Following Freeware: May 2014 releases

This month you can take an insane role-playing game character through a most unusual rendition of Hamlet. You could also visit another Age in a fan-made game set in the Myst universe, or simply travel to a remote island in search of a lost tribe. Alternatively, you might go on a quest to find a pot of gold before a kingdom falls into ruin, or simply try to make the greatest sandwich the world has ever seen. All these await in this month’s round-up of releases from the freeware scene.
 

RoonSehv

You find yourself in a landscape full of sand dunes. A faint sun is just visible through the clouds of sand that are blown about by the hard wind. Wondering how you got here, and where ‘here’ actually is, you start exploring your surroundings. Soon you find some dilapidated remnants of civilization. Looking further, you discover a letter in which you are told that a collapse has happened, and that Ri’Jane is waiting for you in the Age of RoonSehv. Getting there will take some serious puzzle-solving, however.

The Myst series is still popular with a crowd of dedicated fans, some of whom have created games with new Ages. RoonSehv, by Babel Studio, is one such game. It’s still a work in progress but the beautiful demo released shows immense promise. The game is basically an Age in the Uru universe, played in first-person, full 3D and looking like it was made in the Cyan studios. It even has a sort of Cleft, complete with a windmill on top of the steep walls that surround it. Everything is designed with care and has beautiful textures. The environment is not static either: there are leaves floating through the air, a flag flaps in the desert, and a fast-flowing river sprays where it hits rocks in its path. The windmill even casts shadows on the rocks in the Cleft. Buttons you press and switches you flip have the proper ‘Mysty’ look. The sounds are very familiar too: beautiful music, similar to the score you hear in the Myst Ages, plays in the Cleft, and suitable sound effects are heard when you flip switches or walk through a shallow pond, etc.

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Walking around is achieved using the ZQSD keys. Because Denis Martin is French and uses an AZERTY keyboard, this means that the forward and backward keys are swapped on a regular QWERTY keyboard, but in practice it doesn’t matter much. Looking around is done using the mouse, and the mouse is very sensitive, which makes the field of view change a bit abruptly every time you use it. A built-in damping mechanism in the final game would be quite welcome. The cursor is always in the middle of the screen and starts pulsating when hovered over an item you can click on to do something with. The demo contains a few puzzles which are on par with those that inspired them. As in all Myst games, solving puzzles requires you to take in many details of your surroundings, read the texts that you come across and then manipulate machinery to get it working and to open doors. Some of the puzzles are simple but others are quite hard, yet they all fit very well in the game.

All in all, RoonSehv is a commendable, well-executed effort in recapturing the spirit of the old Myst, and the Uru games in particular. Denis Martin keeps a developer’s blog in which he shows the progress he and his staff make with the game. There is already much more material than the demo shows, so let’s hope the finished game will be released in the not-too-distant future.

The RoonSehv demo can be downloaded from the official website.

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Oceanspirit Danish

The king is dead and Denlet, Prince of Menmark (it’s like Denmark, only manlier) has returned home. His uncle, Hansius, seems pleased enough to see the prince, but something is stinky in the state of Menmark. A ghost haunts the battlements, and there are suggestions of foul play afoot. Denlet, Scourge of the Underworld, must take up his spiky haircut and ludicrously over-sized sword and hunt down the perpetrator. With more than a touch of the Oceanspirit about him, there may be less Shakespearean poetry, and more ridiculously named sword moves in this play.

Oceanspirit Dennis, the AGS community’s Final Fantasy parody character, is taken in a whole new direction by Crystal Shard. This game takes Dennis through a version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, though it is fair to say that the action, if not the overall story, somewhat diverges from the original. The game takes place around a handful of locations in and near the royal castle of Menmark. The castle itself is rendered in a light, semi-realistic cartoon fashion, though the sun and the moon are more stylised. The characters are realistically proportioned, though the same cannot be said for Denlet’s spiky hair and a sword his own height. Only Denlet himself is fully animated, with other characters sliding around, though Orfeelya’s sweeping dress hides her feet anyway. The background music is an overly dramatic piece, full of trumpets and sweeping swings, to match the tone of the game.

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For the most part, the game is navigated by one-click mouse control. When the cursor is pointed at an object or feature you can interact with, a text marker appears. Mostly this command is just to look, though the actual wording varies from object to object, and even changes on individual objects when you re-enter a scene. You can gaze at, regard, glimpse and view much of the scenery. Most of these options produce dialogue that is either actually Shakespeare, or at least a fair facsimile thereof. Clicking on Denlet himself gives the command “check pockets”, allowing access to inventory. The story is surreal, with many of the characters appearing to be the same person in different outfits, though they will strenuously deny any resemblance each time. You will use a small amount of inventory to uncover the truth behind your father’s death and avenge him. At various points you will also fight different characters. This is accomplished by drawing various shapes on the screen, recorded in a book in the inventory, which cause Denlet to execute different fighting moves. Each fight gets more difficult as you progress through the game, so reasonable dexterity will be required of any player wishing to see the end.

Oceanspirit Danish can be downloaded from the AGS website.