Indie showcase

After discovering PowerQuest, Dave Lloyd’s collection of Unity prefabs for making point and click adventures, MEGHANN O’NEILL created an adventure game for Global Game Jam. It’s small, but complete, and you can find it on itch.io with the title, The Kid Who Stole Christmas. She isn’t absolutely fixated on adventure games this issue, but she has reviewed two, with a

THE CURIOUS EXPEDITION 2 DEVELOPER Maschinen-Mensch PRICE $28.95 AVAILABILITY Released WEBSITE https://curious-expedition.com/

Ilove games that feel unfair. Not games that are actually unfair, just those that appear to be murdering you arbitrarily for the longest time, before they ultimately prove that your poor decision making did, in fact, justify failure. Although I’ve improved at The Curious Expedition 2, over many hours of play, there are still moments that leave me scowling. I feel like I “should” be more successful. It’s surprisingly compelling. When an outcome can’t be completely controlled, and the stakes are high, things get exciting.

Luck (in the form of an insanity event) can mean the difference between finding mangoes and Jules Verne eating your love interest. It’s possible you should have brought tea, which makes the initial cost of pathfinding saner, but grappling hooks to preserve your sanity on hilly terrain may have been of genuine importance, too. You could have asked ‘natives’ for food instead of the location of their village, which was too far away to sanely reach. If you’re on the hardest difficulty, even the wrong choice between walking left or right makes madness inevitable.

You’re a colonial explorer embarking on expeditions the word “curious” would only describe if you had no regard for your companions, the environment, native people and sacred treasures/ monuments. It’s possible to play as “benevolent” but it’s much easier to play as “oblivious”. This game is (likely) a complex political statement that I’m not sure I entirely understand, except that winning often feels like another unfairness. Do I really deserve a parade after trading just a few marbles for the natives’ precious ceremonial treasures?

The campaign is organised so that you can choose from missions, located in unlockable biomes, before you’re forced through another fresh eye. It’s also interesting to note that all of these games sell for the same price; $28.95, because they’re all quite different in structure, scope and in terms of production. If indie game prices are on the way up, that’s pleasing, but we’re also committed to bringing you the information you need to be able to decide if something is for you. story level. You can be sponsored by one of three factions, one snooty, one steampunk, one mystical, who will provision your expedition. I prefer Lux Labs, because of their magnificent exploding batteries, but it’s possible to approach gameplay in a myriad of ways. Explosions are useful in combat, but only if your companions can roll blue and you don’t want to bother with stealth and a shroud of animal scent.

In fact, every decision requires you to understand its interconnected implications. Combat can be useful as a source of meat, for example. If you eat dead creatures raw, you’ll remain slightly saner, but travelling with a cook can dramatically improve upon these results. Of course, natives will get progressively angrier the more wildlife you kill (including if the animal stalked you as prey) and so you can forget about resting in their village. If you travel with a hound, however, they can hunt (the less conspicuous) quail every several days.

One character, the Travelling Quack, is a great example of this double-edged sword idea. Sometimes, they will make a potion that heals, but it tastes so bad, the recipient will lose a point of loyalty. An infected wound will always lead to death, but a curative potion usually causes some kind of persistent, paranoid quality. Not so bad? A pyromaniac can “accidentally” incinerate the entire group, if you’re slow to move. And poor loyalty has some especially dire consequences, including companions stealing away with all of your stolen treasures.

Whether or not this game feels fair is related to two key concepts; insight and luck. Firstly, you don’t know what you don’t know, until you know it. The first time you go insane, you could just have a weird dream in the purple fog (that gradually strangles the island, to prevent dilly dallying). But it’s not until you experience a more serious consequence that the real danger of insanity is revealed. Is cannibalism, for example, caused by a failing statistic, like low loyalty?

If so, the game does a great job of obfuscating it, because I have no idea.

