Second-guessing all my choices in The Novelist

I myself am not a novelist, though I’ve taken a stab at completing several books, one of which still lingers in the back of my mind as something decent or, at the very least, worth finishing off. That said, I have had some short stories published over these past years of my capricious life–hey, check out “Opportune” in the Triangulation: Lost Voices anthology, being sold over at that Amazon dot com site–and do grok a bit of the internal struggles that come with balancing time with creativity and drive, in terms of producing something.

That’s what’s at the heart of The Novelist–balance. This 2013 game about life, family, and the choices we make comes from Kent Hudson and Orthogonal Games and packs quite a wallop. Maybe not for everyone, but certainly for me, an introvert who spends far too much time worrying about decisions, both past and those still to happen, and whether anything could have been or be different. I will most likely only ever play this game once, and so the decisions I made for the Kaplans are final and finite, never to play out differently. Let me set up the plot for y’all…well, at least how it starts.

The Kaplans are on vacation in an isolated house on the coast. Novelist Dan Kaplan hopes the time away will not only reconnect them all, but also defeat his crippling writer’s block, which is stopping progress on his next book. Dan’s wife Linda wants to work on their failing marriage, as well as develop a career as a painter. Their son Tommy is incredibly lonely here and desperate to gain his father’s attention. Also, the house is haunted, and you play as this spiritual incarnate, listening to the family’s thoughts and influencing the decisions the family makes over the course of the summer. More on that last bit…in a bit.

The Novelist has two styles of play: stealth or storytelling mode. I went with the former, since it seemed to add more to the gameplay, wherein you actually have to be careful not to make yourself known to the house’s inhabitants, otherwise you can’t read their thoughts and help influence them in a certain direction. As a ghost, you can travel–and safely hide–in lights, but you can also exit light fixtures to move around the home, and this is when you need to be aware of where Dan, Linda, and Tommy are at all times. If they see you, they’ll become suspicious, and if you can’t hide fast enough, they’ll eventually be spooked to the point of no return. Without this element, I feel like The Novelist would simply be an interactive story, which is not a deal-breaker at all, but trying to remain hidden at least adds some tension while searching the home for clues.

The Novelist is separated into chapters, and in each one, you must gather clues and listen to the family’s thoughts to learn about their lives and true desires. Once you are ready, you must make a decision, which means selecting one person’s desire over the other two, which often leads to disappointment on their parts. If you found enough clues, you can make a single compromise, which means it’s only half disappointing and probably better than nothing. For one chapter, I forgot to make a compromise before whispering my ghostly choices into Dan’s ear as he slept, and I’ve felt horrible ever since–someone else could have at least be minutely happier, if not happy, and I funked it up.

Anyways, your decisions then affect the next chapter and how the characters feel and move on with their days. You’ll read letters and notes that give you a glimpse of the repercussions you’ve created, as well as feel like a sad sack of slop every time you spy one of Tommy’s crayon drawings. At night, after you found all the clues and selected your decision, you get to wander the house freely as everyone sleeps, coming across spiritual journal entries of people that once lived in the house; I found this to be the least interesting aspect of The Novelist, and it felt like a forced way to explain how the home became haunted by a spirit. All I was concerned about was the here and now, the current happenings.

Ultimately, from The Novelist I learned that I’m probably going to be a terrible parent. Many of Tommy’s issues, such as wanting to build a toy car or look for arrowheads in the woods, seemed trivial when compared to fixing Dan and Linda’s marriage or Dan making progress on his next novel, which, as an author, is his job and future income and security. So Tommy got left out for a lot of the game, except later when I did make his education a top priority for the family. Still, there were ups and downs across the whole summer, and while things turned out okay-ish for everyone involved, I still wonder if I could have done a better job of manipulating them towards happiness.

The Novelist will not blow anyone away with its visuals, but the writing and solid voice acting really help bring the Kaplans to life, in a way that makes their dreams and desires feel tangible–and thus more heartbreaking when you steer them off the path. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in choice, as this is basically those big moments in Mass Effect and Telltale’s The Walking Dead, but from beginning to end, and much more mundane. It’s all the more believable despite the magic whispering ghost zipping from lamp to lamp and hiding in bathrooms, which never seemed to get visited, to not get spotted.

