By John Walker on April 18th, 2013.
The route to a successful indie platformer these days is to come up with a unique gimmick, or a unique twist on an old gimmick, and do an incredibly good job of applying it to your world. Sundae Factory’s Ecotone is a touch braver than that. It’s taking every platforming gimmick, and using one per level. And from the demo version that’s playable on their site, they’re doing a damned good job of it.
By John Walker on April 17th, 2013.
You need a new puzzle platformer to fill four hours of your life. I have one. This is synergy. High fives in an orderly queue. Plazma Being is the terrible name for a deceptively tricky little puzzler from first-time dev, Felix Wunderlich. (Also, coincidentally, winner of Today’s Best Name.) You, as you may have guessed, play a blob of plasma. What you might not have intuited is that you’re captured by aliens, cast on a planet with an unfamiliar force called “gravity”, and trying to find your way out of there.
By John Walker on April 12th, 2013.
There are two choices here. You can take my word that it’s worth playing this year-old free first-person puzzle game Good Morning, Commander, and approach it as unknowingly as I did (thanks Indiegames.com, who spotted it last week). Or you can have a bit of convincing from the words below, that shall still not contain any major spoilers. Decide… NOW!
By John Walker on April 11th, 2013.
You wait thirty years for a indie game project to be barraged by fans after saying they were going to charge for DLC and then changing their minds as a consequence, and then you forget how this sentence even began. In the case of Squad, who make the ship-building-and-flying space sim Kerbal Space Program, this occurred after fan misinterpretation of the promise that all “updates” would be free. For 3 Sprockets’ Cubeman 2, it was the use of in-game purchases in promotional material for the main game that caught players’ ire. Both have had diplomatic changes of heart.
By John Walker on April 10th, 2013.
How do you feel about thruster-based games? Me – I’m terrified of them, bringing back haunting memories of endless hours, days, months, failing at Moon Cresta. Oh God, Moon Cresta. Just the name evokes some mad synaesthesiac response, let alone those hateful, HATEFUL Atomic Piles. Oh man, I need a hug… Sorry, far off track. My traumatic Speccy past aside, Flowstorm is absolutely nothing like Moon Cresta, thank all that’s holy. But it is a game about manoeuvring a little rocket ship THAT’S A DANGEROUSLY SIMILAR SHAPE TO MY NIGHTMARES, through ludicrously tight curvy corridors. And what’s rather pleasing to discover is that’s a game about skidding, as much as it is thrusting. (Missus.)
A Funny Spell
By John Walker on April 9th, 2013.
When indie developer Ryan Creighton (Untold Entertainment) read a review of Bookworm Adventures, he was very excited. A game in which a story was told, with your means of interaction as a grid of tiles, from which words are spelt. He couldn’t wait to play it. And then he realised that wasn’t really what it was.
Bookworm Adventure, as great as it is (and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise (via spelling)), doesn’t really tell a story. The adventures of a worm called Lex are loosely strung together at best. Creighton realised he wanted to make the game he’d thought it was going to be. And thus Spellirium.
By John Walker on April 3rd, 2013.
Tom Jubert, game writer on projects like FTL, Penumbra, Driver: San Francisco and many others, has previously impressed us with his self-developed Ir/rational games. Formed from his love of philosophy, and a desire to spread the concepts of clear thinking, the logical deduction game mixes straight thinking with smart writing, and just enough humour. The good news is there’s to be a sequel, Ir/rational Investigator, heading to PC if only it can be rescued from the needless wasteland of the awful Greenlight.
Spleen, With Heart
By John Walker on April 3rd, 2013.
There a phrases that can put a man off a game. Like “retro graphics” and “zombie”. But you’re not to let that do that here. The Organ Trail is very much The Oregon Trail, the mostly-text-based game that was first created in the early 70s, with the bandits are replaced by zombies. But what you’ve got here is an extremely compelling, extremely tough little simulator, and one that should keep you enthralled for hours.
By Craig Pearson on March 29th, 2013.
Hot-air balloons are just like zombies. Slow-moving, bloated, gassy, and every summer the people of Bath gather and watch them take off. The many ways they’re not like zombies are evident in The Aurora Wager, a free indie game built for the 7DRL competition. It’s not very roguelike, because a lot of those elements fell out of the basket as the game was hastily put together, but it is fun.
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By Craig Pearson on March 27th, 2013.
It’s just a scooch over a year since RPS first peeked into the indie tactical shooter, Intruder. It looked good enough to hang around the back of my brain, insistently waiting for me to remember to check it out again. And today I did. Intruder looks like the sort of game that you’d make if you loved tactical shooters, but don’t care about major cities or worry about dramatic plot twists. Just a couple of teams in a confined space with a lot of guns and gadgets.
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By Craig Pearson on March 27th, 2013.
It’s always interesting seeing how games come to be. Take Relock: it was inspired by Wolfire‘s excellent Receiver, a complicated gun sim that was made for the 7-day FPS challenge in the middle of last year. Receiver is excellent, but with Wolfire currently making a wabbit kung-fu sim, it’s unlikely to get much love. So Relock is here to give the people that loved Receiver something to be excited about, though it’s missing the oddball story, NPCs, and randomly created levels. So what does it have?
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