Luckily, you can play on the hardest difficulty and still choose whether permadeath will wipe the whole run, or just the current mission, as you learn. When I was playing on the easiest, I thought that the levels were procedurally generated. It was only after dying several times on the hardest that I realised that (possibly) handcrafted levels seem to persist for a few attempts in a row, then change. This creates a kind of beneficial unfairness because, if you know that the question mark to the left is not an oasis, you can make trails in a more useful direction.

Probably the most interesting difference between the easiest and hardest difficulties is that the maps diverge radically, in size. Longer journeys make you more insane. I believe roving predators are also more dangerous, both because of party size and higher hitpoints, but I was trying to avoid them, so I can’t be sure. Combat is much easier to understand, compared with the original Curious Expedition, although instruction provided remains sparse. You’ll need to prepare, experiment and pay attention, three of my favourite things.

Each companion has two dice. They’ll have unique abilities on a couple of faces, like Jules Verne’s desire to write notes about the attacking creature, for fame. You’ll win or buy weapons and other equippable items, which will transform faces from (perhaps) Weak

Punch into something more powerful that may stun or cause bleeding. When a companion is bleeding, using an affected die causes them damage, too. Each die will also have blank faces which you can reroll once, although this may be unwise if this causes a quick adversary to be given an extra hit.

Things get more complex when you realise that each face of the die, or consumable item, has slots for boosts of the same colour. So, you can roll a red Heal and heal more hitpoints by adding any other red face, even if it’s an attack or something unrelated. Alternatively, you could use the red Attack and boost the hitpoints damaged with the red Heal. And potions are dice that have six (blank) faces of one colour, exclusively used for boosting. I loved this combat system. You can hedge your bets, but the spectre of bad luck always looms large.

I was playing Risk with the kids recently. They were horrified by those moments when the odds were in their favour; having more dice and soldiers, yet they rolled badly. An entire war can hinge on someone getting a couple of sixes. At one point, with his confidence thoroughly undermined by a run of bad luck, my younger son ate a plastic soldier instead of the potato chip he was holding in his other hand. If there is a more apt metaphor for The Curious Expedition 2, I don’t know it. It’s hilarious, unexpected and both more and less unfair than you’d like it to be.

HENRY MOSSE AND THE WORMHOLE CONSPIRACY DEVELOPER Bad Goat Studios PRICE $28.95 AVAILABILITY Released WEBSITE https://www.mosseadventure.com/

Ilove adventure games and I love playing them with my kids. My kids are somewhat less keen, however, especially as they get older. Lyndon was eight when we played Thimbleweed Park and it was Ransome’s beeped out swearing that kept him engaged. I play adventures regardless but, given Henry Mosse and the Wormhole Conspiracy is about going on a galactic journey with your mum, I thought it might be worth trying to get Lyndon back on board. There were lots of laughs, some cheerful eye rolling and a surprising number of “stuck” moments.

Henry, although an older teenager, is incredibly naive, surely the consequence of futuristic helicopter parenting. For an adventure game protagonist, this works well because it means he can be endlessly curious and shocked by the events unfolding around him. In fact, he’s hardly explored the cosmos at all, despite the Mosse Family running a delivery service through space. The gig is not without its mundanity, like business dealings and paperwork, but mysterious deeds are afoot and things are about to take a darker turn.

The puzzles are unusually challenging and highly varied. One moment, which involves approaching a fractious turtle, is simple, yet elegant, and I can’t recall coming across this idea before. A couple of times, I was foiled by the art and didn’t notice steps or a walkway to a new area, which was frustrating. I also dislike solving puzzles “accidentally”, where I’m not sure what I’m trying to achieve, like clicking something on something and it works unexpectedly. The prime culprit for this was an incredibly confusing moment involving flowers, bees and the sun.

Oddly, there appears to be a dialogue option that skips the flower puzzle altogether, as if designers realised it was too difficult, but only at the last minute. Similarly, despite incredible voice acting, I only found a button to skip dialogue (surely mandatory for the genre) near the end. And, although the musical composition, a neat mix of cinematic, orchestral timbres and electronic sounds, is lovely, many of the earlier loops feature highly structured melodic content that seems particularly repetitious (and grating) when you’re stuck.

