Official Indie and Free Games Thread!

[dskzero]

I gotta admit I come here for my indie game news. Kudos, Gendo Ikari.

[Gendo Ikari]

Thank you, I take the chance to post about a true gem.

The Swapper is a sci-fi puzzle/platformer based around what we may call a "clone gun": this device allows the player - a mute and unnamed astronaut (we don't even know if there's a man or a woman inside the suit) who has reached what seems a big archeological site on a distant planet - to create up to four clones who follow the exact same movements. They are recovered by touching them, or when they die (with very painful sounds). The conscience, and therefore the direct control, can be trasnferred to any active body, provided that there aren't colored lights active, red prevent cloning and blue prevent swapping. By holding the cloning button all goes in slow motion, which allows for scaling great heights, or surviving high falls, with a series of quick clonings and transfers. Beside the main mechanic, all you can do is press some switches and move some small objects, but it's more than enough for some really complex puzzles. Later rooms add gravity inversion pads as a further complication. Each rooms holds a certain number of orbs, which are required in increasing numbers to open access to other areas.

The locations are dark, and there's a strong use of bloom and other graphical filters, but the player has excellent animation, rotations, zooms and parallaxes are perfect and, most imnportantly, everything is done with a mix of claymation and digitized common objects. The results is really beautiful and original, still pictures cannot do it justice.

Like the game wasn't already great to play and to look at, there's a good plot that's even integrated with the gameplay mechanics, going as far as posing questions about existence without seeming pretentious. There is tension but the atmosphere is mostly minimalistic - I'd dare to compare it to 2001: A Space Odyssey at times. There are two ending, although they depend only on a final choice, and the first one is quite moving.

Shouldn't last more than 6 hours, and the difficulty of the puzzles is quite uneven, but let's face it: just four people created a game that has great puzzle mechanics, pretty visuals and a deep plot in a single package. The prizes it exhibits in its homepage are deserved.

[Gendo Ikari]

Admittedly, the first impact with Waking Mars is not good: many background elements look like paper cutouts, character portraits seem out of some cheap Hidden Object Game and animation is Flash-like, or almost. Life has been discovered under the surface of Mars but the probe robot is missing and the player character, a scientist, goes underground to look for it.

And here the good things begin: no little gray humanoid or lost civilizations, but dormant organisms, similar to our plants, that need a “push” to be awakened. A certain level of biomass must be reached in every location to open access to further areas. You begin with only a couple types of seeds but the quantity of factors to take into considerations grows rapidly: organism that awaken only with a certain biomass, acid and basic terrains, predator plants, the mysteries behind huge plants and crystals... You discover all by doing like a scientist: you experiment. This translates into “try everything with everything” but it's not boring, quite the opposite, and a complete database of discoveries brings a tangible sense of progression. Some of the biggest caves allow so much organisms, they become self-sustaining ecosystems.

After all the new elements are introduced, it drags on for a while around two-thirds of the experience, but the final discoveries are worth it. There's also ART, the funny AI accompanying the player, to lighten up the atmosphere. And for all the flaws in the visuals, the parallaxes give depth to the 2D scenarios.

[Gendo Ikari]

Moshimoshi is a little psychaedelic arena shooter. The background constantly shifts between three different colors which, not incidentally, are the same as the main sprite, the enemies and their projectiles, making them invisibile at regular intervals. This makes for a really trippy challenge, although the game is just all there, so there's little after the novelty wears off. I haven't tried other games by the same author.

[Gendo Ikari]

And for once, I want to write about a terrible game I just tried.

CyberMedic sounds good in concept: as a female cyborg with skates, you run through a large futuristic city to save people who need CPR. Beside a time limit to save them, you also need to constantly touch recharge stations. You can jump very high, so your movement ability is virtually limitless.




Reality, however, is much different from the trailer and I leave to this video review I found to explain all the fatal flaws that kill what could have potentially been a good game. And that announcer / mission control voice is truly annoying. How this was part of The Free Bundle is a mystery.

[jorpho]

Remember The Ur-Quan Masters, the open-source rerelease of Star Control 2 that you never got around to playing? (Yeah, you. You know who you are.)

Did you know that someone's taken the next step and made it HD?

sourceforge.net/projects/urquanmastershd/

[Gendo Ikari]

Great news, thanks! I saw several pics of the project long ago but I thought it was destined to become vaporware - then again, even the UQM remix project was finished. From a look at the original version's forum, I read that you can still use the original grapics if you want, and that you can turn off the time limit in the options, no external mods needed.

---

Having two characters that move together but differently on the player's input is not a new concept but DuoTasking implements it well. When the robot moves horizontally, the turret on the left side of the screen goes up and down; the former can jump, the latter shoots. The turret must clear the way from red blocks and hostile robots, while the robot can activate some switches; both must be careful of laser turrets, which are not only indestructible but deflect lasers, and the turret's own laser is deadly for the robot. Every single move must be carefully planned to ultimately collect all the items in a level. It gets difficult quickly, and some passages feel a bit “trial & error”, but I never felt the challenge to be unfair. I also found the clear and minimalistic graphics, made with big outlined pixels, to be perfect for the game.

