An endless supply of handsome princes to Little Briar Rose’s rescue

The original version of Sleeping Beauty by the Brothers Grimm, meaning the non-Disney take or even the more recent stab via Angelina Jolie’s Maleficent, tackles such hot topics like adultery, bigamy, murder, rape, suicide, and even cannibalism. Yes, this is how fairy tales went back then. Thankfully, Little Briar Rose from Elf Games is not quite as dark as its source material, both in look and narrative, though we never do see what happens once the prince makes it to the castle, leaving that ending to either your Disney-slanted imagination or something more horrifying, the kind of twist that George R.R. Martin would appreciate.

But what is Little Briar Rose, other than a different name for a complicated tale of a comatose princess? It’s a point-and-click adventure game using a stunningly gorgeous stained glass art style, revolving around this plot: a princess has fallen under a curse that puts both her and her whole kingdom to sleep, with thick briar bushes blocking the way inside her kingdom, and the only way to break the curse is for a prince to awaken her with a true love’s kiss on the lips. However, in order to clear away much of the thick briar bushes and open up a path forward, the prince must first help the magical denizens of the forest. There are wishes to be granted still. Some are basic fetch quests, some involve a wee bit of puzzle solving, some are multiple choice-driven, and they all require a lot of backtracking.

Overall, Little Briar Rose isn’t a very long adventure. I think there are a total of five or six screens to explore, with plenty of revisiting between them all to solve every last puzzle and clear away those thorny vines. One puzzle asks you to construct a house based on a crude drawing, another requires you to gather specific information and relay it correctly, and the remainder involves finding items and giving them to the right non-playable character. Here’s the main deal: you’ll need to talk to everyone you’ve met, multiple times depending on the situation, to be set on the right track. If you feel stuck or unsure how to push the puzzle forward, go and talk to every merman, fairy, and gnome you see. Even that crow atop those mushrooms. Talk, talk, talk. Some of the dialogue is a little tedious to sift through, but it is well-paced and amusing for the most part. Obviously, the game’s art style is a delight to behold–and I wanted more screens to gawk at more colorful images–though the limited soundtrack grows tiresome quickly.

Interestingly, you can fail at several of the puzzle scenarios in Little Briar Rose, resulting in the death of your prince. No worries though as a new one quickly shows up to carry on the previous one’s torch and try again. This prince will have a new name and differently-colored hair and clothes, but otherwise, it’s just another empty husk to move around the game’s world and do your bidding. Adventure games like Gemini Rue and Beneath a Steel Sky have implemented death before, but they actually abide by the laws of death; here, it doesn’t make sense or even feel necessary. All it does is kill a few more minutes, making you backtrack to whatever puzzle you were at, as well as redo the steps you previously took to begin solving it if you forgot to save beforehand. I’d rather have seen some kind of “lolz you so wrong, prince, try again!” message rather than this, and trust me, I saw enough new princes spawn to earn an Achievement notification. Seeing as that was the only Achievement to pop up during my time in Princess Aurora’s land and that there’s no way to even view them, it came across as a waste.

I don’t want to come across too negative, as it was an enjoyable and certainly unique adventure gaming experience. At least there was no cannibalism. You can grab a copy for zero dollars for either Windows or Mac OS X at Elf Games’ website. I also scrolled through the developers’ blog, and it seems like Little Briar Rose is going through some revamping, with new art to come. I might give it another go down the line, curious to see what else changes.

Don’t worry, everyone, for I found all 10 yellow cupcakes

I have a bunch of Grinding Down posts in the work, all in different shapes of completion and on pretty diversified topics, such as marbles, sneaking around and stabbing tourists, and battling monsters that grow stronger ever turn, but I’m not really feeling motivated to write about any of them at the moment. Here’s my rule–don’t force your writing. Write when you are inspired or when you just can’t stop typing, when the ideas in your head are bouncing around, gasping for air. When it is fun and not a hassle. So, instead of churning out words and phrases I feel no connection to at the given moment, I’ll wax on a bit about a little Flash distraction I stumbled across recently called Find 10 Yellow Cupcakes, playable in your browser over here.

In Find 10 Yellow Cupcakes, you must do just that. It follows the same logic behind Escape the Barn. It’s an “escape the room” style point-and-click adventure game, with the twist being that, in order to escape this rather calm, if barely furnished home of yours, you must first gather up ten yellow cupcakes. For who, you surely ask? I don’t know. Let’s say it is either aliens or really picky friends, as they will not stoop low enough to eat green cupcakes. Anyways, eight of these cupcakes are hidden throughout the house, and there’s some item-driven puzzling involved to get the last two into your collection, but you’ll find these cupcakes by clicking on things, opening drawers and doors, and entering in passcodes to breach security locks.

