1937: This Starry Midnight We Make

I’m a big fan of the work of Carpe Fulgur, the small, independent localisation team previously responsible for bringing English-speaking audiences the excellent Recettear, its predecessor Chantelise and the charming Metroidvania-ish Fortune Summoners, and who have most recently been working on the sprawling behemoth that is Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter alongside Xseed Games.

I was pretty intrigued, then, when Andrew Dice of Carpe Fulgur proudly announced the team’s fifth project: a peculiar affair called This Starry Midnight We Make. Unlike Carpe Fulgur’s previous output, it’s not a role-playing game. It is… well, it’s kind of baffling, to be honest. I guess technically it’s a puzzle game of sorts, but I actually want to describe it more as a game about experimentation.

I sat down and played the demo version — available now on Steam, with the full version coming later this month — and recorded my experiences, bewilderment and all. Here’s what happened when I had a go:

As you can see if you watched the video, the game blends visual novel-style storytelling with its main mechanic: creating “stars” in a magical basin that appears to influence what happens in Kyoto according to the astrological phenomena you create.

The basic format of the game involves plopping stones into this basin and watching them do stuff, then figuring out how to make them do other stuff. The basin is split into five elemental areas, represented by faint swirling coloured gases, and the combination of the elemental area you drop a stone into and the type of stone you drop determines what happens next.

As you progress through the game, you’re tasked with a series of quests that ask you to create specific phenomena. What’s interesting is that after an initial, rather brief and unenlightening tutorial, you’re pretty much left to figure everything out for yourself. How, exactly, do you create a nebula? The game sure isn’t going to tell you right off the bat, though it will record the phenomenon in your notebook once you’ve created it once, allowing you to refer back to it and check how you did it if you’re not sure.

Beginning with the simple task of creating individual stars, the quests later start demanding that you create evolved forms of stars that involve mixing different types together, manipulating the amount of elemental gas in an area of the basin and even using “clay stars” to fuse others together. Beyond that, you’re tasked with creating “constellations” using specific combinations of stars that you’ve created, and the game hints that once these have been created, they’ll be used as “tools” to further manipulate your astral creations, though the demo stops before you get to see what this means for yourself.

What I found initially offputting but subsequently rather compelling about This Starry Midnight We Make is what I hinted at above: you have to figure out everything for yourself. And this is a huge adjustment from a lot of modern games, which spend much of their early hours walking you through every step of the mechanics you might be using throughout the game until you’re absolutely sure you know what you’re supposed to be doing. Not so in This Starry Midnight We Make. You are, in effect, a scientist, given some interesting things to fiddle around with and left to your own devices to try things out and see what happens. Some of the things you do will work — and these form genuine “Eureka!” moments, since you’ve figured them out for yourself — and others will not work, forcing you to analyse your “mistakes” and learn from them… or perhaps determine what caused an unexpected reaction to happen.

I find it difficult to envision how the game will carry this strange concept through a full-length narrative, but I’m kind of intrigued to find out. It’s a slow burn of a game, for sure, and its obtuseness will doubtless put many people off within about ten minutes of starting, but if you put some time in and make the effort to actually experiment with it yourself, you’ll find a strangely compelling experience waiting for you.

Do I recommend it? I’m hesitant to do so before seeing the full version, but I can at least recommend that you give the demo a try for yourself to see what you think and whether it might be for you. It’s available now from Steam.

1190: Dev Diary 5

I’ve been thinking about interface design today. I told myself that I wouldn’t faff around with the default RPG Maker bits and bobs too much so as not to hold up actually writing the story, but in practice it’s so simple to tweak this stuff that I couldn’t help myself. In doing so, I’ve immediately made a difference to the game that makes it look a little less like a half-arsed default RPG Maker project and has a bit more individuality, despite still largely using stock assets.

As a reminder, here’s a typical shot of how it looked before:

And here’s how a different moment in the game looks as of today:

Not a huge difference, I know, but the astute among you will notice two things: firstly, the colour of the text box has changed to a deep navy blue rather than the default gradient fill, and the main game screen now has a Persona 3-style “clock” in the upper-right corner of the screen, indicating what time of day it is. Presently, this only shows the time of day, but I’m toying with it showing what day it is, too — my hesitation on this note is that which day it is is only relevant for part of the game rather than the whole thing.