St. Chicken is actually about surviving the perils of the ocean

I don’t think I can actually tell you where my copy of St. Chicken came from–probably a bundle from yesteryear–but I never imagined it was a game about a magical guppy leading its offspring to ancient relics while keeping them healthy and nourished and out of harm’s way. The game’s executable file has sat untouched in my laptop’s “videogames” folder, but I’m trying to make a dent and open up some hard-drive space.

Truthfully, I expected a cutesy, colorful platformer starring a cartoonish chicken, like a throwback to the early Sony/Sega mascot days, on some sort of religious mission to save his or her brethren from factory farm management or an evil tractor while gathering enough eggs to unlock power-ups. Nope.

St. Chicken is a quirky puzzle-lite maze explorer where you play as a lost pet guppy with special healing powers. Basically, you swim around as the titular St. Chicken, collecting white pellets that ding as you touch them, which I imagine are food. As the guppy eats each pellet, it grows larger, and after a set amount, spawns a tiny offspring, called fry, as well as shrinking back down in size. Your fry need to remain close to St. Chicken to stay healthy and alive, and by pressing the space bar you can summon the offspring over all at once. Kind of like the “all units” command from whatever RTS franchise floats your boat.

Your goal is to get all your fry safely to the end of the level where some glowing bit of treasure or relic awaits, which is not as easy as it sounds. Like in Pikmin, your babies are pretty vulnerable, and if an eel or sting ray makes contact with them, they will perish, with no way to get them back. You also have to stay on top of the fact that St. Chicken’s fry are always close because if they linger too long away from their parent, they will perish from general weakness. I ran into a few cases where one little fry got caught behind a wall and didn’t follow the others along the main path, perishing after a few seconds by itself.

From what I can gather, there’s a total of six levels to get through in St. Chicken, each gated by a specific number of rescued fry. Alas, I couldn’t get past the fifth level, as I found it beyond frustrating to lose all of St. Chicken’s offspring right near the end. Granted, it was my fault for not paying close attention, but the thought of going back and redoing the entire level over again–it’s fairly lengthy and tedious by nature due to having to move slowly and meticulously since many paths are blocked off at first–did not excite me. And so I’ll walk away from 2012’s St. Chicken with 64 fry happy and safe from underwater predators, but no more than that.

Tilt every platform to make it through Through

Here’s the unfortunate reality: I will never have enough time to explore all the game jams out there that I want to explore. I’m still not even close to seeing all the entries from GameBoy Jam 3, of which there are 237 in total, and I’ve tried out a whooping three, each of which had something unique or fun to offer: The Tale of Kelda, Roguelight, and Meowgical Tower. Now here we are with a further 181 creations for the next iteration, the rightfully named GameBoy Jam 4, and I don’t know what to do with myself. Guess I’ll play something.

Through is a short, proof of concept puzzle platformer starring a tiny black pixel that could probably befriend the likes of Boxboy and the doomed hero from Disposabot. There are twelve levels in total, with the goal being to reach the teleport pad; however, it’s not always a straight path to it, and this is where tilting takes over. By pushing our tiny retro pixel soldier against a wall for a second or two, he or she or it can pass through, turning the wall into empty space and reshuffling the other platforms around. It’s a bit mind-bending, and I never really saw how the world shifted or was going to shift, like one eventually did in Fez, but if you kept playing around with tilting this way or that, the exit would get closer and closer.

The twelve levels here are not difficult, especially the first three that act more like a tutorial than anything, and so Through is more of a casual playthrough, where you try pushing against a wall and seeing what happens. If it doesn’t work out, jump elsewhere and push another wall. Floor spikes make an appearance only in the final level, and those kind of dangerous elements could have been introduced earlier to create some tension or force players to find an alternate path to the exit. All of this is backed by a looping soundtrack of bloops and bleeps, though it works well enough.

