Steam Pack 13

The thirteenth Steam Pack, huh? This means I’ll have reviewed approximately 52 games through those articles, in the span of about two years. Not actually all that impressive… because I could make more Steam Packs, yet I spend seven articles ranting about Undertale, or six about GTA V… I make things way too complicated for myself. Either way, Steam Packs are a nice change of pace… mostly because I couldn’t dedicate a full article to any of these. I’d run out of stuff to say 1/4h of the way through.

Hm, I wonder if the number will mean anything regarding the quality of the games reviewed today...

Disillusions Manga Horror

Developed and published by StephenAllen, this game wasoriginally made for mobile, and now imported to Steam for the world to play on larger screens. …Okay. Sure, why not. It‘s also this developer’s only game on the platform, and while I usually try to be nicer to a developer’s first game, I still point out the flaws.

This is the story of DiS, a young man with a bad case of the Anime Face, white hair and weird eyes. He’s checking around some kind of haunted house, looking for his friend named Vigil. Couldn’t that Vigil guy get a better place to stay in? But hey, he has sushis, that’s our incentive. First DiS looks for a way in, then when he’s inside he looks for his friend. Then there’s a third chapter that follows a different character, investigator Sui, trying to figure out what exactly happened on the crime scene. Both stories eventually connect in a fourth level, which is supposedly multiplayer.

Why scoring your time in a story event-based plot?

It’s a game in which you explore a 3D environment, looking for “clues” I guess. Each clue prompts the main character to appear on the screen in 2D with his dialogue box, and one of approximately two voice clips each. You’ll grow tired very quickly of each character’s super-limited voice clips. The story progresses as you discover the clues. Exploration is required in order to find everything and “complete” the level proper. Also, for some reason, there’s a timer and you can try to beat your previous best time on any level. Allow me to ask, what’s the point of that? A time challenge for a few levels that are story-based?

Darkness..... yay?

As is to be expected of horror games, this one’s almost entirely set in darkness, the player’s view is fairly limited. The story bits will cause certain things to happen, and the setting will try to be scary. Emphasis on “try”. Because it’s pretty much a failure.

As for the fourth level? It’s only playable in multiplayer. And this game has next to no players whatsoever, which means it’s pretty much pointless to even try. The whole game is really short and there’s not much of a reason to play it more than once, getting a better time just isn’t worth it.

They sure take cops young into the force these days.

Still, as an attempt at taking this mobile game to Steam, I suppose the transition wasn’t done too poorly. The game does keep track of players’ best times for each level, however unnecessary I feel that it is. The game is also, for some reason, compatible with some of the VR sets out there.

I’m all for young developers making their own games, as a way to test the waters. But there is one undeniable truth to game-making: Practice makes perfect, we all start somewhere. Therefore, one’s first games are pretty much always going to suck. I mean, good work for StephenAllen to get something out there, release a game they liked to create, but this 0.99$ game isn’t even worth that price. At the very least, I hope they’ve been learning from their experimentation in game-making and are striving to improve, and release a second product eventually, one that shows the improvements. Disillusions Manga Horror is… just bad.

The Plan

Some Steam games are short, sweet experiences. More of a tech demo than anything else. There’s the ever-popular visual novel, of which some are very short and sweet, and then there are games that aren’t meant to be long. I remember saying before that a lot of free games are short, and kept free specifically because the length means there’s no point in attaching a price tag. This little game is one such example.

In The Plan, by Krillbite Studio, you play a little fly that decides to see the world up there, which really just means you can fly upwards until something makes you stop. Well, okay, there are some things on the way. The fly gets caught in a spider web, and struggles to escape. You can get free pretty easily. And it’s only up from there. Eventually, the fly reaches its destination.

That's a cool design for a sun.

ZAP

That was a lightbulb. When they say “Go into the light”, I don’t think they mean a 60-watts.

There’s a second mode that replaces the fly by… Navi from The Legend of Zelda. Hey! Listen! You’re gonna die up there! What am I saying, 90% of players would gladly send that fairy up into a deadly situation.

That's what happens when a fairy loses their Kokiri.

At least, the game is short and sweet, the animations are fluid and the environment is pretty. However, there’s little incentive to beating it more than twice, you complete it in less than 7 minutes - it’s probably the shortest game I’ve ever played for the blog - and, well, since it’s free, it’s probably not worth keeping around once you’ve seen everything there’s to see in it.

The store page mentions that Krillbite Studios made this very short game while they were working on a much larger project known as Among the Sleep, a horror game in which you’re playing as a two-year-old child. The reviews for that one are glowing - check that game out.

To Burn In Memory

I'd say something, but there's nothing to say.

The previous two titles at least felt like games. To Burn In Memory, developed and released by Orihaus (also their only game), felt like an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) novel that could have been sold in any other format. Steam is an odd choice. This entire idea, as a game, is an odd choice. Mind you, the intention is good: As you seek your way through a small city, you uncover more of its history until you come to the end, with a big reveal.