Earlier today, the “clock” was much bigger and looked a bit like this:

I actually kind of liked it at the larger size, but it was overlapping the portraits of characters who appeared on the right-hand side of the screen a bit too much for my liking, so I reduced it a bit.

The reason I changed the colour of the text box was because I was experimenting with some scripts that changed the behaviour of the menu. Specifically, they allowed a “wallpaper” image to be applied, so my menu screen now looks like this:

I figured I’d run with the “flat blue” colour scheme, and add a nice silhouette of Ami in the background for a bit of visual interest, and tweak the message box colour to match for consistency’s sake. The silhouette image shows up nicely in the various menu screens without being too obtrusive, as you can see from this shot of the save menu:

In fact, it shows up particularly nicely when choosing to quit or return to the title screen — a happy coincidence of the fact that selecting this option darkens the screen somewhat:

Those of you who know RPG Maker well will also notice I’ve replaced the default font with the nice, simple and clean lines of Verdana. This was primarily to match the default font used in a message box script I’m using, because it was bugging me a bit that the font in my message windows and in the rest of the interface didn’t match.

Oh, God. What is happening to me?

I jest. Fact is, today I’d reached a good natural “stopping point” in terms of composing the story, and it was as good a time as any to fiddle around with the “look” of the game a bit. I’m pleased with the effect it’s had — they’re only subtle little changes, but they’ve had a noticeable effect.

Now it’s time to stop farting about with all this and move the plot onwards. To give you an idea of how things are going, the game is structured in several parts: firstly, there’s a prologue; then there are five in-game days, during which a whole host of different things can happen according to exclusive choices the player makes in each of the morning, afternoon and evening time slots; then there are four unique “second parts” to the game, and one “true ending”. So far, I’ve completely and totally finished the prologue, and I’ve finished the morning of the first day. If you’re actually reading all the text like a normal person and not fast-forwarding it like me when I’m testing (yes, there is a fast-forward function) then there’s probably just under an hour of Stuff to Do and Read so far. After I’ve created various environments once, I can reuse them for other events, which means that development will continue to accelerate as I progress through the story.

Environments like the one seen above are quite complex, and most stuff in the game is “examinable”, so there’s a lot of flavour text in there. Now it’s done, though, if I want Ami to come back here with another character — which I probably do — I don’t have to design that map all over again. Which is nice.

Anyway. I’ll leave that there for now. Just wanted to share how things were going!

1054: Death Means Nothing in Miami

Page_1 So, after being repeatedly bugged by almost everyone I know to try Hotline Miami, I tried Hotline Miami. Actually, to be more accurate, I sat down to play some Hotline Miami several hours ago and somehow here I am at 1am having completed it. What happened there?

I had been warned of the strange time-distorting properties of this curious little game by those who had played it, but having experienced it myself this evening… yes, there’s something very odd going on there. A genuine feeling of, for want of a better word, “addiction” — of not wanting to stop until you’ve seen it through, even if the level you’re on is ridiculously difficult. My “Die 1,000 times” achievement attests to the fact that I apparently did spend quite some time on it this evening.

But allow me to back up for a moment for those who are unfamiliar with Hotline Miami and its dubious charms.

Hotline Miami is basically that game the Daily Mail have been worried about for years. It’s a straight-up game about murdering people with a variety of implements. It’s gory, it’s gross… and after about five or ten minutes of playing, it completely desensitises you to the acts of wanton violence you’re committing. It then shows its true (neon) colours — despite its hyper-violence, it’s actually a sort of puzzle game, a sort of lightning-fast strategy game, a sort of… I don’t know. I don’t like throwing this word around as it’s rarely true, but I have a suspicious feeling that it’s *whisper* unique.

The setup of Hotline Miami is that you, the faceless, nameless protagonist, repeatedly receive strange phone calls from a variety of sources. The phone calls themselves seem relatively innocuous, but when you get to the location you were told to go to, you apparently feel a strange urge to don an animal mask and then slaughter everyone who is there. Which is sort of convenient, because everyone there also wants to slaughter you.

