Another binding factor with these games is that if you combine the costs of each of them, the total is around $20. So whether you gel with all of these or just one, you'll be spending about $20 or lower. Now, most of these are so small and so simple that I won't be giving scores. That ultimately means that some of these aren't going to be eligible to take home the GOTY award in December/January, but they weren't even going to make the top 10 list in the first place (most likely). I will, however, be recommending most of these. Some will have some caveats, but c'est la vie. So, let's get into it!
Publisher: Monster Theatre
Developer: Mosu
Platform: Microsoft Windows
The Dark Queen of Mortholme is a 5-10 minute romp wherein you play as a soulslike boss. Like a soulslike boss, you sit in your combat arena and fight a player character. Naturally, you kill him in one hit the first go around, but he comes back after reviving at a checkpoint. Each time he comes back, he demonstrates a more advanced knowledge of your moveset, to the point that it becomes irritating as he starts to dodge everything you throw at him. There's sort of a meta narrative running through it about purpose, destiny, and the cages they can serve as, but it's only a minor piece. As you can probably tell, this is one of those games that I can't really apply my scoring system to. So for now, I'll leave you with this. The Dark Queen of Mortholme doesn't break any new ground in terms of gameplay, and it isn't going to last you for very long. But as a sort of systems showcase, it's worth the time!
Publisher: Jam Bell Games
Developer: Jam Bell Games
Platform: Microsoft Windows
Another roughly 5-10 minute romp, Ignis Dei takes place in Florence during the plague. You are a person trying to cross into the afterlife by solving puzzles. So it's a concept we're all familiar with, but some of the puzzles are unique. When you enter into a puzzle area, you get a little text overlay with an elegant-sounding poem that more-or-less spells out the rules in a somewhat cryptic way. The key, though, is always watching and listening to your soundings. None of these puzzles are particularly hard, but I was impressed by the execution. What really drives this game home is its atmosphere, which you'll just have to experience for yourself. Ignis Dei has one major thing over the rest of the games on this list: it's free. So if you're in the mood for a small bite of a game with some interesting puzzles and surprisingly good atmosphere, you literally have nothing to lose!
Publisher: Studio Carota
Developer: Studio Carota
Platform: Microsoft Windows
Loan Shark, like The Dark Queen of Mortholme, has a little something it wants to say, but it says it more effectively. The game follows a fisherman who got fed up with having to answer to bosses who don't actually know anything about fishing. So, he took out a loan to buy a boat from a, you guessed it, loan shark. The amount due with interest is, no joking, about 9,999,999 Euros, and fish don't sell that well...and the full amount is due within 45 in-game minutes. After catching a magic fish, however, the fisherman starts to see an easy way to make back the money he owes...but nothing like that comes without a price. As you may be able to guess, Loan Shark is largely a statement about how bright-eyed/bushy-tailed idealists are often taken advantage of and turned into chum for the wealthy, and it delivers this statement effectively (if a little heavy-handedly) enough. The fishing minigame itself is pretty bare-bones...but the more complicated a fishing system is, the more annoying it is, so that simplicity is appreciated.
There's some degree of technical jank, however, in how the subtitles scale with the UI. The lettering in the UI is pretty tiny, so I had to up the scale, and this caused the subtitles to go off the screen, meaning I missed quite a bit of what was said.
Oddly, the game also decides to use the Fears to Fathom chase music at the very end. This being a project with exactly zero budget, I don't hold them in any contempt for using free sounds...but Fears to Fathom is a pretty famous horror anthology, so surely they would have known people would instantly peg the chase sound, right? It's not a huge thing, but it is a distraction.
Loan Shark is surprisingly good for what it is. From a story that made me feel anxious to a relaxing-enough fishing process, Studio Carota clearly shows that they're gonna go far with this debut title. I can't wait to see what they do next, and if you've got the $4 entry fee to spare, I don't think you'll regret spending the cash!
Publisher: Polden Publishing
Developer: solarsuit.games
Platforms: Microsoft Windows (Reviewed), MacOS
Of the games represented in this article, Static Dread: The Lighthouse (hereafter called Static Dread, because the subtitle is wholly unnecessary) is the largest. It also showed the most promise and eventually fell the furthest. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
In a small New England fishing village and its surrounding islands and cities, a mysterious aurora has appeared across the sky. This aurora has disabled basically all automated systems, including those that manage ship navigation. You are a lighthouse keeper hired to handle all of that. But this is a small New England fishing village where strange supernatural things are happening, so you know what that means? Lovecraftian horror, that's what. While you're doing your job, there's a not-at-all-subtle voice in your head telling you to do things like feed ships to a maelstrom or give your pets names that people will be afraid to say out loud. As the nights progress and you choose who to side with, things in the outside world get stranger and stranger. And that's the story and premise.
Aside from the navigation help, you also have to keep things running in the lighthouse. That means turning the tower light on again if it flips off, kickstarting the generator if it goes kaputt, and most importantly, keeping yourself going so that everything else can keep going.
