Hey folks and welcome to another monthly feature of mine, returning for its second year. I make a big furor about Steam every March, but it's easy to neglect its smaller, Indie-r brother Desura - a digital distribution service that focuses more on smaller studios and developers, and were selling games in Alpha states before it was cool. Many Desura-only games are on the waiting list to be Greenlighted, or have chosen to eschew Valve's draconian admission process entirely. Subsequently, many of them have slipped through the cracks and avoided any major coverage, and so I want to give them and the service some ups (and, yeah, maybe I also want to find out if all this weird Indie stuff I've been sitting on is worth playing).

Last time, I picked fourteen games that looked interesting and went through them in alphabetical order. Since I've been buying even more Desura games this year (I blame the Indie Royale bundles) I decided to stick everything in my Desura library that wasn't yet available on Steam into a random item selector and just see where fate takes me. Also, because I have a few 2013 games I want to see out before the end of this year, I'm grouping these Desura posts into three per update, with three day delays between each. No need to spam everyone's notifications again so soon after Octurbo...

Photography, Physics and Phr00t

The game: Gentrieve 2

The source: The Indie Royale Spring Sun Bundle

The pre-amble: Gentrieve 2, from phr00t, has been described (by me, right now, at my most loquacious) as a procedurally-generated 3D first-person shooter roguelike Metroidvania, in which each "fortress" level is built from scratch using only a sixteen character code as the basis. Players progress through an abstract world of geometric shapes and platforms, fighting off cuboid enemies, looking for power-ups and attempting to reach the end goal: the Mass Generator, which is at the core of each of these fortresses.

The playthrough: Gentrieve 2 is a really odd experiment in PCG, but I'm not entirely convinced it's quite at where it wants to be. Though the easy money would be on a Minecraft comparison, the game actually bothers with more than simple cubes. I mean, there's, uh, spheres as well. The first-person shooter gameplay is kind of basic and perfunctory, as is the platforming, but the game's not kidding about being a Metroidvania: you even get your own 3D map that auto-updates locations with their contents and even color-codes them if they happen to be one-way tunnels or boss chambers or what have you.

Though I didn't play it a particularly long time, I took a spin on two different dungeons: one that I asked the computer to generate for me, the other I created myself with the non-sequitur phrase "HelloChineseBaby". What's a little remarkable is how much easier the game's randomly generated fortress was: I might be imagining it (and I should probably build more than two dungeons before jumping to conclusions) but I'm thinking there might be something in the game's algorithms designed to cough up a simple dungeon to acclimatize new players. "HelloChineseBaby" was definitely no joke, and I was getting stomped by rooms full of enemies, spike traps and an enormous spherical boss room way too soon into my adventure. It is definitely a little exciting, in a weird way, to create your own randomized dungeon adventures, and this has been a selling point for many roguelikes since their inception. I just wish I had more to do than run around a bunch of blocky rooms shooting things; considering the player is remotely controlling a high-tech military drone, I can't see why this couldn't have been more like Descent. Now that'd be a confusing but fun mess of a procedurally generated game.

The verdict: It's not too bad. I don't think its basic gunplay and platforming could sustain someone's interest to the same extent as the endless creativity of Minecraft or Terraria, but there's a kernel of an idea here that might potentially be a bigger deal further down the road. Who wouldn't want to play a procedurally-generated Metroidvania game? (Like that in-the-works Chasm game, maybe, or perhaps Gentrieve 3?)

The game: LogiGun

The source: The Indie Royale Debut 3 Bundle

The pre-amble: LogiGun is a 2D puzzle-platformer. Yep, one of those. As is often the case with these things, you have to use your environment, your character's abilities, the game's physics engine and your own wits to get from point A to point B. There might also be a story that explains what's going and why you're doing all these puzzles, maybe.

The playthrough: I don't want to be hard on LogiGun. It's very much content with what it is, and assumes the player is too, because the puzzle difficulty is quite challenging right off the bat. It'll tutorialize everything out of a sense of duty, but you'll be throwing boxes around and hitting switches in a specific order in no time at all. It has quite a few interesting ideas and wasn't going to wait around for me to get used to the last introduced mechanic before tossing a few more my way, which is always appreciated in this era of slowing the eff down to allow those at the bottom of the class to catch up. I'm being mean for no reason now, but the crux of the matter is that I like a game that sets a strong pace and tasks you with keeping up with it: not to make the internet's millionth malapropos Dark Souls comparison or anything, but that's the type of situation that I'm referring to.