A “To be continued…” message pops up after you finish Through‘s final level, and I do hope we get more from this. The mechanics are there, but a little more variety could help, as well as a smidgen more art, though the simple graphics help create a lonely aesthetic. The game’s developer goes by the username goshki, and I’m not familiar with any of his other work, but I’d love to see this warp maze puzzle game expand into something a bit trickier, more demanding. Personally, I think it’d be a great fit on the Nintendo 3DS, especially if there’s a level editor involved, wherein we can then see what others can create with this idea. All right, I’m off to get a cup of coffee, and I think I’ll just push against the kitchen wall afterwards and see where it takes me.

Time is of the essence when you have to Race the Sun

I first glimpsed the scorching hot light that is Flippfly’s Race the Sun last year at the tail-end of my Extra Life stream when, one might say, I myself was racing the sun to stay awake for the final few hours of charity-driven gaming. I was playing my Steam copy using an Xbox 360 controller to do the needful, and I found it to be a stylish, engaging experience of piloting an airship to the end of a bunch of regions before the sun sets. That last tidbit is very important considering that the airship is solar-powered, so if the sun sets or if you spend too long in shadows you’ll lose energy and come crashing to a dead halt.

Strangely, if you look over some of my gaming history, it’s evident that I’m a fan of endless runners. Jetpack Joyride and Temple Run 2 are good examples of that genre done well, done with enough addictive hooks to keep me going. Substance over style is the key element here, as an endless runner doesn’t need to have super realistic graphics for it to be enjoyable, but the activities you can do as the main character pushes forward without warning are where the game becomes fun or a chore. I don’t mind picking up gems, so long as picking them up feeds into a side quest or becomes currency for upgrades. It can’t literally just be endless running.

Again, the core gameplay of Race the Sun is pretty straightforward: race the sun until it sets. You control a solar glider that relies on sunlight to keep it powered; in order to survive, you also have to avoid a number of obstacles, such as sentient square blocks, tall pyramids, spinning windmills, and falling towers. Due to the game’s minimalistic art style, it can be hard to tell what some of these shapes are; perhaps they are just shapes in the end, lost in a forest or crumbling cityscape. As your ship rushes forward, you can pick up different booster types (jump, shield) as well as hit warp portals, which zip you right to the end of a region, no questions asked.

For many, endless runners are all about the high score. Strangely, I don’t really care about a number attached to my name listed on a board with similar results in Race the Sun. I prefer going for the side challenges, such as collect three boosters in mid-air in a single run or use the warp portal five times, which help you level up and unlock new abilities and decals for your airship. If you are interested in a high score, you’ll want to collect as many Tris, which are blue-colored pickups, to up your multiplier while also trying to survive running into things. Though some side challenges ask you to do that, which is fine by me.

To back all your quick reflexes, barrel rolls, and boosting ahead is an electronica, drum beat-infused soundtrack that is beyond catchy. You can buy it separately over here. It also builds with your progress, which really hammers home the sense of almost there during the end of the later regions.

I’m not certain about this, but it seems like Race the Sun‘s world is reconstructed after a set period of time (maybe every few days or a week?) so while I have become familiar with the layout of the gray-colored world in these last few sessions, that will all change shortly. Unlike with Tower of Guns, this is a rogue-light that I can really just pick up and play for a bit, though I’m stuck at level 17 currently, with two of the three side challenges available being of the “only turn left for two regions” or “only turn right” ilk, which are difficult to master. Either way, that sun is always setting, and my job is to not see that happen. Happy racing, all.

Help Jason defeat the corruption in IAMJASON

It’s not hard to see that I appreciate just about any game with a low res retro style to it. It makes my imagination work ten times as hard. Some recent notable examples include A Place in Space, Bernband, and A House in California, but we can dig deeper and see that I’ve been into this style since the heydays of the text-based murder mystery Sleuth on the family computer. To be fair, that game’s retro look was due to it actually being a retro game and using ASCII characters as graphics, released in 1983 by Eric N. Miller of Norland Software. Anyways, IAMJASON is another great runner to carry the “less is more” torch for indie games, delivering a somber, unsettling story through traditional mechanics and a visual style that has you determining for yourself what you are seeing.

