Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Before FTL became the short-form sci-fi adventure of choice for the discerning PC enthusiast, Digital Eel had set up a very effective stall in that particular sector of the internet. The Infinite Space games are among the few ‘coffee break’ games that I’ve ever played during actual breaks from work, back in the days when I sat in an office and pretended to be interested in the kind of water cooler conversations that could drive a man to dehydration. News of a third game is welcome and it has the perfect subtitle: Sea of Stars. Digital Eel are seeking $30,000 via Kickstarter and have had a decent start to their campaign.

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Before we fell in love with FTL, we fell in love with all sorts of other things that involve spaceships and random encounters, because we’re the sort of chaps who crave excitement and reckon that spending your entire life on one planet is cowardly. Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space is the second game I thought of when I first read about FTL – Space Alert was the first – and although most of the similarities don’t quite penetrate to the hull, the randomised galaxy, node-hopping and portion-sized play are common to both. Weird Worlds fits a coffee break rather than a lunch break and isn’t permeated with anxious doom, but it’s worth a look. Particularly for the next 85 hours when it is available at a price of your choosing at IndieGameStand.

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One Mr Britton starts my day with splendid news. Shrapnel have added to their fine roster of free games. Particularly, the splendid Strange Adventures In Infinite Space by Digital Eel. It’s the precursor to Weird Worlds, which I adored – go see my Eurogamer review for further elaboration. If you can put up with the more retro-presentation, Strange Adventures is a very similar thing – basically a 20-minute top-down Elite clone where you explore a randomly generated galaxy for swag and get home before your mate’s fag break has finished. Get it here and waste some time today. If it takes your fancy, its sequel is still available to buy. Also, Strange Adventures has a hefty mod-scene, so you can expand the free game with more splendid free-osity. Hurrah for Free-osity! Hurrah for Digital Eel! Hurrah for Strange Adventures In Infinite Space! Hurrah! Hurr[Snip! That's quite enough o that - Ed].

Regular readers will of course be familiar with my personal penchant for flying very vast down some tubes. But they might not be aware that Simon Carless of Gamasutra is a great big hippie. I say this because not only did he perform some kind of transcontinental high-five with Kieron over the Minterian splendour of Space Giraffe, but he also sent me a link to a flying-down-tubes-very-fast game, only this time the tubes were psychedelic. All of which preposterous preamble leads me to Brainpipe, a game of lysergic excellence by Digital Eel. Simon loves it, and I bet that’s because he lives in San Francisco with all the other draft-dodgers. You fly down a pipe, avoid some stuff, collect other stuff, and it all gets a bit trippy. There’s a demo too. Try it.

I, meanwhile, will go back to reviewing Men Of War. Men Of War. That’s a real game, with terrain and inventories. None of this colours and long hair and clever words stuff. Tsk.

Yes, I know this is old, but i) it came out before RPS existed. Therefore it’s new. Nothing exists until we say so and ii) I just don’t care. The brilliant Star-Trek-as-Solitaire Weird Worlds came up in conversation today, and I realised bar the Eat Electric Death boardgame I had no idea if Digital Eel had done anything since. And they have. It’s Soup Du Jour and it’s basically a Physics-based Tetris-style game. The tiny – both in size and length of play – demo is here.
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I’ve got a lot to write about recent Indie-faves later, but until then, here’s a quickie about a pre-RPS indie fave which caught my eye. Specifically, Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space. Digital Eel have released their IGF-winning sound-track for download and ear-listening. You can get it from here. Hell, the Demo is on the same page and I strongly recommend you to give it a shot if you haven’t already. It’s a gloriously hyper-speed space-exploration game. Essentially, when most normal humans play a game of Solitaire in a coffee break, people who read RPS should be playing things like Weird Worlds. And for more information, here’s my 2005-era Eurogamer review.