An online Flash version exists, with different music, a cheesy title screen and few other slight changes.

[Gendo Ikari]

Kaikan is a great shmup with a strong arcade feel. The screen is even pillarboxed, although a few indicators are still on the black sides. There are five different ships, each with its speed, main weapon and secondary weapon (bomb is the same for eveyone, unfortunately). Items left by enemies can be easily collected by releasing the shot button. The more you collect, the more their rank rises – at A they're worth 10,000 points each. The rank is reset is one item falls down the screen or you are hit. They also replenish a purple bar on the bottom, which can protect the ship from a shot or unleash a bomb. The ship can slow down, concentrating fire and showing its hitpoint.

While not particularly creative, the pixel graphics are fine, with satisfying explosions, and make good use of rotation and zoom at times. On top of that, the game is very fast: be sure to activate top-right option in keyconfig.exe (despite the name, it also manages a few other options beside the controls) to keep it manageable.

There are five levels and the true final boss can be confronted only if you beat the last level without continuing, but nine credits ensure that even an average player can have fun with Kaikan, although the last level is a veritable bullet hell. Beside its quality, it also shows the capabilities of Shooting Game Builder, a free tool that's unfortunately not translated into English.









The same developer recently released TinyXevivos, a Xevious clone/parody that mixes an even more retro aesthetic (the graphics are made with huge pixels) with modern touches. Funnily, I was often able to kill the bosses even before they started attacking, by landing a bomb on their core as they started appearing. There's also a nice little surprise at the end. THe consideration about the config are valid for this game, too.

[Gendo Ikari]

For the "let's clear the bigger files first" series, I present The Piano, a surreal interactive story about a man who may or may not have killed his brothers, and better not spoil further. While the atmosphere and art direction are really good in some parts, like the prologue and epilogue, it falls flat when trying to put in more "gamey" elements. The search for diaries and gate keys is annoying, and when interacting with a piano it's mandatory to solve a boring rhytm-game sequence (be warned: when asking for directions, it means the arrow keys). The third chapter is needlessly drawn out. You are often chased by a mysterious shadow but you cannot die, it just puts heavy filters on the visual. Good ideas, so-so execution, although I appreciated that the "jumpscares" weren't scary at all (intentional or not, I don't know).

[Gendo Ikari]

Castlevania Fighter can give a wrong first impression. It's made with MUGEN using graphics mostly form SotN and the GBA and DS episosed of the series, the title is banal, the premise as well - in an alternate timeline Dracula won against Trevor Belmont and, after 400 years, he's become so powerful he's a menace for other timelines, which prompts characters from those to gather and fight him; this explains the presence of a few baddies (even Death) in the cast.

As you start playing, however, you can notice that, even if some attacks are performed with the usual fighting game inputs, it mostly controls like a true CV, with an attack button and a jump button; another one is used to dodge and one to select items you can use with Up + Attack. The game is a boss rush against a wide array of enemies from the saga (they are not selectable as playable characters); beside Dracula and his direct subordinates, they are randomized, so you don't get to see all in a single play. If you hold Start between matches, you'll access a store to get objects that can be used during a battle, like health potions. The orbs released by dead bosses replenish energy, and if taken during certain frames of animation (exactly how, it's unfortunately obscure) they give some permanent bonuses.

Like the number of characters and bosses wasn't already high, there are also a few extra characters: some are "joke" ones, others are from CV ripoffs, like Touhou's Reimu and Sakuya in their Koumajou Densetsu versions (and Remilia may appear during Survival Mode). MUGEN is pushed to its lmits to recreate enemy patterns and attacks that seem to have come out from a genuine CV. And, although you need to look at the readme file to know, there are options like removing the non-CV characters or use a different set of voices by simply moving around a few files. Oddly the Versus mode, usually the real "meat" of a fighting game, is the worst, since only the selectable characters can be involved and this type of gameplay isn't good for competition anyway.

While still in beta (a Story Mode is to be added sometime in the future), it's already heavy in content; a solid fangame that's better than the official Castlevania fighting game.

  

 

 

[Gendo Ikari]

Eternal Champions: The Thin Strings of Fate is a huge and ambitious OpenBor project. A retelling of Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side, it casts Shadow Yamoto on a mission from the Eternal Champion through time, meeting some other characters as bosses. Single player only: more episodes and characters were planned but since this one took years they were dropped.

All six available buttons are used (two punches, two kicks, jump and block); four special moves are available with Vs fighting-style inputs. There are however several sections with different gameplay: most are 2D fighting or platforming, with no movement on a third axis, but there are also a driving section with scaled sprites (!), a shooting gallery where you control Shadow's hand and throw shurikens, even a useless and fortunately brief stealth section, and “adventure” section where you need to talk to some characters to trigger more characters and dialogue choices. There are branching paths, and only one branch is visible, in other cases you'll have to spot some breakable objects to access other paths; many stages and bosses cannot be seen in a single playthrough, and at least one path has Shadow defying the Champion's mission, with him as the final boss instead of the Dark Champion. Progress is saved between every stage.

