Indie Games

I just noticed Proteus, the minimalist musical exploration game by Ed Key and David Kanaga, is now available on PS3 (at least on the European store).

Maybe a little too expensive for what amounts to a pretty short (though highly repayable) experience, but challenging what we expect a video game to be is not the least of its merits. Pointless and boring for some, mesmerizing and deeply relaxing for others, Proteus' difference is to be celebrated and encouraged and so is Sony for bringing (or at least accepting) oddities like this one to PSN.

Winner of several awards for its mold breaking approach to game design and its beautiful soundtrack.



Also available on computers via Steam.

Bumping!

Had and artist acquaintance share this on facebook. Game he's working on.
Turn based Roguelike rpg? well shit, that is right up my alley. that is getting pimped.

On Steam Greenlight.
Steam Greenlight :: Dragon Fin Soup




Would Other games be interested in other greenlights? I know I would like to know when something cool is there, I might not have seen.



PS, Since I am bumping Gnomoria has been constantly updated. probably has a good more too it then last checked out.

These days I have been playing a 2D puzzle-platformer called Vessel (available on Steam since 2012 and PS3 just now, X360 TBA).

The puzzles are based around fluids (water, lava, steam and some goo) and little creatures made out of these fluids that have basic behaviors (move toward the player, hit the nearest switch, etc). I find the puzzle design pretty neat and they introduce new elements smoothly. I am not too happy with the main character's design and animation, with the sounds he makes (he sounds like he's wearing clogs!) and, more importantly, with his jumping physics. As soon as there are mobile elements, streams of water or slanted platforms, jumping feels mushy and becomes an inexact science. Some item manipulations also have this slightly chaotic quality that comes with physics simulation that I always find a bit unpleasant in an action-puzzle game (I like when things are as tight as Adventure of Lolo!). It's annoying here and there (there is notably a part with conveyor belts, mobile platforms and lava that is highly unpleasant), but it's rare enough to not be a deal breaker.

The game could have used a little more 'dressing up' too as the minimalist intro (scanning some newspaper clippings and schematics) and lack of text (written or spoken) do a poor job at establishing a character, creating a narrative and fleshing up the game world. As it stands, it feels a bit unfinished on that front. Again, not a deal breaker since the core experience, the puzzle design, is good. Also positives, the steam-punky, industrial-revolutiony visuals and the dynamic camera that works well more often than not.



On a side note, the guys behind the PS3 port suck at releasing games, because it landed on the PS Store without any metadata, so I had to check metacritics to know wtf that new game was.

I had to used the advanced search function to dig this one out from page 987243! Anyway: indies!

Secrets of Raetikon: You play a bird in a 2D game about exploration + physics puzzles + avian fights. Pretty neat visuals, but I found just about everything else lacking. A testament to that is that they patched in a 'no combat' mode as combat is so damn annoying and messy. The official trailer seem to purposefully avoid to show the character and the crappy action.




Jazzpunk: is a comedy game with a lot of non-sense, parody of cold war spy stories and meta humor. It is often very funny (which is pretty spectacular for a video game really) and almost always very very stupid (at time it's clever, but it's mostly stupid). The game is technically super lame (which is not really problem considering what it is trying to do) and super short (2-3 hours, maybe 4-5 if you try to find all the funnies hidden everywhere) which is not a problem in itself (especially when the focus is comedy), but the price tag feels a bit high for what amount to a very funny Half Life 2 mod. Think: silly comedy version of The Stanley Parable.




Kentucky Route Zero: is a point and click adventure game of mesmerizing minimal beauty, superior film making and most bizzare narrative. My steam review is: "If David Lynch and Guy Maddin had a love child born in Kentucky and interested in deconstructing the codes and structures of adventure games, he would try to do something as uniquely brilliant as Kentucky Route Zero and probably fail." Not for everyone, as it is a very strange game with fever-dreamish qualities, but pretty damn amazing. Note: 3 episodes are out and the total game will consist of 5 episodes.

I just wanted to point out thatEnvironmental Station Alpha, a metroid clone of sorts, is on steam's Greenlight. Check the demo and up vote it if you liked what you played. I was/am one of the beta testers for it and it's a pretty sweet action/exploration game with a healthy dose of content and some tricky optional secrets/challenges for the completists.