IAMJASON is a point-and-click adventure game set in a dystopian other-realm where the colors pink, purple, and orange reign. The long and short of the game’s plot is that you must help Jason defeat the corruption, and to say anything else would ruin a lot of the discovery. The game was developed by Calico Reverie for the Monthly Adventure Game Studio (MAGS) competition in February 2015, which is a 30-day game dev challenge. I believe the theme for that month’s challenge was “losing something,” and IAMJASON is successfully all about that, whether it is in the form of family or memory or even meaning.

Mechanics are what you expect for the genre. You have an inventory to collect items into, as well as four commands–go, use, take, and look. Interestingly, the text you get from looking at items or trying to combine this with that is presented largely at the top of the screen in single word blips, as if the protagonist is really thinking about every word. You could almost imagine a “DOES. NOT. COMPUTE.” joke to pop up during some puzzle error, but the game never breaks from its seriousness. This goes the same for IAMJASON‘s soundtrack, which is low, peppered with muted bleeps and bloops, as well as the occasional burst of static acting as a drum beat. It works magically to create an atmosphere of dismay and disinterest, of broken beings continuing to just go through the motions. Many of the puzzles are logical even if you are dealing with fairly illogical concepts and items, such as daemon robots, passcode mechanisms, and power cores.

Unfortunately, I ran into a nasty, game-stopping bug in IAMJASON. Basically, I solved a part of a puzzle’s process earlier than expected, immobilizing a daemon robot to allow me to get a key item, but in doing so this locked the door to the room said robot is now trapped in. To complete the game, I needed to extract something from the wonky robot, but the door refused to open for me. I had to watch the remaining five or so minutes of gameplay on YouTube, which, while not the worst outcome, was still a little disappointing.

Other than that, I heartily recommend you give IAMJASON a go. It’s about thirty minutes of gameplay in total–so long as you act accordingly–and hopefully that previously mentioned bug is fixed or will soon be. Regardless, this is a strange and fascinating world worth ridding of corruption, even if it means losing everything.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #28 – IAMJASON

Defeat corruption
In this dystopian realm
But lose everything

–

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.

Case #31 will have you going in circles

There’s something undeniably amazing about Case #31, but it’s actually unfortunately a sub-par gaming experience, severely hampered by things like pace and grammar and competent controls. However, the hint of goodness–possibly even greatness–is there, but you have to travel around in a circle for a good while to even begin to see it. There’s a fluidity to this wee game that is striking, like a mix of Bastion‘s levels zooming up from nowhere and Puppeteer‘s puppet show aesthetic, with background and foreground elements plopping down and getting pulled away as if all on strings. It certainly plays within the jam’s theme of “a game on a single screen,” wherein the screen is, more or less, stationary, but the dressings change to alter its look.

First, the nitty gritty. Case #31 was developed for Ludum Dare 31 in 46 hours using Unity3D through a team of six people. It revolves around–see what I did there?–a murder mystery in a dark, seedy town, though it ultimately feels like an unexplained excuse to shoot some cops. Basically, you, as a detective, end up upon a dead body and ultimately become a leading suspect, resulting in no other choice but to shoot down cops and make a break for freedom. Possibly answers, too, but I never saw Case #31 to completion despite several restarts. I’m writing most of this post a few days after actually playing Case #31 so it doesn’t bode well for the narrative when I can’t really remember any vital details.

The controls are fairly limited. You can move left and right with the arrow keys, sliding along the screen as if being carried by a merry-go-round. You can also jump with up or duck with down, as well as shoot your shooty thing. That’s kind of it. Your goal is to push forward to the right without taking too many hits. Unfortunately, there are no checkpoints. Or perhaps they are spaced far, far apart and I never hit one. Either way, once you die, you start over from the very beginning, which means button-mashing your way past the grammatically poor dialogue to test your skills again at shooting men of the law while not taking any hits yourself. It’s disappointing and off-putting, which is why I closed my browser after buying the farm three or four times.

