Pak Watch: Crypts and Towers

Slain: The Seven Towers
Slain is a PC game being developed by Andrew Gilmour and published by Wolfbrewgames.  It's in a retro style that I love, and is heavy on the gothic horror.  Demons and Bleeding trees and a hero with a big beard and a giant sword.  What can I say?  I like indie games with a 16-bit style with detailed backgrounds.  And gothic horror is always fun.  I think Slain fits the bill, so I'm in support of it.  The website over at wolfbrew games has information if you care to know more.  You can also like their page over on facebook.  I did.

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Courier of the Crypts

This game is another 16-bit style game being developed by a tiny team- 2 people, by the names of Primoz Vovk and Zdravko Djorjevic.  The game is a top down dungeon explorer with the central mechanic revolving around lighting torches and solving puzzles.  This mechanic seems reminiscent of the third Zelda game.  Graphically, the imagery looks to be tailored to the different lighting effects.

The team did not reach their goal with their indiegogo campaign.  While the campaign is closed, there is a demo available, and the game did achieve greenlight status on Steam. 

I originally heard about this game from an article in indie gaming news, a prolific website with regular news on upcoming indie games.  

-D

Monthly Update: September 2013

Welp, PAX Prime has once again graced the Pacific Northwest with it's presence (and is currently in an unprecedented Day IV).  The Labor Day weekend for me however was spent at work, so much so that I'm going back today.  I was going to hit up Safeway on my way home too, but now remembering that a lot businesses celebrate holidays and might be closed or have modified work hours.  Not us!  We're Amur'can!

Self loathing aside and back to happy times.  Like a game D'Octorpotts got me called Papo & Yo.  Which is a really spiffy game.  I saw it on Steam for quite a while, but for whatever reason had never looked into it.  Then I played it.  It's a somewhat uplifting game with pretty dark undertones of alcoholism and child/spousal abuse.  

Right, happier things.  

As some may have predicted, the re-Kickstarter campaign for Shadow of the Eternals failed to reach their $750,000 goal.  However, the game was greenlit as part of Steam's Greenlight indie gaming place/thing, which is good news.  This doesn't seem like the game is going to be shelved and the company will implode, so there's still hope, even if it is just a fools hope.  Thanks Gandalf.

In similar news, fellow [ENFORCER] Jupiter of Earth (aka Jupiter) is working for/with Sword & Spirit Software to make a game that looks/sounds a lot like a mix between Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem.  The game is called Shades of Sanity and they started their own Kickstarter back in mid August and it will run until Friday September 27th, 2013.  Their target goal is $200,000 and they're currently 5% of the way there.  Here's to hoping, and better hoping than Shadow of the Eternals.

I have not a whole lot else to report in the wide world of video games.  I did recently find out that The Elder Scrolls Online will adopt the apparently poisonous pay model for their game.  The first month will be free followed by a $15/month fee after you purchase the game for around $50-60.  That's pretty much what I expected.  I'm still on the fence if I want to delve into this monster.

Infinite Space is continuing to be played, despite an obvious error in programing by Nude Maker and Platinum Games where celestial objects observed and discovered in other games affects if you discover them on your current game (even if you delete all game files by saving over them, which is the only way to delete saved files).  DKC Returns hasn't been played in a number of weeks because Infinite Space is just too engaging.  Torchlight is still being delved into.  Ace Combat Assault Horizon hasn't been played in over a month because of annoying/aggressive/bastardly vicious Ruskies that just won't die (ie let themselves be shot down) in the later half of a long level.  Plants vs Zombies 2 is seeing a resurgence in both gameplay and the number of popups to buy stuff.

So that's where I am currently at.

Oh, and the book Letters of a Woman Homesteader is doing a great job of reminding me that I'm not as much of a wilderness bad-ass as I would like to be.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Pussy, Pussy, Pussy. . .

First Impressions: Among the Sleep: Pre-Alpha (PC)

No, thank you for letting me play!

With Krillbite Studio's Kickstarter (which has less than 24 hours remaining) for Among the Sleep fully funded, the public now has access to a pre-alpha release of their game.

I just played the extent of what was released on Wednesday, May 15th.

It. Is. Awesome.

I can't really say much about the storyline for the game other than you're a toddler, a two year old I believe, your crib topples over.  Oh, and your teddy bear seems to be sentient.

In the beginning, you're just wandering around your house.  Keep in mind you're a two year old, so you're visual perspective is from that of a child who both crawls and walks.  And, and, AND!, you can see yourself:

Yes, at anytime you can look down, see your little bebby belly getting a good scratch.  This looking down perspective comes pretty handing though when walking across platforms, which I won't talk about aside from here so that I don't give anything (much else anyway) away.  This looking down and seeing yourself is one of many little things that was included, that didn't have to be included, that make this game amazing.  

What's that?  You can't make out what that writing says?  Of course you can't, you're two years old.  You can't read.  Yes, you can make out individual letters on the blocks (as in the above picture), but those are individual letters, not words, which your brain probably can't even comprehend yet.

