Indie Game Review - All of Our Friends are Dead

All of Our Friends Are Dead (2009, Indie)


Before the review starts, I just want to ask you to think about something for a second. Take any horror game, book, or movie. Think about "What makes X product scary?" Of course the answer is going to be different for everything (and every person!)

All of Our Friends Are Dead (or AOFAD from here on out)
is a 'sidescrolling horror' game, that is lots of sidescrolling, but no horror.
An average platformer that misses the beat on actual horror. So what's missing?



It's pixel graphics only come in a few colors, white, black and red.
An interesting style choice, that lends a very neat surrealist sense to the game.
It's 8-bit graphical style goes great with the color choices,
shining especially in the later stages. The aesthetic of the game shares something similar with Silent Hill,
using a 'decaying' world that becomes increasingly nonsensical as you progress, falling snow gives way to blood and writhing tentacles.
A world that becomes incomprehensible as you steadily progress, giving way to low beat 8-bit music that only slightly contributes to any sense of atmosphere.
Maybe though, this is where the game starts to fall apart, the fact that you know nothing about the game.
Why should you be afraid? You're playing as a character (mans?) you know nothing about, in a world that's similar. Imagine if a game like The Suffering was based on a similar principle.
Would the game still be scary if you knew nothing about your character, setting or why you were doing anything? Certainly, the occasionally disturbing looking enemy might give you a cheap fright
but the game would lack any sense of true horror.
As much as the game tries to send chills down your spine, or disturb with oddly designed enemies, cryptic text or strange surroundings, the game comes off less like
"What happens when an artist makes a videogame" (in the crea- 'artists' own words) and more like something an art school freshman might scribble about in a notebook.

Just because the game fails to be truly horror inspiring doesn't necessarily make it 'bad', It's still a fairly decent platformer just with wasted potential.
Much like Knytt or Seiklus, a lot of the focus on the gameplay is on more relaxed platforming, with a few trick jumps thrown here and there.
Enemies pose little threat, going down in just a few hits from your infinite ammo machine gun.

As stated earlier, a lot of the level design is based around 'disturbing' details, such as bloodied spikes or women tied to walls, an endless stream of moaning zombies.
Unfortunately, a majority of the deaths in the game come from being hit behind a wall by a projectile, or slipping a pixel off the edge of a platform when you land and careening into spikes.
Even with all of the blood, tentacles and bleeding hearts, there is hardly any tension from the actual gameplay and it really hurts the game.
AOFAD can be completed in about 30 minutes to an hour, depending on how long you take, even with the slightly nonlinear level structure.

You can certainly do a lot worse, but then again, we should all try to do better shouldn't we?


Game link:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=5395.0

Screenshot credit to AmonTillado26

Pick it up, Phones!

So I bought The World Ends With You (TWEWY) for short a few days back.
A bunch of people I know have it and have been bugging me to buy it for a little while so I finally did. Half expecting a let down I braced myself and found pretty much everything I expected...to be blown out of the water!

I'll do a post about it when I can finally put it down for more then five minutes >:{
srsly, best rpg for 2008.

Folklore

So I rented this for the PS3 the other day. I didn't know what to think of it, The cover had more colors then an acid trip but I grabbed it anyway.
Boy, was I in for a surprise.

Right off the bat I'm assaulted by some Burton-esque imagery as the game loads up. It hits the start screen and I feel like I'm about to play a videogame based on The Night Before Christmas. The wonderfully rendered CGI cutscene at the beginning of the game introduces us to our two key characters, Ellen (a teenage whore that nobody likes and her mother died) and Keats (a total badass reporter for an occult magazine who approaches things with heavy science and skepticism.) The game centers around the mysterious village in southern Ireland of Doolin, where apparently you can meet the dead. Ellen goes there to try and meet her mother and find out why she left, and Keats goes there after receiving a mysterious phone call. At the beginning of each chapter, you're allowed to pick to play as either Ellen or Keats. Certain decisions made in while playing as either character affect the other characters game, which is kind of neat.

PROLOGUE/CHAPTER 1: FLESHRUM (Keats)
I'll try and leave out spoilers. Keats and Ellen show up at the town, Keats and Ellen find some girl on a cliff who dies or something. Play the game.

