2013 Game Review Haiku, #54 – Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy!

A nasty baron
Using spoonbeaks for labor
Nelly, on the case

–

These little haikus proved to be quite popular in 2012, so I’m gonna keep them going for another year. Or until I get bored with them. Whatever comes first. If you want to read more words about these games that I’m beating, just search around on Grinding Down. I’m sure I’ve talked about them here or there at some point. Anyways, enjoy my videogamey take on Japanese poetry.

2013 Game Review Haiku, #52 – Annie Android: Automated Affection

Annie loves Mailbot
RoboHQ assigns her
Another bot, bleep

–

These little haikus proved to be quite popular in 2012, so I’m gonna keep them going for another year. Or until I get bored with them. Whatever comes first. If you want to read more words about these games that I’m beating, just search around on Grinding Down. I’m sure I’ve talked about them here or there at some point. Anyways, enjoy my videogamey take on Japanese poetry.

Not eliminating the memories of loss in Eternally Us

Grief is natural; we’ve all experienced the emotional suffering one feels when something or someone truly cherished is taken away, and if for some reason you haven’t, bless your lucky, cold-as-steel soul. No, really. I hope you never have to feel the lingering twist of a broken heart, but I kind of doubt you’ll avoid it in one form or another. It’s dark subject matter, sure, but worth exploring just as much as any other adventure game plot based around escapism, making a name for yourself, and standing up against persecution.

Eternally Us is about grieving. I didn’t know this immediately going into it, but by the end, all is made explicitly clear. It’s self-described as a tale of love, life, and friendship. Created for the April 2010 MAGS competition by Infinite Grace Games, this somber story from Steven Poulton (writer, programmer, scorer) and Ben Chandler (designer, artist) starts innocently enough, with two young girls sitting on a park bench. Amber and Fio, short for Fionna, are feeding the pigeons, enjoying the nice weather as friends are wont to do. Alas, just as Fio is about to hit her childhood best friend with some very bad news, a magical door appears and opens, revealing some monstrous zombie-like being. And then, just like that…Fio is gone.

Amber now has to travel across five strikingly different locations in search of her stolen friend, solving puzzles and speaking her mind to any that will listen. The scenes are diverse, with one set in a dark, marshy swamp and another in the quiet snow and the final one in the middle of some tranquil, autumnal woods. Chandler’s colorful art makes each place highly expressive and detailed, with the supernatural mixing with the natural in a fairy tale way that had me immediately thinking of The Neverending Story. It’s amazing what adding glowing eyes can do to personalizing bark and branches, but it’s extremely effective here. There’s also a weather effect on top of the painted backgrounds in every scene, with my favorites being the rain and falling leaves. Small details, but they matter. They help you–and maybe even Amber too–forget that this place is not real, that you are traveling through portals and doorways, trapped in the otherworld, looking for someone you actually lost long ago.

Sound-wise, there’s falling rain and peaceful bird-chirping, as well as some surprisingly strong voice acting. Naturally, Amber is the one voice we hear the most, and her voice actress Miranda Gauvin does a fine job of playing someone that is unable to cope, that is begging for answers, but would also rather not hear them. The more inhuman characters dance the line between creepy and ridiculous, but again, I like them talkative trees. A soft, unobtrusive melody plays on a few of the scenes, too.

It’s a point-and-click game, and fairly limited in what you can actually do. The left mouse button lets Amber use items, and the right button examines things, which is the standard we’ve all come to know these days. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Two of a Kind. Found items immediately go to her inventory, which can be accessed by moving the mouse cursor to the top of the screen. Any items you find relate to that scene only and vanish when you move on to the next area, so if you get stuck, just keep trying every possible combination/tactic. I only ran into problems with the squirrel at the end, and that was more of technical issues than not understanding what I was supposed to do. I did not see a strong connection in some of the puzzles to what was happening in Amber’s mind, but maybe others will.

Eternally Us is ultimately a downer, but a fantastic way to fall. The puzzles are not terribly difficult and contained to a single scene to make things easier, but it’s the dialogue that you want to hear and the way Amber grows over the course of the short game. There’s also some cleverness afoot, such as how Amber “sinks” through the swamp to the depression area. Basically, you should play this short adventure game to put her and her friend at peace–and maybe find some solace yourself. It’s free and can be downloaded here.

2013 Game Review Haiku, #51 – Eternally Us

A best friend is gone
We all grieve differently
Amber points and clicks

–

These little haikus proved to be quite popular in 2012, so I’m gonna keep them going for another year. Or until I get bored with them. Whatever comes first. If you want to read more words about these games that I’m beating, just search around on Grinding Down. I’m sure I’ve talked about them here or there at some point. Anyways, enjoy my videogamey take on Japanese poetry.

