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. . .

First Impressions: Penumbra Overture (PC)

Penumbra Overture is the first game in a trilogy from Frictional Games.  I previously reviewed their lastest release, Amnesia ~ Justine ~ which was a stand alone expansion for Amensia: The Dark Descent.  After I finished Amnesia, I looked up the company and found that they had released the Penumbra trilogy three years prior in 2007.  I only recently started playing at Conklederp's request, although it didn't take long for her to convince me.  Now on to the game itself, although I'm going to be making a lot of comparisons to Amnesia as that was the game from Frictional Games that I played first, so you'll have to bare with me on that front.

Having already played Amnesia, Penumbra Overture. felt very familiar.  They're both exploration games in and fps world.  Manipulating objects is also the same as in Amnesia, in that you move the cross hairs over a particular object such as a door or a chest and the cross hairs change to a hand.  By clicking on the object, your hand grasps the item and you're able to pick up, open, throw said item/object.  One big change I noticed with Penumbra Overture was that objects here seemed to have more weight than in Amnesia, which was odd considering that this game came first.  In Amnesia I could lift boxes and barrels, hurling them across the room as if I was throwing a baseball.  In Penumbra Overture, if I can throw a barrel, it's most likely because it's empty while I can only just lift a machine motor (and move slowly while doing so) because it's made out of dense materials.

There is another major departure between Penumbra Overture and Amnesia:

Yes, you are wielding a pickaxe.  Granted it's not the most graceful of wieldings, but it does the job when you come up against the stubborn boarded up door or air vent grate.  It's not as useful against feral wolves, but it has proved effective on at least one occasion.  Yes, you have physical weapons and there's more than one way of wielding them.  Let's stay with the pickaxe for the time being as it's still right there.  You're able to slash from upper right to lower left, back hand slash (upper left to lower right) and jab with the top part of the pickaxe.  This is done by holding the left mouse button and mimicking the motions you want to do.  Now, before you start thinking that by being armed with a pickaxe, you're a death dealing miner from hell.  As any normal person swinging a weapon at an attacking feral wolf, you're somewhat clumsy.  I don't feel that that's an error on the part of the programmers, but this isn't an fps action game, it's an fps exploration/adventure game and the safer thing to do, would be to either run away or hide.

Now hiding is a big part of this game, so big in fact that you have your own visual cues to let you know how well you're hiding.  "Hiding" is activated whenever you crouch.  When you stop moving, a thin blue "fuzz" circles the screen, which lets you know that you're kind of hiding but when the screen looks like this:

(by "this" I mean when the foreground is all blue and saturated), you know you're well hidden.  Bare in mind, that doesn't mean you're invisible.  If a wolf were to come around that far corner, it would be far less likely to see/react to me than if I were standing.  If a wolf came around that nearby corner, it would spot me, stop, growl, back up, then charge and kill me in three bites.

To answer that question, yes, you do have life, although it's a slightly arbitrary health meter.  You have a outline of your body standing, highlighted in green as well as a textual description such as, "I'm as fit as can be expected."  Health can be regained by either staying put for a short while or by taking pain killers.  The only problem with this approach, is that in the amount of time it takes to open up your inventory (which doesn't pause the game mind you), and take the pills, you could almost, just as easily find a corner to duck into until your health reaches full.  As in Amnesia, death has become more of an annoyance than something that I fear.

Death now brings me to saving.  Until I began writing this, I was not sure at all about what/where the save spots in the game where.  I knew that the game kept a number of auto saves, usually when you go through a door that requires the loading screen, but an obvious place to save?  I figured they didn't exist.  It turns out that whenever you encounter an odd, creepy looking lantern that seems like it's burrowing into your soul/subconscious, the game saves.  There's no hitting "escape" then clicking "save & exit," which to some extent makes me fear for wondering when I'll come to the next transition door.  It does feel a bit odd though having/needing to go to the "Auto Saves" file to find where I want the game to load from.

One really cool thing that I've been doing while playing is keeping a notebook.  The character in the game has a notebook and I figured, why shouldn't I?  It has come in pretty handy as well.  Now instead of going to the in-game notebook to look at the page with the Morse Code cipher to figure out what the pass code is for the key pad on the other side of the area, I can just look at my own notes while listening to the radio transmission and write down the sequence.  That way when I go to the keypad, I'll know exactly what to press.  It's also been very handy for making maps.  There are in-game maps, but those are in the form of a map being on the wall of the mine and you looking at it.  You can't take it with you, so I thought it best to carry one with me.

Now, I just realized that I haven't said anything about the story and that's mainly because I'm still trying to figure out what the story is.  Similar to Amnesia in that I only was able to put all the little pieces together near the end of the game, I feel like Penumbra Overture will operate in a very similar manner.  This game also involves a lot of reading, either from notes, diary entries and newspaper clippings from topics ranging from Inuit culture, Greenland mythology, to the ravings of a man eating spiders.  It's all about creating the world and mood.

In closing, Penumbra Overture is a very creepy, atmospheric survival horror game where you go to open a door, and shit like this happens:

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

We're Gunna Need a Bigger Boat