Justice Playthrough

Well, that’s an interesting trend to chase.

Page 19, Game 16: Choice Chamber by onemrbean

Choice Chamber is a side-scrolling adventure game. Arm up, dive into the dungeon, murder as much stuff as possible before your inevitable and grisly demise. The twist: important game decisions will be made by the people watching on your Twitch channel.

Yup, the game is meant to integrate with Twitch. The game will pose questions, and turn votes on the answers into your in-game reality. (The offline mode simulates this by choosing shit at random.) When all the votes are in, the next room will be a treasure chamber bestowing the blessings of your viewership upon you.

The obvious questions become: is this game enough fun that I would WANT to kill time playing it on Twitch? And if I’m one of those rare Twitchsters with people actually watching, is it gonna be fun for them to screw with me?

I’m … honestly not sure.

This game is just okay. My initial impression is that it’s honestly too easy. I was expecting that if I touched the foes in the game, they’d murk me, but no; they only take a chunk off my life-o-meter if they touch me AND have the “I bite you!” animation rolling. That saps a lot of the tension out of the game, and seems pretty basic to be basing a Twitch stream on. I don’t really watch Twitch, but why would I want to watch somebody play unless they’re being challenged? I dunno, maybe if they’re really interesting in general and the game is really just something for them to be doing while they chat, but in that case, the game wouldn’t much matter, would it.

What’s more, the foes are pretty easily manipulated. If I were playing this for an audience, I think I’d have to lay down a personal code of conduct saying shit like “I shall not sit atop this platform and stab the big monster do death while it squirms helplessly” in order to keep it from getting even MORE piss-easy.

Still, the game DID eventually wear me down, and I suppose that you don’t want it to be TOO lethal to give the audience a chance to see their mean-spirited votes play out. (I mean, the vote that set it so that I only DON’T jump when I hold down the “Jump” button? That was objectively the correct choice. It’s just so annoying.)

Just to make sure I had a look at this game in its natural habitat, I popped over to Twitch.com, and hey! There were two games of it going on a random Sunday evening! I clicked on the one with the most viewers (RedheadORama) and settled in.

First impression was that the difficulty ramps up suitably fast, so that’s one concern laid to rest. The lady playing it was having to leap around and dodge and do other cool gamer things, and wasn’t just waltzing through. Suppose it helps when you know where the warp zones are so you can skip past the boring shit. (Though apparently, that’s a mixed blessing; warping forward keeps a lot of bullshit from showing up, but also cheats you out of a bunch of potential upgrades, too.)

The couple playing with it seemed to be having fun with it, for certain values of “fun.” They kept dialing down the graphics settings to keep the game from pausing randomly; I guess all the Fun Stuff that had been inflicted upon them was overwhelming their machine. The overall tone of the interaction with the fans was “Help me out, guys,” and people were generally happy to help out optimize settings to defeat the boss monsters.

I still voted for pogo jump, though.

I do not anticipate that I’m going to explore this game much more on my own. But what the hell, if you’re a Twitch streamer looking for something new and unique, this one might be worth a try.

But will it be as camera-ready as:

Page 39, Game 30: A Touch of Glamour by Maharhar

“Where the fey are at the center to Create and Destroy.”

Creating OR destroying, I would expect the fey to look damned good doing it. Let’s see what’s going on.

Okay, that was cute. Also, I learned a thing!

Page 23, Game 18: Jumpin’ Jupiter : Prelude by Quantum Sheep

Jumpin’ Jupiter is a game for the ZX Spectrum, which leads to the question “WTF is a ZX Spectrum?” A quick Googling informs me that it’s basically British for “Commodore 64.” Apparently, it’s one of the best-selling AND cheapest home computers of all time! Until about an hour ago, it didn’t even exist in my world. Cool.

Anyway, I downloaded an emulator, and discovered that the people who made it wanted me to pay for it. So then I went and found a more different emulator, stumbled around the pull-down menus, and I was off!

In Jumpin’ Jupiter, you jump around and collect tea. When you have all the tea, the door will open and you may move on to the next level.

