Format: PC | Genre: Turn Based Strategy| Publisher: Proxy Studios | Developer: Proxy Studios | Release date: 02/10/2010 | Price: $9.99

Leena van Deventer goes on a quest to conquer things in CONQUEST.

WHAT ARE we going to do tomorrow Brain? The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world…. with the help of Proxy Studios and their latest undertaking: Conquest. Ok so it might not have been the exact phrasing from Pinky and The Brain’s script but it darn well should have been. Conquest is an outstanding indie simultaneous turn-based strategy game, with a very familiar structure. A lot of people say turn-based “dominate the world” strategy games are all the same, but not me. No no no. I will not RISK comparing it to other games. For the sake of our CIVILISATION (…. five…) I will stray from drawing such parallels.

Seriously though, it’s very familiar but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It lessens the learning curve and allows you to dive right in. While the seasoned strategy fan will feel accustomed to how things work, it still maintains the ability for a newbie to sit down and understand how it works, that balance can’t be the easiest of achievements. It’s possibly a great starter-strategy game for the folk not too familiar with the genre, a gateway game to the wonderful world of territorial warfare.

Victory is yours in Conquest when you reign over 75% of the cities on the map, made up of a series of octagonal territories. The terrain on these maps differs, usually either being lush grassy tropics, desert plains, or snow-covered wastelands. Each terrain however contains the same features: lakes, mountains, and valleys. You start with your operations box in your top left-hand corner, in which you’ll find access to your Drop Box, Nuclear missile, and Satellites. These are given out at differing intervals, and are your weapons for taking over the world. Your Drop Box contains 4 troopers and 2 tanks, and you start off with 3 of them. The first prong of strategy is deciding where to put them – if you hide them in the mountains, it will be harder for the opposing force to see them, unless they have positioned a satellite nearby. From there you move territory by territory trying to acquire more cities, and battle it out with the opposing force for the ones you both want. As the turns progress you gradually get more reinforcements plonked in your Drop Box, even the addition of jets, able to move 2 territories at a time instead of the single-traversing troopers and tanks.

Officer Pancake reporting, here to crepe and pillage…

Finding out where this opposing force is spawning from (their Drop Box) is a massive advantage, and you do this by sprinkling satellites everywhere all over your map, or using your grey matter to imagine where you think they would put them, then nuking them with no mercy and no restraint. You’re given 20 turns before the game is considered finished, if no one claims over three quarters of the cities beforehand. This keeps each game down to about 20-30 minutes, which is another plus to it being newbie-friendly, it’s not the hours-upon-hours timesink that many may expect of a strategy game. There is single player and multiplayer available, with up to 6 players able to be involved in the same game. The visual style is lush and detailed, with the map being a little bigger than the screen but easily fixed via scrolling either with the WASD keys or edge scrolling with the mouse. Blowing up the nukes has a little mushroom cloud animation that is particularly thrilling and makes you wish you were assigned nukes more often than every 4 turns just so you can watch them explode.

Musically, this game offers more than your standard indie games do, in particular the quality of the voice work in the score. Beautifully haunting singing, along with intense ominously swelling crescendos make it feel like a lot of love has gone into the music in Conquest. It never gets old and it adds to the pressure as the game gets closer to those last remaining turns.

Fractions speak louder than words…

It’s not all roses though, despite really enjoying my time in Conquest (and itching to play right now) there are a few small tweaks that could make it even better. The lack of a pause button when the turns are timed is a bit of a bummer if you have other things occupying your attention at the same time as playing, but I understand how it may negatively affect gameplay to have one implemented – giving people more time to mull over strategy and such, and making single player and multiplayer too different. When you are either victorious or defeated and someone achieves 75% domination, a screen comes up to claim the winner, then there’s this awkward moment when you clear that screen, and suddenly find yourself back in your game, able to move the pieces around. I assume this is to see what happened in that final turn and how you took them out/were taken out, but being able to move your pieces and having to click “end turn” to really end the game feels a little cumbersome. Besides, having the chance to obliterate every single enemy on the map once you’ve won would be oodles of fun, a victory dance of sorts.

These are tiny little qualms though when it comes to the game as a whole. I thoroughly enjoy my time in Conquest, and find the limit on the number of turns to be a highly appealing quality in terms of it’s addictive nature and that drive to play “just one more” before quitting. It’s visually appealing, sounds terrific (how they can psyche me up for a battle and be relaxing at the same time I have absolutely no idea) and the core game play is solid, simple, and easy to execute. You’re really left to your own devices and not in that stranded-alone-in-the-woods kind of way, in the “You’re old enough and ugly enough to look after yourself” kind of way. I can’t stop going back to play Conquest, and I imagine the novelty isn’t going to be wearing off anytime soon. So without further ado, I’m going to buy the game for a bunch of friends so we can get our multiplayer on!

