Following Freeware – May 2015 releases

Willem’s Winners

A Matter of Caos: Episode 4

Mr. Gilbert, the purple-tentacled protagonist of Expera Game Studio’s excellent mystery adventure, stars one last time in the series finale of A Matter of Caos. Having rescued Daphne, the girl he was looking for in the first three episodes, now he wants to find out who was after her and why. During his search for answers, he gets hold of an item Daphne had hidden, which, when used in the right ritual will destroy the world. Of course he wants to prevent that, which brings him into contact once more with most of the friends and foes he’s made already in this case, as well as with a very angry woman.

Technically and aesthetically, nothing has changed since the last episode. The world is still presented in not-very-detailed black and white screens using pseudo-first-person viewpoints, while the music, which was specially composed for this series, is still effectively dark and the few sound effects feel authentic. Clicking colorful icons takes Gilbert to new locations, provides a description of the object or person highlighted, or places an item in inventory, located at the bottom of the screen. Items in inventory are brightly colored, and an icon allows you to examine them in more detail. In the top right is an icon that gives access to Gilbert’s thoughts, which sometimes help to solve puzzles.

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The puzzles are once again a mix of inventory and dialogue challenges. Amongst the challenges Mr. Gilbert faces in this episode are preventing someone from killing him by saying the right things, releasing someone from a container, and creating confusion in the casino without attracting attention to himself. Unfortunately there is one crucial puzzle that I found very hard to solve. You have to align certain things in the puzzle, but they are hard to make out and what the final pattern is supposed to be is very hard to tell. I “solved” it by random clicking until suddenly the scene changed. But apart from this particular puzzle, all obstacles in A Matter of Caos are well thought out and fit perfectly in the story.

As with the earlier episodes, the series finale is unsuitable for kids due to its mature subject matter. You can once again opt for a short overview of what happened prior to the start of this game, but it’s highly recommended to play the whole series from the beginning. You won’t see many new people in this installment, as most of your interactions will be with Gilbert’s remaining friends and foes. This episode contains quite a lot of funny references to other games, movies and internet memes. The story stays as good as ever right until the end, and wraps up very nicely, leaving no loose ends. Overall, the four episodes of A Matter of Caos collectively make the best freeware adventure game I’ve played in the last six months by far.

A Matter of Caos: Episode 4 can be played online at Kongregate.

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Doomsday

You are an assistant scientist working in a lab. You’re not very busy when the lead scientist suddenly announces that he has missed a BIG meteor coming towards the Earth. He needs you to find some people and equipment – including a flux capacitor – to change its course so it will pass by harmlessly. But that’s not all: you only have four minutes to find everything!

Doomsday, by faroreforelorn, is a short game but quite well made. Presented in a third-person overhead view, the game world is limited to the lab, a diner, a bit of the street and a grocery store. All of these locations, plus the people and objects that inhabit them, are drawn in a simple, blocky style in bright colors. The people are reasonably detailed, however: the scientists have glasses and a lab coat on, a homeless man shifts his eyes like a lunatic, and everyone bobs their heads in a funny way. On the upper right side of the screen the meteor is shown, drawing closer and closer to the Earth. If that isn’t stressful enough, the action is accompanied by bombastic music that makes you want to hurry even more. There are no voices or even sound effects in Doomsday. All spoken text appears at the bottom of the screen.

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The keyboard-only interface is simple: you move the girl with the arrow keys and interact with hotspots and call up the inventory with the V and Tab keys, respectively. You don’t need to take things out of the inventory to use them, as the game chooses the correct inventory item when necessary. Getting the stuff you need is quite a quest, however: you have to help the police solve a crime, get a small engine fixed, and find a substitute for the flux capacitor, amongst other tasks. This all involves more talking and running than our dapper scientist girl expected, but makes for a fun game that is very replayable because you will most likely fail to get everything you need in time during the first few playthroughs. The ending is a bit unexpected but scientifically correct.

Doomsday can be played online at Newgrounds.

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Camp 1

At a mineral prospecting prison camp, pilot and inmate Korski has worked long enough at the drill site and is preparing his final ground-to-orbit cargo shipment. After this flight he will be allowed to go home. Korski is happy to be leaving the dreaded place. Camp 1 is not a nice place to be: it is cold, always dark, and all the people are bald due to the high radiation levels. Naturally, because they are all inmates, the people there don’t trust each other very much either. Unfortunately, Korski crashes just minutes after takeoff, and after making it back to the camp on foot, he finds his colleagues dead or gone. Now he has to find out what happened, and he soon discovers that things in Camp 1 were even worse than he thought.

The engaging adventure Camp 1, by Waxwing Games, is played in third-person mode. Its pixel art locations, limited to the camp, the space ship interior, a snowy plain and the insides of some of the tents, are dimly lit by artificial light and extremely muted in limited color. Most often you will just hear the whirr of machinery or the sound of the wind in the background, but sometimes classical music is played, partly lightening the mood of this fairly somber and silent game. There is no voice acting; all text is shown in an oblong box at the top of the screen, and spoken dialogue is accompanied by a stylized portrait of the person speaking.

The inventory and button for Korski’s notes are in the lower part of the screen. Left-clicking an environmental object or inventory item lets Korski pick it up or interact with it, and right-clicking causes him to tell you something about it. You’ll have do a lot of different things to bring this mid-length adventure to completion. For instance, you must construct a transmitter to send an SOS signal, get a form signed by all four remaining members of Camp 1, and bypass a deep gorge using nothing but a malfunctioning crane, all without knowing exactly who to trust. Overcoming these objectives involves an eclectic mix of inventory and machinery puzzles. Many of them are challenging, so you have to really pay attention to little details to solve them all. Apart from a bit of pixel hunting, however, the puzzles are all very well integrated and don’t hold up the game just for the sake of puzzling. A lack of personality in all the characters, including Korski, makes playing this game a bit of a detached experience, but otherwise Camp 1 is a solid adventure that will take quite a bit of brain power to finish.

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Camp 1 can be downloaded from Indie DB.