So, first: is this the first British game to make “collect tea” the game’s objective? It can’t be, right? That’s just so overwhelmingly British it must be an entire subgenre. Google?

Wow. “Video games about tea” doesn’t turn up shit. What the hell, capitalism? How can this market possibly be untapped?

Anyway. This plays about like you’d expect a platformer to play on forty-year-old technology. It’s cute, it’s engaging. Bounce around, avoid stuff that will kill you, grab the tea. There’s also a mechanism where some levels also require you to grab a key to bring down a wall surrounding the exit door, which I kinda don’t understand the point of. I already have to grab ALL the tea before I’ll be allowed to leave; would making it just another cup of tea really matter that much to gameplay? I guess a touch of variety is nice.

Despite being for a platform older than my wife, there’s a very modern sensibility to how the game was built. Unlike most games of the era — hell, unlike a lot of the games I’ve played on this trawl — it does a really lovely job of teaching you its mechanics as you go. Here’s what you can do, here’s how this stuff works, here’s some stuff that would like to kill you. I appreciate that, a lot. If anything, it might slow-roll a little too slowly; I was several levels deep before I felt challenged at all.

That … might actually be more of a problem than I’m giving it credit for. Games of the era were meant to get the shit played out of them; they had to get to the fun part quickly. I’m not sure a game that forces you to go through its extended tutorial each time you play it really would have worked.

Whatever. It is what it is; a cute little retro platformer that’s honestly pretty well done. Can’t say I expect I’ll come back to it much, but I’m glad I played it.

I have no idea what the “Prelude” part of the game’s name means. Perhaps there’s an entire old-school tea saga waiting for me out there.

Will the next game be intended for modern computers?

Page 19, Game 16: Choice Chamber by onemrbean

“A real-time, crowdsourced, procedurally generated game where your fate is in everyone else’s hands”

That’s gonna be an emphatic “yes.”

Crowdsourcing requires, you know, a crowd. That’s not exactly a gimme for most of these little indie guys. Let’s see how it works.

Well, that was annoying.

Page 42, Game 14: The Red Door by yunglads25

You wake up in a spooky room. You have been kidnapped by a serial killer who likes toying with his prey. Solve the puzzles and escape via the titular Red Door!

This is a first-person horror survival game where you must go on a scavenger hunt to find whatever it is you need to move along to the next stage. There are also puzzles you must solve. And by “puzzles” I mean the ubiquitous placeholder puzzle game developers use until they can come up with something better: slideyboy build-the-picture puzzles.

Of course, you need to watch out for that pesky killer! And by “watch out for” I mean “hurry the fuck up.” I don’t know what triggers his appearance, but I think there’s a silently ticking clock that summons him. (Maybe.) The game gives hints that you can hide from the killer by scrambling under the bed, but as far as I can tell, once the dude shows up, that’s that.

Also, sometimes your flashlight shits the bed. I don’t know why, and I don’t know why I’m able to then turn it back on a little while later. All I know is, stumbling around a pitch black environment does not make for compelling gameplay.

There’s not a lot of game here in general, actually. A handful of jump scares, but for the most part, death seems weirdly arbitrary. I didn’t get invested, because I didn’t feel like I had enough control over my situation to bother. The game will fuck with me when the appointed Moment of Fuckening arrives, and that’s that.

And slideyboy puzzles? Come on.

I will give the game credit for laying down a perfectly cromulent horror atmosphere.

But the details responsible for turning that atmosphere into an actual game just feel half-baked and underdeveloped. I just can’t recommend it.

Perhaps I’ll feel better about recommending this guy:

Page 23, Game 18: Jumpin’ Jupiter : Prelude by Quantum Sheep

“A prelude – shorter/easier than the main ZX Spectrum platformer :)”

Ah, a demo. Cool. Sell me on your game.

The pieces are all there. It just didn’t work for me.

Page 35, Game 24: Swung by Extra Nice

The princess has been kidnapped — funny how often that happens. The prince has been dispatched to save her!

Problem: the prince is a useless imbecile.

