Prepare to be surprised by Barely Floating’s unlikely hero

Barely Floating likes to challenge your expectations, almost immediately from the get-go. This alone makes it worth seeing, though then you’ll quickly realize it’s a pretty standard point-and-click adventure game once the adventuring begins. Still, kudos where kudos are deserved, and I applaud Stemshock Interactive’s decision to make the star of their game Joseph Lancaster, an old, whiny grandpa, cane in hand and medication pills in his pockets–for certain, he’s no spry Guybrush Threepwood or quick-witted American tourist George Stobbart. Then again, not many can be.

Right. Pirates have taken hostages off a cruise ship, holding them for ransom on The Sea Krait. In comes Agent Morris on a helicopter, a true professional with cool sunglasses and plenty of hostage-saving in his history. However, negotiations quickly take a turn for the worse, forcing Joe–he prefers to be called this–to take actions into his own wrinkled hands. Thankfully, since everyone views him as non-threatening he gets more freedom than the other hostages, allowing him to go from room to room, pointing and clicking to solve puzzles and put his plans into movement.

It’s an adventure game, so expect to collect a lot of items–some traditional, some silly, such as Barbara, an inflatable sex doll–and then use those items on people and other things in a creative manner. There’s also a very large dialogue element to Barely Floating. You can pick from options, but, once in a dialogue with someone, you can also click on things outside the list to ask about them. So, even though the cloth-covered machine isn’t a topic of choice when speaking with Igon, my favorite non-pirate-turned-pirate, selecting it still brings up a reaction and clues. I thought this was implemented really well and even becomes a key part of a puzzle’s solution when it becomes karaoke time.

Everyone on The Sea Krait, except for maybe the captain, directly counter the straightforwardness of Joe and the Wheat family. There’s Igon, who keeps items in his empty eye socket; there’s Pex, an idiot with too much muscle; there’s the bartender with the strange creature living in his dirty beard; there’s horny and severely obese Herr Hindenberg; and so on. This is where Barely Floating sees most of its color and humor shine through, and you strangely become more interested and invested in these lighthearted characters than the rich family actually held hostage.

Here are the parts I got stuck at, forcing me to dig up an online walkthrough. Some puzzles are timing-based, like getting the bartender to wash his beard by accident or having the recently fired geek lob a drink directly into the jukebox. I also struggled to fully comprehend how to handle the karaoke puzzle, though I wasn’t too far off course. Speaking of that, one of the more final puzzles involves using the pirate ship’s navigation system and speaking via text inputs to other ships in the area. Unfortunately, here, the game is looking for very specific phrases and sentences, and though I was close on a few of them, you can’t solve it unless you put in exactly what is desired. Felt this was a bit unfair, and there should’ve been more wiggle room.

I really like Barely Floating‘s look, though some backgrounds could be more detailed than others, and much of the animations are shortchanged. Still, every character is unique and stands out, and the text sort of bobs up and down, like it is floating on the water’s surface, which is a fantastic touch. You don’t have to do any “pixel hunting” as everything essential pretty much pops off the screen. In terms of music, there isn’t a lot of variety, but what is there is good, though it can get tiresome, especially when you realize how much backtracking you have to do–it is, after all, a tiny ship.

Seems like this was originally part of the Summerbatch Volume 1 bundle, which also featured Jailbreak, Nancy the Happy Whore, Patchwork, and PISS. Now, I did not purchase the bundle back in the day, ending up nabbing Barely Floating for free from its AGS page. Of those in the bundle, I’ve already played Patchwork and downloaded a copy of Ben Chandler’s PISS–there really is no good way to say that–but have yet to try out the latter. I wonder if I can find the other two titles elsewhere, though neither are giving me the warm fuzzies from screenshots.

Heads up, this is no short adventure either, with plenty to click on and read. Voice acting would’ve helped in spots, but the writing is fun and mostly to the point. You can, however, go pretty deep in some conversations. I think it took me about an hour and change to see Barely Floating‘s credits roll as the sun set. You can download a copy of the game and see for yourself how long it takes an old geezer to become a hero.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #6 – Barely Floating

Pirates want ransom
Negotiations go wrong
Old man must point, click

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From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.

