Don’t let Insidia’s dark creatures consume you

I really need to start spending more time perusing Adult Swim’s gaming subsite. I mean, previously, they blew me away with Winnose, a surreal puzzle thing blistering with catchy tunes and tricky riddles, and sort of impressed me at the start of Westerado, that Western tale of revenge murder and retro graphics. Plus, if I remember correctly, they are also behind Jazzpunk, a zany adventure game that I do have in my Steam library and hope to play both before the year is over and I have it spoiled for me on the Giant Bomb GOTY podcasts. Either way, they put out strange, unique experiences–“Too Many Cooks”, anyone?–and Insidia, while actually rather plain and straightforward, is still a solid half hour of fun.

What’s Insidia all about? Well, it’s about a traveler, who may or may not be a female automaton, who has to make an emergency landing on a dark, strange planet in order to fix her broken spaceship. Ten repair kits will do the trick. To find them, you’ll need to explore and collect several power-ups, like double jumping and moving faster, which allow you to access new parts of the map. There are also ten hidden areas containing switches to flip, and if you want the best ending, you’ll need to discover them all. Otherwise, the darkness will consume you, which is probably the same fate that fell on those skeleton in cages you are trying not to notice in the background as you move about.

Speaking of moving about, you can use WASD or the arrow keys to move, X to jump, M to bring up your map, and T to safely teleport the traveler back to the spaceship at any time. That last point is great, considering the spaceship is near the middle of the map, making it handy for cutting down on backtracking. I found both moving and jumping with the arrow keeps to be less reliable and switched to a letter key for jumping and had little problems after that. There are save points everywhere, but you don’t actually lose any progress if you die, so they act more like respawn points. You can totally collect a repair kit, jump into some spinning spikes, and restart four screens over with the repair kit still collected. I persevered, and after about twenty minutes or so collected all ten repair kits, as well as flipping the ten hidden switches, which allowed the little orange robot to lift off the planet free from harm.

Insidia obviously looks like a handful of other small, indie platformers of late. Thankfully, I’m a fan of this simplistic, old-school style, but it does try to be its own thing, with a sort of sketchiness to it. Seeing it and the monster designs in motion shows that there is great personality here, and a single haunting song makes up the whole soundtrack, shadowing your jumps with clinks and clanks and techno-esque bloops. It helps build ambiance. If there’s one nitpick–and naturally this is one I’m always going to gripe on when it comes to games–it’s that the text for both the intro/end cutscenes could use some serious editing, as well as the tutorial messages. Saw a number of spelling mistakes, as well as just strange wording, which is a shame as the cutscene art is quite cool.

Anyways, you can play Insidia right over here, so stop reading and make with the clicky clicky.

Hunt the varmint that killed your family in Westerado

With a name like Westerado and a colorfully retro look, it didn’t take much to get me interested in this browser-based Western, free to play over at Adult Swim’s gaming subsite. A dastardly bandit kills your entire family, burning your home to the ground as a bonus, and you must go seeking revenge, gathering clues and helping others to learn the true identity of the bastard, in order to shoot him in front of the local saloon. It’s a traditional premise, but the idea of not knowing exactly who the murderer is works amazingly, especially since you can accuse nearly everyone you talk to and even draw your pistol on them. I killed a rancher just because he seemed to be holding back information; I’m not proud of that, just saying it’s something that can be done.

You control your bandit-seeking cowboy with WASD, using J to holster or unholster your pistol, K to both cock it and then fire, and R to reload a single bullet. E is your main action button for speaking and selecting dialogue options. Your cowboy wanders towns, picks up quests, learns clues, and continues on. Oh, and you can even join in a round of poker. I’ve played Westerado now in two separate sessions, with the first lasting an hour, and the second being much shorter than that, eventually breaking itself. It’s a surprisingly deep game that could potentially take several hours to complete, unless you know exactly where to go and who the bandit is from the word go. Not sure if that’s random each time or not, wasn’t paying attention to the details there.

I struggled with the shooting, mostly because there are some faults with it. I like the idea of manually reloading one bullet at a time and cocking the gun each time before firing, but maybe it’s a little too restrictive in execution. Throw in the fact that you automatically holster your pistol when you run and you can find yourself taking out your pistol, running over to an armed bandit, and then standing there empty-handed while your hat gets shot off. Lose three hats and then get shot one more time–you’re dead. Not a huge deal, as some progress is saved, though it’s not entirely clear what is being saved and when. I did die fighting some bandits and returned to the same place to find the ones I managed to kill still on the ground. So, yeah. That’s cool and all, considering it is browser-based, so you kind of have to play it in a single sitting or leave it running when you walk away.

And naturally, as this is me we’re talking about, I ran into a nasty glitch, which I worked my way around, but then it broke Westerado, thus lowering my interest to ever play again and figure out just who exactly shot my mother and brother. Oh well. I know he had a brown hat and is very thin, but that could be a number of men in town. Anyways, the glitch. Tasked with leading a caravan of goods, I quickly had to defend it from bandits with guns on horseback. Well, that’s what the instructions said, at least. No bandits ever showed up. The music was hyper and dramatic, and the caravan and my cowboy continued to race forward. This went on uneventfully for several minutes before I figured out that something broke; no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the bandits to spawn. Ultimately, I shot the caravan’s horse and lost the mission. Was dumped back into the wonderfully named town of Clintwood, where things slowed down and the game hitched up, eventually freezing on the fast travel map. Well, shoot.

So yeah, Westerado. A fantastic name, appropriate and polished tunes, a neat look, and the potential for a great mystery to solve. Alas, I don’t have the time to dig into it all at once, and now I’m scared of more glitches. But feel free to give it a chance, as it’s pretty charming otherwise.