So here we are with Part 2. I left you all with the merest aperitif last time, but now it's the main course. The $5 main course of Groupees' Be Mine 14 bundle, to be precise. I need to stop with the meal metaphors; I'm hungry enough right now.

There's four games to look at today, and there's a curious mix of the interesting and the "interesting". (I need to buy a damn thesaurus already.) Bizarrely heavy focus on supernatural antics during the colonization of the Americas too. It's probably worth noting that this bundle will end later today, and might already be over by the time you read this. That's my bad: I could've started these Bundle Boggles earlier but I got sidetracked by those loveable Giant Bomb buffoons and their Deadly Premonition playthroughs. Blame Agent York.

Be Mine 14 More Like Benign 4. (Oooooh and the Burns Keep Coming.)

Betrayer is the headliner of the bunch: an atmospheric horror-themed first-person shooter that has a bit more of an action-adventure edge to it. Though you can run around shooting bestial Spaniards with a crummy bow and arrow to your heart's content, it seems more like a game that rewards patience, prudence and persistence: You earn money from taking down foes and through exploration, but you're also very vulnerable to getting swarmed by enemies if you're gallivanting around and taking things too lightly. The best course appears to be to stealthily remove the nearby dangers while keeping a clear route back to the home base open in order to restock on droughts of healing water and other supplies. As for particular goals, the player can jump in and out of an "other world" filled with spirits both malevolent and benevolent and see what's shakin'. Many of these spirits (the benevolent kind, at least, since the malevolent ones don't seem to be big talkers) ask you to search for remnants of their former lives so they can pass on, and there's also dangling narrative threads to follow in the form of notes and gravestones. So far, it seems to be a game that is content to give you a few ideas and lets you seek out answers on your own.

Fittingly, I'd have to say this game reminds me the most of the Elder Scrolls series. There's nothing overtly RPG going on, as you don't level up or anything, but the tactical approach to enemies and the way you're often investigating new points of interest in the immediate area because they just popped up on the radar (in Betrayer's case, this "radar" is a sound that perks up whenever the player is close to an object of note as well as otherworldly wails that direct you towards your quest targets). I know I spent much of Oblivion and Skyrim keeping low to the ground whenever enemies were nearby in order to get the advantage of surprise in battle (though the off-the-record reason was so I could avoid as much of those games' combat as possible). It's mechanically similar in other ways too, though perhaps a better comparison would be something like Far Cry where you generally pick a direction and FPS your way to riches and glory. Neither really fits into what Betrayer's doing, which has more of a methodical horror edge to it that steers you away from combat simply because these are scary spooky monsters that the game wants you to take seriously despite all those loud comical "DING!"s your arrows make whenever they are deflected by their Conquistador armor. It's not a perfect contrivance, but it doesn't take long for the game to establish a satisfactory explanation for why you're meant to be playing it the way they want you to. Personally, I generally don't mind stealth when it's this unobtrusive to the rest of the game, and there's no big furor if you happen to get spotted (or killed, even, though you can make things more difficult by implementing a corpse run feature that drops your valuables upon death for later retrieval).

As for the story of Betrayer, it seems to regard a haunted outpost in 17th century Virginia, when colonists were establishing the first trade routes and settlements on the newly discovered continent and getting into fracases (fracii?) with the locals. It's clear some manner of massacre happened around these parts, but I'm sure it'll take a little while longer before the bigger picture forms and we discover which side were the aggressors (my money's on both sides being driven to destroy each other by supernatural entities, since this place seems lousy with the things). There's also a mysterious maiden in red (the game has only ever referred to her as such) who is seeking her twin and seems oblivious to the spooky monsters and otherworldly portals that are perturbing the player. I believe she's the only friendly face the player ever meets, and I don't doubt that she has a central role in the game's mysteries.

Betrayer seems like an intriguing game so far, and one I'd be happy to continue exploring. The combat and stealth are perfunctory, but then they don't seem like the focus. Instead, the spotlight seems to be on progressing the plot by exploring the local area for clues and fulfilling tasks given by woeful spirits unable to cross over. Maybe a little bit of treasure hunting and equipment finding to make the surrounding environs a little less dangerous to wander around in too. I've never been entirely copacetic on what a game from the "action-adventure" genre is meant to entail, but if it's simply any game that surrounds its narrative-driven progression core with an outer shell of acceptable action gameplay, Betrayer is it. I just wish it ran a little better on this machine. All that greyscale can take a lot out of a graphics card, it appears.