BUMP! I'll add some comments later about Shelter, Gemini Rue, A Bird Story, Lifeless Planet, BasketBelle, Eidolon, OFF, Nadeyanen and Yume Nikki, but for now 2 things:

1) Environmental Station Alpha (see above) has yet to be Greenlighted! That's a shame! Try the demo, like it and up vote iton Greenlight.

2)Beeswingis out! This is a semi auto-biographical game about a Scott living in Poland who dreams about paying a visit to his village of origin: Beeswing.

Rarely will you play a game that feels so much like an intimate labor of love. The fact it is a little rough around the edges, the (often brilliant) home-made analogue music, the hand drawn and hand sculpted visuals, the use of pre-existing real world material, they all reinforce that extremely peculiar feeling for a video game. On top of that, the game performs a number of interesting experiments with video game storytelling.

There is a couple hours worth of content in there, but it's a game that stays with you a bit longer than that.

It's available right nowon itch.ioand it also just got puton Greenlightso you can go and up vote it if it sounds like it could be your kind of thing.

Shelter: Badger, mushrooms, but no snake. Neat and original visual design and great soundtrack for a game about surviving as an adult badger protecting 5 little ones. A couple core elements are bit obscure (most notably that the pelt color of the young ones signifies their level of hunger), but it's a nice if simplistic sneak/survival game.

Going through the story mode took me a little under 2 hours, but there is also an infinite survival mode that I did not touch.




Gemini Rue: A classic point and click adventure game in pixel art set in a futuristic world. It offers a pretty cleverly implemented action verbs system, two story lines you play in parallel (an undercover investigation on a rainy miner planet and an attempt at escaping a space penitentiary) and 8 hours worth of a pretty decent story.

My main problem with adventure games is that it can go fast into the "use half chewed lollipop on thermonuclear toaster" territory and I have zero patience for this kind of stuff. Here, the narrative flow is kept going by actions that make sense (even if not always super obvious) so you are not spending half your time over a walkthrough wandering why you are not just watching a let's play on youTube (Hi 2 U Deponia!).




A Bird Story: Created by the makers of To The Moon, A Bird Story is an attempt at telling a wordless story using the tools of 16-bit era JRPG (minus fight engine). As with To The Moon, the pixel art is impressive and here there is also a multiplication of custom animations that carry a lot of the narration. The game is at its best when it becomes a dreamscape where everything is possible, but I must say the well crafted but extraordinarily sappy music and the boy and pet bonding story did not do much for me, to the point I found this 'interactive short story' a bit long as it took me to go through as long as some feature films.

It should also be noted that the fantasy of the 'wordless story' as some sort of pure experiment to show the narrative power of a medium really is an illusion and here, like in most movies that attempted it, it feels limitative and artificial, not liberating.



More later...

It's A Wipe

This is a really cheap indie game by Parody Games. Only $5 and available from eithertheir websiteor onsteam. Graphics are what you'd expect from a $5 game and game play is bit repetitive, but you are the Guild Leader of a raiding guild. Repetitive is what raiding is all about. And yes, you will come to hate over half your guild. They guys who made it did a very good job of getting the emo loot whoring correct.

Its A Wipe Promo Video! - YouTube

This is just in: Environmental Station Alpha isout on steam!

Metroidvania fans, don't hesitate! The game is very neat and also pretty long for this type of product.

Fazana_sl said:

You can buy Cubeworld!

Click to expand...

God this game was such a disappointment.

Recommend the episodic "Life is Strange" on steam. Very pretty game about being an 18 year old student involved in lots of fun mystery and drama. It is sort of a walk-about-and-interact-with-stuff at your own pace kind of game.

There are only 2 episodes out, next one is in May sometime?

Third episode was awesome

I'll (re)do a shameless plug for a game made by some buddies of mine. It's a little horizontal shm'up with some interesting mechanics. It's already out on Xbox Live Indie Marketplace (while it still exists!) and Desura, but They recently put it on Steam Greenlight:Nandeyanen!?

NB1: The counter system the game use is best played with an arcade stick

NB2: The game is pretty short with only 3 (4?) stages, but the price is very low and while finishing the game in easy (auto counter) is not too difficult, mastering the game and score system in normal (manual counter) takes some time.

