Following Freeware – April 2016 releases

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Crazy Mom

It’s Crazy Dad and Crazy Mom’s 15th anniversary and Crazy Mom is throwing a party. But she’s missing three indispensable ingredients: cocktail stir sticks, balloons and a tape with hers and Crazy Dad’s song on it. In order to collect all of these items she must hypnotize someone, steal a stuffed snake from the museum and crash a computer, amongst other crazy things.

After several Crazy Dad adventures, Carmel Games decided it was high time to produce Crazy Mom. The “wacky” dial, which is set high in almost all Carmel titles, is turned up to 11 for this one, with entertaining results. As usual the game world, comprising the Crazy family’s living room, the city center, library, park and museum, is shown in brightly colored, third-person cartoon-style drawings with barely any straight edges. Unfortunately there’s little animation to see: whilst Crazy Dad’s eyes and hair are constantly moving, Crazy Mom is almost stoically calm, although her eyes always look in two different directions. The background music is an upbeat instrumental tune that repeats indefinitely; luckily it can be switched off. Voice acting is very good, as we’ve come to expect from this developer. Along with the music and voices, you will hear glass breaking, doors opening, the buzzing of a fly and many more sounds, all of which are high quality effects.

Crazy Mom is a point-and-click adventure using only one mouse button. If you know Carmel, the interface has remained the same for quite a while now, with the inventory at the bottom right of the screen and buttons for the settings and a walkthrough at the bottom left. The puzzles are all inventory-based, except one where you have to make a sort of jigsaw. Because of the off-the-wall nature of Crazy Mom, the solutions to many puzzles are often funny and very different from what you would encounter in the real world. None are particularly difficult though; you can easily finish Crazy Mom in around 20 minutes, making it a good game for a little fun on a coffee break.

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Crazy Mom can be played online at JayIsGames.

Rogue Quest: Episode 1

Konrad Meridian has made a long and difficult trip, eventually ending up in the entrance hall of the Leech King’s crypt. Now that he’s arrived, he’s ready to find the treasure that’s allegedly hidden here. However, when an iron portcullis suddenly comes crashing down, sealing the exit, Konrad realizes that the place is better protected than it seemed at first sight. Perhaps the corpse lying at his feet should have been a clue.

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Rogue Quest: Episode 1, by Expera Game Studio, is a light-hearted game taking place across only six screens designed in a simple pixel art style with bright colors. The game is presented in third-person, but we never see Konrad move, as clicking an exit makes the next screen appear, and clicking applicable hotspots simply causes an action to occur with no actual effort from the protagonist. Enlivening the limited scenes are animations like the flickering of torch light and the movements of a massive, very ugly creature, as does the upbeat instrumental music (which also features in developer’s A Tale of Caos series). There are only one or two sound effects, the most noticeable of which is the maniacal laughter of the Leech King. There is no voice acting; all spoken text is displayed with a different color for every speaker.

The game is played using only the left mouse button, with the inventory accessed by clicking a knapsack icon at the top left of the screen. Next to that icon is another that makes all interactive items on the current screen highlight in green. In the upper right corner are icons for hints and the game menu. The puzzles aren’t too obvious and are well-integrated into the story. You have to find a tool to loosen a torch from its holder, kill a pair of terrible creatures by using their weaknesses against them, and destroy an artifact using a recipe you find, amongst other tasks. If successful, Konrad will finally be able to claim the Leech King’s treasure and go off to find new adventures. Unfortunately, the lack of any real story makes this a bit of a disappointment for me, compared to the other games Expera has made so far. Although there is no teaser of a new adventure for Konrad at the end, since this is described as the first episode, let’s hope the series is fleshed out a little better the further it goes along.

Rogue Quest: Episode 1 can be played online at Kongregate.

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