Bundle Boggle: Groupees' Bundle Yourself (Part 2)

All right. I want to make something clear: I tend to do these Bundle lowdowns as a way of highlighting the cream of the (very) Indie crop, rather than admonishing a bunch of amateur game designers for even trying to compete with the big boys. One of those things makes me seem like an underdog supporter, while the other makes me seem like a jerk kicking sand in people's faces. Though the first half of the Groupees Bundle Yourself bundle wasn't, shall we say, quite up to par, there's no reason the second half cannot be.

Then again, I'm starting to see the wisdom in just blogging about the big Indie names as they make their Steam debuts to rapturous applause. Lord knows I'd rather be playing them instead, on the whole. But I'll always maintain that it's never worth counting out Desura or its bundles completely, and it's often the best way to check out a lot of Steam Greenlight games beforehand to see if they can cut the mustard. Escape Goat, Tales of Maj'Eyal and Knytt Underground were all Desura-only games initially, and took a while to get out of the Greenlight gulag despite being quality Indie games.

It's very possible that the other four games in this bundle might include some bangers, is all I'm saying.

Bundle Yourself: Part 2: No Bangers, Sorry

Orborun

You remember those slide levels in Super Mario 64? There were only two of them, yet it felt like I spent half the game trying to emancipate them of their Power Stars due to how challenging it was to control a careening 250lb plumber zipping down a toboggan run. Well, in case you thought those slide sequences were far too easy and mundane for you, here's Orborun.

Orborun puts you in the chassis of a spherical robot, sent to challenge some of the most devious high-speed translucent plastic obstacle courses this side of F-Zero GX. The target is to simply make it to the goal at the end of the stage, but in order to earn the most star prizes you have to do it as quickly as possible while collecting as much hard-to-reach collectible junk as you can. Earning stars (and a piece of highly treasured Zetium should you get all three stars for a course) unlocks bonus stages and new cosmetic upgrades for your robot.

Hey, guess what? Nothing in this game is remotely simple. Even if all you wanted to do was make it to the end and get a single star for every stage, the game's still not going to let it be a walk in the park. I might've said this was a bit like the Super Mario 64 slides, but it's actually a bit closer to the bike levels in the various Battletoads games: it's less a process of controlling your speed, gracefully taking corners and judiciously picking your moments to accelerate than it is about trying your best to guide an object hurtling at supersonic speeds down courses devised by sadists.

Though you wouldn't be able to tell from all my grousing, Orborun's a lot of fun. It's graphically and musically unremarkable (which I'm fine with, since it isn't the focus), but there's a lot of ingenuity with the course design, as occasionally cruel as it is. The star ratings really make you think about the "ideal path" to follow, and there's a lot of longevity in hitting your head against a particularly devious track again and again to maximize your score. The game has a handy restart button that you'll be tapping a lot while chasing higher ratings, so it's only as frustrating as you'll let it become. I haven't provided too many reasons to buy this bundle yet, but Orborun is one of them.

Project APT

But never mind the actual fun stuff, you want to hear me complain about obtuse bullshit again, don't you? Say hello to Project APT. It's a point and click adventure game, though that's kind of disingenuous as it's entirely led by keyboard controls. The player explores a rundown apartment complex full of some really bizarre instances in order to do... something.

I've made it sound like another arty Hippocampal type of experience, but the interface is actually quite straightforward: explore rooms, find items, use items to get other items, use those items to solve puzzles and move on. The game has no directions, but will give you hints on what sort of item needs to be used where. There's very much a Roberta Williams logic to some of the puzzles, but fortunately there's very few of them to actually solve before the game is over. Maybe that's not a "fortunately" statement, but I digress.

If I had to guess, the game saw how Lone Survivor distilled the Silent Hill experience into a smaller yet equally disturbing 2D inventory-based adventure game and decided to follow suit. It's got a macabre vibe and is full of Silent Hill's trademark symbolism and weirdness for the sake of weirdness. The ending provides some context to the odd sights you've seen and odd puzzles you've solved, but most of it is left to the player's intuition to figure out. In this regard, it's probably not quite as successful as Jasper Byrne's spooky enigma, but it's definitely on the same staticky radio wavelength.

It has a few problems though. There's no saving, but there are deaths, so you'll find yourself starting over a lot. This, plus the protagonist's languid gait artificially stretch an interesting five minute Newgrounds browser horror game into an interminable half hour chore. It might make for interesting Spookin' With Scoops fare, but no more so than any of the other odd little Indie horror adventure games @patrickklepek's shown off in the past. Like the previously covered Loot Hero, it feels like a freely available portfolio booster created over a weekend than a game anyone ought to be charging money for. Not awful, but not exactly a substantial package either.