Watch the Betrayer QL here.

I've yet to make up my mind about Consortium. Someone mentioned that the game was pushing some social elements in its advertising on the last update, and it lead me to believe that this was some manner of cel-shaded Star Trek take on Velvet Sundown. The game's a bit more like an first-person story-driven Mass Effect from what I've played, but I'm enjoying how it cleverly integrates the notion that the player has been warped through time into a "Consortium" crewmember's body and left to play out a multi-branched storyline involving the disabling and boarding of your military ship by mercenaries apparently after your blood in particular. The game purposefully leaves out a lot of information about the Consortium and its technology on the basis that you should already know everything as a high-ranking crewmember of the ship, and lets you intuit and piece together the finer details on your own. Or you can simply ask everyone what they mean whenever they mention what are, to them, everyday concepts. You'll arouse suspicion by asking too many questions and sounding like an imposter, but there's only so much improvisation you can do without the information necessary to understand what's going on. Because there appears to be an option to replay from the same point (or reload earlier checkpoints), it seems as if it's possible to play the game multiple ways and discover multiple solutions to scenarios. Scenarios like the hijacking I just played, which is presumably the first of many. I know I said it isn't quite as Star Trek as it appeared, but for the life of me I can't help but think of that FMV game where Q forces you to repeat the mission that killed your father until you get it right. In another sense, it's almost the same kind of amateur improv theater that Velvet Sundown is, though of course without the other human players.

The game's also a FPS, but like Betrayer it doesn't force you to do anything of the sort if you're looking for an alternate and more pacifistic approach. There's a training room that lets you practice the basics of the combat that the game wisely adds as an optional objective early on, but the game takes pains to convince you that combat is rarely necessary if you're clever and resourceful enough to avoid bloodshed. As for NPCs, there's various crewmembers with their own unique personalities and temperaments that may well have important ties to the story, but they all have these non-descript designations relating to chess pieces, which is one of those many unknown things you have to kind of figure out by asking around (discreetly of course, lest you draw too much attention) and looking up data files on the information kiosks. Here's a freebie: Bishops are apparently the badass Spartan types that do all the dirty work when it comes to armed conflict and are prized highly by crews for their martial prowess. Knights seem to run things, rooks fulfill most of the other senior officer roles and the pawns are interchangeable ensigns and grunts. Of course, they all have real names and personalities and separate nationalities beyond their non-descript titles like "Bishop6" or "Pawn15". It's ultimately up to the player just how invested they want to get in these characters' lives. The game certainly doesn't mind if you intend to be the brusque, all-business type.

What was occasionally amusing is that the game makes it very easy for you to accidentally reveal yourself as a stranger in a strange land. For instance, you know as a traveler from presumably the 2010s (the game suggests that it is the player's own consciousness that has leapt through time) that this is many years into the future, but you'll occasionally have the option to ask about raising shields or scanning for lifeforms and have people react to you like you're a nutcase for thinking those technologies exist. Other times you'll get blindsided by talk about some contemporary technology or current event and either have to ask pointedly about it or simply improvise around it somehow. There's always the option to remain silent throughout, and various hints suggest that it's a common enough personality trait among the taciturn and security-focused Bishops. There's many more fun little details too, like how people will explain that you stand motionless and twiddle your fingers in mid-air whenever you're checking your inventory or mission log, though since everyone else in a senior position employs similar technology folk generally don't think anything of it.

Consortium does have its array of flaws though. For one, the graphics are a little... well, they're more stylized than anything, so I can't fault them too much for that. I suppose that's the benefit of the cel-shaded format. I'm not particularly fond of how wooden everyone's model animations are and how dull and round-edged the world is, let's just say, though there's some cool screen "static" effects that occurs as your connection to the future fluctuates occasionally. The load times can be abysmal, with large pauses between lines of conversation even, and the combat and motion in general feel a little stilted. The game has a curious system for inventory management where you can store items like guns as energy and recreate them later, or you can create a more versatile form of energy (used for healing and repairs) by recycling the junk you find all over the place. They both share the same bar though, and you're frequently having to burn off one type of energy to make room for the other, which can make for some annoying juggling when the chips are down.