You work your way through the levels by killing all the enemies. You have to scavenge weapons from dead enemies or the environment, and guns only have a small amount of ammunition in them when you do find them. Melee kills are silent, whereas attacking with a gun will often bring enemies running. When enemies are unaware of your presence, they follow very simple, predictable patterns. All you have to do is complete each stage of each chapter by killing all the enemies, at which point you’ll receive a score breakdown showing how you did. The better you score, the better your grade and the more stuff you unlock.

Unlockable stuff includes weapons, which show up randomly in the levels, and masks, which you can equip before the level starts. Each mask has a special ability — one provides larger amounts of ammunition in guns, for example, while another makes your bare-handed attack (which normally just knocks enemies down, necessitating a ground attack to finish them off) a fatal strike. After unlocking the latter, I found that I didn’t really use the others all that much. Perhaps I’m just unimaginative.

There is a plot that gradually unfolds as you progress through the levels. Like the swirly, pixelated, colourful visuals, it is rather vague and dream-like, and the end leaves a large number of questions. There are a few nice twists and turns, but it’s not really the star of the show here — it simply provides a loose justification for the various top-down locations in which you visit and kill everything.

Hotline Miami is tough. There are levels that will repeatedly kill you over and over and over again — a thousand times or more, apparently — but somehow it will keep you playing in that same, inescapably compulsive way that Super Meat Boy encourages “just one more go”. The fact that respawning after death is completely instantaneous helps this somewhat — there’s no real feeling of being “penalised” for dying, it’s simply part of the learning experience for each level. Death ceases to become something that makes you want to throw your controller out of the window, and instead becomes an exhortation from the game to try again and do better. It’s still frustrating — I called the game (or possibly myself) “dickhead” a good few times while playing — but the important thing to note about it is that when you die, it’s usually your own fault rather than that of the game. This is the sign of a well-designed difficult game — one where you accept that you’ll make mistakes and learn from them, rather than where dying repeatedly simply makes you want to switch off and play something that repeatedly massages your ego, gives you a cuddle and tells you everything is going to be all right.

Anyway. That’s Hotline Miami. If you have no issue with your games being borderline abusive in terms of difficulty, hyper-violent with little to no remorse, and leave you feeling like you’ve had some sort of drug-fuelled experience for several hours, then you should probably check it out. Conveniently, it’s 50% off on Steam this weekend. How about that.

You should also check out this “two-headed review” over at Games Are Evil.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to sleep… and probably have some very peculiar dreams.

#oneaday Day 694: BUNNNNNNDLE

There’s been some discussion recently over whether or not superdeals like the Humble Indie Bundle and IndieRoyale are beneficial or detrimental to the industry at large — particularly the independent developers whose work is featured in the packages.

For consumers, it’s pretty much an unquestionable win. To be able to pick up substantial packages of games for a fraction of their normal cost (the latest Humble Bundle offers 7 titles, a value of approximately $100) is brilliant, and in both cases, those who want to pay more can if they desire. Likewise, those on a budget can pay the minimum without guilt. The Humble Bundle also has the added karmic bonus of an optional charity donation, too, so you can justify filling your Steam library with stuff you might not get around to for a few months on the grounds of it being “for the children”.

For developers, though, you can see how it might be something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, these bundles often take on a higher public profile than the individual component games themselves. This exposes a variety of quality, unknown titles to the world, encouraging consumers to step out of the comfort zone of triple-A titles to explore the wider world of gaming. Sick of hearing about Call of Duty all the time? Don’t play it — check out the rapidly-expanding indie market and you’ll never need to even think about Activision ever again.

On the other hand, all the time these bundles are selling games for a fraction of their normal price, developers are losing out on those sweet, sweet monies. And unlike publishing behemoths like EA and Activision, these developers are often counting on the income from their creations to ensure their continued existence as studios. In the case of some developers, your buying their game might even be helping to put food on their table.

