Following Freeware – October 2014 releases

Willem’s Winners
 

A Day at the Library

A Day at the Library, by Carmel Games, is the sequel to last month’s Sweet Revenge. After his adventure with the candy shop in the first episode, Crazy Dad has become even wonkier in the head than before, and on doctor’s orders has found himself a nice quiet job in the library. Unfortunately for him, the library has free Wi-Fi, which means it is filled with teens playing games on their iPads and generally being a nuisance. So now Dad has his hands full getting rid of the kids.

Although the game is short, it is quite funny and presented in the professional, cartoony style we’ve come to expect from this developer. Crazy Dad’s eyes roll about in their sockets while he grimaces from sheer craziness, most of the kids look and act like real obnoxious teenagers, and the whole environment radiates a wackiness even greater than in the ‘normal’ Carmel Games titles. As always, the world is presented in colorful, detailed screens in which everything is a bit crooked and almost no lines are parallel or even straight. The voice acting is superb, with Dad having a hard time making normal sentences and the kids talking like teens do. All spoken text is subtitled in one of the seven languages that you can choose from at the beginning of the game. Of course there are good sound effects and in the background there is a nice but repetitive, ever-present musical score, though you can turn the latter off.

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The one-button, point-and-click interface that Carmel Games uses in all its games is also present here. The puzzles are almost all inventory-based and not very hard, but they are logical and well designed. The solutions Crazy Dad comes up with to reach his goal are worthy of a true adventurer. Some of the objects he uses include glass shards and a bomb, and he removes the kids without any regard for private or public property, ensuring that they will never come back. However, none of the kids are really hurt during the game.

A Day at the Library can be played online at Epic Break.

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Memories of a Snake

Memories of a Snake, by Marion, is a full-length fan game that tells the story of the well-known Harry Potter character Salazar Slytherin from his birth almost to his death. The game shows how and why Hogwarts was built, and what happened to Salazar after that. We learn why he hates Muggles, and how his early youth made him the man he was when Hogwarts was built. Players will help him build the Chamber of Secrets, breed a Basilisk, and much later you will find him back in the rebuilt castle of his parents.

Memories of a Snake is presented in third-person format using backgrounds lifted from Sierra’s King’s Quest and Quest for Glory series, and they do indeed look very much like the mid-nineties Sierra games. They also do their job very well: the castle where Salazar grows up is dark and gloomy; the neighboring Muggle town is also a bit dark because its inhabitants are afraid of the wizard in the castle, but Hogsmeade is a cheerful town painted in bright colors. In many screens you see people or animals walking around, going about their business, with water flowing and birds flying or sitting on branches, all of which give the game a lively feel. The music, offering a wide variety of tunes, fits the situations you encounter very well. The other sounds are also well done, including the likes of a crackling fire and the footsteps of people walking or voices talking in the background. There is almost no voice acting other than when people talk to snakes. All dialogue is shown as text on the screen, with a different color for each character.

The game uses a simple two-button mouse interface with the inventory at the bottom of the screen. Right-clicking on an object tells you something about it; left-clicking lets Salazar interact with the object. The game contains a mix of fetching, inventory, spellcasting and conversation puzzles. Most of the puzzles are not hard but they all fit neatly into the story. The game was originally made in French, leading to the occasional translation issue, but this is never really a problem. What is a problem is that the game contains a nasty bug: after Salazar rebuilds his castle he can’t travel to either Hogwarts or Hogsmeade anymore because the game either crashes (Hogwarts) or prevents Salazar from returning to his castle afterwards (Hogsmeade). Fortunately, if you keep that in mind the game is perfectly playable to the end. Here and there Memories of a Snake is a bit slow, but it’s definitely worth playing if you are a Harry Potter fan.

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Memories of a Snake can be downloaded from the AGS website.

(Editor’s note: If it seems like we covered this same game a year ago, well, we did. We blame it on a Confundus charm. But hey, you can never have enough Potter, and – hey, look over there… Obliviate!)