Monday nights, 6PM, at Awesome Inc., we meet up to expose ourselves to indie games. C’mon out and look at how small game designers are pushing the medium, or bring something we can play!
This week, we looked at: Atum, dys4ia, and And the Robot Horse You Rode In On.
Details after the jump.
Atum
1p, puzzle platformer, web (unity), free
Atum is a game-within-a-game. The introduction takes you into a lifelike office with a game ready to play on your desktop PC. The inner game is a puzzle platformer, but you need to use physical objects from the “real” world to advance through the inner world.
Discussion notes:
- The office is mostly desaturated and low-contrast, but important objects are brightly-colored.
- The keyboard has colored WASD keys, guiding the player on controls without instructions.
- The office props are nicely styled and reinforce the recursive theme of the game.
- It can be quite difficult to play without sound. Some of the audio cues are important to understanding what to do. Subtitles would help.
dys4ia
1p, serious/minigames, web (flash), free
dys4ia is Anna Anthropy’s story of her experience becoming a transgendered woman. She uses minigames to represent important events during the process.
Discussion notes:
- The game is similar to Unmanned, in that the gameplay is a means to advance the story.
- It’s entertaining, but those of us who had played it wouldn’t use the word “fun” to describe it.
- No replay value. It’s an experience; the gameplay is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
- The minigame mechanics reflect the topics the author covers. When she says, “I feel like a spy in the women’s bathroom,” players make their way through a stealth minigame. Each concept is expressed by borrowing its conventional gameplay representation, linking narrative and gameplay.
And the Robot Horse You Rode In On
1p, story/adventure, web (HTML), free
And the Robot Horse You Rode In On is another game from Anna Anthropy. It’s a story adventure built with Twine (howto, TwineHub). Set in a future with the titular robot horses, ray guns, and banditas in alien deserts.
Discussion notes:
- It’s difficult to make an engaging presentation out of a text game.
- Your character recalls previous events, but you make choices about how those events proceed as if they’re happening in the present tense.
- Casting the player as an unreliable narrator is a great interactive storytelling trick.
See you next time, runners.