When I look at stars, I will always think of Starbot

I truly have a soft spot for stories about robots and what it means to be alive, to be living. Blame Ghost in the Shell for changing me at a young age. Granted, games like Machinarium and Secret Agent Clank didn’t explore this concept too deeply, but they starred cutesy automatons and got an easy pass. The only real standout example of myself questioning where the future of artificial intelligence can go is with KOS-MOS, which stands for Kosmos Obey Strategical Multiple Operation System, from Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht. And no, I do not believe Claptrap is progress forward. However, Starbot from developer Cloudhime tackles issues of friendship and loyalty in an adorably sweet way, pushing cozy over sermonizing.

Here’s how this little indie adventure goes: two scientists have created a work-in-progress robot in order to fetch parts on additional satellites. While powered down and in a mysterious dream-like realm, this robot befriends a star. Together, they will travel to other satellites, all while avoiding dangerous sloths. In the same vein that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince explored companionship and loss in an absurd, surreal world, Starbot does this twofold, both with its robotic and human characters, namely Lilli and Mat.

Gameplay is exploration-based, using the arrow keys to move Starbot around and some other button to interact with people and things. It might be space and it might be Z, but I can’t remember now. Since this is built in the RPGMaker program, you have that typical stat screen menu that does not need to exist, though it does show you a list of any items you’ve collected. The dream-like realm is more of a maze, often asking you to go through the right door, collect a number of keys, and avoid crossing paths with sloths. Otherwise, it’s all about talking to NPCs, listening to what they have to say, and moving on. Don’t forget to dig through everyone’s trash bins like it’s a Pokemon game.

Now, not everything is clear in Starbot, and maybe that’s done on purpose. For one thing, the use of “egg” never gelled with me, and I still don’t understand what it meant in context to these people, this world. I mean, most houses contain a painting of an egg or multiple eggs, so clearly they are important to people, but I’m not sure how. Or why. Also, even though I read every e-mail between Lilli and Mat, I’m not sure I comprehended everything about their relationship, especially the metal arm bits. As is often the case with smaller indie titles created by a single soul, a solid round of copyediting would help strengthen the already strong, wistful writing. And yes, I’m available for hire, thanks for asking. Just be prepared for me to add about ten more puns to everyone’s dialogue.

Overall, Starbot took me about 45 minutes to get through, and that was me not rushing, really taking everything in, examining all items, listening to the retro soundtrack, and speaking to every NPC multiple times. You might be able to burn through it faster, but I wouldn’t recommend it. After all, good friendships take time to grow.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #5 – Starbot

Befriending a star
Digging through trash cans, e-mails
Le Petit Prince shines

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From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.

A Boney Night casts spells and sings songs about beer

Heavily inspired by the LucasArts and Sierra classics of yesteryear, A Boney Night does not do much to stand out in the crowd. That said, it’s still an enjoyably short, retro point-and-click adventure, featuring hand-drawn backgrounds and original music. Plus, there’s a talking mushroom that you basically pepper-spray in order to bottle its tears. I know I have your attention now.

A Boney Night‘s story is something akin to a one-off episode of a Saturday morning cartoon. For some reason, I keep thinking about The Smurfs, for whatever its worth. Undra, a witch witnessing her later years in life, is suddenly awoken to her talking mushroom making a racket outside. Unfortunately, she needs to create a potion to be able to comprehend its words, and so the quest begins there. Once you do hear what it has to say, you’ll learn that a great evil is taking over the land. Spoilers: it’s zombies. Help Undra stop the undead by teaming her up with Kijo the surprisingly sensitive orc and creating more powerful potions.

Your clickable actions are threefold: examine, touch, and talk. You can do this for every item, person, and noun you come across in the wild, as well as whatever thoughts you have in your inventory. I suggest examining everything at least once, as it sometimes does advance the plot or give you a hint about what you need to do next. All of the puzzles are fairly logical, though I stumbled for a moment on “a dash of honesty” during the first repel aura potion Undra had to make. Here’s a clue: look inside the orc. Despite there only being three actions, I still found it tiring to cycle through them, but I guess that’s just part of that old-school adventuring charm.

A couple small critiques. Strangely, there’s a save/load function included in A Boney Night, but the game seems like you can complete it under an hour. I think I was probably around the thirty-five or forty minute mark, taking my time to read everything and explore all areas. Not really sure if you’d ever need to save your progress, especially since you can’t lose or screw anything up by missing an item. While the game features some catchy original songs, especially the one that plays at Undra’s home, it also does not contain any sound effects, which is a little jarring. I really wanted to hear some loud whooshing when I released that wind potion on the walnut tree. Pretty sure those old LucasArts/Sierra games had sound effects…right?

