Discolored: Lifeless.
Games that play with colour, whether it be from the basic idea of restoring it to your world (ala Gris) or the more advanced mechanical based ones like Antichamber, have held some significant fascination for me. I’m not quite sure what it is though as it’s not like I’m obsessed with colour in other aspects of my life. So you can likely see why Discolored caught my attention when I was trolling the Steam discovery engine looking for a game to review this week. Whilst the concept was enough to draw me in the execution however is sub-par, it’s simplistic mechanics, lack of any story and general lack of polish made for a rather unsatisfying 75 minutes of game time.
The game’s plot is extremely simplistic; telling you that there’s a diner somewhere that’s lost all its colour and you’ve been sent to investigate. The game doesn’t have any further dialogue or items in the game that’d point as to why that might have been the case, nor does completing any of the puzzles reveal any further insight about that. Now I’ve played my fair share of games that tell stories through unconventional means but Discolored seemingly wants you to believe it has one without actually putting any effort in to develop it. This only makes the game’s ultimate conclusion even more confusing as it offers up no explanation nor real conclusion to your time spent there.
The game’s graphics are…ok, something which usually is neither here nor there but looking at the developer’s webpage it’s clear that he’s capable of producing far better art and assets than what has been included in the game. I can likely hazard a guess as to why: simplicity on the graphics end belies the complexity he likely encountered when trying to code for enabling/disabling the different colours. That’d explain why most of the surfaces are completely flat and untextured and why most of the assets themselves are very basic. Still given the fact that the colour mechanic itself is basic and not particularly interesting I’d honestly say he would’ve been better served toning down the mechanic and focusing on the visuals and story a little more.
Discolored’s mechanics focus somewhat around the idea of restoring colour to the world but for the most part it’s your run of the mill puzzler. None of them are particularly difficult but you’ll likely hit a few walls where you and the developer’s chain of logic part ways. This isn’t helped by the fact that the hit detection is a bit wonky and 90% of the time when I was stuck on something it was when I had clicked on a particular object and it did nothing, necessitating me finding the right angle to actually get it to work. You’d also think that switching or combining different colours would be a major mechanic that the game focuses on but it isn’t, only coming into play a couple of times before the game runs its course.
There’s just nothing really about Discolored that stands out as a reason for you to play it. The mechanics aren’t inventive or novel, the graphics are below average, there’s not a skerrick of a story to be had and the soundtrack is so forgettable that I can’t even really remember if there is one. I was kind of hoping for a new take on the “restore colour to the world” trope but found a very basic puzzler that does little to make you want to keep playing.
I went into Discolored without any expectations really, just looking for a game to tide over the blog between the larger reviews. What I found was a below par game that, given the credentials of the developer, could have been a lot better. The only standout feature is that it’s short so you’re unlikely to waste a great deal of time stumbling through the ham fisted puzzles, gawking at boring graphics or trying to remember if there was a soundtrack or not. To the developer I have this to say: build a game around your strengths. It’s obvious you’ve got skills in 3D artwork, start from that basis and work up.
Rating: 5.5/10
Discolored is available on PC right now for $11.50. Total play time was 75 minutes with 84% of the achievements unlocked.
Untitled Goose Game: HONK!
At this point I don’t think this game really needs any introduction…however…
I, like many innocent children, was the victim of a goose attack. Now the fact that I may have been antagonizing it with a friend of mine is largely beside the point, the fact still remains that a creature almost the same size as me chased me out of its territory with a series of loud honks and small nips at any part of my body in reach. Thus I came to the conclusion that geese are terrible, terrible animals and so when I saw a game that allowed you to be terrible as a goose I was immediately sold on the premise. So began an almost year long wait for it to come out and, whilst I was somewhat disappointed that it came out on the Epic Store first, I wasn’t going to let that stop me from tormenting others in the same way I had.
It is a lovely day in town and you are a horrible goose, set out to ruin everyone’s day. You have a mission, although that won’t be revealed to you until some time later, which in order to complete you have to make your way through the town proper. However it’s clear that this isn’t the first time you’ve been through here and the town is decidedly unfriendly to geese. From wary shopkeepers who watch your every move to barkeeps who won’t even let you in the door it’s clear that you’re going to have to do your geesely worst in order to get what you want.
Untitled Goose Game utilises a low-poly, low texture visual style that’s still all the rage with indie devs these days. The benefits of doing so are numerous: texturing is easier, the game will run on anything built in the last 10 years and you can hide a lot of mistakes and other mischief when you’ve got a bunch of solid colours lavishing everything. The animations, for everything except the goose, are decidedly low fidelity and are most likely hand animated. For a game whose main premise is all about mischief and mayhem the cartoonish art style fits in well.
Every level in Untitled Goose Game has a set of tasks for you to complete, the culmination of which will then allow you to move onto the next one. They start of pretty straight forward, mostly requiring you to get an item from A to B but the later levels require you to trigger certain behaviours which can be done in a variety of ways. This gives the game a kind of Hitman-esque feel to it as there’s always an obvious solution but every so often you’ll complete a puzzle in a really weird way and that will get you thinking about what you possibly get away with. The answer to that question is, surprisingly, quite a lot as the speed runners and glitchers have aptly demonstrated.