8/10

What does this score mean?

Conquest is available from its official website for $9.99

Flight

Leena Van Deventer talks FLIGHT.

FLIGHT IS a charming development from Armor Games that I fell across while cruising Kongregate. Your aim is to “Throw your paper plane, collect points, upgrade, (and) save the world”. Pretty big task for such a flimsy piece of aeronautical architecture, she cried. You start off with a fairly basic paper aeroplane (nothing to do with Angus and Julia Stone, unfortunately), some environmental features (acting as boosts) and the aim to go the longest distance possible before crashing or stalling. Through a little grinding and points-farming, you begin to earn money with which to upgrade to bigger and better flying machines. Your upgrades not only apply to your variety of craft, which can transmorph from simple school-yard paper glider into something resembling a Harrier jet, but also to the environment.  Other upgrades affect fuel efficiency and capacity, engine boosts, inertia on the initial fling of the aircraft, and an adorable “mysterious and impractical upgrade probably not worth the money”. This however ends up being an essential part of getting the long distances required to score maximum moolah.

This nifty little free flash game even involves a small storyline to try to encourage you to finish the game and max out each upgrade on offer. You start off in London, where a small girl is desperate to send a letter to Santa asking for her Mother for Christmas. From here the plane hits a lovesick man square in his lovesick head in Paris as he laments his repudiated lover, before writing a love-note to send through the air currents to reach his other half. He draws a picture of them both near a campfire and speaks of their wish to one day go camping near their dream campfire. Swooning is apparent as you slowly walk along this meandering storyline. As the lovelorn gentleman propels his aircraft into the air with nought but the power of his love, I started to get a little whimsical about this game. Until the next cutscene.

Here we see a man in Egypt, receiving the love-note and in his mind imagining the two lovers thrust into that dream campfire of theirs and all eternal hellfire breaking out, making the world explode. Riiiight. Just as I was thinking “You kinda lost me, dude”, he bit into his finger, enabling him to write “THE END IS NEAR” with his own blood on the paper plane before sending it on. The story went from kind of losing me to losing me in such proportions I had to leave a trail of crumbs in order to be found again by loved ones and offspring.

The storyline may have lost me a little, but the playing is what kept me coming back. I didn’t care too much for cutscenes and didn’t feel like they took away from the game, more so that it just wasn’t perhaps as fleshed out as it could have been. And you know, less crazy. You start with an initial fling of the aircraft, thrusting it into the air. From here you slowly descend, much like the real thing, but with added upgrades enabling you to steer and use engine boosts, very much unlike the real thing. Collecting paper cranes and stars along the way help you to gain money for upgrading, and also small power boosts. The super boost stars have a tail behind them, enabling you to get enough warning about where they are to be able to attempt to collect them. Using your A and D buttons to control the angle of the nose of the aircraft, and space to use your engine boost, you can attempt to fly for as long as possible over the given environment, whether it be London, Paris, Egypt, Africa, or Japan.

The music is a joy, not being repetitive and annoying, specifically in the places where the game play might be. The art style avoids the predictable Paper Mario type parchment effects and sticks with a unique and clean interface. The cutscenes in particular have a warm hand-drawn quality to them that adds depth and interest. It would have been nice to have some added elements in the environment, such as a risk of bird strike or other such threats to bang into mid-flight, but considering its price point (or lack of it) and simplicity I think it still stands on its own quite well.

Flight is a fun way to spend some time, as you keep trying to beat your personal best you will be rewarded by a few strokes of good luck that keep you excited and motivated to keep playing, that makes it this week’s Friday Freebie!

You can find Flight at Kongregate.

Format: PC | Genre: Puzzle | Publisher: Rotten Tater | Developer: Rotten Tater | Release date: 28/12/2010 | Price: FREE

Lewis Anderson thinks he doesn’t belong in this world. And that the elevator is DEFINITELY his salvation. Confused? Play indie puzzler SUTEF to find out what the hell’s going on…

IT’S HARD to describe suteF in words. Actually no, that’s a lie. It’s a puzzle game. And like most puzzle games, it has puzzles that require solutions. Negotiate the little blue fellow around the screen until he reaches the exit, then repeat on the next level.

