Following Freeware: July 2014 releases

This month you can play as a cat-humanoid or a man with the head of a pig. You can hunt a demon in a fantasy world, fend off the horror that rises at night in an ordinary apartment, or face the monsters that lurk in the deepest reaches of sleep. Alternatively, you might experience a decidedly unreal search for fuel, the more mundane challenge of a snowman contest, or the brutally real difficulties of coming out to your loved ones. All these await you in this month’s round-up of releases from the freeware scene.
 

OneShot

Niko, a boy from a world of cat-humanoids, wakes up to find himself in a strange house. Deep within the basement of this mysterious domicile he finds a bulb that glows with a warm light when he holds it. Within this darkened world, his ability marks Niko as the saviour, come to restore light to the world. All he has to do is ascend to the top of the Spire, from which this bulb will provide sunlight to the entire land. But the world is already decaying from ages spent in darkness, and another force is at work that could be friend or foe. With his own fate intertwined with that of this beleaguered land, Niko has a tough challenge ahead.

Mathew Velasquez has weaved a compelling tale. The graphics feature a retro RPG look, with a top-down view. Whilst the initial house is in good condition, much of the rest of the world is in decay, with rubble strewn about and areas where reality itself appears to be fraying. After the opening you will find yourself exploring the wasteland appropriately titled ‘The Barrens’. Your journey will also take you through the leafy Glen and to the heights of the Spire itself. Conversations provide more detailed close-ups of characters, with Niko’s bright cat eyes being especially striking. There are also some cutscenes in a hand-drawn art style reminiscent of a Manga comic. Atmospheric music plays throughout, with the tunes largely mirroring the sense of desolation. There are also numerous sound effects, including the changing sound of footsteps as you move from surface to surface.

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Control is done by keyboard, with the Z key interacting in the direction you are facing and X calling up a menu. From the menu you can select an item to use in the outside world, or select a second item to create a combination. You can also equip certain objects, such as the mask that allows you to pass near toxic gas vents. There is a Quit option, but players should be very certain before using this. You are warned that quitting will prove fatal to Niko, and there are a handful of other decisions that have a permanent effect on the game on any given computer. Fortunately, each major area contains a bed in a readily accessible place. Using this saves and quits the game without any other consequences. You will need to interact with many characters to find out what is going on, and will use much inventory both singly and in combination. A later portion of the game also has a cunning multi-layered maze, and there are a couple of puzzles that require you to literally think outside the box, blurring reality and the game world together.

OneShot can be downloaded from the RPG Maker website. Versions for Windows, Mac and Linux are available.

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Coming Out Simulator 2014

Coming Out Simulator 2014, by Nicky Case, was written in one day for the Nar8 Jam. It is a semi-autobiographical game in which the bisexual Case describes his coming out to his parents. In the game you play Nicky, and his boyfriend urges you to tell his parents that he is bi. From there on you can choose how the story goes.

This is a text game in which dialogue is shown in speech bubbles like in WhatsApp or Skype at the upper half of the screen. The stylized pictures are drawn in a cartoony style in black and grey, with little detail. All images are drawn against a background of a single pastel hue, and the characters have no faces at all. The characters do make smoothly animated movements throughout the game, however, which makes the game a bit livelier. Background noises that fit the environments in which the story takes place can be heard, like the inside of a Starbucks or the meowing of a clock shaped like a cat, but the game has no music or voices. Unfortunately, the appearance of a new text bubble is accompanied by a loud and irritating ‘ploink!’ noise that you cannot switch off.

As the story unfolds, every now and then you are confronted with three options which you can choose from, using the mouse. The choices you make influence the story, and of course the way people react to you. But because it’s an autobiographical game, it always ends more or less the same. What the game does beautifully is give you an idea of how difficult it can be for a person to come out to their parents. It can get very depressing, but the game also shows that there is still hope even if your parents fail to deal with the fact that you’re different than most people. It does so in a very conversational and gripping way, with both funny and heartbreaking moments. As a heterosexual, I’ve never dealt with problems like this, but the game is worth playing for exactly that reason, raising awareness of issues beyond my own experiences. And if you are LGBT and having difficulties coming out, maybe you’ll be encouraged to try things you haven’t thought about. Either way, the game has no options at all, so you will have to play it in one go, which takes about 15 minutes. After playing, you are given the opportunity to try again from the beginning, to change the way the story goes.

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Coming Out Simulator 2014 can be played online at itch.io.