Quick Review: I, Zombie

A zombie game, except you are the zombie! And you must use whatever grey matter you’ve got left in order to infect everyone.

Aim for the living! The unarmed ones first.

I, Zombie is a creation of Awesome Games Studio and was released on December 9th, 2014. I already gave you a solid idea of the concept: It’s a puzzle game. You’re Patient Zero, the first zombie, and you do what any good zombie does – turn others into zombies. But you’ve got to be strategic about it… After all, it doesn’t take long for these humans to wise up and arm themselves with those pesky guns.

Ah yes, guns - the zombie's worst enemy.

Avoid the shooty-shooty-bang-bang.

On each level, you start as the lone zombie and must infect every other human. Take cover in order to hide from the shooters, which usually follow a set route and attack whenever they see zombies. And since you’re the boss of the infected, you can order them around; ask them to remain in place, follow you around, or attack the nearest human on sight. Zombies do heal from bullet wounds; however, the lower their current HP gets, the slower they’ll walk. Keep them in one place away from danger, and the zombies will heal HP, regaining the lost speed. That goes for your main zombie too; in fact, you must usually sneak your way around, alone or with your group of zombies, and infect everyone without too many casualties on your end.

"I'm hidden! Look for me!"

Each level awards up to three stars for completion – one for beating the level, two for completing it with a few losses, three stars if you completed the level without a single zombie getting killed by these pesky gun-toting humans. And some of these are pretty tough. For added content, there’s the winter-themed levels, in which your zombie(s) can hide behind snowmen and mounds of snow. A few levels also involve the zombification of a single scientist who’s working on a cure – but you need to sneak around the shooters in order to reach that guy.

"...Too much pew-pew! Too much pew-pew!"
Why do I picture zombies talking like toddlers?

The game is actually fairly short, only 31 levels (counting Level 00, the tutorial). Its brevity is a bit annoying – well, unless you aim for three stars on every level, in which case, good luck to you. Some of these will require a very tight balance between the commands you can give the other zombies and the sneaking element. However! There’s a section welcoming fan-made levels. The quality there can vary wildly, but it can be interesting to see what other players have come up with.

It’s a good game. I like it, I recommend it. Like I say, it feels a bit short, but it’s not too much of an issue. You can usually get it on Steam for about 2$.

Quick Review: Luna's Wandering Stars

A lot of puzzle games out there love to start the player with a base concept, then switch things around and throw curveballs to surprise us. It's even more applicable here, as curveballs and loops are the name of the game in Luna’s Wandering Stars.

Starting simple, like any good puzzle game ought to do.

Developed and published by Serenity Forge, and released on May 15th, 2015, Luna's Wandering Stars is a game about using orbital mechanics to your advantage. Every time, you’re controlling a moon floating around or near a planet. Smaller asteroids are also floating around, and you collect them to fill up a gauge – the level is completed when the gauge is full. Each level has three golden asteroids, and catching all three in a level earns you a gold crown on that level.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee~

From the Sun outwards, thus starting from Mercury, each planet of our Solar System has 15 levels, and a new gimmick is introduced in each set. The Mercury set has the basic orbital mechanics involving the moon. The Venus set shoves a rocket up your moon’s butt, allowing you to control its trajectory with short blasts – and thus, you have to maneuver your floating rock around until you’ve filled the gauge. The Earth set has the moon always spin around the planet, but you can control the Earth’s gravity and, thus, affect the moon’s trajectory. Be careful of the destructive debris floating by, however. The Mars levels are especially fun; your moon has a gun now, but you must use it to kill the deadly obstacles (May they be the murderous, red-tinted asteroids, or the purple asteroids that slow down your moon).

Is anyone going to address that the Moon is basically
absorbing asteroids to make itself stronger?

And so on: In the Jupiter levels, you are setting up redirects which will send the moon in the direction you’ve set, allowing you to collect the golden asteroids. Careful, though – the redirects last only 5 seconds, oh and also, there’s a lot of death traps in every area. The moon orbiting Saturn can change its density – go from tiny to huge, and either avoid or catch everything on the way; this also has an effect on the moon’s orbit and trajectory. And so on, and so forth, all the way to the ninth planet. All very creative puzzle ideas making use of the game’s central gameplay mechanics, with slight tweaks.

Ooof... icollecting those golds will be tough.

Gravity is my harshest mistress.

Also, it’s beautiful to look at. Oh, it’s so, so nice. The music’s pretty good as well. The difficulty, on the other hand, can bounce around quite a bit – after one tutorial level, you’re thrown into more challenges that can be either pretty easy – or pretty damn tough. And if you aim for the golden asteroids… oh boy, are you in for a fun time.

I didn’t finish the game, but I like the creativity behind it. I felt it was a fun experience. The concept is nice: A basic puzzle, followed by eight new takes on the basic puzzle with new gameplay mechanics. Fifteen levels each, that’s quite a lot. I don’t think there’s much else to say: It's good. If you’re interested, you can get it for roughly 10$.

Quick Review: House of Caravan

“A matchbox.”

House of Caravan, aside from being a drawer-opening simulator, is an indie exploration/puzzle “horror” adventure about a boy trapped in a large mansion away from the city, having to find his way out. It was developed and published by Rosebud Games, and released to Steam on April 16th, 2015.

What happened to all the light?