As with all things simple, what starts out straightforward soon becomes complex. Lasers that kill on touch, a surface grabbing hookshot and devices that invert gravity help to complicate proceedings. On top of that, most levels require crates to be massaged across them with any incorrect movements leading to a level restart. Undue haste is the enemy here – especially when certain levels, just when they seem solved, flicker with white noise before dramatically altering their layout.

All well and good then. A puzzler with elegant solutions at the best of times and with keyboard shaking frustration at the worst.

More than one way out

But then there’s the… other stuff. The unsettling stuff. The stuff that words fail to describe.

The game opens with Amaras, the little blue fellow, stranded atop a tower and coughing up blood. Amaras then ventures through a dark world littered with giant monitors and stone walls before coming across clones of himself who have seen a violent end. Sometimes they’re in the middle of their violent end, debating with panic before giving up and throwing themselves into the Grim Reaper’s embrace.

The Amaras you control isn’t above the torture either. Brutal deaths await your character too, sometimes intentionally, but suteF always makes sure you have a new Amaras clone ready to lead into hell.

Me, myself and I

Amaras is a sympathetic chap who doesn’t belong where he is. He’s thrown into the company of other characters, like the amiable Computer Bear or benevolent Fetus, but largely spends his torturous journey on his lonesome. A journey that becomes more disturbing as it goes on.

One section of the game sees Amaras walking along a path strewn with clone corpses, the scene repeating as he walks through it like some kind of 18-rated episode of the Flintstones. He walks along the path while his ‘friend’ floats above taunting him. Amaras begins to flee the taunts, but soon tires and starts to walk. Then he starts to crawl. And then, finally, Amaras lays down to die.

Disturbing isn’t a good enough word to describe what’s going on here. It’s on a par with that level from Modern Warfare. SetuF is a game unafraid to use a character’s death as more than just an excuse to punish the player. Here, death is part of the atmosphere and brings the ambiguous world of suteF to life just as much as the eerie sound effects and gloomy surroundings.

No way out

Another section, simply called ‘Choice’, sees Amaras and a clone trapped in separate cells by lasers. One Amaras can free the other but will die in the process. As the level title dictates, there’s a choice here between killing the player character, or waiting and letting the other Amaras free you. And he will free you. He’ll push that crate along the ledge, shaking in fear the whole time, and delay his final movements as though he knows they will be his last. Then, in one final act, he’ll push the crate over the edge, freeing your Amaras. I’ll let you guess what happens to the other one.

Harrowing stuff. This is a dark game but, despite what this review describes, not a gruesome one. It’s the brainchild of a warped mind that chills you as much as it challenges you. From the start the player is sucked into the sinister dimensions of setuF and isn’t let go until its chilling end.

What does it all mean?

Keen observers will have noted that suteF is Fetus written backwards, which perhaps implies that the trials of Amarus and his clones are some kind of dark allegory for the ‘Great Sperm Race’. Only one clone can win right?

But what the game means is immaterial. setuF is one hell of a twisted puzzle jaunt that is totally worthy of your gaming time. Set aside a couple of hours for it, go on. You won’t regret it.

8/10

What does this score mean?

SuteF is available via the publisher, Rotten Tater’s, website and also Gamejolt.

It’s free so you’ve got no excuse!

The IGF’s Success…

Chris Evans takes a look at the Indie developer’s home away from home.

THE INDEPENDENT Games Festival is due to hold its 13th annual awards ceremony in the Spring of 2011. The IGF is a mainstay of the gaming calendar, and in the words of Kyle Gabler (World of Goo) ”is the biggest showcase for indie games”.

There are numerous games which have featured in the IGF that have gone on to achieve critical and commercial success, games like Kyle’s World of Goo, Machinarium and Everyday Shooter. If it is possible, this years entries look like they will match, if not surpass the success experienced by those other indie greats. Games like Amnesia: Dark Descent, Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble and Minecraft already have garnered quite a reputation while there are bound to be numerous gems hidden away amongst the 391 entries.

I asked Kyle why he thinks the IGF has been able to expand in the way it has done in the 11 years it has been running. In typical 2D Boy-esque fashion he replied saying “IGF started like 10 years ago or something…and in that time, we have a new crop of kids who have grown up with the internet radiating into their eye sockets from birth, and they’ve become so scary capable with computers, their brains pulsate, causing bits and bytes to swarm about, eventually settling into perfect army lines of code, creating wonderfully surprising new games.”