Even with twelve credits, I found the game to be very difficult, as many enemies are damage sponges; maybe not coincidentally an option for cheats was left active, and may be the only way for some players to see all the content the game as to offer. Upon finishing you unlock the Eternal Champion, the Dark Champion, and Shadow Maximum version, who gets four additional moves, like an hurricane kick and an incredibly powerful shuriken. However, if you use, you start in a training room and can directly access one of two paths of stages, with no branches or non-fighting stages.

Several stages are far too long, while oddly level 5 and 6 are very brief, and the clashing of styles of the graphics taken from dozens of games is often evident, but there's a sometimes surprising attention to detail: both Shadow and several enemies have a different idle animation when energy of low; Shadow performs stage fatalities in cutscenes after some bosses; a few instant death pits offer unique animations; when using one of the three unlockable characters, a certain input combination will bring up a movelist. There's also a well-crafted guide you can download beside the game itself.

[To activate the cheats: go to Options -> System Settings, set Cheats to On, go back to the main menu and then re-enter the Options to find additional ones for lives, energy and credits.]

[Gendo Ikari]

Gunpoint is a 2D stealth/platformer. It stars Richard Conway, a freelance spy who, while trying a new techno-gadget, a pair of pants that allow the wearer to make incredible leaps and survive high falls, ends up witness of a murder and is suspected for it. A friend of the victim offers him a chance to prove his innocence while gaining some money, and he will get tangled into a web of conspiracies and betrayals.

His first and most important gadget is the Crosslink. With it, you can access a secondary mode where everything is shown as silohuettes, except electrical objects, which you can rewire; to access more of them, however, you'll have to put devices, called Wirejacks, on electical boxes. Among other things you can set light switches to open doors, security cameras to call an elevator instead of sounding an alarm, or an electrical discharge to come out of a power socket by connecting it to a sound sensor, knocking out a guard near it. There are many possible ways to proceed, and later levels become true puzzles.

This mechanic mixes perfectly with the more “traditional” stealth ones. Skill points are used to power up the pants or get more uses of some gadgets. There are several others you can buy, among them a gun, but shooting will activate a timer: if you don't leave the level before it runs out, an unavoidable sniper will appear at the exit and you will be forced to reload before the shot. On that matter, the saving system is very efficient, as it practically autosaves constantly; when you die, you'll get four options to reload, from a few instants before the move that proved fatal to long before.

Despite the high-tech gadgetry, Gunpoint manages to convey a good noir atmosphere mixed with strong humour, thanks to excellent writing of the instant-messaging conversations between Conway and the employers. Given the generous saving system, the game may not last more than 6 hours but, beside the replayability, I found every minute of it well spent: when I mastered the use of the Crosslink, I was even struck by the “just one more level” syndrome. To top it off, while simple at first sight the graphics are quite pretty, a pixel art with plenty of small details.

[derboo]

Gunpoint is pretty rad. Been considering it for my final 500-Word Indie review of 2013, but currently it's still a tossup between 4 games, and I might go with something simpler...

[Gendo Ikari]

Rumble Pack, a long-running fighting game project, looks like a poor man's Skullgirls at first sight but is definitely worth of attention. First off, it's a rare case of a MUGEN game with completely original graphical assets; the characters, while simple in design, are expressive and finely animated. Its biggest selling point is the ability to select three different fighting styles for each character, called Hex, Decimal and Binary, with mostly different movesets between each of them, and a few characters have even different idle animations for every style. Hex gives access to powerful super moves accompanied by full-screen animations. A few characters are a little wacky, like the German humanoid chicken with fire powers, a guy who parodies "weeaboo" characters with lines like "Something... in Japanese!", and a big cat.

The current version has 12 characters and its incompleteness is obvious (some even have only one or two styles), but beside a future update of the MUGEN version, a more professional upgrade/remake of the game is being planned for Unity, with several character redesigns in line (the cat's going to get an exoskeleton to be as tall as the other characters). If the latter version manages to take off, it may become a nice treat for fighting game enthusiasts, unless they cannot stand "cutesy" designs. What Rumble Pack would need now, IMO, is a "true" website.

screens from future 1.70 version, with new backgrounds






old trailer from early 2012


couple of previews from future version

[Gendo Ikari]

Lately I'm stuck with slower Internet at home and dedicating these days more to some AAA titles, but I've learned of a new free adventure game called Heroine's Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok, released on Christmas after a long development that had started in 2010. The title and the RPG elements make it obviously inspired by the Quest for Glory series but, most of all, it is the new game from the developers of A Tale of Two Kingdoms; a good reason alone to be hyped about it.