A mysterious adventure

Matthew Cangelosi’s A Curious Nightfall is a short platformer about a young girl who finds a mysterious pouch dropped by a bird. When she attempts to discover its contents, the earth beneath her cracks open and she falls into a mysterious world. She then sets out to return the bag to its rightful owner.

Unlike most platform games, there’s very little gameplay here. Most of the time the player will find herself wandering about, jumping over large stones and climbing ledges of different heights. There are very few objects to interact with, and most, if not all, of them have no effect either on the plot or on the gameplay.

But perhaps that’s not what the author intended.

Playing through A Curious Nightfall felt like watching Saturday morning cartoons when I was still a young kid, fascinated by the pretty pictures. A few more touches would have been nice – the transition between the girl crouching and crawling could have been smoother, and animation for the girl climbing down from ledges would also have been nice. Other than that, the animation was pretty gorgeous. It’s almost as if the author actually studied how a young girl moves.

The other thing to look forward to was the equally gorgeous soundtrack, made by “Flashygoodness” who also contributed music to a game called “Tower of Heaven.”

For these two reasons alone, A Curious Nightfall can be a fascinating experience. Grab a copy from the mirrors listed here.

That effin’ punk

Playing through the AGS One Room-One Week (OROW) competition entries reminds me of that point in Samurai Showdown IV where the characters expends more than 75% of his life bars in order to gain more power. Some of the games produced in the comp have been pretty astounding, to say the least.

Take, for example, By the Numbers by Aki Ahonen.

The player takes on the role of Lieutenant Timothy Orman, a police officer who’s not afraid of using other means necessary to get the truth. The game puts you in the interrogation with an architect who claims he witnessed one of the women getting kidnapped just outside his office.

Unlike other point-and-click games, however, By the Numbers zeroes in more on the conversations Orman needs to get into with the witness to save the current victim. There isn’t much interaction apart from selecting, say, which location the witness worked in or how the girl was kidnapped. Pretty airtight story.

What makes the game interesting is the acting.

The game features “motion-captured” facial gestures (using vector graphics) during the conversations between Orman and the witness, which, coupled with full voice acting, renders the facial expressions as realistic as possible. (The whole process is explained in this short “Making Of” video the author made.)

It’s a short game, yes, but for a 7-day game, the effort was well worth it. So it was no surprise when the game won 1st place in all the OROW VI categories.

Give it a try here. (Mediafire mirror)

Cryptozookeeper released

Necrotic Drift and Fallacy of Dawn author Robb Sherwin has finally released his latest piece called Cryptozookeeper.

Sherwin describes the game in an early interview as “basically a cross between Monster Rancher, Zork, and a good call on Coast-to-Coast AM.”

The game can be downloaded from the Internet Archive. It’s a hefty one at around 600MB (mostly because of the graphics and the music files).

Pow. Zoom.

Today I am resurrected to bring some good news from the interactive fiction front.

Andrew “Zarf” Plotkin’s Hadean Lands project on Kickstarter has went over the top in, as he himself reported it, Day 1. Seriously.

There’s some interesting discussion going on over at Emily Short’s blog, too.

The Operative Word is “Extreme”

Darius Poyer’s rein is a really short point-and-click adventure made in AGS where you play as one of the staff working in a secret research facility called Fraxtor 21. The story starts with the entire building collapsing around you, so you run and try to escape.

I’m going to start off with a warning: the game is extremely short. Shorter than, say, A Cure for the Common Cold, or probably even most of Ben Chandler’s games. I’ll explain a bit further, but first, the good stuff.

The game’s graphics were executed fairly well, comparable to the ones used in Croshaw’s Chzo Mythos games (5 Days A Stranger, etc.). There aren’t many objects to interact with, but the ones included in the game did suffice.

Most, if not all, of the puzzles can be solved pretty much by trial and error, and they are not very difficult to solve, either. The game also provides a handy “autosave” feature whenever you enter a new room, which lets you continue even when your character has met her untimely end.

Rein‘s soundtrack wasn’t as cut-out for the game as it should have been. The music was appropriately depressing given the story, but there were times when it didn’t really felt as urgent as it should have been.

This leads to the game’s other particular shortcoming (pun not intended): its length. Most short games, despite their shortness, are able to provide the player the sense of actually completing the game’s story. All the possibilities are neatly tied up at the end. Maybe it’s just me, but I couldn’t help thinking the game had been ended prematurely. Or perhaps, it’s hard to “root” for the player character because there wasn’t much time for characterization in the first place (the building is collapsing, no time for chit-chat).

Considering it was completed in under 2 weeks, rein is not a bad game. Whether the author makes a sequel or not, I’m looking forward to more of his games.