RPS Feature Murderous
I am not here. I’m back to full-time on RPS in a month, in the meantime up to all manner of secret projects the likes of which would make you far too excited. And in my time away, I’ve not had cause to worry one bit about my co-owned business, in the hands of my phenomenally talented colleagues. Well, until I noticed something pretty serious had happened. A Castle-based PC game had been released on Steam, and not A SINGLE WORD has been written about it. WHAT IN THE?
First of all, I’m bringing you the most important news: there’s a game whose name is Farm For Your Life. Let’s not let that get buried under any other information I might provide after this point. Farm For Your Life.
Other interesting factors, albeit ones that pale in comparison, are that you can buy it right now, or… earn it for free.
What is it with games and classic literature? Ever since I’ve been doing this ridiculous job, I’ve been plagued by the utter nonsense of companies who take a 19th century novel, then tear half the pages out and replace them with a child’s home-made comics about aliens. It’s as if there’s a wanton conspiracy to ensure that anything that might be a serious work of literature be allowed nowhere near a game. Although of course, perhaps I’m letting myself get a bit too worked up over a hidden object game based on Sherlock Holmes. You could also argue that it’s an excuse to link to a Kickstarter at the bottom of the post, just because I want to play the game, but if you did I’d punch you square in the nose.
RPS Feature Let's be honest, the title sounds SO rude
I feel a weight of the pointlessness of trying to convince a hardcore gaming audience to give their money and time to a casual game. Clearly there’s a lot of prejudice, a lot of it earned by the crappy nature of so much of the casual market, the rest I’d argue pure snobbishness on the part of gamers. Obvious breakthrough exceptions, invariably published by PopCap, can crossover, but otherwise words like “hidden object” tend to have people click straight past. I think it’s a shame, because I just had a lot of fun playing Dark Strokes: Sins of the Fathers.
If you were attempting to find casual gaming gold, you might well think about trying to create a game at the midpoint of Plants Vs. Zombies and Diner Dash. That’s pretty much what Black Market Games (created by a group formerly from Dark Water Games, they of Dogfighter) have done, with Dead Hungry Diner. A game in which two canny orphan twins realise the best way to thwart the zombie apocalypse is to feed them. In a restaurant. In a graveyard. You can check out the first eleven levels to see if that works for you via the demo.
The other day I was arguing that all new game trends trend toward adventure. What I’m saying is, adventure gaming is the natural form of game, to which all games aspire. And so it is that the infinitude of the casual gaming market is all gradually forming itself from a void into a desire to be adventures. They’ve just got to take that one leap of realising that adventures are really hard work. Another step closer for the hidden object genre is Elementary My Dear Majesty!, for which a demo is now available.
I have a theory. If you took some babies, raised them isolation – perhaps on the Moon – and gave them no cultural input at all, they’d still eventually develop adventure games. They’re like an inevitability, an unavoidable direction for things to head toward. Don’t believe me? Look what’s happening to the so-called casual market, as every game type starts morphing into proto-adventuring. You can’t get a match-3 these days without it trying to include an inventory. Hell, look at the painfully mediocre L.A. Noire, and its almost sweet attempts to invent the graphic adventure genre as if it had never happened in the 80s/90s, thus making all the same tiresome mistakes as they did in their earlier days. As for the hidden object genre – it’s like a pupa, waiting to emerge. Unfortunately, some of those attempts to convert to a beautiful butterfly are still a little, well, awkward. They’re moths. One such moth is Pahelika Revelations.
