Following Freeware – June 2015 releases
Extrication
Your wheeling and dealing has finally caught up with you. You owe Fat Tony big time, and he has a very harsh way of dealing with those that don’t pay up. With only 24 hours before he comes for you, there’s no way you can raise the money in time. Your only hope is to disappear before he arrives. You’re going to need some seed cash to set up elsewhere, and a new identity to cover your tracks. Your motorcycle is in the lock-up, if you can just find the key. Oh, and you need to break it off with your girl before you go. The clock is ticking so it’s time to get a move on.
Set in a crime-ridden city, Mattias Gustavson’s Extrication is a dark tale. The left half of the screen is dominated by a headshot of the lead character with a grim expression. In the right half, location views are presented in a top down perspective with transitions from place to place via a slideshow format. The graphics are low-res, but there is sufficient detail to recognise items, such as a car in a garage or some boxes in a warehouse. When there are characters in your current location, portrait illustrations of them appear at the top of the screen. As you interact with them, these are expanded to take up the left half of the screen, with the character’s dialogue appearing on the right. The small number of inventory items available appear along the right side of the screen, and a clock showing the time remaining sits in the top right corner. Throughout your adventure, a gritty action musical theme plays in an ‘80s synth style.
Control involves either left-clicking with the mouse or using the keyboard to move and interact. Every action, be it speaking to a character or checking an object, ticks off simulated time. Your task is not a simple one. The one person who owes you money is nowhere to be found, and the key to the lock-up holding your motorcycle is with someone who may not be so keen to hand it over. Depending on your actions, characters appear and disappear at certain locations, so a reasonable amount of backtracking is required. The lead character is not a nice person, and there is some moderately strong language in places. Add to this the fact you will have to engage in some criminal activity to succeed, and this may not be a game suitable for the young or easily offended. If you take too long to achieve your objectives, the result is a game over scene as you meet your fate courtesy of Fat Tony. There is no manual save, but the game is short enough that, armed with knowledge from a failed attempt, a replay is not overly onerous.
Extrication can be downloaded from the Game Jolt website.
Wrong Channel
You stand in a darkened, sparsely furnished room. You cannot recall exactly how you got here, though you feel that some tragedy has led you to this place. The thing that catches your eye is a large television, which at first glance seems to show only static. Yet this is no ordinary television, and selecting the right channels can take you to other places. But don’t, whatever you do, select a wrong channel.
Psychological horror awaits players in Wrong Channel, by Calico Reverie. The minimalist graphical style is an extremely blocky pixel art format. Whilst large items such as a door or a tree are easily recognisable, smaller objects are only identifiable by their labels. Each location in the game occupies a single screen, with the television a constant presence in all. The colour palette is grim, reinforcing the depressing nature of the setting. Black dominates throughout, and even the accentuating colours are muted. A piece made up of long, slow, echoing tones provides a disturbing musical background. Sound effects include the static of the television and the unpleasant result of incorrect channel selection.
Control is achieved by simple left-click, with a menu of actions appearing on-screen when you click on a hotspot. You do not have direct access to an inventory, with collected objects simply appearing as options when you interact with a relevant item. Using the television to access different rooms forms the central part of the game. You need to decipher appropriate channel numbers from clues hidden in books and in complex formula. Simply flicking through the channels is not an option, as wrong channels produce a gruesome game over. As well as clues to channel numbers, you will also come across information that goes some way to explaining your predicament. Whilst pixelated, the horror tone makes this unsuitable for children or the easily disturbed.
Wrong Channel can be downloaded from the AGS website.
Willem’s Winners
Space Incident
Aboard a tiny spaceship on its way from Mars to Earth are two technicians and an Artificial Intelligence called Alex, which functions as the captain. Suddenly a third person emerges from the escape pod and asks for access. Compounding matters further, an enemy ship arrives in the neighbourhood and shoots at you every time you start your engines! Acting as the ship’s A.I., you must deal with the new crew member, the enemy, and a crew that needs to remain willing to obey your commands in order to get everyone safely to Earth.
Space Incident, by Vogd3, shows a cut-through view of the spaceship so you can see all its components and rooms and the crew working in it. All of this is presented in remarkable pixel art detail. You can clearly see the expressions on the crew’s faces, and cracks and fires in equipment after accidents occur. Care is taken to use lots of contrast so everything is clearly visible. The game is accompanied by strange spacey “music” and good sound effects for almost every action the crew performs, like drinking and eating, stopping fires, and typing. Both the music, which might irritate you after a while, and the sound effects can be switched off individually if so desired. With no voice acting, the game uses text to convey everything the crew members say to Alex.
In the top right corner of the screen there is a skip button, which can only be used in certain instances to bypass uneventful waiting periods. In the middle there is a line of text that tells you what you currently have to do. Usually it will tell you to wait until a crew member wants to talk to you, or it will say that a crew member needs attention. Because the spaceship is bigger than the screen, you can drag it around using the mouse. Hovering the cursor over a crew member makes a small diagram appear, indicating vital life signs like how good he feels, his energy and brain power levels, and how much food he still has inside him. Clicking on a crew member centers him in the middle of the screen while the camera pans as he moves through the ship. When a crew member wants to say something, he raises his finger and a bubble with an icon appears above his head. Clicking the bubble makes a dialogue screen appear, in which the crew member and Alex are represented by drawings. Unfortunately, the text displayed contains quite a few spelling and style errors. Often the crew members ask what to do, but they also tell you if they have good ideas or are scared. On many occasions, different options for your reply are presented for you to choose between them. Your decisions have a profound influence on how the story goes and whether or not the ship and its crew reach Earth safely or perish trying. You get points for each decision you make, but since there is no final score shown at the end of the game, they only seem to serve as an indication of how you’ve handled certain situations.
The crew members show very real human emotions. Each person has a different opinion on how to deal with the threats around him and also reacts differently to these threats. It’s often hard to find the best way to deal with their different personalities. As the boss, you not only have to give orders but also take into account who is the best person to handle certain tasks, and make sure nobody gets too much on his plate, including yourself. At one point things get very hectic, and you have to stay cool and keep calm to be able to give the right commands. During conversations time stands still, but in between you sometimes have to be quick to issue the right order or prevent someone from panicking. During the trip you must balance between being the boss and a colleague, comforting the crew members or ordering them to do your bidding, which makes the game a very interesting tool to test your managing skills. You can finish the game within an hour, but an auto-save option means you don’t have to finish it in one sitting. There are no less than ten different endings, so if you don’t succeed in arriving safely on Earth you can try again. Overall, this is a game worth trying because of the profound way its story is told.
Space Incident can be played online at Newgrounds.
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