This has been a good couple of days for brilliant free games that pretty much speak for themselves. Impasse, for example, is a minimalist puzzler from Wanderlands where the experience of playing provides its own silent tutorial as you move through a series of deviously constructed levels. If you know too much going into it, the joy of discovery is diminished, so all I’ll say is this: over at the developer’s blog, the team is already discussing the creation of a post-mortem. I hope they end up putting it online, as it should be fascinating stuff.
Then there’s Spelunky, Derek Yu’s legendary endless platformer. It’s heading to Xbox Live Arcade later this year, and has finally washed up on the Mac. If you haven’t tried it yet, you really should. Beyond that, Chillingo has just released Quiz Climber, Relentless Software’s first iOS game. The Brighton-based team has been working with trivia challenges for years with its Buzz! titles, and this is probably the studio’s most immediately gratifying effort yet: a simple cartoon leaderboard in which you try to keep ahead of your Facebook friends. In other words, there’s literally nothing between you and the endless mocking of your peers.
But in terms of games that might actually benefit from a little discussion, Droqen, the maker of N?na Ha?e F?aith, has released a new browser effort called 100th. He describes it as a “short but deep puzzle platformer with a fairly simple difficulty curve”. I’d describe it as an ingenious reworking on the escort mission – albeit one that’s much better than that sounds.
In 100th, your job is to navigate a series of increasingly complex chambers without popping your balloon on spikes, or letting it float away. If you do lose your balloon, you can always get another one, mind, but this is about as satisfying an outcome in the game as it is in real life: the first balloon is always the best balloon, and anything else is just a sad form of self-deception.
The game really comes into focus once you realise that the balloon is actually a useful ally in its own right: let go of it and, if you’re quick enough, you can hop on top to boost yourself to otherwise unreachable platforms. As always with Droqen’s work, the environments are sparse but atmospheric, while the landscape is populated with weirdly shaped dot-eyed strangers that effortlessly exude a kind of pixelated Lovecraftian horror. On balance, bringing something as theoretically cheery as a balloon into such an abstractly terrifying world only makes things worse.
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