The gameplay begins in a dark room containing toys, and this first room is a pretty good indicator of what comes next: It’s mostly dark, so you’ve got to look around for items you can use, and how to use them in order to leave the room. Be ready to open a lot of drawers – no, really, most of what you find is hidden in drawers all over the place. And most frequently, you’ll find matchboxes, each one of them containing a single match. Because getting a few matches each time would be too easy, I guess. Even then, good luck finding lamps and lighting them. The part of the first room where you find the items needed to move forward is completely darkened, and you can barely see the lamps that you can light up.

"A matchbox. Again."

Okay, so that was a bad first impression. How does the rest of the game fare? Well, aside from a few interesting puzzles here and there, it’s not fantastic. Now that the large mansion is available, what follows is a lot of areas still shrouded in darkness – therefore, a lot of matchboxes to look for, and a lot of rooms that need to be lit up. The interesting puzzles include reconstituting a letter like it’s a puzzle, using prior knowledge in order to unlock boxes, and so on.

Oh good, the place has taxidermy now.

I put “horror” in quotes, perhaps air quotes even, as there really isn’t much scary in this game. Aside from windows getting broken in the hall due to the wind (gee, that’s a very strong wind) and some slightly disturbing imagery, such as animal cadavers hanging from the ceiling in a small room near the kitchen (okay, so they butcher the animals themselves for meat, what’s wrong there?), it isn’t very creepy. I guess any creepy elements lie in the letters you find around the mansion, which detail the lives of the residents prior to you being trapped there, and whichever connection the protagonist may have had with them. Unsettling perhaps, but the scare factor is closer to zero.

I still went through and beat the game, though it’s not one I feel the need to keep in my collection. Still, if this odd mix of puzzle, horror and exploration is to your liking, you might find something of interest in here. If so, it only costs 2$ on Steam.

Quick Review: Hook

Not the film starring Robin Williams; not even remotely affiliated with it. This is a game of hook, line, and sinker… but mostly hooks.

That's nothing compared to what comes afterwards.

Developed by Maciej Targoni and Wojciech Wasiak, and published to Steam by the former on January 25th, 2015, Hook is a puzzle game in which you reel back various hooks at the end of intertwining lines. Like any good puzzle game, it starts out easy enough; some practice at first, by showing the basics, then you’re thrown into increasingly complex setups. After the firstlevels, you're shown crooked hooks, intertwining hooks, hooks tied together that get reeled at the same time. Then you get intersections that can be switched around... Your task by this point is to complete a circuit from hook to reel, then reel in – always on the condition that the hook isn’t blocked, of course. And it only gets tougher from there. How crazy does it get? Here’s a look at some of the final levels…

…Yep.

The first level featuring intersections...

To the game’s credit, it follows the rule of progressive difficulty to a T, so you’re never thrown into new mechanics blind – you always get to learn about them first in simpler puzzles, then see them implemented into puzzles that increase in difficulty. The last couple levels involve following every single possible path to make sure you’re only reeling in the hooks you can properly reel in, and none of the ones that are blocked. The last levels are so tough that instead of starting over from scratch after only one mistake, as was the case up to that point, you’re given three “lives”, thus two chances to screw up before you’re forced to start over. The last levels can get pretty long and tedious as a result, as many of them involve long, complex pathways as well as some mental visualization and a lot of trial and error.

...and it gets progressively harder as you go on.

However, overall, it’s pretty great exercise for your brain. It’s fun, simple, short and sweet (it may have 50 levels, but you can complete them all in a little more than an hour if you know what you’re doing). It costs only 1$, but that’s great quality for the price.

Here’s a fun drinking game, take a sip for every time I use the word “hook” and “reel” in this quickie review. A message to your liver: I am so, so sorry.

Quick Review: Greyfox RPG

I know I meant to play more RPG Maker games, but I haven’t seen many so far. This one takes away any battles in favor of a story and some puzzle elements.

I'm not entirely sure I'm allowed to drive here.

Really? You just look like your hair went grey, is all.

Greyfox was developed by Lesley Dodd and published by EQ Games on February 23rd, 2015. It’s the story of a young woman who takes residence in a retirement town mostly inhabited by elderly people. She hopes to get a start on life by living here for a bit before moving forward. She’s only just settled when she meets a strange, witch-like woman. That night, she wakes up to find out she’s become as old as most of the people living there, and the magical woman puts her through four trials, in which she’ll inhabit the bodies of four different elderly people living in the area, and make personal decisions that may affect their lives for the better… or for the worse.

"I guess I would know that woman's plan if I was that woman!"

The choices are yours – you can learn the story behind each of these people, and offer them some form of closure – a good one or a bad one, up to you. These four people are a crazy old cat lady with psychological issues, an old man in a retirement home who was pretty awful to his family, and two wives to needy and/or irascible old men. And through these, the protagonist is supposed to learn a few important things about life, I guess? Something about the choices made through life constantly having ramifications, even once you’ve gotten to old age?

I am seeing ghostly Santas - Christmas is early this year!

For an RPG Maker title that tries to tell a story, it’s alright. I wouldn’t call it ground-breaking, but it’s decent. I appreciate that you can choose which choices to make, and you’re not forced to follow set paths. While the comedy fails more often than not, there are moments that are actually pretty witty in the plot. As an example, the old cat lady needs to take antipsychotic drugs, and her state gets worse as you progress through her story, seeing ghosts roaming the game all over the place at increasing frequency until the lady ingests her pills. (No, she's not the one that sees them; they appear on the overworld map, in increasing numbers.)

Some interesting ideas here, some very creative usage of RPG Maker – I’ll give the game that. Ultimately, while I played through it, I don’t think I’d play it again, but it’s an alright one. The 1$ price tag is just fine for it, too.