Another thing, when you press Esc/pause, you cover your face with your hands.  Fucking_Brilliant.

Onto other things now.  How does the game handle?  It handles just fine.  I didn't have any problems with the controls.  I did change the mouse to inverted controls and the only other thing that doing that might have affected was which way you had to move the mouse in order to open up doors, drawers and cabinets.  For instance, to pull open a drawer, I had to click the drawer and push the mouse forward.  After figuring this out on the first time, I was perfectly fine.

And remember, you're playing as a toddler.  You can't reach that door knob, so you have to find something to pull over to that door, climb up on said object and then open the door.  This type of perspective was one of the major draws to the game for me.  I play a lot of horror games, but playing one from a toddler's perspective, seeing the world through their eyes, albeit with an adult's mind and how to interact with the world, it's like seeing things as brand new all over again.  I don't remember the first time I ever saw a washing machine and I can almost guarantee that my little brain couldn't process what that big white thing did.  It might've even frightened me somewhat.  That's what Among the Sleep did to me.  It made me wary of a washing machine that was running at night.  That's something.

The music, what little there was that wasn't there for atmospheric purposes was very nice, but the sound editing was great.  A lot of the ambient night time noises that you'd hear around a house in the middle of the night seemed amplified, especially the ticking of that damned ominous clock.  The lullaby too, that the mother sings to you as you're falling asleep, reminded me of the lullaby from Pan's Labyrinth: beautiful and motherly with a very slight undertone of foreboding.

The playable pre-release demo-esque of Among the Sleep played for about 20-25 minutes on my initial playthrough, but a lot of that time was spent just looking at my surroundings and seeing what I could interact with.  On subsequent playthoughs, when I was going around getting pictures, but trying to also see how fast I could finish, it took me, maybe 10 minutes.  You and all your friends with a computer should really go to the Kickstarter page and download the pre-alpha demo-game-thing and play it.  Then, play it again.  I'm really looking forward to sometime around December when the full game is released.

Lastly, I'd like to leave you with this little nugget from the game, when shit began to get weird:

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
A Long, Long Time Ago. . .

Browsing The Horrors of Steam's Greenlight District

Because I feel that I haven't talked enough about horror related video games in the last post, I'm going to be bringing them up all over again, but this time in a slightly different light.

Around the end of last week I was browsing Steam's Greenlight section upon realizing that I hadn't looked at any games since the area was first launched.  I will admit that I'm a bit shallow in that if the thumbnail title and title of a game doesn't look/sound interesting I won't click it to find out more about that game.  I admit that it's not the best way of finding new and interesting games, but that's they way my brain happens to work and it's a little hard to try and rewire to look for and think differently.  I feel like this is the argument for bigotry, but that's something else entirely.

Back to video games.  Horror-esque video games.

The first game I came across was Among the Sleep.

After finding out more about the title, font and art, Among the Sleep is an POV horror game where you play as a two year old in a world that seems to move in and out of a dream world.  That alone sold me to support their project.  At the moment they are $16,329 short of their $200,000 goal and have four days remaining.  Check out the video and support if you think the game and people warrant/deserve it.

The second game was Darkwood.

Darkwood is a top down adventure horror game in a randomly generated open world.  The game is also permadeath, which could understandably be a turn off to a lot of gamers, although the creators say/hint that some of what you do will be carried over in subsequent playthroughs such as looting your corpse.  The game trailer, which is "pre-alpha" looks pretty damn good and terrifying.  The group is currently fundraising over on Indiegogo and they're 23 days out and have 23% of their goal, so a pretty decent start and plenty of time to go. 

The third game is titled The Forest and doesn't have so much of a title screen as it does a logo:

The Forest can be found on Steam's Greenlight page and is an action/adventure/simulation/horror game.  I don't feel like there are enough of simulation/horror video games out there and come to think of it, I can't remember ever seeing a game described as "simulation/horror," but I tend to be somewhat sheltered so that may be the case.  The trailer give glimpses of things that you can do in-game, such as cut down trees to build a shelter and it feels like this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the simulation part goes.  I have hopes, high or otherwise, for this game and I hope to see it "greenlit."

The one game that doesn't fall under the horror genre that I looked a bit at was a game called Realm.

Realm is a point-and-click game that looks absolutely beautiful.  In their promotional video, the creators point out several things that people do a lot of in point-and-click games, such as "CLICK ALL THE THINGS" and trying out everything in an overloaded inventory to see if it has an effect on the object.  I like their approach and I would hope that their game gets fully funded on Kickstarter, but with only eight days remaining and the project still needing £131,152, (that's $200,551 for us Yanks) the end doesn't look too good at the moment.