I ended up downloading A Boney Night to enjoy on my laptop in bed under the heated blanket (what, too much information?), but it looks like you can now play an HTML version of it right in your browser. If you’re looking for a retro point-and-click adventure game starring a witch sporting an attitude and wicked beehive hairdo, here you go.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #3 – A Boney Night

Here come the zombies
Undra knows a spell or two
Use thoughts on items

–

From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.

Sense the evil, never see it in All the Way Down

All the Way Down is a short, dark tale of dread and death set in Yorkshire, England during an ominous snowstorm. It’s openly inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s work, though I can’t pinpoint an exact story of his where it is drawing directly from, but “The Whisperer in Darkness” is probably a good place to start. Still, a lot of his themes are represented here, such as personal madness and fear of the unknown, the unnamable.

Our nameless young man, a hiker, is simply trying to find a place to spend the night and get out of the snowy cold. He stumbles across a convenience store in a small mining village called Millvale; alas, he is not warmly welcomed, since he is far from a local. However, the clerk at the convenience store suggests he check out The Miner’s Arms, a small bar just down the road, known for occasionally putting up stragglers in need. Naturally, things go downhill from there.

I love that All the Way Down is picking up the dropped faceless in-game models torch last seen held by The Granstream Saga. The character portraits themselves are actually more detailed, left black and white save for rosy cheeks, that warm orange-red someone’s nose turns when they’ve had a bit too much to drink. It’s a strong effect, gelling well with the often pleasant, colorfully warm backdrops, despite everything somehow silently screaming terror and mayhem. You never end up seeing the Deep Ones, the monsters feared by all of Millvale, but that’s fine. You don’t need to see them to believe and sense their presence, but I did find the main guy’s switch from stark disbelief to pure panic a little too convenient; he goes to bed, wakes up to a pounding on his door, and now swears that it is pure evil coming for him. There should’ve been a dream sequence scene to help sell that better.

Puzzle-wise, there’s unfortunately not much here. In fact, I can only recall four sections where you actually are tasked with pointing on items, clicking, and clicking somewhere else: the miner flashback, escaping your bedroom, freeing yourself from the basement, and using the minecart to flee. That might sound like a lot, but it’s not; the amount of interaction and exploration is slim to none, with the puzzle solutions extremely easy to spot, save for a tin can that I missed during my initial pixel scan of the screen. At the start, while the hiker is conversing with the convenience store worker, there’s dialogue options, but that never appears again, not even with the barkeeper or old man filling him in on the village’s grim history. A missed opportunity, but given that there’s voice acting involved, I can understand if words had to be limited to a specific amount. Just felt like a tease, that’s all.

I really dug the look and feel of All the Way Down, but wanted more interaction, more poking and prodding. Let me find the madness; then, let me run from it, blindly, arms flailing, my only direction away.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #1 – All the Way Down

Know not if they eat
Deep Ones never satisfied
Not all the way down

–

From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.

Survival is the name of the game for Rein

Rein is another small adventure game I downloaded some time back, but only came across recently while trying to delete games I’ve already played off my hard-drive. This laptop of mine is filling up fast, and I have no one to blame but myself. Stop all the downloading. It’s probably a stretch to compare it to surviving, but there is an element of choice at play: keep this, delete that, move here, grab that. You never know what to save, what might come in handy down the line, in some unpredictable scenario. Thankfully, in real life, I can move at a slower clip than Darius Poyer’s Rein demands because even a single pause is enough to get yourself flattened, though you can always try again.

Here’s why you, a scientist, must survive: your research facility is crumbling after an experiment goes wrong. That’s all you get, and all you’ll get, unfortunately, as much of the story is left clouded in a chemical fog. Instead, the focus is on escaping, reaching fresh air while everyone else around you succumbs to Death’s cruel touch. I died within seconds of starting Rein. Then I died within seconds of restarting Rein. Died on the next screen almost instantly. You are probably seeing a pattern by now. This is not a game where you have time to right-click on items and read their descriptions; it’s all about moving, thrusting forward, thinking on your feet, no loitering.

