Low-Fi Plays: Reviews of Six Random Indie Games
By gamer_152 6 Comments
So, I wanted to do something a little different this week. There's a slew of video games forever being disseminated onto the internet via student projects, game jams, and low budget ventures, the majority of which won't see even a few characters devoted to them, and they could do with a little sunlight. Here, I'm giving micro-reviews of six different free and shamelessly raw indie games. It's a given that they're all going to be pretty rough, so these won't be comprehensive looks at their quality. I'm mainly probing to see what they do that other games don't and what their standout characteristics are. Links are provided for each game if you want to pick them up yourself.
Insomnis
As was the case with Steam Greenlight, itch.io is flooded with mechanically minimalist horror games. Insomnis, however, is one without all the jump scares that became part and parcel of the genre and instead relies purely on atmospheric eeriness. Textured with decaying wood and mouldy wallpaper, the environment is somewhere between the palatial home of Layers of Fear and a ramshackle cabin in the woods, except, cut across by splashes of vibrant lighting. This use of colour is unique, if aesthetically inappropriate, and has that hint of a newbie programmer testing out lighting in an Unreal project for the first time. Where the developer has not generously lighted the game, you can illuminate its rotting floorboards using a porcelain ballerina with a bulb installed where the head should be. This eccentric replacement for a flashlight is mildly distracting, but it does make you think about how rarely we see creative alternatives to the standard equipment of many video games: torches, first aid kits, ammo, etc.
Progress through Insomnis requires plenty of backtracking, and sometimes it can be hard to know which door in the world has just unlocked when they all look the same and when the game only drops so many clues about your intended destination at any one time. But you can see how, with a little clean-up, the puzzles in each room could be sculpted into something special. The most memorable involves a radio which plays a recording of a poem that sounds nonsensical on the first listen. However, in the same chamber are racks of Renaissance paintings and the idea is to match the imagery of the paintings to the lines of the poem. I'd love to see someone else pick up this concept and run with it.
Check, Please!
This pick is one of those goofy physics comedies which hands you deliberately awkward controls and then asks you to perform a precision task with them. In Check, Please! you're on a romantic date and need to pour wine, light candles, and more to woo your woman, but unfortunately for you, your hands move like two big oven gloves. The premise of Check, Please! is funnier than that of similar games like Surgeon Simulator or Goat Simulator in that everything is happening in a social context. You're not just fumbling and dropping instruments while trying to perform a task; your date is watching you lose control of the situation the whole time. Of course, with facial animation being such an intensive process, there's only so much this Ludum Dare game can do to sell your date's confusion and astonishment at your antics. The designer also imposes a time limit on you that feels unnecessary for such a novelty toy. The play doesn't stand up to repetition, and I'd prefer to be able to see it all in one sitting instead of having to run back through the same fracases because of a ticking clock.
Sonic Suggests
Online, there's a whole artistic subgenre of warped cartoon versions of Sonic and his pals. As best I can tell, they were conceived of as a parody of the crudely-drawn Sonic fan pieces you can find in terrifying numbers all over sites like DeviantArt. Although, with the Sonic series having fallen out of favour with many of its oldschool fans, these scribbles of a Sonic who looks like he's taken several trips through the washing machine also serve as a commentary on the muddled series itself. Sonic Suggests is a video game version of those parody manglings of the Sega mascot and his world. The low-detail geometric patterns of the original Green Hill Zone make it so that even an artist without a budget can accurately resurrect it in 3D dimensions. Disappointingly, I'm not sure this joke is made any funnier for existing in a video game format. The floaty control of Sonic Suggests reminds you why many barebones indie games have you stick to walking: More physics-reliant movement like running and jumping requires some deft tuning to pull off right. Tuning you won't find here.
Ramble
In Ramble, you're a person in a forest fixing a fence. Perhaps something happens when you finish fixing the fence, but I wouldn't know because this is one of those games where it was more fun to run off the beaten path and breathe the world in. With so much of your attention spent on the visuals and sounds of the title, it doesn't need any play smacked on top to feel like a complete work of art. As you wander the meadows and streams of Ramble's woods, disembodied voices read you assorted literary excerpts, and it reminded me of Scanner Sombre as a game that uses its SFX to realise a highly organic environment while leaning hard into experimental visuals. I'm not sure I've seen a game where the colour palette changes so readily, and the combination of a vivid world and encroaching patches of white around the edge of the screen suggests that Ramble is a sort of ludic painting.
the static speaks my name
Content warning: Suicide
the static speaks my name is a gallows humour Gone Home. Many indie games seal you inside a single building because that's where your mission is, but in tssmn, your character's behaviour makes it implicitly clear that their social isolation is a condition of their existence. Their fridge is empty, they have no friends to talk to online, and a lack of bright lights in this game helps convey how oppressive their lifestyle is. Unusually, a stack of televisions displaying white noise sits in their hallway, and it's an environmental feature which works as a statement piece because it's the single outright unbelievable decorative item in this house. Situated at the end of the main corridor of the home, it provides a simple example of how level design to force the player to view a setpiece that establishes the tone you want for your title.
At the end of the tssmn, you gain entry to the one room that had remained out of bounds for its length. It contains a noose which the player character uses to hang themselves. In the ending, we see a cosmos in which the stars represent people who all took their lives in their own way. Ironically, it's in suicide that we get to connect, even if very distantly, with other people. The mix of comedy and drama in the game is unsettling because you never know which you're going to get next, but while it doesn't feel like tssmn is mocking the protagonist hanging themselves, it does feel like the game is somewhat exploitative of the character's socially anxious behaviour. tssmn's most thought-provoking element is that name and the mystery of how it fits into the plot. For me, it means the condition that this character is living in tells you who they are.
the static speaks my name on Steam
From Ivan
I prefaced these games with a warning that you can't expect them to be up to the standard of a full retail product, but From Ivan absolutely is. In From Ivan, you are a government bureaucrat employed to mail greetings cards to designated targets to motivate, console, or celebrate, as is needed. From Ivan pleases because it picks a topic that is unique and interesting, but that can be covered comfortably within the scope of its development time and budget. It's easy to laugh along with its ridicule of rigid office protocol and have flashbacks to standing in the aisles of greeting cards stores when you see its mix of hokey and twee graphic design.
In making the sending of the cards mandatory, the title highlights the problem with greeting cards. If it's not optional to gift them, they're not an earnest expression of how we feel about a person or event; they only echo what our culture tells us we should say at certain holidays and milestones. The game also questions the ability of human resource departments to speak to people on a genuine level. However, From Ivan is only happy to make time for the other side of the coin, showing that mail isn't just a way to send customary Father's Day acknowledgement or sheaves of condolence cardboard, it can also be a ground for building a relationship with someone.
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Thanks for reading.