Andy Schatz, the mind behind thieve-em-up Monaco feels that the presence of the IGF has had a cyclical effect on indie game development in general. “The IGF gets so many entries now because there are so many more indie game developers now than there ever were before. The IGF is a partial reason for that growth, as is the increased exposure of indie games and the increased commercial viability of them as well.”

The IGF has become so important in the indie gaming world that Kyle describes it as the “Academy Award of indie gaming”. When I asked Andy why he entered Monaco into the IGF he gave a reply that should make budding developers sit up and take notice, “I think the better question is, why would any indie game designer NOT enter the IGF?”

Serious Business

With the ever rising number of entries to the IGF developers are certainly aware of the impact the competition can have on a game. It is an impact that goes further than the financial rewards, the winner of the Seamus McNally Grand Prize at the awards ceremony next year will receive $20,000 with the other awards each offering $2,500.

Kyle describes a two-fold impact of the IGF, firstly a recognition before entering that there was a pressing need to get World of Goo into a vaguely finished piece and a new found confidence in the game after winning the Design Innovation and Technical Excellence awards in 2008. “IGFaffected us in two ways: 1. Pre-IGF, it forced us to pull together all the scrappy little pieces of game and music we had into a coherent experience. I (and probably other “creative” folks) tend to be extremely indecisive when there’s no time limit.   2. Post IGF, we finally had confidence in the game we were making. We just didn’t know if anyone would care or understand basic things about our game, like that you could build structures with balls of goo. Once we knew people “got it”, it propelled us forward.”

Andy told me a similar story after Monaco won the Grand Prize and the Excellence in Design awards earlier this year. “It allowed me to be more ambitious, for better or for worse.  When I built the game, I only intended to work on it for 6 weeks.  Then it was nominated, which meant that I planned to work on it for about 4 months.  Then it won, so I decided to take it the route of a full-sized console downloadable title.”

The IGF is one of the best parts of gaming, it is genuinely exciting to see such a variety of titles being made and not just for the PC. While there may always be some early favourites each year, such as Minecraft and Amnesia this year as Andy says “often the most impressive games are the ones you’ve never heard of, particularly the student entries.” It is worth digging through the 391 games competing in this the 13th Annual Independent Games Festival, you never know when you will come across the next World of Goo or Monaco.

Format: PS3/PSP | Genre: Arcade | Publisher: PSP Minis | Developer: Craneball Studios | Release date: 09/12/2010 | Price: £3.99

Is Peter Willington full of hot air?  Let’s find out as he plays BLIMP: THE FLYING ADVENTURES.

IF THERE’S one mode of transport that’s not conducive to… well… movement… it’s the dirigible. Somewhere between the ‘grace’ of hot air balloon landings and the Hindenburg disaster, mankind has realised that filling a giant craft with gas, creating a large surface area that’s easily affected by wind and having a vehicle that features levels of controllability lower than this guy around hot dogs, is probably a bad idea.

Thank heavens for steam punk then, keeping the dream of hot air automotion alive. Thank heavens too for Blimp: The Flying Adventures, a PSP Minis title with the guts to explore the notion that the titular aircraft type could be anything but a slow, hulking, dangerous mess and instead a combat ready, nimble little number capable of repelling aliens.

The Blimps of B:TFA come in two flavours, the agile and swift player craft that can merrily zip about the screen with a tap on the X button and a nudge of the analog stick, plus enemy Zeppelins which lazily patrol left to right in the hope that you’ll knock into them, ping off at an angle and take damage as you desperately try to regain control. These latter types are backed up by far more potent – but equally bankrupt in terms of strategic thought – tanks and stationary mounted weapons, all of which possess projectile weapons to avoid and therefore must be dealt with to continue. Possessing just bombs that drop vertically, disposing of said enemies can be a little stilted, usually a case of flying past as quickly as possible and mashing the right shoulder button to rain a hail of hit-and-hope down upon the bad guys. Problem is, you have a limited number of bombs at your disposal – which can be refilled with a small number of weapon crates scattered across the level – meaning that often the best approach is to sacrifice some life in exchange for more consistent hits. The title’s focus on getting high scores seems somewhat at odds with this conceit, as remaining health and time is added to a total after each stage, but the determined will no doubt find ways to circumvent this issue. For those that just want to plough through the – desperately weak – story though, your main priority will be to rescue allies by setting down near to where they are stranded and picking up packages to transport to other areas. It’s a simple setup for a simple game, one that can be flown through within a couple of hours at most, with only the very late levels providing any resistance to progress whatsoever.