Siege of Inaolia

Sigh. There's a reason I don't go into Early Access stuff often. I don't sign up for betas either. I've been in game development, and there's nothing particularly fun about staring at an unfinished game with all its cracks and fissures on full display and concentrating too much on what still needs to be done than trying to derive any enjoyment from a half-baked game. I don't really understand the mindset of wanting to freely test a studio's game for them either, but then I was fortunate enough to skip the tester phase of my game design career, as unfortunately truncated as it ended up being.

In case I'm being too opaque with that off-topic tirade, Siege of Inaolia is a game very obviously in an Alpha state. I don't believe games should be sold in their Beta state, let alone Alpha, but I guess if there's a market for it I can't really complain. I suppose it's like a hands-on "watch your pizza getting made while you wait" approach to pre-ordering, but I've yet to see much in the way of accountability from these ambitious Indie games trying to finish their project through generous donations from players already sold on the idea alone. Great if you want to take the risk and buy in, but you better hope there's another thousand or so people who are thinking the same way.

Siege of Inaolia, lest I digress about selling Alpha builds any further, is a 3rd person real-time action RPG with skill trees and the sort of tactical combat that involves kiting and the like. Like an action CRPG made in the 90s (or with a 90s sensibility, if we're talking Risen or Divinity II), essentially, though it's not quite there yet. There's no story mode or anything, just a barebones horde mode with two stages, a single playable character (a warrior type) and a bunch of ugly enemies to hit over the head repeatedly. It's at least playable and mostly stable, but it's about as far from a complete product as you could hope to find.

So really, I can neither cast aspersions nor encourage what little there is because there's really nothing here yet. There's no telling how different the final product will be, or if everything will still look the way it does or if anything of the current level-up/skill/combat systems will persist in the final build. All I can say for right now is to not bother right now and perhaps come back in a year's time. Maybe they'll have something closer to a Beta by then. And, hey, for the record I dug Venetica so don't think of me as unilaterally down on dodgy small studio CRPGs.

Space Slice

Now this is an interesting one. Space Slice is, if I had to nail down a genre, a platformer exploration game set around planetoids and gravity wells. While not quite one of my beloved SpaceWhippers, there's a free-roaming element in which your little alien fellow, Zynth, has to earn a vast amount of a resource named Nihilium in order to call out mechanics to fix his spacecraft.

While you can do this from simply exploring and killing little bug monsters everywhere, the fastest (if not necessarily the safest) way to earn money is to find and defeat huge alien monsters in mildly strategic boss fights. You can buy a bunch of upgrades from merchants, dipping into your valuable supply of Nihilium, but these items will eventually wear out and vanish through heavy use. As the bosses get more lucrative in their payouts, they end up needing more of these consumable items to damage effectively, so there's a little bit of a Monster Hunter type investment/preparation element going on.

Really, though, this is a very laid-back game where you're whizzing around planets, finding new life and new civilizations and kicking them around for their valuable elemental currency. Checkpoints are frequent and your guy has a decent health bar to boot, and your little robotic guide will show you the way to each of the game's boss encounters in case you get lost. I've noticed a lot of Indie games experimenting with planet physics (that recent Gravity Ghost QL comes to mind), presumably inspired by Super Mario Galaxy, and this one's a breezy and low-stress interpretation of that concept. If you can get to grips (as it were) with the game's odd gravity well traversal - hint, smaller planets have less gravity, which means higher vertical leaps - it should keep you entertained for a few hours.

The End!

Well, this part wasn't quite the inadvertent condemnation of Indie games that the last part was, but there's still only a couple of games really worth playing in this bundle. Goes to show, it's hard to sort the wheat from the chaff by appearance alone especially with the huge number of bundles like this that get released on a weekly basis. Hopefully I've given you pause for thought regarding purchasing decisions, but then it's not like throwing a couple bucks to support Indie developers is ever a bad thing regardless of how middling their games might actually be. From small acorns grow mighty oaks, and all that.

Thanks for stopping by, and I'll probably be heading back to some big AAA games for a bit. Only so much Indie I can take in one month. (Dammit if I haven't been meaning to finally get around to Thomas Was Alone after that Mike Bithell guest spot on Bombin', though. Well, back to my Steam library I go.)