You might think finding ten yellow cupcakes is…a piece of cake. ::rimshot:: I’m here to tell you otherwise. Allow me to share with y’all some cupcake-unearthing tips. Remember to interact with everything that looks interactive, like light switches or curtains or even the drain in the sink. Also, in order to use an item, click on it in your inventory and then click on the “About Item” button to see if up close and use other items on it. Lastly, don’t forget, you only care about yellow cupcakes; if you come into possession of a cupcake of a different color, munch away.

Find 10 Yellow Cupcakes is a short, tasty bit of pointing and clicking and deducing, with a minimalistic look and sound design. That’s fine. I wasn’t looking for much here, but once I began gathering cupcakes, the tug to collect them all pulled me along, even when I got stuck over the last two cupcakes. Granted, I knew what I needed to do, but struggled with the game’s interface to get the job done. You also don’t get much feedback or resolution once you find all ten yellow cupcakes and hightail it outside, other than a “hey, congrats, d00d” image. Still, much like a cupcake is all you need when you’re hungering for something sweet, but not too much, MayMay’s latest game satisfied me until dinner. That said, I don’t consider this big enough of an experience to add it to my games I completed in 2015 list.

Awakener has young adventurer Fadi performing a number of tasks

Evidently, I still have a bunch of Ben Chandler’s earlier point-and-click adventure games downloaded on my laptop, waiting patiently. Ready to be played, like good little patients. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. That is, only if I use my mouse cursor to click on them and hit “run.” That might not sound like a tricky puzzle, but some days, some cold, tired, lonely nights, it can be a true struggle to do anything other than crawl under the heated blanket with a cat and burn the dark hours with a continuous stream of Netflix. That said, I decided to check out Awakener over the weekend and was surprised to discover it was both a short and straightforward experience, peppered with wall-breaking humor and flashy animations, like when Fadi finds the dagger.

Here’s the deal. A nine-year-old boy called Fadi thirsts for adventure much in the same way a drowning man thirsts for air. Er, no. That’s probably too dramatic. So, when asked to retrieve a potion from the local store by his Aunt Sylvia, he sees this straightforward challenge as much more, as a not so simple task. With point-and-click adventure games, it never really is anyways. In order to retrieve this potion, this Spirit of Hartshorn, which should be potent enough to wake the sleeping man outside his aunt’s home, Fadi will have to jump through some non-literal hoops, supplying people he meets with just what they need to give up whatever item they have to help him progress. I mean, that statue isn’t going to dress itself.

As it turns out, Awakener takes place across a single screen, though it does scroll left and right, so you could argue that it is like three rooms connected with no loading. This is not a detriment, as some developers can do a lot with a little. I personally liked the bite-size environment to scour, as it never felt overwhelming, and the backtracking only took a few clicks. You’re in a sort of open market area, with a couple houses and a bar, though you can’t go inside anywhere; no worries, as everyone you need to converse with for puzzle actions is outside, getting some fresh fantasy-limned air. Just like Chandler’s other earlier works, such as Fragment and ~airwave~ – I Fought the Law, and the Law One, the characters and environments are brightly colored, zany, with some nontraditional takes on geometry.

Awakener‘s puzzles are all item-based, which means speaking with someone to figure out what item they need or how to get the item they already have. You’ll never hold too much in your inventory at one time, which keeps things pretty simple to figure out. The solutions are fairly obvious, like helping an assassin on her assassination quest, though I did get stuck for a minute or two on how to obtain the soldier’s pike, not realizing it was a timing issue. Also, if I recall–it’s been a few days now–all puzzles are solved using a single item on a second single thing, with very little item combining at play.

Ultimately, this is a short, early comedic stab from Ben Chandler, one still worth checking out if you have a few minutes to spare and like clicking on things. The dialogue is amusing, especially if you are a fan of adventure games and can take a few jokes at a genre you enjoy, though don’t expect much in the sound department. You can grab a free copy of the game over this a-way.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #20 – Awakener

To wake the sleeper
Help assassin, buy pennies
Oh, dress the statue

–

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.

Ascend towards an unknown destination in The Old Tree

According to Steam, I completed The Old Tree in twelve minutes. Thankfully, those were twelve really good minutes spent in a bizarre, surprising world, starring a microscopic octopus-like alien blob, as well as a couple other cartoonish characters, like that insect bellboy. It’s a short experience, but satisfying, and there’s obviously room for so much more.

From Red Dwarf Games, The Old Tree effectively mixes point-and-click adventuring with beautifully interactive art. Think more Samorost 2 than Botanicula, but both fit the vibe when it comes to imagination and creativity. Anyways, in this atmospheric free-to-play title, you help guide a tiny alien thing, which I’ve seen referred to as both Dumbo Octopus and Baby Cthulhu by fans, to an unknown destination. Basically, you’ll hit a number of progress-blocking puzzles, where you have to figure out what to click on in the environment–and in what order–to open up the path for our leading creepy, crawling turnip to keep moving. Despite some of the surroundings, the puzzles are mostly logical, such as how you can’t open a door as easily when it is submerged in water, meaning you need to empty the tank first. I really liked getting around the insect bellhop and his/her need to control the light switch.

