Indie

The Journey Down: Chapter One Review

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

The Journey Down: Over the Edge, 2010’s surprise freeware hit from SkyGoblin’s Theodor Waern returns in all-new commercial form! The ex-Adventure Game Studio title now flaunts its own in-house engine, new puzzles and locations, higher-resolution art and all-new 3D-animated characters and voice acting! In addition to being released on the PC and Mac at GamersGate, Linux, Android and iOS ports are also to arrive shortly.

The new The Journey Down: Chapter One, then, is the first part of an episodic adventure series in the Monkey Island–Full Throttle–Grim Fandango mode – as good a trinity of influences as any! The game tells the story of Bwana and Kito, two adopted brothers, who have been left in charge of captain Kaonandodo’s “Gas and Charter” enterprise ever since his sudden disappearance. The brothers are however left hanging high and dry after the mysterious Armando Power Company initiates a dastardly money grab – just as a damsel in distress appears knocking on the brothers’ proverbial door!

The original indie release was a critical hit. “Over the Edge” was one of the – if not the – best medium-length indie adventures of 2010. I personally thought as much. Two years after the fact, however, reviewing the all-new remake, seems oddly unfair as well as difficult: What was the feature, exactly, that made the original so very enjoyable, and more importantly, how to once again accurately convey it?

Was it the game’s wistful nostalgia combined with surprisingly effective comedic relief, or the “Fandango”-like injection of the African Chokwe/Makonde masks that so successfully gave the game its unique touch? Or the stirringly sharp hand-painted 2D backgrounds? Or the expert pacing and flow? The carefully-crafted, balanced puzzle-solving? The jokes?

Looking back, in my original review, I did claim The Journey Down’s primary feature to be its visual direction. This fact should be altogether apparent just from screenshots alone, however, which makes me want to revise my previous statement, instead focusing on the one thing every prospective Journeyman and -woman should know: (more…)

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On The Love Letter

Martyn Zachary 1 Comment

I want to take the time to briefly celebrate the spectacular achievements of a minigame currently (and very, very deservedly) making the rounds in the video gaming blogosphere. The game in question is axcho and knivel’s Flixel game The Love Letter. (Go on, open the link and play the game right away. Do it! Just get back here once you’re done.) The Love Letter deserves to be played because it manages to grasp something of the Real ™, of the very nature of human interaction, in a way that is rarely observed in video games.

In addition, The Love Letter is also a little marvel of economy in design: Not only does it very convincingly, effortlessly and fluidly tie in a) setting, b) narrative exposition and c) gameplay to each other, it also manages to use them, co-operatively, in conveying to (and thus actually reproducing in) the player emotions such as pressure, hurry, constraint, annoyance and relief.

With an amazing absence of complexity to boot. We are talking about an itsy-bitsy one-room, one-button five-minute minigame about arriving late to school, finding a love letter stashed in your locker, and setting out to find whomever wrote it.

Super KISS.

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When Are Bad Ideas Good Ideas? Goats vs Nazis and Dropsy

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

Kickstarter, bless ’em, have made possible many projects that would have been much, much harder for indie developers to initiate only a few measly years ago. We’ve seen plenty of really interesting projects receive funding via the platform, including Kentucky Route Zero, Octodad 2, Star Command and Blade Symphony.

Goats vs Nazis, then, is the latest game project to kickstart their development with the platform.

I don’t even know where to start – or end, for that matter. Certainly, Goats vs Nazis looks to be one part game, nine parts marketing campaign – heck, that’s exactly why we’re mentioning the project on the blog! The actual novelty value of juxtaposing goats to nazis is obviously up to the funder/player/developer to decide. If you DO feel that it’s a good idea, then off to Kickstarter you go!

As if Goats vs Nazis wasn’t enough for just one post, I also stumbled upon Jay Tholen’s Dropsy. Dropsy seems – by my estimation, anyway – to be a Windows-bound point and click adventure game about a… clown… that is manic, depressive or both? The hero, “hand-less, unintelligible, and questionably human” … “will also encounter colorful characters and mind-stretching logic puzzles in surreal, off-kilter landscapes”. Sounds a notch like Toonstruck to me.

