I was 13 years old when I first encountered Brian Moriatry’s Loom. It was on a friend’s ninja PC that sported both VGA and AdLib cards and I was, understandably, blown away. The complex, whimsical story, the wonderful graphics, the unique musical interface and the amazing music itself were unlike anything I had ever seen. Or have seen since.
IAMJASON is a dystopian sci-fi point-and-click adventure about losing something. Well, everything actually, though it does let you fight and defeat corruption. The corruption to be exact, which is quite an honourable thing to do, especially when accomplished in resolutions as low and chunky as 160×90.
Having hidden a package delivered by a stranger, shot someone I never got to talk to, snuck into a hotel room and listened to lovely renditions of Chopin’s wonderful music, I can safely say that you will not get bored with Providence.
So you seem to have been cast as the grim hero who’ll save the distressed damsel once again, but please, worry not. Until I Have You, despite lacking in the plot department, is different in other ways. In this case it’s through the mechanics that the game differentiates itself, as it’s a platformer in which you move the mouse pointer to accelerate towards the direction of your choice, click one mouse button to shoot and the other to jump, and click on the scroll button to cycle through your weapons.
When Ruth Manning-Sanders retold the spooky, kids tale of The Old Whitch fifty years ago, she couldn’t have possibly anticipated it would spawn such a wonderfully odd interactive thing as Able Mable Gets A Job. Nor could she have expected that so many naughty little jokes could fit into something so short and so whimsical.
I’ve been looking for a decent, freeware 16-bit-esque racer in the style of Outrun for quite some time now and kept bumping into unfinished prototypes, bad ideas, boring implementations and short one-level offerings.
Thankfully and due to the wonders of the internets, I found a terrific one in the most unlikely of places: the Adventure Game Studio forums. A place where people are bound to talk about their mouse driven point-and-click adventures and not racing games of the Red Hot Overdrive variety.
Besides being one of the best looking games of Ludum Dare 30, The Lion’s Song also happens to be one of the select few that sport really great writing. And an excellent core storytelling idea; one that has made for some classical short stories and, finally, for a wonderful short game about the quest for inspiration.