2013 Game Review Haiku, #50 – Oiche Mhaith

An abused young girl
Unhappiness breeds more pain
Beyond disturbing

–

These little haikus proved to be quite popular in 2012, so I’m gonna keep them going for another year. Or until I get bored with them. Whatever comes first. If you want to read more words about these games that I’m beating, just search around on Grinding Down. I’m sure I’ve talked about them here or there at some point. Anyways, enjoy my videogamey take on Japanese poetry.

2013 Game Review Haiku, #49 – Two of a Kind

A priceless crystal
Gone, new case for Tim and Tiff
Dachshund bonus points

–

These little haikus proved to be quite popular in 2012, so I’m gonna keep them going for another year. Or until I get bored with them. Whatever comes first. If you want to read more words about these games that I’m beating, just search around on Grinding Down. I’m sure I’ve talked about them here or there at some point. Anyways, enjoy my videogamey take on Japanese poetry.

A mysterious hatch leads to trouble in BNKR

I’m attracted to games with strange names or, at the very least, strangely written names. For instance, ^_^, XIII, Viewtiful Joe, and Big Mutha Truckers 2: Truck Me Harder. Some quick complete transparency though: I’ve never played that last title, but just the sound of it alone, the way it rolls off your tongue and hangs in the air like some glowing, ethereal angel, has me curious. But yeah, if your game’s title is non-traditional and a bit bizarre, then you already have my attention, which is really helpful when sorting through game jam lists, too. And all that is just to slip into talking about BNKR, a point-and-click game by Piter Games not from Philip K. Dick and not from some recent jam, but just out there, waiting for you to devour.

Here’s the deal: the world was once populated by humans, but now only androids roam the bereft towns and buildings, constantly searching for fuel vital for survival. One day, a hatch opens, demanding whatever lies beneath it to be explored. You play as an unnamed–yet numbered–android with a digitalized male voice who goes down the ladder to see if there is anything worth salvaging.

Not counting the first hub area, which is a small, closed off town in the form of an overhead map with a few buildings to explore, most of BNKR is played from first person perspective. Er, I mean…first android perspective. Thank you, thank you. No, please, I’m happy to sign autographs. Anyways, you can click to move from scene to scene or interact with your surroundings and items in the inventory. A changing cursor alerts you if there’s something worth investigating. And that’s it gameplay-wise, which is fine, as it’s very short, though I’ll admit it took me much longer than probably others to complete it as I got stuck on two less-than-clear puzzles. Spoiler: you can find the third piece of mirror glass hidden between a desk’s drawers, as well as the other half of the broken key in a vent near the ceiling out in the main hallway. There, that should help greatly.

BNKR is a beautiful, desolate world. Also: very gray. You wouldn’t be wrong to immediately think of Machinarium or Primordia immediately, to compare in looks. There’s some light narration atop some striking artwork, and the voice of the robot you control is both human and not, which only helped draw me in more. It’s a strange combination of familiar and foreign, with the robot’s comments on things like levers and desks and photos of once-living humans little puzzles themselves. You can tell that the robot is a little sad, a little unsure. You can mildly interact with another android at the beginning of the game, but other than that, you’re searching solo; I think more droid-on-droid interaction would have been nice–hey now–as well as some dialogue trees to help fill in story gaps. Other than a couple of really well hidden items, the puzzles are pretty easy to figure out if you keep on clicking, and you can probably breeze through the game in about ten or fifteen minutes.

Alas, BNKR ends right as it just starts getting good plot-wise, and so I’ll have to keep looking for whatever comes from the people at Piter Games, as finding out what’s actually inside that opened hatch is just the tip of the post-apocalyptic iceberg.

2013 Game Review Haiku, #48 – BNKR

A bunker opens
Need android fuel to survive
Where is mirror glass?

–

These little haikus proved to be quite popular in 2012, so I’m gonna keep them going for another year. Or until I get bored with them. Whatever comes first. If you want to read more words about these games that I’m beating, just search around on Grinding Down. I’m sure I’ve talked about them here or there at some point. Anyways, enjoy my videogamey take on Japanese poetry.

Deponia’s English translation is the trickiest puzzle yet

It’s a bummer to have to be so hard on Deponia simply for its atrocious German to English translation work, as everything else is actually quite good–if a bit too straightforward for the point-and-click genre–but text is a large, vital part of many adventure games. They say every man carries a sword, and sometimes they need to fall on them to remain honorable, and so I say “On your knees!” to all that work/worked at Daedalic, not just the one wearing the “proofreader” badge. Your shoddy QA job cannot be ignored. But let’s get some of the other stuff out of the way first, like story and gameplay and pretty, pretty pictures.