Other than that, I haven’t the faintest idea as to what is going on here. But fret not, for there be video! The Kickstarter video gives you a fantastic idea of what you might be getting. (You’ll be getting crazy, that’s what you’ll be getting). Keep in mind that Mr. Tholen has set the funding bar for the game very, very low indeed, so don’t be afraid to pledge just because the measly sum of $225 has already been fulfilled.

P.S. Can’t believe I just wrote this post.

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Ensnaring Customers: Spiderweb Carnage Sale

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

I’ll let Jeff Vogel, the man behind the Seattle-based RPG game company Spiderweb Software, do the talking:

Glorious October Carnage Sale! In celebration of a fantastic year (releasing Avadon and putting out our first titles on Steam and the iPad), we are permanently lowering the prices of everything we sell by 20% or more! Even better, for the entire month of October, all of our products for Windows and Mac will be 10% off!

In his blog, Vogel also outlines his motivations for the change in the company’s overall pricing structure:

A LOT of money is being made by selling games for cheap. So now , instead of selling our games for $25 or $28 (!!!), we’ll sell them for $20 or $15. I know this still seems like a lot, but I haven’t backed off on the key thing I’ve long said … People Who Write Niche Games Can’t Charge a Dollar. If you’re making a pretty, shiny, highly casual game with cartoon squirrels and you think you can find a million fans for it, go ahead. Charge a dollar. You’ll have to. But if you write games like mine? Low budget, old school, hardcore RPGs with lots of content? If I charged a dollar for it, I’d have to sell a copy to pretty much every interested human everywhere to have a chance of making money.

The end result of the price drop? Geneforge 1-3 go for 15% and 4-5 for $20; the same pricing structure applies to Avernum, too. Throw in the extra 10% October discount and you’re looking at some pretty cheap stuff. Avadon, now $20 on the website, is actually cheaper still on Steam right now, so you might want to take a look at that, if you’d like some extra DRM to go with your games!

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The Indie Stone: Brave-Faced & Hard-Headed

Martyn Zachary 1 Comment

“Ah, but The Indie Stone is a brave-faced stone.” -Brendan Caldwell

In what can only be described (in suitably hyperbolic tones) as the most unfortunate development process ever (Duke Nukem Forever, you say? Ptsch! Ptschhh!), the Indie Stone have had their dev laptops stolen. According to the team, the latest update – and as such, months of work – to Project Zomboid was lost due to the game being backed up between the two stolen machines, yet seldom externally. A massive, repetitive witch-hunt by the gaming community subsequently ensued on both Reddit and Twitter, resulting in emotional distress, self-flagellation and many a brain cell lost.

Yes, perhaps the lost data should have been backed up better, but after such a costly setback, the isometric open-world zombie survival game developers need all the financial and emotional support they can get. It’s not like “Backups!!” weren’t the first thing they thought when the severity of the situation first unraveled.

The burglary is only the latest episode in an inexplicable series of unfortunate events; the team has had their Paypal funds held hostage by the evil bank-like corporation (also experienced by the Xenonauts team as well as Mojang); only shortly after the Paypal debacle, the Indie Stone also got a similar receipt from Google Checkout, who blocked new orders and revoked access to their funds.

A man blows himself up in a car next to the aforementioned flat; their expensive web servers crash. A development build leaks.

Once the team finally gets back on track, solving their issues both with Paypal and  Google Checkout by ingeniously pairing joke games to actual pre-order subscriptions – then, the burglary.

Gosh, these hard-headed, brave-faced guys, they’ve got stones all right, having already promised to “come back stronger”! 1)http://projectzomboid.com/blog/index.php/2011/10/project-zomboid-burglary-statement/ You should preorder Project Zomboid now – just to tempt the fates, spite the gods, piss off the demons and so forth. Surely something somewhere is trying to put and end to Project Zomboid. Let’s not let it, shall we?

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