‘Lunar Lander with no fuel limits and more bombs’ is a brutally direct way of summarising the game’s play systems, but that’s what this is in many ways, a clone of an old arcade game for a bite sized gaming demographic. While you’ll find plenty of games that are mechanically similar, it’s the art style that distinguishes it from the rest of the pack. During play, the areas have an excellent sense of scale and place colourful, pastille shaded landscapes of massive whirring cogs, giant steaming pipes and towering pillars of iron to hold it all together. The presentation during thedisappointingly bad narrative sections, however, is somewhat different, with characters being represented in an oppressive black and white, hand drawn manner, decked out in World War Two era, Red Baron style uniforms only much darker.

With a striking presentation that masks a fairly plain and repetitive game, this is one for those with an interest in steam punk aesthetics or a need for a twist on a 30 year old arcade game to fill their memory card / hard drive. If the story had drive or the gameplay was varied up a little this could have been a unique release, as it is though it’s a solid enough time waster that just so happens to look pretty.

6/10

What does this score mean?

Format: PC/Xbox 360/PS3 (soon) | Genre: Cute ‘em up | Publisher: Atari | Developer: Artech Studios | Release date: 10/11/2010 | Price: £6.99/800 MS Points

Leena van Deventer gets out her green thumb in THE UNDERGARDEN.

THE UNDERGARDEN is a whimsical place, not quite underwater but not quite of the air either. It’s a unique ethereal place where these two familiar environments are blended into one. The occasional bubble noise and the blue serene nature of some of the backgrounds made me think the caves my little sprite was seemingly swimming around in and exploring were all underwater – before I came across currents that acted andsounded like wind. This left me with the impression that The Undergarden was not a place you could easily describe – a truly peculiar ecosystem. Either that or the sound work was sloppy.

You play as a small creature with horns and spotted skin, floating around his little garden paradise with a life-time aspiration of fertilising all the flowers he can find and making his surroundings flourish and bloom with colour. With no backstory and no real aim other than to cruise around making things pretty, it soon becomes very obvious why the game’s developers have coined The Undergarden a “zen game”. Via warp tunnels, you tour different levels, bouncing on pollen pads to excrete the life-giving glow-balls, collecting them and spreading them around the world, watching the plants do their thing. Spindly tendrils, trees bearing fruit and seeds, and coral-esque bioluminecent vegetation are all brought to life by your presence as you float past the buds, armed with pollen power. On the PC version you use your mouse to move, clicking and dragging to give yourself a power boost,  it doesn’t ask much of you – you can drink a cup of coffee and pat the dog while still happily clicking away. Intense is not a word that belongs anywhere near The Undergarden.

You can delve as deeply into The Undergarden as you wish, simply getting from A to B, or trying to 100% each level by collecting the ‘special flowers’ and the crystals. Your sprite can grab seeds and fruit grown on trees to achieve different outcomes. Pick up yellow heavy seeds and place them on a switch to lower it and pass through. Grab the blue floaty seeds to press a lever on the roof of the cave. You are also equipped with explodey bomb seeds to blast your way through rocky roadblocks.

There are not many threats in this world – you cannot die – although you may encounter green glow-balls that rob you of your precious pollen, or  gelatinous-amoeba-type-blobs that will grab and disorient you if you invade their personal space. The main obstacles getting in the way of your exploration, however, are rocks, black smog (which you need special light seeds to get through) and simple puzzles that usually require the heavy or floaty seeds to solve. You never feel menaced or at risk by anything in particular, if anything you feel invincible and chilled at your core. This feeling is helped by the adorable soundtrack. You can choose the music you wish to listen to by picking up little Musicians that are out and about and taking them on a journey with you. Once you get sick of the music, pick up a different one. The music was a highlight for me, especially the very delicate tribal drums. It added to the overall unwinding process.

Continues…

Defining the genre

Leena van Deventer asks “How do we define an indie game?”

I LOVE when you’re hanging around minding your own business and out of nowhere you’re ambushed by an interesting discussion that insists you poke and prod at it until you’ve sufficiently explored every nook and cranny it’s got. I had such an ambush today, when I asked my twitter brethren what their favourite indie game of 2010 was. A few game titles were thrown in the ring before debate quickly turned to semantical definition of the term ‘indie’. What is an indie game? What are The Rules™ when applying this monicker? Some interesting points came to light, some people finding it quite easy to apply a definition and a set of attributes a game must or must not have in order to call itself an independent game. Some acknowledged varying shades of grey in the interpretation. I personally go from moments of clarity to utter confusion. Usually followed by despair, exasperation and some sort of delicious biscuit.