Alas, Rein ends right once you get a hang of how it operates. Seriously, it’s short. Maybe ten minutes long tops, and I’m only grumbling about this fact because I wanted more. I wanted the research facility to be larger, to have more rooms to explore and discover the ingredients behind its downfall. Was not a big fan of the puzzle solution where you use a handgun to shoot off a padlock, something that MythBusters debunked a good while back. Rein‘s claustrophobic nature is extremely effective, so much that when you get to the “safe” room, the one where you won’t die by lingering too long, it does feel like a pinch of relief, a weight off. There is a lot of solid animation here–really liked the one for our leading scientist opening a powered-down door with a metal pipe–and an atmospheric piano tune that sets the tone.

Historically, I’ve not played too many point-and-click adventure games where death is an option, one lingering just above the protagonist’s head, waiting to strike. If I recall, you can get yourself shot quite easily in Beneath a Steel Sky. There’s also the numerous missteps you can make in Another World/Out of This World, which one might not classify as an adventure game, but I think it is Rein‘s biggest inspirational drawing point. Other than those examples, I can’t come up with any others I’ve experienced that punish sloppy pointing and clicking, but it is an interesting concept in a genre generally regarded as infallible, unless you can’t find a specific pixel or determine the logic behind the developers’ minds.

Go on. Try your luck at surviving within a crumbling research by downloading Rein over here. I bet you’ll do better than me.

A Date in the Park is no walk in the park

A Date in the Park is out to surprise you, whether it is through its digitalized 1990s visuals and animated sprites, the brazen stride forward it takes to leave you in the dark when it comes to translating Portuguese, or its twisted, tragic tale of love at first sight. I finished it the other night feeling…perturbed. Shaken. And a little more cautious of empty parks in the middle of the afternoon.

You play as Lou, who looks like he should be either the lead singer of an early 2000s emo punk rock band or a recently homeless man living under a beach boardwalk given his adoration for flip-flops. Lou recently moved to Lisbon, in Portugal, to take up a new job and start life anew, though A Date in the Park never really goes into specifics there; it doesn’t matter. Lou is a catalyst, a way forward, a love-sick boy with fantasies of picnics and skinny-dipping in his head. The night prior, Lou meets Catarina, an enchanting woman to say the least, at a bar, and the two of them hit it off great in the way that many first encounters do, where you eager say “me too” when something you enjoy as well is brought up and the hours simply drift by in a fascinating lull. She told him to meet her the next day at Tapada das Necessidades, her favorite park.

I’ve never been to a foreign country by myself. In high school, I had the chance to go to France with my French class, but I chickened out for reasons I won’t go into here. I have to imagine that it can be scary, to know no one, to be up against a language barrier when trying to meet someone. And so, when you do make a connection, like Lou with Catarina, you have to pursue it, wholeheartedly. This means that despite Catarina not appearing at the park when they agreed upon, Lou will do whatever he can to see her again, even if it involves chasing after floating balloons and solving mechanical puzzles.

A Date in the Park, in terms of a point-and-click adventure game, is fairly straightforward. You have an inventory accessible via the top of the screen, you can click to walk around, you can click to either interact with an item or look at it for a description, and you can right click on the corners of the screen to instantly exit to the next screen. Alas, there’s not very many people in the park to interact with, meaning no dialogue trees or experimentation with items on people. The  person you do interact with early on, a gardener, speaks no English, leaving everything one-sided. The puzzles are limited and fairly easy to deduce, save for the one where you need to get the water pump working for the statue pools; I got through it guessing, and I also have to imagine some players might have trouble not realizing that many screens scroll, meaning there might be an exit to a new screen off to the right or left, but it’s only visible if you move over enough. Some of the back-tracking proves annoying, but not too much.

This is a surreal piece of horror, no doubt about it, and things quickly escalate once Lou discovers the wounded duckling. I have some big problems with the plot in terms of believability, but then again, it’s just a game, and I can look past a lot of things, but given how real of a setting it takes place in, as well as realistic sprites playing the roles…I wanted something real. Part of me would have been totally okay with a straightforward date in the park, with hand holding and skipping and looking at the historical sights. The tension builds to a horrific horror–think Se7en–and it drives last few minutes of the game with a palpable panic. I was certainly caught off guard, maybe even more than Lou; like him, I was here for a stroll in the park. We got that and then some.

All in all, A Date in the Park took me about an hour to get through, but again, I got stuck for a bit on that water pump puzzle. Others might move through it faster. You can grab the game for free right over here, but only after you finish feeding the squirrels and sitting quietly on a bench to take in nature’s beauty for at least five minutes. Oh, and after you get through A Date in the Park with your heart intact, check out Mudlarks, another free adventure title from the same developer Cloak and Dagger Games. I plan to soon enough.