You might be feeling a bit guilty for putting in that bare minimum donation now. However, you probably shouldn’t — many developers, including Robert Boyd of Cthulhu Saves the World developer Zeboyd Games, report that strong sales actually continue for some time after a Steam sale or bundle deal — and the cheapest sale isn’t necessarily the one where a title will sell the most. It’s all about visibility — during Steam’s Halloween sale, during which Zeboyd’s titles were 33% off, the developer sold more copies than during the larger Thanksgiving sale, where they were 66% off. The difference? The Halloween sale was small enough that customers could see all of the titles on offer, while the Thanksgiving offering was a traditionally huge Steam sale, with a huge variety of content on offer for a fraction of its usual price.

Valve have often reported that sales of titles like Team Fortress 2 (before it went free to play, obviously) and Left 4 Dead took an upward turn after a sale in which they had been reduced by a considerable margin. The most likely explanation for this is related to the “visibility” issue that Boyd mentioned — once a sale is over and done with, players are going to be trying out all these weird and wonderful games that they took a chance on, and Steam being an inherently social platform, their friends are going to see what they’re up to. Cue a number of conversations about “what on earth is that you’re playing?” coupled with enthusiastic gibbering about how awesome Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is and you can see how this “word of mouth” effect could have a powerful impact on sales, even after special offers are long gone.

So in summary, no, I don’t think these indie bundles are bad for the industry. I’m happy they exist because they’ve certainly introduced me to a variety of wonderful games over the years — and proven that even if you find the way the triple-A sector does business to be somewhat distasteful, there’s always something to play.

So if you haven’t already, go pick up a copy of the latest Humble and IndieRoyale bundles now — links at the top of this post.

#oneaday Day 531: Steam-Powered Sales

One of the best things about a Steam sale is not the fact that you can get packs of high-profile triple-A titles for ludicrous prices (although that’s welcome too) but the fact that you can afford to take risks on obscure indie titles that you may not have thought to investigate in the past.

This has paid off on a number of separate occasions for me in the past, with some real gems coming to my attention purely by virtue of the fact that they were either dirt cheap or bundled with some other titles which had piqued my interest. Some of these have become a little more well known since I first picked them up, others haven’t.

Let’s take a peek at a few of them.

Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale

This utterly charming JRPG-cum-light management game is oozing with charm and character, not least from the protagonist Recette and her money-loving fairy companion Tear. The writing (or rather, localisation) of the game is probably the best thing about this game, but it helps that it’s a solid (if slightly repetitive) game. The repetition ceases to matter, though, when the incidental scenes featuring well-defined and well-written characters are so entertaining, and happen just often enough to break up the curious combination of loot-whoring dungeon crawling and shop management.

BIT.TRIP BEAT

I’d never played a BIT.TRIP game prior to this one but was dimly aware of their existence. BEAT is, in simple terms, one-player pong but combined with a rhythm game and the sort of things you’d see if an Atari 2600 took too much LSD. It’s a strange, hypnotic game that turns into you fusing with your mouse in an intricate dance, bouncing back the huge pixels in time with the music and going slightly dizzy in the process.

Hacker Evolution

If you’ve played Uplink, you’d be forgiven for thinking Hacker Evolution was something similar — but it’s actually a bit different. Where Uplink was most akin to something like Elite, only you were travelling around the world’s computer networks rather than the galaxy, Hacker Evolution is more tightly-focused and level-based. It’s also quite unforgiving, and from my experiences so far it appears that there’s relatively few “correct” ways to complete a level — but that gives it something of a puzzle game feeling which isn’t entirely unwelcome. The fact that you interact with the game by typing authentic-looking commands into a text-based console helps with the whole immersion thing, too.

Altitude

If you’ve often thought that Team Fortress 2 would be better if everyone was in aeroplanes and it was in 2D, then Altitude is the game for you. Featuring a wide selection of aircraft, each with special CoD-style perks — unlockable via CoD-style levelling up — and a decent mix of game types and levels, this is a fun multiplayer title, even if you’re shite at it, which I am.

I’d write more but I appear to have developed an absolutely screaming headache. Night all!

#oneaday Day 99: Mein Kraft

Yes, I have discovered Minecraft. Minecraft, despite being an indie game and therefore something I should technically automatically be championing, going by past experience, is something which I’ve always had something of a curious resistance to. It hasn’t been by choice, though—the reason I haven’t been playing Minecraft is not the same as the reason I’m not playing Call of Duty, for example.