In Deponia, you play as a rude little lay-about called Rufus. He’s a bit like Guybrush Threepwood, except completely unlikeable. He’s smarmy, arrogant, cruel, and inconsiderate, and I got all that from within the first few opening scenes of the game. I guess that’s fine since we now live in an age of many anti-heroes, such as Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones and Walter White in Breaking Bad. But man, he’s a bother. Anyways, Rufus is tired of living life on a literal junk pile of a planet and sets his eyes to the sky, specifically a place called Elysium, which one can assume is where the rich, clean folk spend their days drinking white wine and looking down from balconies. As he makes his way sky-ward, he accidentally bumps into a young girl named Goal being bullied by some men. Inadvertently, he knocks her down to Trash Town below and is tossed overboard after her. And thus begins the epic quest to get the girl and get going.

Gameplay in Deponia is traditional inventory management stuff. You talk to people, collect things, combines items, and use those items on people and other items to solve puzzles and move the story along. What’s really nice is that, at any time, you can press the space bar to highlight all the items Rufus can interact with, so there’s no pixel-hunting roadblocks. Occasionally, just like in Machinarium, there’s some other kinds of puzzles to play with, like fitting all the broken pieces of a glass mosaic back together or highlighting which spots to bomb in the mine via a map or flipping switches to get the tracks perfectly aligned so your vehicle can drive away to safety. Acts are divided up by brightly animated cutscenes, which only ask that you watch them.

Let it be known that the greatest reason to play Deponia is to look at it and get to the next scene and look at that. It is gorgeous, through and through, with a fantastic sense of imagination. Vibrant, colorful art makes up a lot of the screen, and the design of the trashy town areas are pretty original. The characters themselves range greatly in looks, though I guess you could say Goal and Rufus’s ex-girlfriend resemble each other somewhat. The inventory menu takes up your entire screen, though I never recall filling more than two or three rows with items, so it seems like wasted space, but nevertheless you can see everything you are carrying clearly thanks to the vivid artwork. And as I mentioned, the cutscenes are well-animated, though maybe some extra frames of animation are needed when Rufus interacts with certain items or mixes stuff together.

Alas, not all is whistles and whoops. Take, for instance, the treatment of women in Deponia. First of all, there’s not many to begin with. It’s a male-inhabited realm, with men being the forefront of everything: work, science, law, freedom, the upperclass. Obviously there’s Goal, the mumbling, brain-damaged goal of the game, who Rufus wants in the same way a kid on Christmas wants a new toy, and then the whole town tries to win her over through some strange lottery system with the mayor. Then there is Toni, Rufus’s ex-girlfriend, who exists to nag and bemoan the boy, and eventually ends up getting drugged. Oh boy. Subtlety. Lastly, there’s Lotti, who works at the mayor’s office and is constantly switching from her obviously deeper male voice to a fake, over-exaggerated high-pitch voice, time after time, because, y’know, repetition is funny.

Here we are, the real stick in the mud for this adventure game, which was clearly made overseas. Localization and copyediting. They are two different things, and both were not done adequately enough to ensure that Deponia was a quality product. Some German to English translations make no sense, as if some kind of app like Google Translate was used and nothing else, because I found myself scratching my head at some descriptions or clues. Then there’s the lack of consistency across the board, with some words capped and others not, as well as improper grammar. I spotted many wrongly used apostrophes, as well as several sentences ending in commas, not periods. Some might not notice stuff like, but I like to read along as I listen to the voice acting, mostly because I read faster than I listen and can skip ahead if I’m ready. I also ran into a couple of technical problems, such as dialogue choices appearing above the text box and the game not always responding to double-clicking to hop to the next scene instantly. Small stuff, those ones, but there nonetheless.

Deponia is an undoubtably pretty point-and-click adventure game hindered by a number of localization and technical problems. I didn’t have the worst time getting through it, nor did I find myself foaming at the mouth in general excitement over it unfolding, save for the next gorgeous piece of background art to gawk at. I simply played, looked up a puzzle solution when I got stuck several times, frowned, smiled, frowned some more, and finished it off. There are two sequels already out in the series, but I’m in no rush to see what happens next to Rufus and Goal. I’m still not over all the random capitalized “if”s in the middle of sentences.

2013 Game Review Haiku, #45 – Habla Kadabla

An enchanted cash
Register is stolen, but
Habla still smiles

–

These little haikus proved to be quite popular in 2012, so I’m gonna keep them going for another year. Or until I get bored with them. Whatever comes first. If you want to read more words about these games that I’m beating, just search around on Grinding Down. I’m sure I’ve talked about them here or there at some point. Anyways, enjoy my videogamey take on Japanese poetry.