Overall, I can see a lot of potential for an adventure game like this with its emphasis on branching storyline paths and being a little smarter about working out things (or rewinding to take the road less vaporized), though it might need a bit more work first. At least the story parts are intriguing.

All right, confession time. I figured that The Mysterious Cities of Gold: Secret Paths would be some inoffensively bland game for children, but I didn't care. After Betrayer, it was perhaps the game that piqued my interest the most. For the children not of the sun (or, to be less obtuse, those not of the 80s) The Mysterious Cities of Gold was an animated serial about a trio of children attempting to find the titular locations scattered around the newly discovered Central and South American continent, with each episode featuring a new adventure through a temple full of traps or attempting to stay one step ahead of the villains who were also after the golden cities for various reasons (as well as being filled with priceless treasures, they kept talking about how much "power" these places had. You know the drill if you've ever played a JRPG). It was also one of the earliest animes that was ever broadcast on terrestrial TV (at least here in the UK, Europe and I believe Canada), co-produced by both French and Japanese animation studios. As a result, both it and its contemporaries like Ulysses31 had this weird kind of energy and pacing to them, making them feel almost otherworldly. It's hard to parse into words the kind of effect shows like this had on me as a kid, because kids can't really articulate such nuances and I as an adult have mostly forgotten just how I felt about them back then, but you can imagine how someone who grew up on Disney and Hanna Barbara and Looney Toons would react when faced with anime for the first time. Just a whole other venue entirely. Plus, the two shows I mentioned could get kinda weird at times too.

So anyway, The Mysterious Cities of Gold is one of those franchises that hits the nostalgia nerve pretty hard for me just because of how prominently it stood out back in the day (and it's almost melancholy theme tune still occasionally pops into my head). It was relaunched last year, apparently continuing where the original 80s cartoon left off, though I've not felt compelled to check it out in case it doesn't live up to my memories of the original. I mean, it was pretty much the same case with that Thundercats reboot, plus I'm fairly sure they're not making those shows for folk in my age range any more. This game, however, seems to follow the show's plot fairly faithfully, grabbing what I can only imagine are clips from the show itself for the cutscenes between each stage. They look a little too well-animated to be made for the game, and they'll occasionally fast-forward through several episodes of exposition just to get to the next event they can build a level around.

Talking of which, I should probably explain what this game's about. It's a fairly standard Lost Vikings teamwork-based puzzle game with a few stealth elements thrown in (the antagonists are all adults, so there's not much else a trio of kids can do about them other than hide). The player has to solve puzzles by correctly utilizing the three kids and their unique abilities: Esteban, the Spanish kid, can activate pillars of light with his sun medallion; Zia, the Inca priestess girl, can squeeze through tight spaces; and Tao, the last scion of the sunken yet highly advanced Mu civilization, is the only one able to read stones that provide necessary hints to solve puzzles. There's also collectibles to find (the game even does the Donkey Kong 64 thing of making some of them color-coded so only a specific kid can grab them) and enemies to stealth around. The stealth is fortunately fairly mild: the game uses a MGS style over-head view that makes it easy to spot enemies, and the game produces footstep icons to show you where they're headed. If they spot you, you have a few seconds to jump into a hiding spot or back away before it "locks" and you get discovered.

The game's also fairly generous about game overs and such. Essentially, you can get captured as often as you like, but you'll forfeit one of the three "medallion" bonuses at the end of the stage if you get caught more than a certain amount. The other two are, perhaps obviously enough, for getting all the collectibles and finishing the stage in a reasonable amount of time. In the end, it's an inoffensively bland game for children (called it!), but it's definitely not bad. There's a distinct dearth of these sorts of teamwork-based puzzle games, and really the last game that was anything like this was that excellent top-down Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light co-op game for XBLA. But, you know, without the combat or the two player co-op. Still, I'm happy enough to walk away from this knowing they did right by the show. Now let's see about getting a Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors game made...