In fact, if anything, it’s more to do with the fact that when I finally gave in to peer pressure and bought a copy a number of months back, I only had my netbook with me and it ran like ass on there. And then it ran like ass under OS X on my Mac at home, too. For literally months and months I’d been saying to myself “I should really install it on the Windows partition of my Mac and try it properly…”

Well now I have. And what do you know? It’s rather good, though it’s the kind of game that appears to—at least in its current beta stage—be very much “what you make of it”.

If you’re one of the few people who hasn’t contributed to developer Notch’s millions so far, here’s a brief rundown. You are dropped into a randomly-generated world made entirely of blocks of various materials. You have nothing to your name except a punching fist that can knock down trees. It’s up to you to survive, because every night, the nasties come out and will do their best to kill you.

That’s about it—but the main appeal of the game in its present state comes from the fact that once you’ve built yourself a secure shelter, it’s time to start exploring the world and building stuff. You can create structures either by hollowing out existing terrain or by collecting resources and stacking them to build things—kind of like pixelated Lego blocks.

Then there’s the “craft” part of the title—you can make items. The daunting part of the game for new players is the fact that no help is given when you start the game—without looking at sites such as the excellent Minecraft Wiki, you’d be expected to figure out how to make tools for yourself. And given that even making the simplest tools requires several steps (punch trees for wood, craft wood into planks, build workbench from planks, craft planks into sticks, combine sticks and planks in various arrangements to produce tools) it’s arguably something of a long shot to expect people to do this for themselves.

Or is it? Steven Johnson argues in Everything Bad is Good for You that the cognitive processes you go through when figuring out stuff like this for yourself are very beneficial—good “brain exercise”. You use past experience from previous games and other things you’ve done in the game you’re playing to draw conclusions for yourself about what to do next. And sure enough, I found that once I’d started playing a bit and got the basics down, I started naturally experimenting with different arrangements of materials to see what they produced. Some things worked, some things didn’t. If something doesn’t work, you don’t lose anything, either, so the game is set up to encourage exploration and experimentation.

There’s also an element of risk, though. Death isn’t permanent—but it does cause you to drop all your stuff and potentially lose it. If you’ve spent a long time collecting things, this can be a real pain, especially if you were exploring a long way from your home spot. Then there’s the fact that the game’s most notorious enemies, the “Creepers”, explode when they get near you. Not only does this cause significant damage to you, it also blows big holes in the things you’ve built.

But rather than being frustrating, most players simply take this as a sign that they need to defend their homes a little better. Perhaps they should make them harder to get to, or plant some cacti to put off enemies, or build some weapons and armour.

The possibilities are pretty extensive, and I’m looking forward to exploring the game further—and seeing where Notch takes it in the future. The game comes out of beta on the 11th of November this year, so if you want to pick it up for its current reduced price (25% off the full price) then get over there now.

#oneaday, Day 335: My Synapses Are Cold

I think it’s pretty much a given now that I’m a fan of creative indie games, particularly ones that put unusual twists on established formulae. There’s one I haven’t really talked about here yet, and I feel I should rectify this forthwith.

My brother (John Davison of GameSpot, for those three of you who haven’t realised that yet and are now going “Oh, yeah!”) mentioned on Twitter the other day that asynchronous multiplayer was “multiplayer for grown-ups”. Or specifically, multiplayer for people with little to no free time. Eminently suitable for those with jobs. Or those with families. Or those who simply suck at action/skill-based multiplayer titles.

Mode 7 Games’ Frozen Synapse caters for this crowd, specifically the subset of it who wish that they could pull off a headshot at a hundred paces but no longer have the reflexes of a twelve-year old with too much sugar and caffeine in their system. Frozen Synapse is, at heart, a team-based first-person shooter, albeit one represented from a top-down view played in turns by only two people. So not a lot like a first-person shooter at all, really.