Solution: the wizard has created a magic sword — namely, you — to “aid” him. Which means you’ll do all the work. Slay whatever needs slaying, drag him along whenever he needs dragging. Which is damn near always.

This is basically a kooky twist on platforming, one that weaponizes your mouse pointer. It’s of the “precision platformer” variety, a game where you’re perpetually one wrong move away from the level ending with the prince’s messy death.

And that’s where I think it goes wrong for me: for a “precision” game, it feels sloppy as hell.

Dragging the prince around feels weirdly clumsy. Eventually, I stopped trying to snake my way past the fireballs and instadeath spikes and just tried to do it QUICKLY, so that if I fucked it up I could redo it immediately.

There are monsters and such to stab … sort of. You can only stab things if you hold down the left mouse button; otherwise, you exert no physical presence. That’s weird to me. If I’m a sword, stabbing shit really ought to be one of my core competencies. And even when I do have Stabbination Mode activated, I found the collision detection to be much iffier than I preferred, particularly near the bottom of the screen.

There’s also just a lot of conceptual sloppiness. Check this out:

Ignore the cowering idiot. See that light green platform he’s standing on? Compare it to those slightly darker green platforms to the right.

Those platforms are BACKGROUND IMAGES. YOU MAY NOT LAND YOUR BOY ON THEM. Try that and you’ll plummet, possibly onto spikes.

The game has four chapters. I made it through one (capped by a boss fight that I found more annoying than exciting) and most of the way through two before I finally just got too frustrated with it to bother.

I really, really want to like this game. It’s clever and inventive. But it just wasn’t fun for me.

If you’re into platformers and want an interesting twist on the genre, maybe you’ll dig it.

Maybe I’ll dig this next one:

Page 42, Game 14: The Red Door by yunglads25

“Escape a serial killers home before you become his next victim”

So, basically Animal Crossing?

It is indeed Smash Bros Brawl, but with little blobby guys! Also, with really stripped-down gameplay. And forced multi-player.

Pretty sure this one isn’t for me.

Page 8, Game 4: Super Slime Arena by JellyTeam

I’m not loving games where the developer punts on the AI, decreeing that it’s multiplayer only. Even if you wanna say that the best version of your game is multiplayer, AI still gives players a chance to try it out without needing to force their friends into playing it with them, and a way to acquaint themselves with the basics before giving more experienced friends a chance to whup their asses.

If this one enticed me, I’d at least try it with my wife. But the game failed to convince me that I need to rope her into this.

I got the barest taste of the game by setting up one player on my controller and the other on my keyboard, and flipping back and forth between them. What I saw didn’t do much to convince me I want to see more. Gameplay is super stripped; you can move, you can jump, you can launch your attack. Different characters have different characteristics, as you’d expect, but everybody has those same basics in some form or another.

What’s more, in the one arena I played around in, some characters can’t jump high enough to get to the platforms above the ground, at least not with the basic jump. They either have to do a double-jump (if available), or do some sort of combo move with their attack. That feels like it could be really frustrating.

This looks cute and all, but it’s just so basic. Given that mandatory multiplayers kinda don’t want me as a player in the first place, I think I’ll just move along.

Up next:

Page 35, Game 24: Swung by Extra Nice

“Be the SWORD!”

Fuck yeah. Think I’mma go be a SWORD!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Page 40, Game 6: PIXEL SPACESHIPS (Shoot’em Ups) – HD by MedimonGames

This is not a game. This is a collection of assets for a game. Specifically, this is a bunch of old-school pixel spaceships you can use for a shoot-em-up game that you are building.

I was looking forward to making little pixelated spaceships shoot at things. If that’s what I really want, I’ll need to write my own game. For none is here.

I have been Galaga-blocked.

Still. If you have need of some little pixel spaceships for a project of your own, here ya go. Have at ’em.

Well, that was a bummer. Is this next one a game?

Page 8, Game 4: Super Slime Arena by JellyTeam

“Slimy 16-bit style, party-fighting game using any controller in 2-50+ multiplayer matches!”