Really, what I find most interesting about this is how very similar it is to Silent Hill.
In Folklore, the 'real' world is a run down, dilapidated and mostly abandoned village, filled with secrets. The 'real' world sections play out like a cross between an Adventure game and an interactive movie. You walk around and talk to people, cross referencing information, interrogating and receiving items and clues about what's going on in the village. It has sort of a Horror game tone about it, the run down setting and the people of the village hiding many secrets. However, once you obtain a specific type of item you can return to your characters 'base' and go to sleep until nightfall, where the more fantastical nature of the game begins.

At nighttime, the pub is inhabited by a variety of Otherworldly creatures. A small, talking, anthropomorphic Scottish rat and a Welsh Twin-Headed-Tin man to a skeleton with glass eyes names Dave. They bridge the two worlds of the game, the 'Normal world' and the 'Netherworld' By dropping off the items you receive during the game at a set of Stonehenge like ruins a portal opens up and takes you to this 'Netherworld'. The first one you visit is the Faery world, populated by, obviously - Faeries, but a vicious manner of creature created from the the thoughts of the dead called 'Folk'. This is where the main portion of the game takes place as either character. Each time you kill a new 'Folk' you can Absorb their 'Id' and use them as you will (Assigning them to any of the Square, X, O and Triangle buttons) They can be used as everything to shields, swords, and Devastating cannon attacks. The need to level up and collect all of the Folk give the game a certain 'Pokemon' Element.

Combat is fast and furious, depending heavily on how well you can use the currently assigned Folks strengths. Each folk has a variety of tasks that must be accomplished before they level up, from absorbing more of the same type to using a specific type of item on them. I'd like to continue this review right now, but I'm only a quarter of the way through it.

One thing you immediately notice when you play the game is it's use of a fantastic color palette. Don't go looking for any muddled grays or browns, Each location is a colorful and vivid dream-like landscape.

So far:

+ Great Burton-esque visuals for each realm. From the colorful Faeryworld to the ruined (albeit cartoonish) city of Warcadia.
+Fantastic character design. Belgae is the coolest guy around.
+Wonderful combat. The ability to have an ever changing selection of attack possibilities keep it from being repetitive.
+A great setting. The staggering difference between the two 'worlds' is amazing and gives the game quite a bit of depth and character.

I'll post a bit more about it once I get through the game more. So far I've only been playing Keats portion of the game.

(The art used in this post is taken from the fantastic art at http://tln.jakou.com/)

WANTED is absolute trash.

You know, there's this funny thing about comic books anymore. Lots of people say 'Comics are for Adults' well, the absolute negation of that statement is in the 'Graphic Novel' WANTED.
I'm not going to raise any points about the storyline or anything. The book is sort of like Fight Club, but with crappier writing and more guns.
The book is 'Adult' because it has extreme violence, tits and lots of the word "Fuck."
Oh, yes. There's also a homage to Clayface (The batman villain) except he's made of shit.

Yes, you've read that right. A homage to Clayface except he's made of SHIT.
Supposedly the comic was made (I hear, anyway) as an adult answer to the teenage power fantasies read by thirteen to seventeen year olds that flood the comic book market.
The thing is, the only people that like extreme gore, vulgarity and nudity (Don't forget shit monsters!) are, well, thirteen year olds.

I hate this website

So I was reading Kotaku a few months ago and they linked to this website written by a guy who may or may not be british.
The first thing I notice and the only thing I actually like about the website is the fact that the layout is superb, It's a video game review site that's actually pleasing to look at (I'm looking at you, 1up)
The other thing I noticed immediately is the horrible quality of the writing. The writer(s?)
All have the same generic snarky and narcissistic holier-then-thou attitude that seems to permeate most of the blogosphere now.
I sort of dismissed it when I was reading through one of the reviews, but I couldn't really exactly tell what he was talking about in the review in question from the constant run on sentences and convoluted language. It almost seemed liked the people running the website don't actually enjoy playing videogames (much less writing about them!)

Speaking of new games!

New games

The general consensus from game related news outlets and the people that so passionately follow their every single word, is that Grand Theft Auto IV is fantastic, so is Crisis Core, and The World Ends With You

There is a slight problem here, one, being that people like me wont be able to play these games for months. I guess it comes down to me being too lazy to get a job, or find decent work around here.

Point is! Most massive media outlets don't take into consideration the piss poor gamer that's left either suffering with utter crap from the bargain bin or old classics. It's reaching a point when just about everyone in the world has played the old classics, so I guess I've finally started turning to freeware. I wouldn't really consider it 'desperate' because I discovered recently that free games are often better then commercial ones.
I usually try to come out with some point in this posts, but really I'm just mad that I can't play Crisis Core
]: