Free and Worth Every Penny - Issue 85: Deity

Oh, this is a treat.  Every once in awhile a game just shows up out of nowhere, grabs me by the throat, and won't let go until I finish it.  When the game is free, it's even better.

What if I told you that somebody had taken the isometric perspective of Diablo, the sneaky murdering of Assassin's Creed, and the bouncing-madly-between-enemies combos of Arkham Asylum, and blended them all together into one experience?  Would you want to play that?  I'd want to play that.  Good news!  We can.

Brought to us by the brilliant students over at Digipen, Deity is "a stealth action game" controlled entirely by use of the mouse.  Far from being a simplified or dumbed-down affair, though, it will tax both your brain and your reflexes with its deliberately limited control scheme.  There isn't much in the way of plot, but the basics are these:  you're a creature of darkness, harmed by light but capable of shifting effortlessly and unseen through shadow.  Your homeland's been invaded by legions of enemies, and you need to sneak through an occupied castle to take down their leader.  If you have to take down a bunch of grunts along the way, well, there's no harm in that, is there.

Those guards will never know what hit them.

Basic movement is standard Diablo-style click-to-run, but that's a great way to get killed fast, as anyone who sees you on the ground will start attacking you immediately.  Luckily, your specialty happens to be hiding incorporeal in the flames of torches, and (like the gargoyles in the aforementioned Arkham Asylum) they're all over the place.  Right-click a torch, and you'll jump to it, changing its color and hiding your presence.  If there's another nearby, you can jump from torch to torch, covering large distances almost instantly.

This also forms the first half of the combat mechanic;  attack a guard from behind from a hidden position, and you'll instantly kill them as well as regain some health.  (Claiming a torch for the first time also gives you a health boost.)  Attack a guard from the front, though, and you'll take damage.  Careful timing is paramount to success.

The second, more interesting half of combat comes from your ability to "chain" together a number of jumps before needing to get back to a safe place to hide.  Hold the right mouse button and left-click, and you'll set a chain waypoint, of which you have a limited supply.  (Three at first, more as you progress through the game.)  Any guard you hit in the chain will be killed instantly, without damage to you, even if you attack from the front.  Gargoyles scattered around the level can be incorporated in your chain jumps as well for tactical advantage and extra distance, though you may not rest on them.

Torch > Guard > Torch.  One less enemy, and no-one the wiser.

Chains replenish over time, and using a chain triggers a slow-motion effect to help you plan your moves precisely.  Any guard left alive after a chain will start attacking you, so isolating and eliminating groups is key.  As the game progresses, each level becomes a freeform combat puzzle, working out how to take down the guards without being spotted and killed.  Jump to torch.  Chain to gargoyle, guard #1, guard #2, and back to torch.  Wait for next patrol, then chain to guard #3, guard #4, gargoyle, back to torch.  Move on.  It feels great when you get the hang of it, and complications like well lit (therefore deadly) areas and invincible winged guards patrolling the halls keep things from getting too repetitive.

Also protecting against repetition is the length, which is very short - really the only negative thing I have to say about the game.  It's the work of less than an hour or so on Normal;  I haven't tried Hard yet, so it may provide more of a challenge, but the boss fight at the end was twitchy enough on Normal to make me less than eager to find out.

If you'd like to see how it looks in action, well, here you are:

Regardless of its brevity, I can't recommend downloading Deity enough.  Creative, slick and satisfying, it brings to mind some of my favorite games while still being a little different from anything else I've played this year.  Digipen frequently delivers stuff worth checking out (remember Igneous?  If you never played Igneous, go check that out too), and this is a great example of what they can do at their best.

Deity is...

• a great implementation of stealth gameplay in an isometric perspective.
• fast-moving and challenging with extremely simple controls.
• further proof that Digipen is a force for good in the world of gaming.
• over too quickly, but it speaks well of it that I want more.

A little less than 200MB for the installer, Windows only;  pick it up here.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers.  This piece also appears there.  If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.

Videogame Music Fans, Take Note.

First of all, if you've somehow never made your way to OCRemix, head on over right now and lose hours of your time.  There's some truly fantastic work available there, all for free.  Every flavor of musical interpretation you could ask for, from chiptune to big band to slow jazz to heavy metal.

Right now, though, I want to call your attention to "25 Year Legend", the album they've just released in honor of the 25th Anniversary of The Legend of Zelda.

I've loved the Zelda series for about 20 of those 25 years, and the overworld music from Link to the Past has a permanent spot in my heart as the most iconic videogame song ever written.  It's just a magnificent piece of music.

"25 Year Legend" includes new takes on songs from Link to the Past, Link's Adventure, Ocarina of Time, Link's Awakening, Wind Waker, Majora's Mask, and the newest game Skyward Sword, written by a very diverse group of composers.  Not every song on it is an out-of-the-park hit, but it's a delightful variety, an obvious labor of love, and free.  If you have any affection for videogame music, please, go check it out.

Free and Worth Every Penny - Issue 84: 8-Bit Halloween

It's been awhile since I've done a Free and Worth Every Penny installment, but Halloween seemed an excellent time to resurrect this feature (see what I did there?  ...sorry), and I can't think of a better way to do it than with my favorite type of freeware:  a retro-themed, hard-as-nails side scrolling platformer.  Welcome to...

This is as straightforward as they come, folks.  You're intrepid hero Jackie Gun.  (Yes.)  It's Halloween, and you're trapped in a graveyard with a bunch of ghouls, ghosts, spirits, specters, and so on.  Help five trapped friendly Caspers escape from their imprisonment, and you'll be free to leave.  Go.

If you don't feel like reading, the trailer is going to tell you 90% of what you need to know.  Take a look.

Yes, that is Vampire Killer from the Castlevania series playing in the background.  It also plays in the game, constantly.  Ordinarily, I might rankle a bit at having music ripped from a commercial series plopped into a freeware title, but being as this is a clearly themed homage and Vampire Killer is some of the best videogame music of all time, I'm gonna let it slide.  If it bothers you, you won't miss much by turning the volume down.

The gameplay is extremely barebones (heh.  bare bones.  on Hallow-- sorry again), giving you no more options than you'd expect if you were playing this on the Gameboy it's built to resemble.  You can run, jump, and shoot.  That's it.  No items to collect, just coins for score and the extremely rare health pickup.  No areas to unlock.  Just one big map, a whole lot of enemies, and you.

There are some secret areas, though, which is a nice touch.

For all its simplicity, it's pretty brutal.  You can take five hits before you're done for, that's all.  No continues, no checkpoints.  You clear this puppy in one try or you start from scratch.  And you'll only find one of those precious health pickups when you free one of the five hidden spirits, so don't count on them to save you.  Luckily, the game controls well and enemies telegraph their attacks and move in patterns, so it really is just a matter of learning what to expect and then executing well.

Still, you'll see the Game Over screen a lot.  It isn't a terribly long game - it's all one interconnected map, no branching paths or doors - so that's a frustration I can deal with, but I certainly would have appreciated a checkpoint after saving each spirit, or at least an Easy Mode with that option.  What can I say, I'm getting soft in my old age.

This is not a game trying to hide its influences.

There are a couple of minor gameplay problems that need mentioning.  Hit boxes are a little bigger than you think they are at first, leading to some initial frustration as you learn how much room you need to give enemies.  You need to press X every time you want to fire, which led to me getting out Pinnacle Game Profiler and setting up a rapid fire profile pretty quickly.

For all the minor kvetching I'm doing, though, I had a good time with 8-Bit Halloween.  Lionsoft has put together a tight, fun little side scroller with pleasing Gameboy-inspired visuals, classic music, and well-worn but reliable mechanics.  Just the thing to burn through on a late night as the last trick-or-treaters ring your doorbell.  Happy Halloween, everybody!

8-Bit Halloween is...

• a game that wears its influences proudly on its sleeve.  And steals its music outright.
• still creative enough in other ways, with challenging level design and an amusingly silly, intentionally throwaway conceit.
• maybe a little too happy to kill you, but that's kind of in the spirit of the holiday, isn't it?
• probably largely forgettable, but worth a spin if you want a little retro Halloween gaming.

Windows only, under 5MB, download it right here.

BONUS FOR READING THIS FAR!  This is not free, but man is it close and it's totally worth every penny.  The Humble Indie Bundle is doing something new:  you can get in on the alpha (and all subsequent versions) of the incredible-looking top-down shooter Voxeltron by paying any amount you want!  You should do this.  Because it's great.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers.  This piece also appears there.  If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.

That Didn't Take Long.

So, it turns out the game I wanted to write about was waiting literally right around the corner.  Which is not to say that I haven't played a lot of good indie titles in the last couple of months - I have, and a few of them I'm hoping to record a podcast about real soon.  But they're also getting a lot of coverage elsewhere; this one, I didn't hear about anywhere until I was watching the trailer and then buying and playing the game.

I should be up front before I start talking about it: I have a thing for rhythm games.  I'm not particularly good at rhythm games, especially Dance Dance Revolution-style ones (which will be ironic in a minute), but I find them fascinating and deeply satisfying to play, even on the low and medium difficulty settings that I usually end up stuck at.

Sequence is a rhythm-based jRPG.  You can view the trailer at the linked Steam page, but I'll embed it here as well for your convenience.

You'll notice watching the trailer that the developer trades on their sense of humor a bit, and that definitely comes through in the game's writing (a blessing in my book, because if there's anything I don't want to do it's play a taking-itself-too-seriously jRPG).  But it's the game's mechanics that set it apart from anything I've played recently, so that's primarily what I want to talk about.

As you can gather from the video, this is "Rhythm RPG" the way Puzzle Quest is "Puzzle RPG", in that they've taken an existing tried-and-true gameplay genre (DDR-formula pattern matching) and tossed an RPG layer on top of it.  Honestly, for $5 I probably would have been pretty happy with that, especially given that the music is catchy and the story at least marginally compelling.  But the battle system they've devised hooked me enough to pull several hours from my schedule in the last 24 that I really didn't have to give it, and it deserves explanation.

You don't play this DDR clone on one note track, you play it on three.  One is your defensive shield; miss a note here, and you'll take damage.  Another is your mana generator; there's no penalty for missing notes on this panel, but every note you hit generates a bit of mana, used to fire off spells.  The third is for successfully casting those spells; every time you want to attack (or heal, or use any of the other abilities you gain throughout the game) you'll need to succeed at a note sequence.  Mess it up, and the spell fails, wasting the mana for it and making it inaccessible until it recharges.

This fairly simple division of the combat into three unique tasks means you're always splitting your time as a strategic resource, trying to figure out which panel is going to give you the greatest reward.  You don't want to ignore the defensive panel or you'll start taking heavy damage, but if those notes come while you're trying to pull off a spell in the casting panel, that's a tradeoff you might make.  You'll spend your downtime in the mana generator building up your reserves, but ending a battle faster increases your XP multiplier at the end so you don't want to burn too much time there.  It's constantly engaging without (so far, a few hours in) ever becoming too frantic to handle, and it's based on solid rhythm game mechanics that I already enjoyed anyway - combined, it's a huge win.

The story's alright.  I can't say I'm exactly engrossed in it, but the writing has moments of genuine wit, the voice acting is pretty decent, and the character art has some personality, in a "this is an anime-styled jRPG" sort of way.  The whole thing is aesthetically pleasing, really, through visuals and music both.  The RPG mechanics outside of combat are what you'd expect: level up through battling to increase stats; craft items, weapons and armor using drops from your enemies; grind your way through a level to get the necessary ingredients to proceed; repeat.  So much so boring if the combat itself wasn't fun to do, but I had enough fun grinding through battles last night to completely lose track of time, so I'm not knocking it for that.

And it's $5.  Five dollars.  Less than that if you get it while it's on special on Steam.  It's crazy - literally insane - to think that Duke Nukem Forever released at ten times the cost of this game (though of course you'll be able to find that one in cereal boxes soon enough).  Go check it out.  Sadly there's no demo at this point, but again.  Guys.  Five bucks.  I love you, indie developers.

Blowing off the Cobwebs

I've let this place get a bit dusty, haven't I.  Sorry about that.

Life got a little crazy over the last couple of months - well, crazier than usual, it's been a crazy year - and I just haven't felt much like writing about games.  I've still played a few, and managed to knock out a couple of podcast episodes over at Immortal Machines, including an interview with the writer of Bastion that I'm really proud of.  (Bastion is utterly fantastic, by the way, and if you haven't played it, you should.  It will undoubtedly end up in my list of the year's favorite games.)  More of that's on the way, I hope - I'm working my way through the last part of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and want to record an episode all about that; also, there's been a weird surge of indie tower defense variants that I want to do an IndieCast about.

But there hasn't been much writing, and I do feel bad about that.  Like exercise, it's a habit that can be hard to restart once you've let it lapse, and it seems to get harder the longer you let it go.

There's a lot of big AAA titles right around the corner, of course - Battlefield 3, Skyrim, the PC version of Arkham City, the PC version of LA Noire - and I may wind up having something to say about those.  Torchlight II continues to torture us with its lack of a release date, but they seem pretty adamant that it'll be out this year, so by definition it must be coming soon.  It's been a very good year to love games, both small- and large-scale.

You know what I've actually been playing this week, though?  Mage Gauntlet on my iPhone.

I don't talk much about iPhone games on here, maybe because I feel like they get covered pretty well by the internet at large already; between TouchArcade, SlideToPlay and following the right folks on Twitter it's hard to miss a good release (and there are so many that I could never keep up).  In fact, even with Mage Gauntlet, rather than try to review it I'll just point you to the review over on STP, because it says pretty much everything I would.  It's a game that'll hit a really sweet spot for anyone with fond memories of 16-bit action RPG's, but I think it's worth checking out for anyone with an iDevice.  I will leave this trailer here for you to check out, because everybody loves trailers.

So if you've got an iPhone, iPad or other iThing, I can't recommend that enough.  Check it out; it's on sale through Sunday.  The other games by Rocketcat - Hook Champ, Super QuickHook and Hook Worlds - are also great fun, though in a totally different vein.

I could write a huge post about all the iPhone games I think are genuinely great, and how as a platform I think the iPhone really is leaving Nintendo and Sony both in the dust, much as I love my 3DS and its predecessors.  At some point perhaps I'll do that.  For tonight I just wanted to get the site out of mothballs and post something.  Hopefully I'll have more offbeat freeware and indie stuff to talk about soon.  Have a good weekend, everyone.