Except that it kind of is. For the uninitiated, Frozen Synapse features a wide selection of different game modes, many of which will be familiar to players of shooty-shooty-bang-bang games. The simplest is Extermination mode, which simply tasks one team with killing the other team before five turns are up.

Each turn represents a five-second period of time, during which your little people can run, walk, duck, crawl, aim, shoot and focus on specific targets. It’s your job to set up a plan of action for them by setting waypoints and actions, then testing your plan to see where they’ll end up after five seconds, then committing your plan. At the same time, your opponent is also doing this, and when both of you have committed your plans, the outcome is shown, and it may not be what you had anticipated.

The cool thing about it, though, is that you don’t both have to be online to play. It’s essentially play-by-email, with the game sending a message to your opponent when you’ve taken your turn and it’s time to check out the carnage. This means that you can have a whole bunch of games on the go at the same time, and be able to rattle through them all in a matter of minutes. It’s a great idea, and it’s awesome to see this kind of idea work in a setting other than a game with With Friends in the title.

Best of all, the game plays well and it’s not even finished yet. The final product promises a single-player campaign mode, puzzle mode and all manner of other goodies. Those who are keen to support the game can pre-order and play the beta version right now, though, and you get a free copy to give to a friend, too. Which is nice.

Even better than that, the game is 30% off until Christmas. So if you’re the slightest bit interested in the unusual concept—and it genuinely does work really rather well—I’d encourage you to support the hard-working three-man team that is Mode 7 and pre-order a copy now.

If you do, be sure to send me a challenge. I cordially invite you to the turn-based bloodbath.

#oneaday, Day 325: Interactive Fiction

There’s a lot to be said for interactivity (or at least the illusion of interactivity) in storytelling. It allows things to be done that are simply impossible with non-interactive media such as books, TV and film.

I spent a couple of hours this afternoon playing Digital: A Love Story, a wonderful game set on the desktop of an Amiga “five minutes into the future of 1988”. If you haven’t played it yet and are intrigued by the premise, I suggest you play it before reading on, because I’m probably going to spoil some things about it. I’ll try not to be too explicit.

At the outset of the game, the player is the proud recipient of a brand-new “Amie” computer with a built-in modem. Your benefactor also provides you with a phone number of a BBS that you might want to check out. And so the story begins with the player dialing into the BBS, complete with terrifyingly authentic-sounding dial and modem tones screeching from your computer’s speakers. The player quickly gets friendly with a person named Emilia and things develop quickly in a manner that will be immediately familiar to anyone who has ever had an online relationship.

All is not as it seems, however, and the player, through a bit of investigation, discovers that there are strange things at work. The BBS crashes, and there is no way of getting in contact with Emilia. Just prior to the crash, she said she was “leaving home” and “getting out”. Thus begins a quest across several BBSes, ARPANet and Sprint’s long-distance calling-card system to track down Emilia and discover what happened.

The game is completely linear. Things happen in a set order, right up to the ending, when the player is faced with an inevitable conclusion that there really is no way around. At this point, we reach one of the most powerful things that gaming can do, and ironically one of the least interactive things about narrative games.

Offer the player the opportunity to do two things: do something, or walk away. Walking away is usually not an option, though Heavy Rain managed to convincingly offer this as an alternative at several points throughout its narrative. Digital: A Love Story, however, makes it abundantly clear that there is only one course of action open to you, and it’s an unpleasant one. Given the great pains that the game has taken up until this point to make you “feel” for the characters involved, despite being based around screens of text, it is difficult to make that final mouse click.

This is something you just can’t do with a book. Stopping halfway down the page and printing “Turn the page to see what happens next” is not an established literary convention, nor should it be. Same with TV and film; with those media, we’re just along for the ride. It’s the reason very few books save the Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure series are written in second-person perspective.

But with a game, the player has been driving the story all along, even if there is only really ever one thing they can do at a time to advance the plot to the next “event”. That illusion of interactivity allows the player to be all the more invested in the story, as if they’re part of the game world. This is further aided in titles such as Digital: A Love Story, which don’t break “character” for a moment. As far as the player is concerned, they’re using an Amiga… sorry, “Amie”. They’re not playing a game, they’ve been transported back in time to 1988, a land of 320×200 graphics, questionable multitasking capabilities and scanlines.

