This week, we take a much-needed snooze. We fight enemies with a keytar, we relive painful memories, and we enjoy being a cute little robot. Silent Hill is also celebrated, and ably duplicated in the fab Banned Memories. Basically, you're going to want to read on. Note: I'm including last week's column at the bottom of this one, in case you happened to miss it last week.
Banned Memories: Yamanashi by GamingEngineer
Banned Memories turns the restrictions of PS1 hardware into a stylistic choice, and why not? Restrictions are great, giving a project a framework to rail against, or to comfortably fit within as you see fit. While the game seems to relish in the low-poly models and texture warping of the early 32-bit days, developer GamingEngineer is pushing against the restrictions of Game Maker: Studio, making probably the most impressive 3D game I've seen with it yet.
Engine aside, this is an atmospheric horror game that stacks up nicely against the likes of Silent Hill and Overblood, even if it's obviously several shades behind those games on account of it being made by one person, rather than a whole team of seasoned professionals. This is an early look at the game, containing a part of a haunted school to explore, and I'm really digging what I've played of it so far. (Via IndieGames)
Zzzz-Zzzz-Zzzz by SaintHeiser
The remarkable Zzzz-Zzzz-Zzzz is set in a dream world, and fittingly its rules have no consistency from one screen to the next. It's called that not only because you're asleep, but because you'll be pressing Z a lot. Z to go through a door. Z to go to sleep. Z to do an interaction, though you're never quite sure what that interaction will be. Because of this, because each new screen feels strange and unfamiliar, Zzzz-Zzzz-Zzzz is one of the few games to really get what dreams are about. It's a delightful, constantly surprising thing—fans of Fez are going to fall in love with it, I reckon.
Liberation, My Love by Newmark Software
A simple platformer embellished with a pleasant art style and premise, about a keytar-wielding robot thing that shoots colours at baddies. (He also has a shield, and a nifty lateral dash move.) The basic jumping and spike-avoiding could feel slicker, but Liberation, My Love's unique setting and look go a long way.
Out of Sight by Isart Digital students
It's a bit like Remember Me, this, specifically those bits in Remember Me where you have to reprogram people's memories (because you're a jerk). You're a woman with dymnesia trying to recover lost memories with the aid of a psychiatrist here, something you achieve by pivoting from one interactible object to the next, in a series of frozen moments from your past. You can examine each object for a bit of background detail, or combine the various sights and smells and sounds and other senses to bring the central memory to life. Writing and UI-wise, this is slightly clumsy, but I think the premise is a strong one. It's a bold and stylistically impressive game too.
Disposable by Martin Cohen
There's not much to Disposable yet, but I did enjoy the look of the world, and the dashy jumping ability I never managed to master. As your little robot explores a facility, looking for terminals to hack in order to open a central door, you'll occasionally need to rely on a tricksy dash-jump-thing that hurtles you through the air at a fixed distance. It's a fun, challenging few minutes of platforming, that Martin Cohen will hopefully return to at a later date.
Previously, on Free games of the week...
Bog by Yannish
Bog is an extraordinary local multiplayer game with a name that conjures images of swamps and sewage. Boo! it's great because it manages to be a same-screen stealth game, by using long grass to disguise your character's position from your enemy—who is probably sitting right beside you on your sofa, sharing your monitor. I love the off-kilter angle, the delicious pixel art, the use of colour too. Bog is charming, beautiful and smart.
Station Fantome by Pol Clarissou
Pol Clarissou's "idlescape" puts you in a creepy metro tunnel, a creepy metro tunnel you can't escape from (or even move in). All you can do is wait for the occasional train, staring into the empty windows of its carriages for any flicker of life. (You won't find it. I think. I hope.)
Chesser by Chris Wade
"Chess is slow. Chess is tedious. Chess doesn't have particles. Fuck that. Chesser is like Chess but more."
Unlike normal Chess, Chesser features a button that kills all the units along a single line, which I'm sure it would have had a thousand years ago if people were smart enough to program video games back then. Chesser also reduces the board to a perhaps more manageable size, allowing for easy rotation with its two giant buttons, to smooth over the process of single-seat turn-based play. (Via Warp Door)
The Old Man Club by Michael Koloch
A...loose adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man And The Sea, The Old Man Club is a game about arm-wrestling that you probably don't want to play if you suffer from RSI. You do the wrestling by clicking the left mouse button repeatedly here, and oh yeah you're wrestling a bunch of exquisitely drawn, bulky men with animal heads. It's short, it's really funny, it's a bit disturbing. Play it, obviously.
Sagittarius by George Prosser
Another local multiplayer game, and one that asks you to share a mouse and keyboard with your opponents. Like Bog, this is a game that does new, smart things with the deathmatch model, giving each player a bow, and arrows that obey the laws of gravity. "You idiot, all arrows do that", you're probably furiously typing right now, but they don't often do it around a series of colourful planetoids. Your little bowperson can walk around their planet, and draw back the mouse to aim their shot, but its trajectory depends on the gravity wells of nearby planets, which will often interfere with it in interesting ways. This is lovely and creative, and I think it would look beautiful on a massive screen, in front of a bunch of competitive friends.
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