A collection aside
DEVELOPER MRRAMM • PRICE FREE https://mrramm.itch.io/the-clock-that-stopped
As the story unfolds, things go wrong. In fact, I thought the game was going to kill me.
Nostalgia combines with novelty in the collection this month and you can play as everything from a reluctant date show contestant to a pencil. MEGHANN O’NEILL often includes free games but, as she has recently been on a holiday to China and has no money, ‘free stuff’ has been on her radar. People create and publish games to be enjoyed for free and this is wonderful, for gamers on every budget. Look out for some Australian games here, too, as we lead up to showcasing the local industry at PAX Australia.
GUARD DUTY
DEVELOPER SICK CHICKEN STUDIOS • PRICE $14.50 https://www.sickchicken.com/ ■ In 2047, the world is sliced in two. How can it be saved? Is it even possible to stick a planet back together? Guard Duty opens a few centuries before this dramatic event. You play (mostly) as Tondbert, the Roger Wilco of city guardsmen. His voice actor is hilarious, especially when Tondbert’s face is swollen with bee stings. After finding his clothes, Tondbert is tasked with saving the princess, who has been mysteriously abducted. It’s clear he thinks she’s awesome. It was also (indirectly) his fault she was kidnapped.
The game’s pixel art is reminiscent of a late Sierra-era King’s Quest, with cartoony cutscenes and garish colours. It’s particularly evocative when hues wash out to whites and greens in dangerous areas. You’ll meet a host of likely townsfolk, including the hag who wants a kiss and a weepy monarch. Interestingly, some characters are never involved with problem solving and function to flesh out a detailed world. I’d usually expect every piece, or person, in an adventure game to be used, yet it’s nice to simply experience extra content.
Initial puzzles involve finding objects and imagining solutions. If you’re stuck, talking to characters is an enjoyable way to collect backstory as well as the clues that will arise from conversation. You can collect more items than you need to finish the game, too. Food makes me particularly nervous, especially if you can eat it, but I found that a surplus of inventory items kept me thinking. A couple of times, I solved puzzles without meaning to, by using an object and getting an unexpected result, especially later in the game.
Puzzling was a little too easy, overall, but I enjoyed not getting very stuck, except where there was a screen to the right that I hadn’t realised was there. This was frustrating. Like in many adventure games, the action often unfolds in discrete areas. Guard Duty is comprised of a majestic town, dark forest and frosty mountain range. At one point, I wanted to get tools from the blacksmith, but I was unable to return to town, when I felt I had a reason to. At the conclusion of Tornbert’s quest, you’re then transported to a new era and play as a contrasting character.
As the story unfolds, things go wrong. In fact, I thought the game was going to kill me. It kind of did, a couple of times, yet the action continued. Guard Duty doesn’t punish you for not saving, like a classic adventure may, but it will force you to replay content if you make an obviously bad decision. You’ll find mazes, which annoyed old adventure fans, but with additional features to help you track your progress. As well as a catapult, badlands and a severed hand, the game seemed to include one of everything this classic adventurer remembers so fondly.
Over a few hours, I enjoyed Guard Duty. It was a straightforward, cleverly written and surprising tale. For adventure fans, this is a nostalgic experience that is faithful to classic adventures, while understanding the comforts contemporary players expect. The game is lighthearted and experiments with narrative structures, even getting suddenly dark in places. I played Space Quest so long ago, I can’t actually remember whether Roger Wilco actually became a proper hero. Can Tondbert rise to greater things? I’ll let you find out.
ANODYNE 2 DEVELOPER SEAN HAN TANI, MARINA KITTAKA PRICE $30 https://sean-han-tani.itch.io/anodyne-2
■ I have a fondness for ‘rose-tinted nostalgia’, like in Stranger Things, where Dustin sang Neverending Story (in perfect harmony) with his girlfriend. I do not recall people doing that in the 80s, but I’m happy to pretend they did. I also never had a Playstation 1, or a Nintendo 64 (I write for a PC gaming magazine, after all), but I totally grok Anodyne 2. Combining clunky 3D with Zelda-like 2D sounded like a weird idea when one of my composition students recommended me this, but the designers have expertly captured an arcane (yet accessible) version of what could have been.
Certainly, the music is wonderful. The first time I noticed how elegantly it has been implemented was after leaving the inside of a lamp-obsessed woman I’d been cleaning of dust. From a flat mix of nostalgic tone colours in 2D, the aural space opened out to reflect the new 3D context of her house. The melody slowed down and synths were added. I don’t know enough about the target systems to be able to tell you how authentic these sounds are, but the music is thoughtfully crafted, playful and cleverer than it should be.
There’s a lot to say and it’s difficult to know where to start, so here’s a story. In 3D space, after driving past it (in car form) many times, I noticed an egg (that the hint dolphin had mentioned) on a rise that was impossible to climb. Figuring I could drop down behind it, I found an unlikely route up a mountain and fell off the edge of the world. Many cheesy ascents later, I was high enough to see the route to the egg and traced it back to a feature that one wouldn’t obviously scale, but could. Levels require that you approach them creatively and I absolutely love that.