It seems to be a common exposition that indie games have a “feel” about them. That “indie” is a philosophical term applied to games that embrace unique and original gameplay mechanics or are otherwise avant-garde and innovative. That they push the envelope and do things never-before-seen. That the only thing driving the game’s development is the creator’s passion and love for it in it’s own creative capacity – the notion that the game is merely a means of artistic expression for the deviser. This is obviously a minefield in terms of a quantifiable means for definition due to its subjective nature – what I consider artsy and what someone else considers artsy are two different things. I may feel like a certain gameplay mechanic is unique and fresh, and another gamer may remember a game that has featured something almost identical. It’s not a clean cut set of rules by which to decree what is indie and what is not, and not all independently-made games bring something new to the table.

Developers developers developers developers developers…

The term “self-published” has been thrown around a bit as one of The Rules™ in my observations, and I think it’s a delicate one. As is “self-funded”. I appreciate the notion of the one-man-band, many great indie games are made this way (dare I say a majority) – but I think it’s quite limiting to say that all indie games must be self-published by that one-man of one-man-band fame, in his backyard. What if that developer finished his game and started looking around for a way to publish/distribute his game, Microsoft found it and threw a bunch of money at it and whacked it up on XBLA with their backing. Does that lone developer then need to hand in his indie pass? I think when it comes to publishing an indie game it all comes down to when the publisher became involved. If the publisher is involved at conception, has a say in any way shape or form in it’s development, or commissioned the work – it’s clearly not independent. However that doesn’t mean you must self-publish. It just means being able to hire the publisher to do what it is supposed to do, get its hands off the development and just ship/promote/distribute your product. “I’m the developer, I’ll develop, I’ll call you when I go gold”.

So does it come down to being entirely creator-funded then? Being set up with venture capital by someone hoping to get some return on their investment is for all intents and purposes, not independent. Nor is undertaking already-licensed intellectual property. But what about angel investors? Government grants? Uncle Pete who you were telling about your game at that BBQ last week who wants to throw a few grand at it because he thinks it’s neat? All money isn’t bad, it’s just the money that implies a hand in creative control.

Continues…

Format: PC/XBox 360 | Genre: Puzzle Platformer | Publisher: WickedWorx | Developer: WickedWorx | Release date: Now | Price: £3/240 points

Leena van Deventer enters a world where Metal is a four letter word in EXCRUCIATING GUITAR VOYAGE.

IT’S A tricky thing to really nail “naff on purpose”. The danger is if you don’t caricature enough it seems like you’re just as bad as what you’re lampooning, and Excruciating Guitar Voyage flirts with that line. Often. I was consistently wondering if they were serious or taking the mickey, and a feeling of unease was the unpleasant ramification of that.

No stairway

Excruciating Guitar Voyage is a world where metal music has been made illegal – it is an offence to own metal music, watch live metal performances, and own any metal related paraphernalia such as fan magazines and newspapers. Any metal sympathisers are jailed and forced to dance against their will to pop music in a hideous prison asylum. You play as PX, a metal fanboy who is aching to rage against the machine and listen to his beloved music, laws be damned. You go on a point and click slash platforming adventure to find your mate Craig who has some neat metal magazine you want to check out.

The art style is the first thing you see that gives you a twang of fear when you begin your excruciating guitar voyage. Not because it’s creepy or spooky, but you get that awful feeling that this might be a student submission for a game development course or that it is the bastard child of a night at the pub where the creators decided to go home sloshed and make a video game. It has a collage style to it, with the faces of the characters being actual photos (assumed to be the developer and his mates, all harvested from Facebook). The second twang of fear is in the voice acting. Some might say we should be thankful for ANY voice acting in an indie game, it’s rare to see because it’s so hard to get right – especially on the minuscule budgets independent developers are generally running on. But it’s not just “not good”, it’s cringetastic. To be blunt, it feels like the voice acting is where the “Excruciating” part comes in. Some voices were too quiet to hear, some were too loud, some where too monotone, most were horribly executed and all were missing pop filters and equalisers.

