Following Freeware: March 2011 releases

This month you can host a party with some unexpected guests, celebrate ten years of a popular series with a little MacGuffin hunting or return an escaped soul to hell. Perhaps you’d prefer to investigate a brutal murder in a modern setting or a strange assault on a long-standing character in a shared world. Alternatively, you can travel back into your own past, into another, darker dimension or try to save a world where one of the normal dimensions has been lost. You can even enjoy the West as it never was in a new release from a popular developer. All these await you in this round-up of March releases from the freeware scene.
 

---

Zee and the Alien Machine

When his boss comes up for retirement, Zee sees an opportunity for promotion. The only thing standing in his way is that inheriting the position is reliant on getting votes from his fellow shift members. Throwing a great party seems like an ideal way of getting them on board, and Zee sets about doing everything he can to show them a good time. Meeting the widely varying demands of his colleagues is a tough job, but he is determined to succeed. Nothing can divert him from his goal, not even the insistent alarms emanating from his flatmate’s alien invasion detector.

Clickshake’s new adventure blends the relatively mundane task of throwing a party with the fantastical challenge of thwarting alien invaders, to comedic effect. The puzzles start off simple, with all but one of your guests giving you a precise drink order to fill. Once these requests are satisfied, talking to them again reveals more difficult quests to provide each with what they think makes a great party. At the same time, the invasion detector’s activation provides another dilemma for you to solve. Most of the puzzles are dealt with through use of inventory, though a certain amount of environmental interaction is also required. The graphics are a crisp cartoon style, with backgrounds drawn in a semi-realistic fashion. The characters are in normal human proportions except for their heads, which are oversized and feature large, fully expressive faces. These allow you to tell at a glance how much each of your co-workers is enjoying the party, serving as a visual reminder of whose needs you have satisfied. All the characters are well-animated, the NPCs wandering about freely and even dancing if you can find some music they like. The soundtrack is initially a gentle background jazz tune, but two other music styles are available, once you’ve worked out how to get them on your in-game stereo. With four endings and an additional four optional achievements, there is also a certain amount of replayability to this title.

Zee and the Alien Machine can be played online at Games Nitro.

I Forgot

Jeremy once had dreams of becoming a great artist, but those days are gone. Now he spends his days slaving away at a boring office job. When he falls asleep at his desk, he finds himself back in his old apartment being confronted by his younger self. As he explores a world that seems not quite as he recalls, he must face up to his past and the dreams he once had. Examining what once was, will he be able to remember that which he forgot?

This short adventure from Domithan is as much a meditation on our aspirations and what causes us to sometimes leave them behind as it is a game. You’ll travel from your old apartment through snow-filled streets to the community centre where your artistic urges once bore fruit. The graphics are simple but effective, with good perspective and a colour palette largely consisting of greys to suit the down-beat feel of the story. Sound effects like the howling wind on the streets and a low moody soundtrack serve to maintain the atmosphere. Control is point-and-click using the traditional four cursor options, plus a fifth added for this game, Think. By thinking about hotspots, you evoke Jeremy’s recollections about an object, often revealing new items or information vital to your quest. Besides thinking, a handful of inventory-based challenges are presented. There is also one instance where you need to be moderately quick with the mouse button, though failure has no negative effect other than being unable to progress past the obstacle in question.

I Forgot can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

Osada

The Wild West. A place of hard-bitten cowboys, scalp-hunting natives and sleazy saloons. To survive in this outlaw land, a man had to be tough and ready to face any challenge that came his way. At any moment his head could float away, his tattoos could start dancing to the sound of a harmonica or he could find he’s been challenged to a deadly game of ping pong. Wait…what?

Fans of Amanita Design will be pleased to find that they have not been resting on their laurels. This brief offering, part game and part interactive music video, very much follows the surreal legacy of the classic Samorost. Whilst there is no overarching storyline, its varied scenes all have a Wild West theme and transition nicely from one to another. It would be fair to say, however, that the transitions are often as surreal as the interactive portions themselves. The graphics are done in Amanita’s trademark style, blending photographic images with colouring and cunning animations to create a world that’s simultaneously realistic and outlandish. The animations are smooth, a close-up of a real-looking tattooed arm being especially impressive. The game is entirely point-and-click, with the player doing nothing more than searching each scene for items to interact with. Actions (and their results) are often unpredictable, but fortunately the cursor changes to a pointing hand when positioned over a hotspot, and they are comfortably large enough that pixel hunting should not be a requirement. As well as trying to advance to the next scene, most screens allow you to add and subtract parts of the background music by clicking various on-screen items. This gives the opportunity to fully appreciate the “psychedelic country music” created by the Czech composer friend of the Amanita team, Šimon Ornest.

Osada can be played online at the developer’s website.

The Day That Nothing Happened

It’s been a thousand years since the town of Reality-on-the-Norm was founded, and great celebrations are planned. But historical research for the event by the zombie mayor Gower and his faithful aide, Death, has turned up a worrying prophecy. It is foretold that on the dawning of the one thousand and first year of Reality’s existence, all will fall. The only way to avert this disaster is if some brave soul can unite the Majestic MacGuffins. Rather than face this ordeal themselves, the pair enlist Mika Huy, intrepid reporter, for this momentous task. Will she be able to save Reality from its foretold doom?

This game from Creed Malay and Denzil Quixode was the winner of the monthly AGS competition in March. The theme was “Celebration”, with the stipulation that the game had to be based around Reality-on-the-Norm (RON), a shared AGS setting that reached its tenth anniversary recently. The graphics make extensive use of the freely available archive of ready-made characters and locations with the original RON look. As a result, many of these, and the cartoon style in which they are rendered, will be familiar to fans of the series. But whilst familiarity with the RON world undoubtedly enhances the experience, such background knowledge is not vital to play this game. The game uses the standard four-action point-and-click controls, and the quest for the MacGuffins is a humourous one with inventory use, dialogue and a mildly confusing but navigable maze marking the path to success. There is also a whack-a-mole-style minigame, though high accuracy appears not to be required to pass it. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a game put together so quickly, sound is limited to a few appropriate effects.

The Day That Nothing Happened can be downloaded from the RON website.

Reincarnation: A Taste of Evil

If you’ve ever thought fast food was evil, now there is proof. Someone has escaped from hell and been reincarnated as a fast food worker. As in the previous games of this black comedy series, Lucifer tasks his small purple minion to the job of retrieving this wayward miscreant. It’s time to order up a soul to take away.

Whilst this latest release from B Group Productions is one of their shorter “minis” rather than a full-blown episode, it still maintains the established production values of its predecessors. The cartoon graphics show the same attention to detail as always, from the sinister purple demon that you control to the not-much-less sinister individual he has been sent to retrieve. Animations are smooth, including background movement such as rotating air vents and idle animations like the demon blinking. The game is once again fully voiced, with the demon sounding as nasty and evil as in prior games. The other voices are equally well done, including an easter egg conversation found by experimenting with the in-game telephone. A suitably ominous background musical piece tops off proceedings. The puzzles are fairly simple, mostly involving inventory use, with only a single case that requires an action to be well-timed.