Following Freeware: August 2014 releases

This month, you can try to escape a murder scene before the police arrive or avoid death on a remote crashed spaceship. You might also take on the role of a famous detective in a genteel murder mystery, meet a bunch of fictional favourites in a club sitting between worlds, or simply seek to rediscover your identity and your clothes within the dark city alleys. Alternatively, you could take the first steps on a global adventure as adventurer Skip seeks the sauna king of Finland. All these await in this month’s roundup of releases from the freeware scene.
 

Entrapment

On a bad day, Sam Drake got a letter that said: “I will frame you for murder.” He tossed it away, thinking it was a joke, but from then on strange things have begun happening. Every now and then he finds himself waking up in some hotel room, unable to remember how he got there and what happened during the night. He also invariably finds a murdered woman lying there. This time he also finds the door of the hotel room rigged with a bomb. He’ll need to escape this new predicament, and when he does, he wants to find the killer too.

Entrapment, by Scared Square Games, is a short but gripping game. You play as Sam from a third-person view. The environment is shown in a pixelated art style, in drab hues that perfectly convey the dilapidated condition of the hotel. Ominous music sounds throughout the game, adding to the gloomy atmosphere. Fitting sound effects are heard when you open doors and use certain items in the environment, such as the telephone. The game has no voices but all text is displayed on the screen, with different colors for all characters.

Sam is controlled with the mouse. Right-clicking makes him say something about an object; left-clicking causes him to try to do something with it. The bottom of the screen is reserved for the inventory and buttons to save, load or quit, but there is only one save slot and no further options. Most of the puzzles are inventory-based and they’re not very easy: because the story has some peculiar twists and turns it is sometimes not immediately clear what your goal is or how to reach it. Stick with them, however, and you’ll find two different endings that are both quite intriguing and very emotional. For such a short game, the story is well told and contains just the right mix of scary and funny moments. It’s not a game for children though, due to its profanity, scary scenes and references to sex.

Entrapment can be downloaded from the developers’ website.

Generation Ship

Put into cryogenic sleep for the long journey through space, you expected to arise to a new world. Waking to find your ship’s systems in critical condition was not part of the plan. But that is the situation you face, and until you can get some things working again, it’s one you will have to face alone. Worse, the disaster that has done such damage to the ship has also fried the computer’s behavioural circuits. Luckily, the malfunctioning AI is prevented from killing you outright, but any commands to prevent further harm or even be polite to you are completely wiped. With the mission depending on you, can you get everything up and running again?

In Generation Ship, Shide have created a struggle for survival where a mistake can easily prove fatal. The graphic presentation is an angled top-down view of the rooms and corridors of the ship. The spacecraft interior is rendered in reasonable detail, with austere metal bulkheads and control panels scattered through the various sections. Animation is limited to the main character moving and the automatic doors opening and closing. When major actions are undertaken, the view briefly fades out before displaying the results of your choices. The game has no music, with sound entirely devoted to effects relevant to the situation. This includes the whoosh sounds of the doors and the gentle hum of machinery. The computer is fully voiced to a very high standard, her newfound contempt for you coming through in every line.  Subtitles are automatically included for her monologues.