The game's presentation is initially barebones: it's more interested in the puzzles than developing any specific aesthetic. In that sense, and this could be applied to the above Gentrieve 2, it feels like a game designed by a coder rather than an artist. Nothing wrong with that, of course, just that when you have a small team your priorities lean either on one thing or the other, and I'd probably prefer a lot of fancy mechanics that work than a lot of fancy pictures on the whole. Eventually, a mysterious anime person started conversing with the mute protagonist, so I'm guessing that's where the game will start to explain what its deal is and break out of its monochrome walls and lasers shell a bit.

The verdict: Obviously we've seen a lot of games like this in the Indie boom of the past few years: Closure, The Swapper, Gateways, Rochard... and those are just the 2D ones which focus on (mostly) realistic physics. I wish I had an answer for what a game like this could do to stand out. "Having a story" no longer cuts it, because that's become as much of a requisite at this point as competent puzzle design. It might just be that you're either down for some clever physics puzzles and can't get enough of the literal dozens of these things out there, or we're looking at an ever-decreasing demand for these Portal-a-likes (being deliberately reductive here; no coining new genres for me). LogiGun, for what it's worth, seems like a good "one of these" at a reasonable price.

The game: Reef Shot

The source: Adventure RPG Groupee

The pre-amble: Reef Shot's an undersea photography game that largely focuses on taking pictures of pretty, pretty fish. There's also a side-plot concerning the lost Mayan El Dorado tribe, the Spanish Conquistadors that attempted to chase them down several centuries ago and a mysterious lost prophecy. No telling what the prophecy is about, but the game is set during December 2012 if that helps. Fortunately, I can do you one better than this pre-amble, because there's a Quick Look (featuring the rare pairing of Drew and Patrick!) you can watch.

The playthrough: Honestly, I'm sort of ambivalent about Reef Shot. I tend to enjoy these underwater exploration games, but so far it's been rather rigid in what it's allowed me to do. The sole goal (at least so far) is to follow the instructions on screen: this means taking pictures of specific fish, or snapping a picture of a plane wreck or something equally interesting that isn't piscine-related. The game actually won't let you continue until you've done whatever it asks of you, so with many cases you're told to swim out to a transponder beacon and hunt out whichever fish species you're told to snap, often several times, rather than go around snapping everything in your view and moving on at your own pace. The game also doesn't catalog anything, nor score you points on how your photos turned out: instead, points are rewarded in the form of stars which can be spent on the fly for one-off bonuses like a free oxygen/camera refill or for the game to helpfully point out where the next fish is.

There's something to be said for reining in the amount of freedom a player has, because often this freedom can cause them to swim around in circles and stress out about what to do, but at the same time that freedom is also fundamental part of these relaxing aquatic games. I'm hoping the game expands out a little in future levels and maybe gives me a checklist of target spots and lets me have at them in any order I choose. I don't know if I want to keep following commands rather than go exploring on my own. All this linearity makes it feels like an on-rails arcade game, in a way, or maybe a tour at SeaWorld.

Reef Shot does look great though. If I'm not mistaken (and I can't admit I've been following this specific genre too closely), the last serious one of these underwater photo games was Endless Ocean: Blue World on the Wii, which means that Reef Shot could potentially be the best looking game of its type right now, at least with all the settings turned up. That seems like an important consideration for a game focused on its many wonderful aquatic sights and beautiful fish. The perks you get by spending stars gives you plenty of reason to want to take good pictures, since it might mean the difference between being able to refill your tank or having to bow out early, but it's a little dispiriting that you never see any results of your photography. Plus, without the wreckage exploration tension or salvage fun of Everblue, it just doesn't stack up to Arika's PS2 series in terms of fun. I need more to do than take pictures of fish and statues, consarnit. Is that too unreasonable to ask?

The verdict: Reef Shot's fine so far, and offers players an experience that not is not exactly in high supply. If it keeps going with this tedious "photo this same fish five times" malarkey it probably won't keep my interest for much longer, though.