Indie | PC Freebies Round-Up – 04/08/09

By Lewis Denby

There’s been a lot of talk about the pricing of games recently, after the announcement that Modern Warfare 2 would retail at eight million pounds.  Or maybe it was 55.  Something like that, anyway.  So what better time to remind ourselves of the brilliant things in life?  The internet’s full of ways in which we can all game for free.  Who needs those big, multi-million dollar blockbuster titles?  Browser games and 3mb downloads are fine for us!

//A Night To Remember
Ethan Damschroder [link]
Nathan Carter’s a con artist, and this is his last job.  He probably didn’t expect to find himself in a situation involving a crazy murderer at a dinner party.  He probably didn’t expect to find himself captioned by grammatically woeful, misspelled and sterile dialogue, either.

A Night To Remember is often somewhat interesting, if only to see where the tale leads next.  But it is, unfortunately, a somewhat clumsy game.  Puzzles frequently rely on trial and error, there’s absolutely no inspiration to the art, and the looped music is grating.  It’s a half-hour long suspense tale that never does anything resolutely awful, but never quite lifts itself above the level of amateurish mediocrity.  Certainly one to sample if you’re into the old-school point-and-clicks, but nothing you’re likely to be in awe of come the conclusion.

//You Only Live Once
Raitendo [link]
You Only Live Once is initially a neat pastiche on Mario, complete with modernised lost princess story and instantly recognisable side-scrolling platform action.  It then gets extremely silly.  It then turns about as meta as it gets.

The name isn’t a misnomer.  It’s totally literal.  In You Only Live Once, you really do only live once: perishing ends your game, permanently.  Not ‘until you restart’ – permanently.  I imagine you’ll have to delete your temporary internet files and suchlike to reset it.  More interesting than the basic concept, though, is how it’s presented.  You’ve a game over screen and a continue button.  And, well, you can continue, but that simply makes the story progress without you, as you sit and watch the aftermath of your demise.  I fear I’m underselling this – it is, remarkably, not remotely tiresome or rubbish, but actually rather amusing, and well worth a go.

You might want to actually try to beat the game before you go dying, as I hear there is in fact a ‘proper’ ending.  I just died before I got to it, and now there’s no going back.

//Isabelle Poppy and Bling
Andy Wallace [link]
Growing from a project to promote a friend’s music, Isabelle, Poppy and Bling is an obscure title from Andy Wallace.  Shunning the notion of win/lose states, this quirky browser release simply loops each of its three mini-games until the track in question has come to its end.

The mini-games themselves are all mouse-based obscurities, with tasks including blowing a chair on a cloud from one platform to another, stacking planks of wood in mid-air to avoid flooding a boat with rain, and – um – playing arcade classic Millipede.

It’s all extremely abstract, and often somewhat awkward.  I’d imagine it’ll either be very much your thing, or not at all your thing.  But it is certainly interesting for its imaginative art style, which evokes memories of some of the weirder moments in Amanita Design’s Samorost series.  It’s an undoubtedly creative world, clearly crafted with a lot of love and attention.  It’s about as arty as art games come, but at five minutes long, it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to stomach it.

//When Pigs Fly
Auntie Pixelante [link]
When Pigs Fly manages to be at once impossibly cute and insufferably annoying.  The incessant sqeaking of this little piggy is initially enough to make you want to gouge your ears out of your skull, but within minutes it becomes endearing, tranquil almost.  Then you snap out of it, and realise that, yes, it is just a tiny bit irritating.

The game involves guiding this critter around a maze, after he falls into a hole and gets stuck on account of remarkably growing wings.  At first, it’s terribly frustrating, as clipping his oversized hit-box on absolutely anything means he perishes and you have to restart the stage.  Fortunately, each stage is only a single screen wide, so any repetition is quickly out of the way.

Essentially, it plays out a lot like the Helicopter Game, only with a pesky swine where the chopper should be.  That alone is enough to make it worth your while – especially when you eventually cave and turn the sound off.