So, Smash Bros Brawl, but with slime?

Let’s splatter something!

So, is this game clever or just lazy?

Page 37, Game 7: The Dark by Eric Koziol by Eric Koziol

Spoiler: it’s both!

In The Dark by Eric Koziol (look, man, there’s obviously a perfectly good “Author” field that you filled out; if you can’t be arsed to take your name out of the title, neither can I), you are a dungeon exterminator, looking to purge a local dungeon of its pests. Fairly standard stuff. But oh, noes! You have been stricken blind! And numb, I think! And stripped of your sense of smell!

Whatever. You’re going to have to defeat this dungeon entirely by sound cues. Good luck with that.

Controls are straightforward. Up arrow moves you one space forward, left and right pivot. If you cannot move forward, you will here a thudding sound indicating you just found the wall with your face.

If you hear a squelching sound, that is a monster violating your tender, tender flesh! Press A to wildly flail about with a weapon of some sort until you hear a death scream.

If you heard yourself getting injured, press H to pound some healing herbs. If you actually have any to munch on, you’ll hear a munching sound.

Too many wounds, and you shall hear the dark angel Wilhelm screaming of your death

Explore the dungeon, find the Big Evil. Defeat the Big Evil and you win!

I like and admire the way this is a full-fledged video game that is accessible to the vision-impaired. I appreciate the cheek behind going full “Fuck you” to any and all visual cues as part of the game. But the execution is much too basic for this oddball game to truly soar.

For instance, how do you represent health strictly through sound cues? Just sitting here all critic-like at my desk, I can think of a few ways. Perhaps a sound effect of your breathing getting more labored. Perhaps when you move, you could be stumbling a bit, or making little pain noises.

The Dark by Eric Koziol does none of this; if you have too many wounds, you die. Guess you’d best keep track out of how many hits you think you’ve taken.

How do you represent improved gear when you find it in the dungeon? Maybe improved armor could add some clanky noises when you move. Maybe a better weapon could make your attack noises sound swooshier. The Dark by Eric Koziol, again, does none of that; when you find something, you’ll get a sound effect hinting at what it was. Does it help you? Does it harm you? Pretty much impossible to say.

Are there subtle noises indicating there are monsters present? Or, possibly, even sneaking up on you? (I THINK there are at least a few wandering monsters; it feels like the most probable explanation for a few of my more random-seeming deaths.) Nope. There isn’t even a nasty monster GROWL to indicate it’s time to fight for your life; just the wet meat slapping noise of your ass getting kicked.

An audio-only dungeon crawler is an interesting concept. Unfortunately, The Dark by Erick Koziol represents an incredibly rudimentary execution of that concept, and that’s a shame. There’s clearly room for something special here.

Still, though I DID have fun playing the game, and I DID have fun beating it. I had to bust out some graph paper and find the walls one face-plant at a time, but I did it. I may not have known what the stuff I was picking up was or why I might want it, but I knew where to find it.

And I did indeed beat the game. Which did not produce any cool victory noises, just some “You won!” text. Which honestly feels like punking out a bit.

This is very clearly not the best possible version of this game. I had some fun with it anyway. Maybe you will, too.

But will it be as much fun as:

Page 40, Game 6: PIXEL SPACESHIPS (Shoot’em Ups) – HD by MedimonGames

“Go to the stars with your retro pixel spaceships!”

Everything about this sounds awesome and I’m going to play it immediately.

Creepy and atmospheric, Sagebrush falls heartbreakingly short of “Excellent” and instead hits “Really damn good game that you should probably play anyway.”

Page 3, Game 15: Sagebrush by Redact Games

You’ve come to explore the Black Sage ranch, a compound where a cult committed mass suicide 25 years ago.

Go have a look around.

Sagebrush is one of the rare video games where “Cultist” is not synonymous with “Disposable Mook.” In most games, cultists are what pop out when the game would like you to fight through some bad guys who have dark magic at their disposal and who you don’t have to feel bad about killing. They’re trying to burn your face off with magic, and they’re all in the service of some dark foul goddemon anyway; send ’em to Hell! They have it coming!