You're on the night shift, after all, so you'll have to keep yourself awake. This is mainly done by consuming snacks that you can purchase from vendors who show up at the door. These snacks tend to be pretty cheap, so there isn't much challenge in keeping from falling asleep. This goes double if you invest in the coffee machine early on. I don't think I even came close to failing in this way.
Beyond that, you also need to keep your sanity intact as supernatural forces sabotage aspects of the lighthouse. At any point, interior lights can turn off or even detach from the ceiling, satanic graffiti can appear on the walls, and collections of dark tentacles can start poking out of the ground. So if something like that happens, you need to take time away from the radio to fix things so you don't go insane. Once you've fixed these issues, you can once again regain your sanity by eating snacks. Remember, snacks are cheap, so you can mitigate the sanity issue pretty easily. Like with the sleepiness, this all goes double if you invest in a particular item early on: a music player. So, again, I never even came close to failing.
Another item you can invest in early to make your life easier is a fishing rod. Before your shift each day, you can use that rod to catch fish for however long you want. Each fish counts as a snack to consume, so you basically have an infinite supply of resources for both sleepiness and madness. Cheap snacks from vendors, infinite free snacks if you buy a fishing rod early, a coffee machine that largely eliminates the need for snacks in the first place, and a music player that does the same for madness...one wonders why there needed to be a resource management aspect at all when you'd have to make a conceited effort to face any kind of shortage.
There's one other resource I haven't yet touched on, and it serves as a stark contrast to this game's inspiration. That resource is time. In Papers, Please, the goal was to get as many people processed as possible and as accurately as possible to maximize your daily pay. There was a tangible ticking clock to fight against that could be either your best friend or your worst enemy depending on how quickly your brain worked. There's no such system in Static Dread. You have all the time in the world to get through all the ships that come around. You no doubt can guess this means there's no sense of urgency when it comes to fixing lights or fetching snacks. Typical game design sense would dictate that hearing a light bulb explode in the background would be a stressful thing that demands you waste valuable time to make sure you don't go insane. But in reality, it's just an inconvenience. Again, one wonders why such systems exist in the first place.
Here's the thing...I don't actually care that much in terms of challenge. With the speed at which things go wrong in the lighthouse, Static Dread would be possibly the most annoying game of all time if that aforementioned game design sense was brought in to the equation. The presence of these systems could've been infuriating, but the fact that they're so pointless makes them only slightly annoying. That's damning with faint praise if ever I've seen it, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.
The most damning part of Static Dread, however, is how it fails in the most basic senses later on. There was a late game segment where I was having to guide boats through paths based on their size by looking at a colored map. For the first ship I guided, I did it correctly...only to find that I'd accidentally sent it into a restricted area. There were no restricted area notations on the map. The "you screwed up" slip that printed told me to consult the "extra map" for details. There was no extra map. I got up, I looked around, I sat back down at the table, I moved the map around to see if the extra was under it. But I never had any luck. So, I was basically flying blind that whole evening trying to guess where restricted areas might magically exist. This was the start of Static Dread's fall from grace for me...but it's nothing compared to the fact that it made a story choice for me that I didn't make.
I had been fighting against the dark voice and its cult for the whole story, but at a random point in one of the final nights, the game decided I had sent a key good guy directly into rocks in order to appease the voice. I had done no such thing. But the game had just decided I'd done that, and from there on in, I was a true blue dyed-in-the-wool cultist on a dime despite having never once sided with the darkness. As the rest of the game progressed, I tried to undo that damage by helping the good guys as best I could, but the game kept insisting that I was progressing further and further into evil. I even turned on the Lovecraftian god that eventually emerged, but the game still treated me like I'd sided with him every step of the way. In the entire last hour of Static Dread, it all just compounded into a total mess. I had resources out the wazoo, no need of money, and clearly no control over the story. So, I approached the final nights with this overarching attitude of "whatever, man." I stopped caring and just navigated the ships without any regard for what the correct heading was. When the credits rolled over my ridiculously dark ending I hadn't chosen, I found myself immensely disappointed. Despite how laughably easy the game was, I had been legitimately enjoying it up until this point. But when you flub something this much, flaws take on much more sinister undertones in hindsight.
Static Dread: The Lighthouse is a game that had potential. But it was ultimately undone by a lack of care in its design and technical issues pervading its most important facets. I'd say you've got a 99% chance of having a better time than I did given that my problems couldn't possibly be widespread, but I still can't recommend it in good conscience in the same way that I couldn't recommend The Alters in good conscience. Still, it's dirt cheap and a good enough time if you don't run into the problems I did, but as I said to myself multiple times towards the end: "whatever, man."
Let us review:
Unbalanced resource management and survival - 0.5
Miscellaneous technical flaws - 1.0
"Extra map" fiasco - 1.0
Story ignored my choices - 1.0
Pointless last hour because of story issue - 1.0
The final score for Static Dread: The Lighthouse is...
5.5/10 - Slightly Above Average
Do better, solarsuit.games, do better
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thoughts? Questions? Think I'm full of it?