Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s the season of goodwill. Thus there is no better time to play Terry Cavanagh and Increpare’s Flash game about a family who start off swearing at each other and wind up somewhere far, far darker. Unutterably bleak yet strangely moving with it, Oíche Mhaith is an emotionally brutal but deeply compelling and occasionally perversely funny few minutes.
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Walk to the right and talk to dying women. That’s my hastily written but accurate tutorial for Increpare and Starfruit Games’ collaboration, Pirouette. The animation and backgrounds are rather beautiful and the dialogue is chucklesome in its deliberate formality, with a staged quality that seems to laugh in the face of accusations of pretension. These are people, or ideas of people, who speak like exaggerated versions of the expected types. The end seems to have serious intent, or perhaps pretends to, but I was smiling throughout the 10 or 15 minutes it took to play. Pirouette is free and is also available on iPad, which led to Apple categorising it as a book rather than a game. Perhaps that’s a punchline of sorts.

Increpare’s brain-jammin’ 3D puzzle game, English Country Tune, has been released. The game plays with a bunch of spatial puzzle ideas to create some ingenious challenges. It’s had me going a bit hypnotoad with concentration trying to get through the puzzles. There’s a demo for PC and Mac on the site. You should play it. You really should.

Stephen “Increpare” Lavelle has sent over a version of his spatial puzzle game, English Country Tune, and I’ve been playing it. Atmospheric, compelling, and acutely encouraging of the thinking they call lateral, English Country Tune mixes some of the kind of 3D puzzles you might have seen before over the years with some you won’t have seen, and then adds in extra layers of impossible videogame physics and Increpare experimental cleverness. I am currently gnawing on early puzzles that include faked “camouflage” gravity… Yes, it’s that kind of thing. And it’s awesome. That said, despite the name, there are no jaunty folk songs to be found. Not so far, anyway. For gist of the sort of 3D puzzling you’ll be expected to face head below to see the trailer. The game itself will be out via the website a week today, apparently.
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American Dream is a collaborative browser game from Increpare, VVVVVV’s Terry Cavanagh, Jasper Byrne and Tom Morgan-Jones that’s made me laugh more than enough to warrant a post. It’s a bit like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street directed by a wet pocket calculator. Set in the 80s, it tasks you with fulfilling the American dream by making a million dollars, though according to Terry it started its life as a game called Killing Spree about “an assassin who spent all his money on designer furniture”. Go play! It’s exactly the kind of oddball thing that I play then can’t help but wonder how it would have turned out with an actual budget.

I’m not out protesting. I’m sat at home, absorbing a steady drip-feed of political horror off of Twitter. But now, thanks to inexhaustible indie developer Increpare, I can pretend I’m there! Join me as I lock the toilet, open a window, put on a coat and fire up Kettle, a game which casts you as the police trying to effectively bundle a small crowd into a tight space. I got it off Kieron, who got it off Boing Boing. As he says, it really is a neat little puzzler, albeit full disturbing one-liners from a policeman birthed from MSPaint. Thanks, Kieron. Thieron.

Ah, the working week hasn’t begun until we’ve posted a dreadfully sinister indie game. Courtesy of the Indie Games blog, Activate the Three Artefacts and then Leave has you navigating an ominous, claustrophobic environment using your mouse, the WASD keys and by listening out for sounds, though that description doesn’t convey the game’s nightmarish atmosphere. It plays a bit like the hallucination of a sedated hospital patient who’s been left staring at white ceiling tiles. Videogames! Go play.

You know Increpare? Aka Stephen Lavelle? He’s one of the hyper-prolific game creators on the British indie scene. We’ve blogged about a couple of his games before (The historian game Opera Omnia and the Mass Effect 2 parody Starfeld), but he does a whole lot more. His presentation at World of Love basically involved him just talking to everyone in the audience about what they were up to. He also basically worked in the industry as a coder in the games industry and doing it solely as a job – because he saved his creativity for churning out games. Anyway – the reason why I’m posting is that he’s just been made redundant and has put up a request for donations. If you’ve ever dug any of his games, now would be a good time to throw some Internetcoins in his direction. And if you haven’t, go to Increpare‘s site and be bewildered at where to start. I’ve just played Whale of Noise, based around one of our aquatic mammal sorts learning notes to sing to separate its body into increasingly distantly placed parts. And The Terrible Whiteness of Appalachian Nights features stuff so horrible I can’t even show you a screenshot. And the pictured Beatification is just plain odd. What have you found?

I started the day with a micro-webgame which one Mr DMcCool discovered over at the Indie game Blog. “As far as I can tell its a hilarious minimalist critique of Mass Effect,” says DMcCool, which sounds so much the sort of thing I’d write, I’m just going to quote it. Tricky moral dilemmas! Memorable characters! Upgradeable characters! Questionable and repetitive gameplay! Shocking twists! It’s Starfeld.

I’ve been meaning to play this seriously for a few weeks now, and it looks as if it’s never going to happen with my current work and gaming schedule. So I think it best I draw your attention to it, if it hasn’t been already, and sit back. I can’t remember if Robert Yang pointed me at Opera Omnia over at IndieGames first, or whether it was Jim – either way, it’s the sort of experimental, novel game which really isn’t like anything else I can think of. It’s a puzzle game based around you playing a historian, trying to create theories which would explain how a situation come to pass. You make simulation models explaining migration patterns, and is based around reversing the usual ways of thinking. As in, how could this have come to pass? Honestly, it’s very abstract, very strange and certainly worth playing and thinking about. Get it from here.