Lighten up, shake it off

As you try desperately to be a good sport and see it for the silly bit of fun that it is, you come across ‘giantised’ crickets, minecarts, sewers, lasers, electrified fences, a taco shop,  and a dude called Dude Simon, among others. You jump, action, and scroll through your inventory to interact with your environment and other characters, all over this platforming world, sometimes needing to electrocute and set yourself on fire in order to clear certain objectives. Don’t touch the lasers though. Being on fire can’t kill you, raw electricity can’t, but lasers sure as shit do! Knowing what is acceptable and what isn’t in the world takes a little getting used to, normally by trial and error. Some drops look like you’re supposed to go down them to explore but you find yourself dying by plummeting to your death. After you lighten up, know what the ‘rules’ are, and can relax a little bit, it can actually become a bit of fun – but I think it’s a learning curve that some people are going to struggle with or not have the patience for.

When a game is trying to be unprofessional looking it still needs to have a nicely polished base, and I fear Excruciating Guitar Voyage may be missing that base and leaving its audience scratching their heads wondering whether they’re taking the piss out of something bad or are actually bad. The lack of polish is evident not only in the voice acting, but the controls. Jumping was fluffy, with a jump taking about 5 minutes to land, and you need to use Page Down and Page Up to scroll through your inventory, making it a pain for people using small keyboards such as laptop/notebook keyboards where there’s no numeric keypad. It also requires you to be logged in as Administrator whenever you want to play, which I think is a little discourteous to require of players. It’s not uncommon to need to be logged in as Administrator for the first time you play it (and set up) but to require it for every session is a little brassy, in my opinion. This lack of polish makes the game a little less a joke I’m in on and feel more like the joke’s on me. The best person to portray a terrible singer is a great singer, and that is where Excruciating Guitar Voyage falls short of the mark. I appreciate where they were going, what they were trying to do, and how they were trying to go about it – but ultimately they forgot to bring me along with it.

4/10

What does this score mean?

Excruciating Guitar Voyage is available from Wicked Worx for the PC version and the Xbox Live Indie Games Marketplace for the Xbox 360 version.

Format: PC| Genre: Puzzle Racer | Publisher: Noumenon Games | Developer: Noumenon Games | Price: £5.99

Sky rockets in flight, Leena Van Deventer grabs some afternoon delight with NIMBUS.

NOUMENON GAMES had a brilliant idea. “Let’s mix a puzzle game with a RACING game!” they said, “HOLY SHEET!” I said. So they got a few games in the pen together and waited around until the female presented her rump, then BAM! Magic was made. Nimbus exquisitely blends racing elements and puzzle elements to create a unique adventure, one I’ve never seen the likes of before. As if that didn’t have me on Cloud 9 (HAH!), there’s an extra more-ish layer of complexity – your ship has no means of directly propelling itself forward. You need to rely on the environment around you to acquire thrust.

The first level is purely for storytelling, where you witness an alien robotic eyeball stealing away the lovely looking pink ship next to you. As you watch your ship’s bow slowly dip with sadness, it becomes poignantly apparent that the giant eyeball just stole the love of your life. That jerk. As the journey begins to find her, the levels start out at almost a tutorial level, warming you up to the controls and giving you a chance to replay the first few levels to get really comfortable. This is important because the controls are a little fiddly, at times the arrow keys (or WASD, whatever you prefer) are flipped, making the split second decisions the hardest parts to get used to as you instinctively hit right to go right. Things aren’t that simple in Nimbus! While it may be easy to pick up, it’s hard to truly master.

You mixed who with the what now?

Nimbus’s art style in the first few levels struck me as reminiscent of Sonic’s Green Hill Zone, the little squares in the solid rock, that lively bright green grass, the curves, it all tastes like juicy nostalgia. Colours are vivid yet easy on the eyes, making for interesting viewing as more mechanics are introduced. You search for thrust via tiny canons, yellow bouncy pads, and different tiles that offer a boost, some in set directions, all of varying power. Your aim is to get from the start to the black and white checkered blocks at the end of each level – to do this you need to manipulate the items around you to gain enough momentum to get there, along the way collecting keys to unlock certain inaccessible areas. Obstructions which get in the way of you clearing the level include spikes, lasers, crushing blocks, high heights and the most pitiful of all, losing all forward motion and being stranded. Staying still equals death. Learning to manipulate gravity, teleporters, travellators, giant balls, and numerous other devices all test your dexterity skills as well as your puzzle solving abilities. Some levels require very exact pathways, one bump against a wall and you need to start over, yet it never feels unfair. If you screw up it’s your own damn fault.

