arm your righteous fury? I think not!

There is just so much about this game that grosses me out. It starts with the over-the-top Soviet-esque propaganda feel of the framing story. It feels like a parody, like speculation on what anti-Western propaganda might feel like if the USSR had survived to the modern day — except I’m not at all confident the author is in on the joke. I’m no fanboy of unchecked capitalism, but unironically embracing brutal totalitarianism because it too had beef with capitalism isn’t a form of “progress” I can get behind.

I hate the way this game treats protesting as a vehicle for murder and destruction. You’re there to kill people, and leave their mangled little pixelated corpses lying in the street behind you. You’re there to wreck shit. You’re here to skip all the boring chanting bullshit and skip directly to rioting, aka The Fun Part. It’s protesting as envisioned by the memes that one Fox-news-obsessed jagoff you knew from high school keeps posting in Facebook. It’s activism as imagined by dipshit teenage anarchists cosplaying as revolutionaries.

But most of all, I hate the crowd mechanic. When the character you’re controlling dies, you keep going as long as you still have at least one of your disposable followers is still alive — they’ll pick up the flag (literally) and carry it forward. You get the highest ranking by maximizing the number of followers still alive by the end of the level, but ultimately, your casualties are irrelevant as long as one of you slaughters their way through to the end.

This game feels like it fucking despises protesters, and has nothing but contempt for what it sees as their simplistic and violent worldview and their sheeplike devotion to a cause that regards them as nothing but disposable cannon fodder. I have no idea if that represents a dramatic misfire and the complete opposite of what the dev intended, or if that’s secretly the entire goddamn point.

Either way, I’m out. Especially these days.

Perhaps the next game will piss me off less?

Page 17, Game 24: Spectres of the Cold by Daniel Savage

“Here I felt my flesh become the food of my fears.”

Yeah, some nice soothing existential dread sounds like just the thing.