I’ll be honest, my interest in that one was pretty much null. There’s no music, everything is white text on black. There are some background images behind the text, but nothing that the dimmed screen will let you see clearly. Featuring a city that never existed, you supposedly portray a young woman living in those dark times where war is raging, or was raging, and the effects it had on every location and citizen.

Still nothing.

Games that would qualify as CYOA nowadays are better known as visual novels, and I’ve covered quite a few of them for these Steam Packs - except, y’know, visual novels tend to have visuals. In comparison, To Burn In Memory is underwhelming, even if I understand that this system is likely what the developers were going for. This couldn’t even have some sort of music? No? Alright, I guess.

Also, for some inexplicable reason, when I tried to replay this game for the review, I was stuck on the Credits page. Following the instructions of “Click[ing] the scroll on the left bar of the screen” did absolutely nothing, just reopened the Credits page. What the Heck. At least this game is free, there’s that

I’d rather go back to my old CYOA Goosebumps.

Who’s Your Daddy

This one, ironically, I actually wanted to own. The side of me that enjoys black comedy wanted to see what it was like. Developed and released by Evil Tortilla Games (a name as funny as it is random), Who’sYour Daddy is the epic combat of the baby that can’t tell between safe and dangerous, and the daddy who tries his best to look after the little Hellion.

Why is this not working? I know I have no pool experience,
but come on! This can't be so hard!

Both sides are playable. As a baby, your job is to try to kill yourself in ways that the helpless adult in charge must prevent. Meanwhile, as a daddy, your task is to make sure baby doesn’t die. Simple enough, right? Considering this is a competition and both sides want to win, you can imagine the result. The poor, low-resolution house this battle takes place in has seen its fair share of baby deaths.

First off, this title has options for local and online multiplayer, which is already not that bad. Outside of the normal mode, there are larger modes involving multiple babies and/or daddies, such as Family Gathering or The Great Dadlympics. Not special enough? You can create your own mode! There are options to customize your baby and daddy, which is decent.

Because "Take Care of Baby" wasn't enough.

Wanna play alone? Not a problem! There is a single-player mode consisting of 20 challenges, 10 for each actor, in which you must complete tasks in the shortest time possible. Your best times are recorded to the hundredth of a second.

So far, you might think this is ending the article on a high note, right? Well… not quite. Everything else falls apart after you play a few rounds. The music is one of the only elements to be consistently decent here. The graphics? Low-resolution, cheap and pretty lame. CGI graphics like these looked bad even on home consoles of the late nineties.

The oven is on, a bottle of pills is laying about, the
pan is upside-down, the meat on top of that, and some idiot
is opening cabinets and drawers around me for not reason.
I'm doing parenting the right way.

Next up is the gameplay. The physics are broken. Grabbing items is difficult and setting them in places is just as tough. You need precision in order to interact with some items surrounding you, and the camera complicates matters. It’s also very easy to get trapped in some places by simply having drawers and pantry doors open and close. And some players take full advantage of these limitations. I distinctly remember getting trapped in the kitchen by a player opening doors around me. Yes. There are many more examples of wonky physics here, but discussing them would take pages and pages. There’s some creativity to the various challenges you can play in single-player. However, playing them highlights the problems with the game’s physics; here, you don’t have other players to worry about while you complete your mission, so the issues are more noticeable.

"Dead By Daylight: Babies Are Monsters" Edition

I remember doing the first daddy task, which involved picking up the toys scattered in a room and putting them in the toy box, and constantly struggling to do so. The less I say about the time I tried to cook meat the better.

The toys won't fit in the goddamn box!

When it comes to interacting with the surrounding world, Who’s Your Daddy tries to have the basics… and that’s about it. There are many ways for babies to die, and daddies to prevent that, but there’s not all that much.

All of these issues obviously carry on to multiplayer as well. The main 1-vs-1 mode is alright, but the Battle Royales (8 players) can lead to many of these physics issues used and abused easily. That’s saying nothing of many glitches that can be exploited. I tried the Dadlympics mode, and it doesn’t even indicate what you can try to do in order to achieve the daddy tasks that are required to win the match.

That is not how baby works.

And of course, the fairly small player base means it’ll be difficult to amass even enough people for an 8-player match. Not to mention that to play Baby Versus Daddy online, you have to go in and wait for someone who wishes to play the role opposite to yours.

Honestly? I don’t recommend it. However, if you absolutely want to try it out, it’s over here for about 5 dollars. Maybe for some players it’ll be so bad it’s good. Maybe it was designed to be cheap and bad, because nobody would put that much effort on a game where suicidal babies must be saved by overstressed fathers.

But hey, it’s out there.

Next week, something better. Or so I hope.