The sound is bouncy enough to keep you feeling relaxed and light hearted which is important when you start getting into the harder levels and the temptation to ragequit is strong. There is enough of it to be interesting, but never intrusive, and it can be turned off if you wish. If you find the difficulty getting too frustrating there are 3 difficulty levels to choose from, each having their own unique attributes to up the ante. There are a lot of Steam achievements available which further adds to the replay value – the racing element really comes in with the series of time trial achievements, which offers something to go back to once you’ve had your first playthrough.

Nimbus offers something for almost everyone, if you love racing against the clock you can try and beat the best times in the leaderboards or test yourself against the time trial achievements. If you love puzzlers you will revel in the key system and love unlocking zones by triggering switches and working out how to get inanimate objects to do your bidding for you. If you love both of these elements and love when skill and subtlety are rewarded you’re going to have a massively good time in the world of Nimbus. For £5.99 it has room for many replays, each with a different focus if you feel the need for a change. Nimbus is a relaxing, stimulating, refreshing place to visit, and a great way to sink a few hours into something original rather than the same old shovelware we see so much of these days. I look forward to finishing on all 3 difficulties and further achievement whoring. The sky’s the limit with Nimbus!…. Yeah I’ll show myself out.

9/10

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GameCity’s Indie Offerings…

Brendan Caldwell goes rifling through Nottingham’s indieware drawers as he sniffs out the best GameCity has to offer.

THERE IS a white tent in Nottingham’s Market Square. If our teenage memories teach us anything, it’s that disappointing things happen in tents. And this is a big ol’ tent. It’s a pleasant relief, then, that instead of teenagers unsuccessfully rutting and water leaking through the broken zip, the big white tent of Nottingham is actually the main platform of the excellent annual GameCity Festival. Inside is a mix of developers showing off their works-in-progress. Let’s walk past the big, well established names for now. Be gone, Lego Universe. Not now, Crysis 2. Something else compels us forward. GameCity, I have come for your indies.

Substream

An enticing synaesthetic shooter. As your ship travels past various enemies, the background details rhythmically alter. Below you, an abstract ground could be an abstract sea, pulsating to the sounds of – what is that? Electrified accordions? A schizophrenic harmonica? Only Buddha knows such details. But I know this: it sounds good. The developer Ben Bradley tells me that different people have been commissioned to do the music for different levels, so expect a mix of genres. Hopefully there’ll be plenty more of this hybrid instrumentalism.

The trick to Substream is that the ship you control is endlessly repeated on either side of you, hall o’ mirrors style. At first it seems this is only a presentational thing. Then I fire off a couple of rounds at an enemy. The shots bounce off its shield and exit the screen to my right. Immediately, my left flank is under fire. What the – ? My mirror image from the opposite side. I just accidentally shot myself an infinite number of times. There are different types of enemies to counter but it looks like you’ll also have yourself to worry about. Clever stuff.

There was only a tutorial and one playable level on show but it was definitely memorable. It will be interesting to see if the game can make use of the repeating ships as a mechanic in other ways. As it stands, it’s already intriguing. It’s like if someone put an early version of Lylat Wars into one side of the Large Hadron Collider. At the other side they put in a synth. The result is a musical shmup with a smidgen of infinity. Observe.

Colour Runners

Wherein the player will encounter a cityscape that is blank like a canvas, purple paint will go everywhere, and cats exist only in two dimensions on walls.

Built in the Unreal Engine, Colour Runners gives you a section of empty, colourless city and a paintgun. You can only step where you have already painted, but you can also climb up buildings and walls once you’ve covered them. The idea is to discover places where murals exist and spray them (a lot of cats and girls). To liken it to a graffiti title like Jet Set Radio is an unfair comparison, but it does have a similarly interesting idea and some of the artwork in their development process is phenomenal.

Right now, it feels a lot like a constrained Mirror’s Edge. There’s no stylish twists or flair to the free running as such – you basically just run over walls – but the presentation of the world feels similar and is all the better for that contrast between vibrant colour and neutral architecture.

There are a few movement niggles. For instance, inconsistently spraying will leave an invisible wall in your path. You won’t notice you’ve done this until you are unable to move, so it might be annoying in a game that is otherwise reliant on fluidity. Although, we might assume this is a bug they will be trying to remove.

There aren’t any objectives beyond revealing all the pretty decals, so it comes across as a title that is more about mucking about and exploring rather than completing a task. Like all of these indie titles, this may be subject to change. But, right now, Colour Runners fits somewhere between a videogame and an art installation. Enjoyment of the game may depend on how much you enjoy the artistry. You have to admit though, some of it does look swell. So much so we pinched an image to use for the banner above.

Continues…