Just played throughHer Story.

It's a game about understanding a police case by browsing a database of interview clips. As you jump around within the chronology of the 7 depositions, little by little you understood what happened and who are the different characters of the story.

The mechanisms are very limited. It's not some sort of Ace Attorney Game, the mechanisms are only there to allow you to uncover the mystery through your own path, through your own serie of keywords used to search the database. In a way, it's a meta game, you have to fight the interface that obfuscates the data. So it's more an exercise in interactive fiction than a game proper. There is also no win or lose conditions, though there is a resolution of sorts.

I was not blown away by it, but it's intriguingand original enough, cheap, not a huge time commitment (took me a couple hours, though I will probably head back to it to dig deeper), the performance by the actress is pretty solid and the story end up being original.



Available on Steam and also on iOS I believe.

The Talos Principle(PC but announced for PS4)

A bit late to the party, but there isn't much of a party as after searching the board it appears only Iannis (who praised it in the Religion thread in general) and me (who thought it looked promising in the E3 2013 thread and mentioned it based on its great review scores in the Game of the Year 2014 thread) posted about it on rerolled.

Released in december of last year on Steam, The Talos Principle is a first person action-puzzle game, but it is also an adventure game of sorts and an extremely clever philosophical experience. Explaining the setting would already be in spoiler territory considering understanding the setting is a core element of the game.

The puzzle gameplay is very well done, with a smooth progression in complexity through additional elements thrown in the mix. The basic idea is that each puzzle is a mini-maze where you have to reach an item, creating a path using cubes (hexahedra to be precise!) you can climb or use to prop up items, jammers, that freeze electronic equipment (such as flying mines, defense turrets) or open force field doors, and reflectors you use to create nets of energy beams to activate doors or power devices. A bit like in the Tower of Hanoi kind of puzzle there is often some 'building to destroy to build bigger' system, so it's mostly about planning and spacial awareness with a healthy dose of outside the box thinking.

The core puzzles are not overly difficult, but there is a layer of meta puzzles that can be fair bit trickier, but for the wrong reasons. Let me explain: there are stars you can collect (and you really want to collect them - more on that later), but while some are visible and are like additional challenges within puzzles, many others are hidden and can be anywhere. Out of the 30 in the game, I probably cheated for a dozen and there are probably 6 or 7 that I know I would not have found even if I made a real effort to try and find them.

While a very competent puzzle game in its own right, The Talos Principle really shines with its very clever and original story and narration. Of the top of my head I count 5 different narrative axis (for lack of a better term) that runs in parallel with each other, all linked with the situation we are in and all tied with the big philosophical questions at the core of the game. There are several different endings, but, sadly, the one that really enlightens you about what the whole game is about, that is extremely satisfying and nothing short of brilliant, well... that one is very difficult to get. It makes sense that it is, but missing out on that ending is also a bit tragic considering how good it is.

It took me a little less than 30 hours to complete.




It should be noted that a pretty significant DLC (15ish hours for me) has just been released. It merges very nicely with the narration of the core game and extends with elegance its universe with another set of philosophical questions. I must say that the resolution was a little bit underwhelming compared to the core game though.

Oh and this is supposed to be released on PS4 at some point. Maybe they focused on finishing the DLC and now will work on a core+dlc port?

Evoland 2 releases next week (26th). Apparently a lot longer than the first (should be since the first was just a showcase game), running 20+ hours according to previews.

It's not replayable in the sense that there are a lot of secrets, a leaderboard or multiple endings. Even the fact the island is randomly generated does not change things much since all the elements will be the same, just in a different topography (though it might take three or four play through to encounter all the elements). It's replayable in the sense that it is a relaxing and pleasant place to be in, so from time to time it's nice to revisit Proteus. It's like a piece of digital greenery you can take a stroll in whenever you want with the added bonus of the magnificent soundtrack.



Let's take the opportunity of this post to recommend to people who like puzzle games the works ofDraknek aka Alan Hazelden. He made a bunch of neat free games using increpare's puzzlescript (my favorites are 'You're Pulleying My Leg' and 'Mirror Isles') and some commercial project such as the very elegant A Good Snowman is Hard to Build and the acclaimed Sokobond (that I have not played).