I wonder if this game would be a better movie (or comic), or if it had been planned for a different medium initially. So far as I can tell, Henry Mosse is the debut title for Bad Goat Studios. It is unusual that such attention has been paid to aesthetic elements, including story, characters and dialogue, while some of my basic expectations for genre remain unmet. It ended with the suggestion of more chapters to come. I hope the studio has the chance to make a Henry Mosse series, which I imagine could become tighter and more refined, over time.

I particularly like that there appear to be multiple ways to solve puzzles and that this leads to divergent, resultant solutions later, even if this is not always clearly communicated to players. Lyndon’s favourite character was an alien who talks in a frightening, unintelligible hiss and ends every sentence with “beep”. It’s possible he thought the alien was swearing but, either way, he remained interested to the very end. This is an enjoyable experience. I am interested to see what kind of innocent trouble Henry gets himself into next.

MUTROPOLIS DEVELOPER Pirita Studio PRICE $28.95 AVAILABILITY Released WEBSITE https://www.piritastudio.com/

I’ve played so many games. So many. Recently, I’ve noticed myself becoming fixated on single details and ignoring the wider experience, which I’m sure is related to the fact that so little surprises me these days. Mutropolis is another adventure game, but it’s set 3000 years into the future. That’s an amazing concept. Or, it should be. Granted, there’s a futuristic garden in which you can instantly alter the season, just for fun. But why is Carlata dressed exactly like a woman I saw on the train this morning (in 2021)? Her accent also perfectly matches my cousin’s.

Surely we have evolved out of high heels by 5000AD. Haven’t we? What a dark future. In fact, post-cataclysm, humanity survives on Mars. The game is set back on Earth, centering around a company of archeologists who hilariously misunderstand historical figures and everyday items. One book describes roses as, “projectile weapons to defend against opera singers.” When the protagonist doesn’t know what a pyramid is, it is explained to him as being “one of those pointy things in the desert”. The story then widens to encompass 9000 years instead of a mere 3000.

I became fascinated with how puzzles are framed over this great span of time, too. For example, Henry doesn’t know what a plug is, but several solutions involve electricity. And the player has to know how to create a battery from improvised materials. At one point, a futuristic archeologist and an ancient god are confronted with written English. One says they can read it, but they’re telling lies only the player can discern. And yet, the characters are speaking English the entire time. The casual disregard for these dissonances and plot holes is extremely endearing, somehow.

It’s also amusing that the player and protagonist remain distant. Henry’s reluctance to put his hand into dark holes causes absolute hilarity. Yet, his enthusiasm for archaeology (no matter how badly he misunderstands the correct orientation of a bicycle) is infectious. The humour sustained my interest across a gratuitously large collection of puzzles. Even in gated scenes, there are a myriad of items, conversations and visual clues at play. When the game opens into two very large areas, matters become incredibly complex. I found a lot of the puzzles difficult.

I couldn’t decide whether I was trying to solve puzzles as myself, or as a 51st Century man, even if he’s (at heart) a simple historian who still prizes his trowel above all else. I like how Henry often expresses surprise at what I’d consider a logical solution (as a 21st Century player of adventure games). There are less examples of the opposite approach, in which Henry solves puzzles in a way I struggle to understand, and this could have been fun for designers to explore in more detail. But, yes, making things hot and cold is weird in the future.

Mutropolis is an adventure game. It’s funny, massive, beautiful and polished, especially in terms of animations and the occasional, wonderful moment for dynamic music. Perhaps, unlike me, you won’t fixate on what the future might be like 3000 years from now and whether people will still wear dresses, dye their hair purple or have hair at all. Why are they growing apples while roses don’t exist? Oddly these questions made the game even more compelling in my mind. It’s very silly but anything this flippantly thought provoking gets my thumbs up, for sure.