The ending of Digital: A Love Story is bittersweet and if you’ve engaged with the game up until that point in the way it is intended to be engaged with, you’ll find it genuinely emotionally affecting. It’s always interesting when a title which looks so unassuming can actually end up being more powerful than self-consciously “epic” CG cutscenes and over-the-top orchestral music with people singing in Latin.

So, if you remember 1988, if you ever had an Amiga or you remember the golden age of the BBS, check out Digital: A Love Story. It’s free, and well worth your time.

#oneaday, Day 197: Blind Girl

The Xbox Indie Games Marketplace is, at best, a mixed bag, as the vast majority of community-led games portals tend to be. There are some extreme examples of awfulness in there—the most notable that I’ve tried recently being Dossun Island, an 8-bit style platformer with dreadful animation that was clearly designed by someone who has no concept of how parallax scrolling is supposed to work. But then there’s some excellent stuff in there too—stuff which would be worthwhile on Xbox LIVE Arcade. Anyone who’s played games such as Beat Hazard will be aware that there are some genuine gems amongst the millions of massage apps and video-based crap.

And then there’s the “creative” games. For some time now, the term “indie game” has been associated with creativity, artistic experimentation and, of course, that overused word “pretentiousness”. Ever since Braid came along and either charmed or irritated everyone, the term “indie game” has been synonymous with doing things that little bit differently.

One such example of this creativity that I had the good fortune to stumble across tonight was an 80-point game called Blind Girl. In it, you play the titular blind girl and, via some very interesting game mechanics, have to collect musical notes.

Blind Girl, being blind, can’t see anything. So when you enter a level with her all you can see is her face, sitting there in inky blackness with her eyes closed. Moving around causes her face to change into some bare footprints, and the sound of her footsteps causes red “sound waves” to emanate from wherever she is. These sound waves bounce off walls, so by her making noise, the player is able to “see” the layout of the level.

As the game progresses, Blind Girl starts learning a tune. By tapping A, she can sing the part of the tune she has learned so far. This sends out green sound waves which, as the tune grows in length, travel a much greater distance and reveal much more than her footsteps alone.

As a simple maze game, it would be interesting enough. But it’s the twists and puzzles created with these simple mechanics that make Blind Girl such an intriguing game to play. “Enemies”, in the form of sinister floating eyes, are introduced a few levels in. There are red and green variants of these eyes. The red ones will chase Blind Girl if they hear her footsteps, but she can sneak past noiselessly by the player using the analog stick more lightly. The green ones will chase Blind Girl if they hear her singing. However, you can also only see where these eyes are if you hit them with the respectively-coloured sound wave, or if you’re right up close to them you can see “Z”s floating, indicating that they are asleep. Many of the puzzles revolve around manipulating the behaviour of these eyes to clear a path to the musical note, and there’s quite a few examples of creative solutions required.

Following the tradition of Braid, between levels there is some text that makes some attempt to tell a story about our titular heroine. The writers made the strange decision to do this all in rhyme, too, and the “titles” to each level are also in verse. Some of them are a bit clumsy, and it comes across as a very self-conscious attempt to be “arty”. It doesn’t detract from the game at all, though. Just be aware that if Braid‘s books irritated you, Blind Girl‘s poetry might rub you up the wrong way too.

Blind Girl is a pleasure to play. It’s pretty short, so it can easily be played through in one sitting. But the simple game mechanics, which are introduced gradually and paced well without the need for a fourth-wall breaking tutorial, work so well that it’s well worth doing that playthrough. There are times when it’s challenging, but it’s never so difficult that you want to throw the controller down and never play it again (something I experienced with Braid, and something many people have experienced more recently with Limbo). It’s a simple, polished, creative game that is a fine example of someone creating a game which doesn’t easily fit into the traditional “niches” and genres. I guess it’s a puzzle game at heart. But like many other indie games, it’s treated more as a free-flowing, interactive piece of art rather than a “game”.

Check it out. The trial allows you to play about a third of the way through the game, but the full thing is only 80 points. If you’re the slightest bit interested in creative game design, you could do far worse than check it out.