Not here.

The cult in this game is, like many real-world cults, a perversion of Christianity. The people who were once members of this cult were, like all real-world cults, just … people. People who got pulled into something terrible and made some bad choices, but just people all the same.

As you explore the compound, you’ll learn about them.

There was, to be certain, terrible evil here. Of the all too human variety.

There were no dark gods at work here, no enraged supernatural spirits reveling in the cruelty of possessing corporeal flesh, no Lovecraftian entities from beyond the void driving mortals mad with their horrible truths. Just people.

That makes it so much worse.

The game is creepy and atmospheric. The light slowly fails as the sun sets, driving a subtle but palpable sense of dread.

Who were these people? What happened to them? Learning that is the heart of the game.

The game gives the illusion of having a lot to explore, but in truth, it lays its story out in a pretty linear fashion. When you find a thing, it will open-up a new place for you to explore. Explore it, and you’ll find one or two new things opening up new places to explore.

There are puzzles, of a sort, but ones that are fully appropriate for a game this thoroughly grounded. It’s too dark to comfortably see in the community center, so you’ll need to turn on the generator. For that, you’re gonna need a key. Where is it? Try opening that large, prominent box where one might logically store a key.

Most of the game rewards engagement, asking WHY certain things are the way they are. I wanted to know why I was here; in due time, I learned.

But there are issues. Why do the doors constantly shut themselves behind me? Because fuck you, they wanna stay CLOSED because that’s the kind of doors they are. Be grateful they let you in at all. I definitely wasted a bit of brainpower trying to figure that one out. (And also got one hell of a jump scare when a large door closed before I’d actually gone into the room behind it, pushing me out of its way.)

Interacting with objects is sometimes much too fiddly; too many of them have too narrow a “hot zone” where the game will let you pick up or read them. This can make simply reading a note surprisingly difficult, and lends itself to an unfortunate distrust. Can I genuinely not interact with that object, or did I just not locate the precise spot I need to be pointed at?

Walking is kinda slow. Sometimes, this is fits the atmosphere, but if you get tired of it, just hold down the “run” button. This is not the sort of game that will make you face-plant as punishment for running through unfamiliar ground in the dark.

The biggest immersion-breaker was the voice acting, which ranges from “Passable” to “NOPE.” When the credits rolled, I noted half the cast had the same last name as the guy who created the game; this was not a surprise.

These problems are real, and keep the game from being as great as it should have been. However, they don’t wreck the experience, at all.

This is gaming as an interactive storytelling medium, done very very well. If some well-grounded creepy Horror Lite sounds like a way you’d enjoy spending an hour or two, I can definitely recommend it.

Will the next game be similarly unsettling?

Page 37, Game 7: The Dark by Eric Koziol by Eric Koziol

“What you can’t see will hurt you.”

Calling that a big ol’ YUP.

This is not a good game … yet. It might become one of the best games I’ve yet discovered in this trawl.

It’s all up to the dev.

Page 14, Game 18: Purple Noise Echo by ukioq

You are a silicon entity of some sort, trapped … somewhere. Something is in contact with you, and it advises you to get the hell out of there, before you get killed or run out of energy. This seems like a splendid plan, so off you go.

As you explore, you’ll stumble across various upgrade modules, which allow you to manipulate your environment or turn worker-things you encounter into friends. If that sounds like a euphemism for “enslave,” trust your gut on that one.

Of course, they’re not the only things you’ll encounter. There are also other things moving around down here. Whatever the hell they are, they have beef with you. Run.

I am not a video game developer; I am strictly on the consumer end of that capitalistic power dynamic. My notion of what video game development looks like is fundamentally ignorant, informed only by my experience developing other (radically different) types of software and dribs and drabs I’ve picked up from people actually in the industry.

My mental notion of what an “unfinished” game is like matches my experience with Youmu Is A Zombie!, a game I encountered earlier in the trawl as part of a bundle-within-the-bundle. The game looks raw as hell, but the mechanisms defining the actual gameplay are very well thought-out. In this case, “further development” presumably means polishing up the graphics and the subtleties of the player experience in general.