In the end, there isn’t much here in Case #31, but a single strong concept. That said, it came in fifth place for the overall jam. With better controls, varied gameplay, enhanced AI, and copy-edited text with a more engaging story, this could be something really cool. I’d love to see a game with this style on the Nintendo 3DS, as the moving, cardboard cutout background elements would look stellar with the 3D slider turned up a bit. Until then, I’ll just go round and round and round, and you can do so yourself by giving it a go.

There’s always A Place in Space for shooting aliens

Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number just came out, and while I’m definitely interested in more chaotic, gun-tossing mayhem set to electronic beats that thump deep in your chest, from the coverage I’ve seen of it, the game doesn’t really seem to be that much different from the now cult hit. Which means I can wait, there’s no rush. If anything–if the itch becomes too strong to resist scratching–I can simply return to the original game on either Steam or PlayStation 3, as surely I haven’t seen everything there was to see, especially when you consider I went through the trippy tale of revenge wearing nothing but the “doors kill” mask.

Or, if you prefer blowing alien monsters into piles of bloody mush rather than nameless goons at a strip club or seedy apartment complex, there’s A Place in Space, another high-listed entry from Ludum Dare 31. You all remember me dipping my toes into this jam competition’s creations with Kram Keep from a few days ago, right? Right? Well, good. Glad to see your collective memories are in fine shape.

There’s no story here, and there doesn’t need to be a story. Keeping with the jam’s theme of “entire game on one screen,” you move a little, gun-toting astronaut warrior between blackened out rooms, blasting everything that moves until it stops moving, opening the door to the next room. Rinse and repeat, moving clockwise around the same set of rooms, which are randomly generated a la The Binding of Isaac when you step on in. You use the WASD keys to move around and the mouse to both aim and fire whatever gun is currently equipped. The miniscule and crudely pixelated astronaut can only take so many hits from enemies, which means you definitely don’t want to back yourself into a corner. As you create pools of bloody mush, you can also pick up health refills and new weapon types, which immediately change how you both fire and play, just like in Contra.

A couple of problems I ran into, and these might only apply to me, as I’m sure I’m using the worst browser ever designed for Internet browsing. No, I won’t tell you what it is. Whenever I was in the bottom two rooms and tried to walk my astronaut up using the W key, the entire page I was on would shift up, cutting off half my view and forcing me to quickly use the mouse to scroll it back down. When this happened in the middle of a tense shootout, things often didn’t go well. Also, for some reason, every death caused A Place in Space to crash, which wasn’t the biggest deal since it only took a quick refresh to get back into the groove of things…but still. Lastly, and this is more of a nitpick than anything, there didn’t seem to be any way to know how long power-ups lasted, whether it was for a specific number of shots or only for one room; it would certainly help with planning the next room’s attack to know whether I’m going to lose that laser beam add-on early into the skirmish or not.

Give A Place in Space a try in your browser, and I guarantee that you’ll do at least a few runs in a row. If only there was a more killer soundtrack to go along with all that alien monster killing. If only.

Naut wants to know if there is life on Mars

Let’s see. I’ve experienced Scribblenauts from its earnest beginnings to its later, mega-popular forms, thought not all of ’em. I’ve also played Outernauts though Insomiac decided to take it all down off of Facebook some time back. A part of me would eventually like to try out Treasurenauts. Until then, at least I can say I played Naut, which, if keeping with the theme, should have been more amusingly titled as Nautnauts. I don’t know. I think every game title should end with the nauts suffix; yes, even you, Chrono Cross.

Anyways, the stylistic and explorative Naut is from Lucie Viatgé, Tom Victor, and Titouan Millet, members of the Klondike collective. According to their website, they come from the north of France and are not (er, naut) in fact a delicious ice cream treat that comes in over two dozen flavors and includes choco tacos, ice cream sandwiches, and stickless bars. I’m not familiar with too much of their other game work, but if it is anything like Naut, count me in. Or, at the very least, count me in to begin sifting through their, surprisingly, large backlog.

