Five Years of Following Freeware: Year Two

Picking up right where we left off, our five-years-in-five-days freeware retrospective presses on through 2011-2012.
 

August 2011 – The Unicated by Duzz

The competitions at the Adventure Game Studio site struck again. This time the premise of the Monthly competition was “Evil Twin” and Duzz’s approach in The Unicated was an unusual one. Instead of the twins being separate entities, the twins in question are a pair of heads on a single body. One twin, Bo, is a sweet innocent, seeing good in everything. The other, Mal, is pure malevolent evil out to cause misery and destruction wherever they go. With the two being one, the player gets to play both sides, with left-click using Bo and right-click using Mal instead.

It is a fairly simple mechanic, but it is amazing how much difference it makes to the game. Unsurprisingly, successfully completing the game requires a combination of the nice and nasty approaches. That alone would have made for an interesting change from the normal operation of a single character. But despite the game being made within a single month, Duzz went well beyond the basics: every interaction within the game has both a nice and nasty response to it, so even simply playing around is good fun. Add in a black sense of humour, and this is a good, if short, experience.

Taking on the role of a pair of mismatched twins is as simple as downloading The Unicated from the AGS website.

September 2011 – The Unfolding Spider by discordance

The core of a good game is often considered to be a coherent plot set in a consistent world. This allows the player to be drawn into the game world, usually making it a richer experience. But sometimes it is fun to go in the complete opposite direction. The Unfolding Spider starts off with the apparent feel of a noir mystery. The lead character is on a quest to find someone, and is prepared to go to some seedy locales to find them. From there on in, things get a little…weird.

In recalling my experience with this very unusual minimalist black-and-white game, the notes I made to remind myself refer to it simply as “insanity in game form”. Nothing about this adventure makes sense, yet the sheer oddness of the action made it compelling for me to play. There is no way that anyone could turn this into a commercial proposition, and indeed it would have worn out its welcome had it been much longer than it is. As it stands, this is a slice of surreality that provides an undeniable escape from any sort of world that could be described as “real”. It’s like a convoluted mystery thriller, but without the clear explanation of the plot at the end.

If you want to experience the oddity that is The Unfolding Spider for yourself, it can be downloaded from the AGS website.