Strangely, there’s quite a sinister air hanging over The Old Tree despite nothing terrible happening and–spoiler–a happy ending for the little alien dude. Maybe it has to do with the dark lighting or use of unnerving insects in human-like positions, and the quiet, haunting soundtrack probably doesn’t help much. Either way, I kind of dreaded every new scene, waiting for things to take a serious turn for the worse, but it never happened. I guess that is more on me than the game, but I might not recommend this as a bedtime story just yet. Maybe stick with Kirby’s Epic Yarn for the meantime if you are looking for a blob-driven narrative.

That said, I’ll definitely keep an eye out for Red Dwarf Games’ next project, which is called Tales of Cosmos, already on Steam Greenlight and aiming for a 2015 release. Similar to Lost Constellation and Night in the Woods, a freebie taste of what’s to come really helps rope me in for the long haul, and I hope it works on others, as there is something special here in the art direction, something worth exploring in a larger capacity.

Fallow’s demo is full of sorrow and sleepwalking

Fallow had me at “Gothic Americana adventure game,” and so I decided to give rooksfeather‘s personal darling, which looks like a warped version of Pokémon Yellow, a shot. I used to be all about demo trials in my high school years, but other than the special standalone thing for Bravely Default: Flying Fairy, I can’t recall the last time I earnestly tried out a demo. Usually, since I’m so behind as is on current games, I’ll just forget about them for a few months and be surprised when it is actually done and released to the public. However, just the look of Fallow had me hooked. I had to see it in action. Still, nothing tops that Metal Gear Solid demo, which basically gives out the first hour or so of the game for free.

Fallow‘s demo actually ends up providing a ton of background and plot details, but I won’t swear on the Good Book that I understood it all. For starters, you place as Isabelline Fallo, a farmhand in the olden, titular world of Fallow. Unfortunately, she suffers from sleepwalking, often waking up in a new location each morning. This means she has to make her way back home, alone and confused. Plus, it doesn’t help that this isn’t your typical America, brimming with foreign, alien technology and lodestone formations. If I grokked it all correctly, this now desolate and overtaken version of home is the Fallow family’s fault; there was a monument plaque that read something along the line that, as part of their punishment and as a constant reminder, the Fallow family name would now be one letter less–Fallo. Hmm, okay.

As Isabelline makes her way home, she’ll do a lot of exploring, a little investigating, and a pinch of puzzle solving. The puzzles I experienced in the demo are rather straightforward, of the “find the specific item” ilk, but they work well enough. Plus, it is both a joy and bummer to simply exist in this world, to walk around as a beautifully somber guitar lick loops, one not filled with any hope, but written to lull you, put you at ease. I really enjoy how the screen switches over to a first-person shot when you are looking at something worth examining, and if I had any complaints, it is that our sleep-troubled star walks too slow; when your game is mostly walking to and fro, sometimes you just want to hurry along to the next screen, see what else is out there in this strange, crumbling America. The slow pace doesn’t make the backtracking thrilling either.

You too could try out Fallow’s demo or just wait until it is a purchasable product later this year, seeing as it was Steam Greenlit (Greenlighted?) back in November 2014. If I had been paying attention then and saw it and was the kind of soft soul that did things like support upcoming indie developers, I’d have totally upvoted this.

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.

There is no story in The Tiny Bang Story

I think I ended up getting The Tiny Bang Story in one of the first Steam sales I ever participated in, grabbing it because it was über inexpensive and had a fantastic, whimsical art style, similar to Machinarium. I then allowed the casual point-and-clicker to sit quietly and ignored in my Steam library for a good while, eventually giving it an unsuccessful go during my Extra Life stream this past October. Yeah, turns out, playing slow-moving, atmospheric puzzlers does not make for thrilling entertainment, nor does getting stuck in the opening chapter because I couldn’t locate X, Y, and Z. Still, something was there, and so I returned to Colibri Games’ indie mosquito-catching simulator recently to solve every puzzle it contained.

But first, here’s the most disappointing thing about The Tiny Bang Story–there is no story. At least not a solid narrative throughout. Sure, there’s some light setup, but it is just window dressing for…item gathering and random puzzles. See, life on Tiny Planet was pretty relaxing until a great disaster struck–a meteor, that is! Now everything is a mess, and it’s up to, the player, the one with the power to click a mouse button, to restore Tiny Planet back to its peacefulness. You do this by fixing a variety of machines and mechanisms, as well as collecting hidden jigsaw puzzle pieces. That’s the story, and that’s all you get. The rest is left up to your imagination because you’ll get absolutely zero clues no matter how many times you click on those characters.