What is Naut all about? That’s not really something easily answered. You might as well be asking about the meaning of life. Let me steer you in a direction though using the developers’ own words: wander around, drive through the desert, hear what the cosmos has to tell you. While some elements might remain the same, everyone’s experience with Naut will be slightly different. For me, I immediately took our leading astronaut and goofily ran him/her over to the car, and then proceeded to drive around Mars and see its sights. Which consisted of strange plants, additional houses with odd inhabitants, and large rock formations, as well as a lightning storms. I watched the day turn into night and then back into day. Lastly, before deciding I had seen my fill of the Red Planet, I honked my car’s horn enough times to lift both it and its drive high into the air, far enough to no longer be able to see the alien ground below; naturally, I had the astronaut exit the vehicle and fall to his/her…feet. Yup, no fall damage, no fall physics–but that’s okay. It was still a beautiful descent.

Visually, I think Naut is out of this world, pun fully and gleefully intended. It’s a whole lot of pink and pastels for this Martian frontier, but it works, presenting this unknown planet as friendly and inviting, something you shouldn’t be scared to explored. You should be excited, like a kid getting a birthday gift early. The piano-lead soundtrack is melancholic, but adaptive, changing depending on whether you are driving at high speeds or galloping on the ground. Either way, it is at once calming and unnerving, reminding you that you are alone out here, but that that’s a-okay. Mars is both empty and massive, yours for the viewing. Interestingly, you can play Naut with a second player, navigating your collective way from one home to another, which sounds like fun, though I will probably never get to experience it.

Curious to see Mars for yourself? Good at clicking on links? Then grab a free copy of Naut over this way (or drop the developers a few bucks) and enjoy those outer space lightning storms as much as I did.

Kram Keep is a tiny yet towering take on Metroidvania

In a different life, one where maybe I didn’t try to have a career or binge-watch TV shows via Netflix or sleep or, heavens no, make a name for myself through art and writing, I’d be covering every Ludum Dare that happened, deeply examining all the themed creations, whether they got voted highly or not. Alas, that is not me. Instead, I kind of stumble across a Ludum Dare jam game months or even years after it was born. Well, with the topic du jour, I’m not terribly late, seeing that Ludum Dare 31 went down back in early December 2014, its jam theme being “Entire Game on One Screen.”

Kram Keep certainly meets that requirement. It’s the age-old classic tale of a blue-haired vampire hunter, a massively large castle full of traps and projectile-shooting enemies, and an evil master at its top, awaiting your blood. It’s a Metroidvania-style game, stuck on a single screen, meaning you can press the Shift key at any time to zoom out the map all the way and see everywhere you’ll eventually be going; I liked this, as it proved useful in guiding me to the next area, as well as keeping me informed about what was to come and the locations of vital power-ups. If anything, this seems sides more with the vania part than Metroid, but it is hard to say. As you go, you can collect hearts to increase your life bar, but you really want those special abilities–wall jump, double jump, and spread projectiles–if you are going to make any significant progress. Little crosses act as both checkpoints and health refills.

There were perhaps two or three tricky spots in Kram Keep that involved precise wall jump timing, and using the letter X and the arrow directions on the keyboard complicated things. As always, I prefer my platformers with a controller in hand, but sometimes you aren’t allotted such a benefit. In truth, where I needed a controller the most, was against the final boss. He has a pattern, so it eventually comes down to memorization and quick reflexes, but I still managed to put him six feet under with only a sliver of health left. Once you kill him, spoilers, much like with the end of Super Metroid, you have a limited amount of time to escape the castle, which means reversing the way you came in, though some routes are now closed off; I failed it the first time, but by hitting continue on the main menu, you can give it another go, and from what I can tell, it only changes a small part of the credits. Overall, the experience is tough, but fun, something I’d definitely recommend platforming fans to check out.

Since I love statistics and games that spit them out at the end of your run, here are my final, less-than-impressive tallies for Kram Keep:

• Time played: 0:42:51
• Deaths: 52
• Enemies killed: 160
• Crystal Hearts: 5/8
• Difficulty: Normal

Ludum Dare 32 is coming up in the middle of April, though there’s no listed theme just yet. Until then, I think I’ll snoop around a bit more in Ludum Dare 31‘s entries, as I’m almost positive there are a bunch more innovative takes on the “single screen only” theme. Hopefully I can find a few other titles to highlight like Kram Keep, that do a lot with very little.