Lastly is the "sequel" of sorts for Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem that I brought up last Tuesday, Shadow of the Eternals, which now has an official Kickstarter campaign going.  This will bound to cause a bit of confusion as there was already an existing crowdfunding campaign going directly through the company.  The official word is to donate (if you want to and haven't already) through the Kickstarter campaign, which as been adjusted to include the amount already taken in from the first week of crowdfunding.  

That's it for me, for today.  Friday I'll have up my review for the free-to-play-download game, Papers, Please so come back for that and everything else that we'll be posting during the week.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Time Again

First Impressions: Cry of Fear (PC)

I'm one of those people that does judge a book by it's cover.  Does that make me proud that on some level I judge things solely based on their appearance, I guess you could say so, but there have been times when being of that mentality has paid off.  Recently on Steam's front page, down in the Featured section, I saw a thumbnail of a gloved hand trailing against a dank looking wall with the title Cry of Fear looking like the title above this paragraph.  Below said thumbnail was "THIRD-PARTY."  The combination of the lack of price and thumbnail intrigued me to click and find out more about this game.

As it turns out, Cry of Fear was originally a mod for Half-Life 1 developed by Team Psykallar.  Now available through Steam through their Greenlight release series, Cry of Fear is it's own stand alone game, without requiring Half-Life 1 in order to play.  And, and AND, the game is free.  Yes, a free game.  You're welcome to donate to the company, kind of like one of those Humble Indie Bundle or Indie Royal Bundles, but you can play the game first.

And play it I have.  At least for about an hour anyway before deciding that I should stop, write out what I have here to say then head to bed for the night/morning.  I'm going to have pretty awesome dreams too if I don't wake up screaming, although to give the game credit, I was warned ahead of time.  Resident Evil was the first game I saw that had a disclaimer before the game started warning of impending violence and gore, which read as follows, "Warning This game contains strong language and scenes of explicit violence and gore."  Maybe these were more common on PC games, but little 23 year old me hadn't been exposed to too many M rated games; I had some, just not many.  The disclaimer at the beginning of Cry of Fear however, takes the warning up a notch with, "This game contains violence and gore, and can cause fear, depression, heart failure and suicide.  Users and viewers discretion is advised."

Now that's a warning if I've ever read one prior to playing a game before and for whatever reason, I did not feel that it came across as the developers stroking their own horns.  Sure they are to some extent, but to me, it sounded more original than saying that "This game will make you shit bricks and cry for your mommy.  Pussy."  It was all about the language used.

Back to the game.

Cry of Fear is an FPS horror game set somewhere, possibly somewhere in Scandinavia although I don't think the actual setting will be too important.  All it means to me so far is that I can't read any of the newspapers or graffiti that is used as set decorations.  That's pretty much all I know about the setting of the game.  I have come across some enemies who have managed to kill me a few times, which may have also contributed to deciding to write out my thoughts earlier than I may have originally planned.  So, the game looks like this:

Yes, the graphics are a little grainy, which could be an artistic choice or it could be because the game was originally a mod from a 1998 PC game.  Either way, I feel that the graininess adds to the overall atmosphere, which is pretty flippin' creepy.

The game was easily controlled with standard WASD keys and I was able to invert the mouse, which I am always thankful for.  I tinkered around editing some of the other keys such as crouch, but everything else felt like standard FPS PC controls.  At the present, I only have two equippable but each of those items has duel functions, something I haven't seen a lot of since Perfect Dark and something I feel should have been almost required at this point, especially for FPS games.  Your cellphone acts as both a phone and as a flashlight and your knife can either stab or slash; I don't know if there's a tactical difference but I'm sure I'll find out soon enough.

The music, from what I've heard so far is pretty standard fare for a horror game in that it's mainly background ambient music intended to set the mood.  I haven't come across any areas where the music cuts out entirely as sometimes happens in the Resident Evil games.  The environment noise is very well done.  The voice acting isn't great and seems kind of stilted at times, there always seem to be bright yellow subtitles permanently on, although I typically have subtitles off, so in my case I find it a little distracting.

That all being said, I highly recommend trying this game out if you like either FPS and/or horror (including survival horror) games.  It's free after all, but that doesn't mean you don't have to show the developers some love in return for their hard work.  Any game that can cause me to jump in my seat and make me sit back from the keyboard in momentary fear is the type of game that I personally would love to see more of.  

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Feeling Good

P.S.  
***SPOILER - THE WINDOW***
I will give one pseudo-spoiler, but as it happens near the very beginning of the game, it won't be much of one, but more like a walkthrough/hint/tip.  Once you take control of the character, you will eventually come to a window.  Now, this window is a bloody damn pain in the ass to get through.  I don't know if it was an oversight or if it's intended to teach you how to jump through windows, but the point is, I spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.  For me, I was had to crouch first, then jump while moving forward towards the window.  I don't know if there's an easier way as two of the youtube videos I watched don't actually explain what they're doing.  But, just take your time, and you'll make it through that window.  Only to wish about a minute later that you could find your way back to it, board it up an build a thick-ass cement wall so nothing will come through it ever again.  Yourself included.