The gist of the gameplay involves clicking. Click on stuff until a sidebar pops up to tell you what to collect and how many in order for the selected item to work. In reality, The Tiny Bang Story is a very pretty “find the hidden items” game, the kind my mother and I used to play together on the Nintendo DS. There’s no time limit to any of the puzzles, and the game autosaves at nearly every turn, so if you are tired of straining your eyes in search of that one, teeny, tiny light-bulb you can always come back to it later. Which I did. Many puzzles are logic-based while others just ask to you click around enough times; I found a few to be initially difficult because, since there is no story or even text in this game, I did not know what was desired. I struggled the most with the puzzles based around sliding or rearranging tiles because I’ve never been any good at those.

Okay, besides the lack of story, I do have another peeve to pick: the hint system is tedious. In games like Professor Layton, you can collect hidden coins in the screen to spend on clues to help you solve puzzles. That idea is here, too. Sort of. On every screen you visit, there are blue mosquitoes that softly buzz around; if you click on them, you’ll collect them in a bubble at the top right corner, and once you have enough, you can summon a single mosquito to circle around a specific area if you missed something or don’t know where to click next. Fine, fine. Except clicking on the tiny bugs is harder than you first imagine, and then you quickly realize you’re going to need to click on far too many of them just to get a single hint. Like, I think maybe at 14 or 15. No thank you, I’ll just look up an online walkthrough.

Now, while many of the puzzles were hit or miss, the enchanting soundtrack was always spot on. After you complete a chapter, you get to play with the jigsaw puzzle pieces you collected along the way, filling in the picture of Tiny Planet itself. These moments are so soothing that I found myself moving each piece into its slot slower and slower, not wanting it to end. Some might see this as a rather boring task in a game, but the soundtrack and visuals work in unison here to really create something atmospherically pleasing. Plus, the picture in the puzzle moves–kind of like photos in the Harry Potter universe–which helps keep you immersed in completing it.

I thought The Tiny Bang Story was going to be something else, a more narrative-driven adventure game. What it ultimately is isn’t bad; in fact, I had a pretty good time in its kooky and unexplainable world, especially playing around with those jigsaw puzzle pieces at the close of every chapter, but I think this means I need to whet my point-and-click adventuring appetite and finally get around to Beneath a Steel Sky or To the Moon. Or just be content that I recently played Botanicula and it was everything I wanted it to be.

Aimless and without answers, that’s Amihailu in Dreamland

I…don’t really know what to make of Amihailu in Dreamland. That’s not just me being stumped criticually and creatively, but also intellectually. I put about fifty minutes into this exploration-based puzzle game, and I still have no idea what I was ultimately doing other than walking around, interacting with everything I could, and then backtracking to see if I missed something along the way. The game refuses to tell you what to do, where to go, what’s missing, and in this age of Dark Souls and Paper Mario: Sticker Star I applaud that; however, it has gotten to the point that, unless I want to watch a video of someone else playing, I can’t continue on into the darkness.

Here’s how Noyemi K, the game’s creator, describes it:

Amihailu is a recent graduate of the Bromnian Military Academy. She recently came home from vacation with her friends and decides to take a rest because her parents are out. What follows is the strangest, most vivid dream she’s ever had! Amihailu and all her friends find themselves embarking on a strange and twisted adventure in a world where things aren’t at all what they seem and nothing makes any sense!

Yup, nothing makes any sense! That much I grokked. But when it comes to dreamlands, everything is meant to be interpretive and obtuse, so that comes with the territory. Do I really need to understand why touching a painting teleports Amihailu to another part of the map? Or why she keeps running into friends of hers that want nothing to do with her? I learned to not question much in Remember Me or Link’s Awakening, and so I have to do the same here, though without a dash of reality to reference it can be hard to separate the zany from the sane.

The main meat of Amihailu in Dreamland is puzzles and solving them yourself, whether through logic or the use of a specific item, but there’s also an RPG-esque stat screen for Amihailu with details for HP and strength, which initially gave me hope that there would be some turn-based combat. Alas, doesn’t look like it–unless it pops off later on–and I guess it is just part of the program used to create the game, that it has to be there. I keep expecting random battles in these retro-looking exploration tours, and they keep not happening. Good thing I’m still eating up Suikoden II at the moment.

There’s not much out there in terms of walkthroughs, but I tried to follow along with this “spoiler-free” guide, but couldn’t figure out step seven of the first section of the game where you have to find a tension wench from, and I quote, “the purple area.” And so, I wake up, back to the land of the living, to write about Amihailu in Dreamland here at Grinding Down and never to learn what that wood block (cedar) in my key items list was meant for. Oh well. Twas only a dream.