If exploration and experimentation characterise the 3D space, when you shrink down to 2D, the focus switches to puzzling. Equipped primarily with a Nano Vacuum, you have everything you need to suck up incrementally more complicated adversaries and use them in ways that unlock doors and reveal the ‘inner stories’ of esoteric characters. Interestingly, you can double your health or become invincible in these sections and I used each healthstyle to progress, depending on how I was feeling (tired, like a challenge or whatever), rather than difficulty.
The story is adjacent to that of Anodyne and you can play either first, although a knowledgeable player may appreciate certain secrets better. The language is poetic and the characters are imaginative (I caught a centipede train by pulling on its uvula lever, or uvulever). I spent the first half of the game simply enjoying the flowery tales people were telling, before I came to understand the game’s overarching themes. This is a complicated, tentative and caring experience that is difficult to summarise more explicitly, without spoilers.
As I was saying in a lecture to tertiary composers recently, the reason Garfield Minus Garfield works so well as an unexpectedly poignant portrayal of Jon Arbuckle’s inner angst is because (after 40 years, or so) we’re different now. We like existential, visual gags more than we hate Mondays. By allowing the idiosyncrasies of old systems to shine, rather than trying to polish them out, Anodyne 2 transcends everyday nostalgia. Four kids and a monster gave audiences a fresh chance to reexamine D&D, after all. This is 90s gaming’s moment.
A DATE TO DIE FOR DEVELOPER JADE STEWART • PRICE $6.90 https://jadedsynic.itch.io/a-date-to-die-for
■ I played A Date To Die for five times and I think I understand it, but I also wouldn’t say I’m completely sure about that. It’s certainly thought provoking. You’re on a live dating show where no-one seems to want to be there. This is so unexpected (for dating shows) that I didn’t explicitly notice how grumpy everyone was being until the third playthrough, or so. I mean, they’re not grumpy so much as sensitive, and they will share personal stories with you, but choosing dialogue responses felt like walking on eggshells. Why are you people here if not to find love?
I started out trying to game the system; if Rae, the pixie, is quiet, I should say this to charm xer and make the date more successful. I also tried to roleplay in various ways, which everyone seemed to hate. It was far more (personally) rewarding to just empathise deeply with characters and forget about dating altogether. The game neatly explores contexts like dating after heartbreak, as an older person or when you’re shy. It reminded me of Katawa Shoujo, the unexpectedly sensitive dating sim, set in a school for disabled children.
One criticism I’d make is that, in order to experience additional dates, you have to replay a lengthy, unskippable opening section. You are given four dialogue options to experiment with, however, and choosing nastier dialogue gave the game greater context. Another is that I never figured out whether the title has a second meaning. I feel like it should. Yet, if you’re interested in deconstructing the dating sim, A Date to Die for is a great reminder that there are many reasons why people go on dates, beyond love and sex, even if they are initially grumpy about it.
Feeling rather like Janet, from The Good Place, I set out to omnisciently colour more of what is actually a very large world..
PAINT GAME DEVELOPER MAX MYERS • PRICE $5 https://mjm.itch.io/paintgame
■ I’ve never bought an adult colouring book. I actually can’t remember colouring as a child, either. I was probably too busy playing videogames. There was something about marking assignments for three days, however, that created the perfect headspace for Paint Game. I spent a good 40 minutes painting a tree. Then, of course, I walked around to the back of it and had to paint that, too. Some of my watery watercolours leaked into the 3D space that was actually the sky, so I then spent some time reluctantly blotting out beautiful, floating, tree-coloured streaks.
Feeling rather like Janet, from The Good Place, I set out to omnisciently colour more of what is actually a very large world. I decided to get purple with what I thought was sand, but my colours were soon undulating prettily. It was the sea; my weird, algae blooming sea. I initially had one criticism; that the sharp lines of buildings can’t be neatly adhered to with the runny paint, but after suggesting to the developer that he run a competition and him replying that ‘the award could be to stick it on the fridge’, I better understood the childlike aim of the experience.
It’s not so much that only children colour, more that you’re forced to not be perfect at it. So what if my pizza shop looks like someone ate one too many slices of Hawaiian and threw up on it? From a distance, it’s highly impressionist. And yes, I remember my kids’ colouring books, with the messiness and pictures of dogs drawn over the top of the solar system, or whatever. I don’t need a prim, adult colouring book, just the chill freedom to be both sloppy and beautiful.
(Please note, the short soundtrack was made by a good friend of mine, which I realised after playing.)
■ There’s something about the pencil-drawn aesthetic that has captured my imagination this month. The Clock That Stopped opens on lined paper, with sharp, diamond-shaped leaves fluttering in the wind. It feels both handcrafted and computer generated, in an unsettling, yet lovely, way. The game has a Myst-like quality and if you hate obtuse puzzles, you should skip ahead to the next review. I, however, was hooked after finding certain things that made no visual sense. “What the hell is that?” is always going to make for compelling environmental storytelling.
Because, the thing is, why did the clock stop? And where is everyone? Looks like a cosy town. If you can’t be observant, you’ll be pointlessly pulling (an absolute abundance of) levers forever. Finding a gear and (special) lever to fix the clock are really just an elaborate premise for, well, complicated lever puzzles. I almost certainly wouldn’t have played this if I’d known most of my questions would remain unanswered, yet solving the puzzles was very satisfying, in and of itself. If you like unsettling art, and levers, this may be for you.