Whispering Willows I feel is an example of what are being derisively referred to as "walking simulators" these days: games -- which are still quite definitively games, don't get me wrong -- that prioritize story and atmosphere above attempting much in the way of what one might consider traditional gameplay, like shooting stabby things and stabbing shooty things. As Elena, the daughter of a missing groundskeeper who vanished after attending to the creepy old mansion just outside of town, the player is tasked to explore a series of doomed domiciles and eerie estates in Elena's search for both her father and for answers to the deeper mysteries surrounding the property. It's a 2D adventure game -- not unlike the original Clock Tower for the Super Famicom or Lone Survivor for an example that's a bit more recent -- that has you looking for notes and keys and puzzle items and occasionally leaving your earthly form behind as a spirit to check out heretofore inaccessible areas and move objects around via possession. It has some interesting set-pieces, but the game is also largely devoid of combat or anything overtly "actiony" besides a few chase sequences. It's not particularly scary either, but I get the feeling that it's meant for a younger age group obsessed with creepypastas regarding haunted Pokemon carts or emaciated gentlemen or whatever.

I know I seem to toss out game comparisons every time I write about one of these Indies, but I tend to think of them as helpful touchstones to help generalize what the experience is like without giving too much away, which is always something you want to avoid in a narrative-driven game such as this. In this case, Whispering Willows strikes me as similar to something like Finding Teddy or Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP. Largely combat-free (I hardly think Superbrothers' dumb back-and-forth mini-games count) adventures that are more about the exploration and the presentation and following a strong narrative thread (that is to say strong as in forceful and linear, not necessarily a sterling example of fiction) that follows the usual survival horror route of giving you the scenic tour of various locations as you hunt for keys and quest items. It's not a challenging game by any stretch, and the lack of any maps or running (while indoors) drags it out a bit more than it needed to be dragged, but it's an entirely okay game. Like much of what I've covered today, it falls easily within the 3 star range.

That's really all I have to say about this one. It has its secrets, it has its charms and it has a neat atmosphere, but it's really more ephemeral than ethereal. Not something you'd buy a whole bundle for, but a fun little diversion all the same. Though it is notable for having an Ouya shout-out in it. That's not something you see every day.

The Bit at the End

Well, there you have it. The $5 tier is interesting, but perhaps it's better to save that cash and just get Betrayer when it's on special offer. At least there's nothing abjectly terrible in that tier, unlike the $1 lot. I can say with some certainty that all four of these games can be enjoyed to some extent by pretty much anyone. Whether they're actually worth one's time or not is a matter best left to the individual, however. Still, I hope to jump back into Betrayer at some point, and The Mysterious Cities of Gold might be my go-to puzzle game for a while if only so I can get the Cliff Notes version of what this new reboot series is about (man... a new Reboot series, though). I'd keep playing Whispering Willows too, but it appears I completed it in the two hours I assigned myself as a sufficient amount of time for a layered critique. Well, that's a freebie.

Anyway, I have no idea if it's helped convince any of you one way or the other to go check out the bundle as the last few hours of its availability tick away. I don't believe I'll cover the freebie games that have been added since the bundle's launch, since I won't be anywhere near done by the time the bundle is over and by then the exercise will have been rendered moot. Instead, here's a brief summary of the three bonus games and my entirely unsubstantiated reviews of same:

1. BloodRayne 2: I've never played one of these BloodRayne games. I believe they're horror-themed hack-and-slashers (or "character action games" as we've been calling them of late) featuring a pneumatic Nosferatu (Nosferita?) heroine. Unlike the vampires it features, I can't imagine it's aged well in the ten years since it came out, and like Rayne's suit, I have very little material to work with to say much else about it. Perhaps it still has some schlocky appeal for fans of the genre?
2. Eschalon: Book III: I own the first two of these, so I'm hesitant to jump into the third without all the backstory to supply context. The Eschalon series seems to be part of this wave of isometric grid-based Ultima throwbacks (usually put out by Spiderweb Software) to appeal to the older gaming generations. I mean, even older than I am. If I ever try one of these games, it'll almost certainly be the first in the series.
3. Heileen 3: New Horizons: I wish I knew what the hell this was. It looks like a piratey visual novel with a bounty of Princess Maker stat-increasing simulation elements thrown in. It'd be hard to LP this game without quoting that line in Anchorman regarding promiscuous female pirates and their odor, but I'd still be up to the challenge. It's not like it's the only weird dating game I appear to have picked up in my Steam library... one day, Akira.

So yeah. Portentous, if not particularly helpful. Thanks for reading, and I'll keep finding stuff to write about as we edge ever closer to Octurbo 2014 and the Grafx horrors that await. Byeeee~