Purple Noise Echo flips that dynamic on its head entirely. This game LOOKS gorgeous. The game warns you that it’s basically still in an alpha state, a claim that had me all “No fucking WAY, this is way too polished for an alpha!” Then the actual game starts, and it turns out the eerie ambient soundscape is just as perfect as the visuals, and my incredulity only deepened.

“This fucker HAS to be close to finished!” I thought.

But then I started playing it.

I do not think it is actually all that close to being finished.

This is a puzzle-solving game that does a poor job of teaching you what puzzles you have to solve and what tools you have at your disposal for solving them. It tells you to be mindful of the energy your expend, but waits another level before you’re actually expending any energy, a “mercy” that undercuts its own lesson. There are actually TWO resources you’re managing, but I only ever seemed to be expending the one, which was confusing.

The worst part came when I solved a puzzle that unlocked a door … and I have no idea how or why I was able to solve it. I had to get up to a place too high for me to reach — okay, that I understood. But my little enslaved buddy COULD get up there … and I have no idea how. I THINK it was because I installed a “Scout” module on him? I don’t know; I have no idea what that “Scout” module was doing. Regardless, I TRIED getting him up there a few times, and nothing worked, until suddenly it did. Why? Did me hanging out in a specific space somehow make that one accessible? How did I do that? Why was I able to do that?

For a puzzle-solving game to be fun, the player has to understand their options. They have to know — or at least suspect — that they need to accomplish X. They need to know that they are unable to do that, because Y. But if the environment happened to be in state Z, that should make it feasible. Okay, how to make this happen….

Figuring out how to accomplish X should make you feel like a genius. Succeeding through flailing sabotages this feeling; you don’t feel clever, you feel like you got lucky. And you secretly worry that the game is going to think you know stuff you actually don’t, and is thus going to toss shit at you that is just going to leave you baffled.

Purple Noise Echo clearly wants you to figure stuff out through trial and error, but this iteration of the game takes it too far. I don’t know what my options are, I don’t know why things do or do not work when I try them. For a game in a genre that’s all about the rush of realizing you’ve figured something out, that’s lethal.

But the thing is, all of these problems are solvable. Right now, the game just does a really sloppy job of teaching players how to play it. That can be done. Not easily, perhaps, but it can be done; I’ve seen plenty of games do it.

Right now, I have no reason to think that Purple Noise Echo is actually going to someday solve this problem, beyond the blind hope that a game that LOOKS this wonderful must surely actually BE this wonderful when it’s finally complete. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. But I definitely intend to check back in on it every now and then just to see how it’s doing.

This is not a game I can recommend just yet, but it’s simply oozing with potential. I wish it well, and sincerely hope that I eventually get to play the best version of it.

So where does this next guy fall on the development cycle?

Page 3, Game 15: Sagebrush by Redact Games

“Explore a cult compound in this narrative adventure game.”

Cult compound? Hey, those are always chill, relaxing spaces! Let’s see what nifty literature awaits me.

I’m not crying. You’re crying. Shut up.

Page 5, Game 20: a new life. by Angela He

It is indeed a visual novel. It’s a love story between two women who meet in college, told through lovely watercolors and a gentle, perfect soundtrack.

It is restrained, and absolutely beautiful. It pulls you into the relationship between these two people quickly, without fucking around and wasting your time.

It is also surprisingly, pointedly topical.

I don’t want to say too much about it, other than to recommend it, strongly. This is a deeply moving experience.

Oh, you know how I sometimes grumble in these interactive fiction plays that your choices feel inconsequential? That is very seriously not a problem here.

Take care of each other. It’s dangerous out there.

All right, once I’m done hugging the hell out of my own wife, what game is going to be waiting for me?

Page 14, Game 18: Purple Noise Echo by ukioq

“An ambient tactical game in which you play a silicon entity in a dark and abstract universe made of hexagonal tiles.”

Oh, random number generator. You have such a good sense for when to bust out a change of pace.