and all too often aren't.
So I, like everyone else, spend a lot of time playing flash games/video games/avoiding my homework in a deeply unproductive manner. However, I find myself easily bored by most time-waster games and generally unimpressed by what game designers have done with a truly fascinating medium.
Therefore, this week in lists I bring you games that are actually interesting, aesthetically motivated, and worth playing. As usual, I've tried to give my overwhelming attention to things that are a) free b) obscure, as these are probably the two most useful kinds of things I can bring to other people's attention. Also I'm avoiding things that seem obvious--yes, I love the Zelda franchise passionately, but I'm pretty sure everyone knows that they're good already.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has to head this list, just because of the amount of my life I've spent playing it. It's a rougelike (if you hate links, the most important things you need to know are that there's permanent death and randomly generated settings that allow for tons of replayability) that you can download and play for free. It's, unsurprisingly, a dungeon crawl and it is a mystery to me and my friends why it's so much more engaging to us than the hundreds of other dungeon crawls out there.
Certainly the gameplay's good, but it's hardly unique. It has a tileset that makes it feel, for me, much more real than many other rougelikes in which your protagonist is often represented by an '@' symbol (I'm looking at you, Nethack). But it won't be winning any graphics competitions. I think one of my friends said it best when he described it as having "rough edges where the story was ripped out." You wake up in the dungeon, knowing nothing but that you want the Orb of Zot at the bottom. Though you-the-player don't really care much about it, you have to imagine that your character cares quite deeply and has a reason for being there. The flavor text, from the lines of a Scottish ballad that show up for all crappy, dime-a-dozen daggers [He drew his dagger, that was sae sharp/That was sae sharp and meet/And drave into the nut-browne bride/That fell deid at his feit] to the unique descriptions of each enemy, really imply that the world is full and that there's a story you're ignoring like the cold, uncaring player that you are.
It shares some of the qualities that make Nethack much-beloved, such as the presence of Nikola Tesla, Psyche, & co, and the ability to combine objects in innovative ways, but it tries to be self-consciously witty to a much lesser extent. Personally, that suits me. I like being able to take things seriously, often more so than they deserve. That said, Nethack is the only rougelike I know that is available on the iPhone, and it's free, so props to it for that. The controls are a bit clunky, but not too hard to get the hang of. And if you're an addicted enough crawler to download a rougelike to your phone, you'll play anyway.
I've never beaten the game--and I cracked and started using perma-saves (so, even though death is permanent in Dungeon Crawl, you can make a backup save folder and cheat). It's very hard, but really winning isn't where the joy comes in. The dungeon randomly reshuffles levels and monsters every time, so nothing stays the same from game to game. This makes is eminently replayable and if they ever run out of unique enemies then I haven't seen it. You can play as a bunch of different races and classes, each with their own advantages, drawbacks, and unique abilities, and you can worship a number of bizarre deities (don't choose Xom, trust me). There's a very well-maintained and thorough wiki for Dungeon Crawl that can explain the easiest and hardest characters in detail, and probably answer any questions that come up while playing.
Every Day The Same Dream is a lovely, if somewhat depressing, game. Where Dungeon Crawl is nigh-infinite, EDTSD is very short. Most things I could tell you about the game--besides the fact that it has a great score, attractive-but-simple graphics, and a philosophical angle--would ruin it. It's a small world, the goal of which is to exhaust its opportunities. At least if you insist on thinking of games as having goals, which is inadvisable.
In The Company of Myself is another drifting, philosophical game with a good soundtrack, but unlike EDTSD there is more of a sense of it being a traditional game. It runs along the fairly basic model of 'You are a little being with the ability to walk and jump. There are obstacles between you and a door at the other end of the screen. Think around them.' However, it has an interesting gameplay innovation, in which you can do a set of actions, press spacebar, and then a small clone of you will start doing what you just did ad infinitum. However, you can interact with these clones and they are necessary to completing the game. All this is coupled with the meditations of your character on his loneliness and isolation, which are very sweet and sad, and make the process of getting through doors much more weighted and unsettling.
Loved is a disturbing game. You play as a tiny little creature in a world full of the usual spikes and obstacles to climb. You're being guided, however, by an eerie narrator who gives you instructions. You can follow them or ignore them (and there are times you'd want to do both), but that changes what happens to you at the end and the world around you. Let's just say it doesn't appreciate it when you disobey. It's very sad, creepy, and cute--one of the better portrayals of a fucked-up relationship that I've seen.
Facade is the most awkward game ever. It's first-person, you play as your own gender and name (unless you choose not to), and you are going to visit a couple that you're old friends with. Their marriage is in a disastrous state and you proceed to steer your character through a painfully uncomfortable dinner party with them. What you do influences both how they react to each other and to you--I'm told you can, if you make the right decisions, help them mend their relationship. I just tend to get thrown out.
Toribash, on a totally different note, is amusing. It's free, like all of the above, and downloadable. It essentially takes an arcade fighting game and makes it a puzzle game instead. You get two very cleanly animated dolls (sort of like artists' wooden models) and can click on their individual muscles to get them to expand, contract, raise, lower, twist, etc. You see a phantom image of what your adjustments will make you doll do once they start moving and can make corrections. You hit spacebar to let them move little by little, and can continue to adjust in your efforts to hit the other doll. Whoever hits the ground first loses. You can play against an unmoving dummy to get a feel for it (it takes some practice) and then go online and fight other people. You can also save particularly awesome or hilarious fights to watch the replay.
I can sum up in one sentence why you should play Second Person Shooter Zato, even though the graphics are unprepossessing lego-things and there's no plot or anything. It's a second person shooter. There are as many split-screens as there are enemies and you look through the enemies' eyes as your shooter blows them away. I'm so glad someone actually went there.
Now we're going to get into horror, which is becoming a mini-crusade of mine because it's so pathetically represented most of the time.
It is with some trepidation that I make this next recommendation, but it has to be done. Hotel 626 and Asylum 626 are both short horror games put out by Doritos. Because somehow.....bloody, terrible death=tasty chips? I don't know. However, both of these games do some really innovative stuff with your computer and deserve to be longer, advertisement-free games. In my opinion, Asylum is the better game, although Hotel is, strictly speaking, much more of a traditional game. It's a lot easier to actually survive Hotel, for one thing, and you just plain old have more tasks to do, but it's more frustrating and less ambiently creepy.
So, you can only access both games from 6 pm until 6 am, in order to force you to play in the dark. Technically. However, I'm impatient and I cheated and set my computer clock to Moscow time and played in the middle of the day my first go around. Don't do that--I'm sure the dark makes it better. And it's duly eerie to try to log on and be told it's closed. Both games incorporate, with your permission only, your webcam and mike, and can even incorporate your phone number and facebook page if you let them. This lets your face and reactions be a part of the game, reflected in mirrors for instance, and in Hotel it cruelly forces you to try and actually sing on-key in order to lull a demon-child to sleep. The games use live action for their cut scenes, and the production values are really high. They force you to make some disturbing choices, particularly Asylum, and do the traditional visceral scare quite effectively. The only obnoxious thing is the obtrusion of the Doritos logo into the world of the game, which really only happens once. And in Asylum, there's a secret level that you can unlock either by buying their stupid chips or by spending a moment googling the correct image and printing it--you'll know what to do when you see it.
On the theme of horror, I'm going to talk about Silent Hill. For a long time. Particularly The Room (4). But I'll add that later, because I'm tired.
No comments:
Post a Comment