None of the puzzles are particularly challenging however, the most difficult of them mostly just amounting to needing to do something several times over or needing to wait for someone to path into the right spot so you can complete it. Unlike Hitman though none of the cycles are particularly long so you’re not going to be waiting around for ages in order to pull something off. For a casual game like this though I think that’s appropriate since anything too difficult would get in the way of the fun of Untitled Goose Game and there’s certainly enough of that to be had.
The game does have a few rough edges though, mostly stemming from the game’s level construction. Invisible walls abound everywhere and some interactions with the NPCs can see you get stuck behind or around them. It’s also possible to lose certain key items thanks to janky physics interactions although, thankfully, they’re all restored quickly upon a restart. The game could also be a little better at indicating when you’ve figured something out correctly but aren’t timing well, like with the old man in the pub with the dart board. I tried honking at what I thought was the right time multiple times over only to have it not work for some unknown reason. It finally worked on the third try though, oddly enough.
Really there’s not much more to say about Untitled Goose Game other than I think it’s just good fun. It’s not often that you come across a game that does so many things well, especially from a small indie studio with only a single other game under their belt. Untitled Goose Game also doesn’t overstay its welcome either, clocking in at a mere 2 hours for a first play through. In all honesty this is a game I’d love to see on Steam with Steamworks integration as I think the community could have an absolute field day with building custom levels for it. Hopefully that comes in the future as I really haven’t had my fill of being a terrible creature in a sleepy Australian town.
Rating: 9.25/10
Untitled Goose Game is available on PC and Nintendo Switch right now for $19.99. Game was played on the PC with a total of 2 hours play time.
Koral: The Beauty of Our Seas.
One of the many reasons I keep doing these reviews is that I enjoy charting the journeys of the various developers that I come across, especially the smaller indies. For some they create an IP and expand on it, like Frozenbyte with Trine or Moon Studios with Ori and the Blind Forest, whilst others like Supergiant Games continually experiment, almost reinventing themselves with each release. Carlos Coronado, who previously brought us Mind: Path to Thalamus, falls into the previous camp having experimented widely over the many years he’s been a game developer. Whilst I wasn’t able to experience one of his previous titles due to it being VR only when I saw Koral, a casual puzzler with a strong environmental message, I was very interested to see what he’d be bringing to the table.
Koral is a self-described love letter to the ocean, created by the developer whilst he was onboard a sail ship in a marine sanctuary in Northern Catalonia. The game’s core is quite simple: you’re an ocean current that can bring life back to the reefs that have been devastated by humanity’s impact on them. Along the way you’ll be peppered with facts about why many coral reefs are currently under threat and some of the positive actions that have taken place to restore them. When it’s all said and done the game will likely only take you a couple hours to get through, maybe one more if you’re looking to 100% it.
The puzzles aren’t particularly difficult although they do get awfully repetitive as they all share the same core base mechanic: explore to find the little light things and then bring them somewhere to unblock the way forward. The challenge ratchets up mostly through adding in more ways to hide the lights from you or by adding a timer to certain challenges. None of them would be out of reach of even beginner games I feel but there are definitely some that felt a little more tedious than others just because they had an arbitrary time limit placed on them, forcing you to do them over again if you fail.
The pacing could also be a little tighter as there’s numerous long sections where there isn’t any music or something particularly interesting happening on screen. Part of this is probably due to the game’s creation (more on that in a sec) but still I feel like these games live and die by their pacing, tying together the various visual and auditory components together so the game effortlessly flows between stages. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled too much by games like The Turing Test which showed me just how great a game like this can be when all those disparate elements come together well.
Probably one of the most interesting parts of the game for me was the credits when it was revealed that quite a bit of this game was created with assets from the Unreal store, including the music. I mean, it shouldn’t really be a surprise that all those kinds of assets are available on there, but it certainly demonstrated to me just how far that ecosystem has come of late. As time goes on it seems the barriers to creating something worthy of playing are getting lower and lower which, whilst it has increased the incidents of shovelware and asset flips, does mean that creators are now free to focus on the much more important aspects of game development.
Koral does exactly what its developer wants it to do: it shows his love for the ocean and the want to preserve it for all to enjoy. It’s construction might not be the best, suffering from slight pacing issues and repetitive puzzles, but it still manages to get its message across. Perhaps most interestingly for me is the amount of things that went into it that were already prebuilt, I honestly would not have guessed that any of it wasn’t created for this game directly had the developer not mentioned it in the credits. So, in summary, Koral is a great distraction even with its rough edges.
Rating: 8.0/10
Koral is available on PC and Nintendo Switch right now for $16.95. Total play time was 2 hours with 59% of the achievements unlocked.
Vane: Where The Wind Takes Us.
Yeah I know, I have a type.
Take some kind of high concept, wrap it in an intriguing art style, throw in a few interesting puzzle mechanics and back the whole thing up with a semi-decent soundtrack and you’re almost guaranteed to get a look in from me. Part of my penchant for these kinds of games was born out of my time being consumed by other things but over time I’ve grown to quite like the genre and all the weird titles it seems to produce. Vane, as you’ve likely already guessed, fits that description almost perfectly and was the second title to come to me via the new Steam recommendation engine. I’m glad to say that this time around it was bang on the money, directing me to an incredibly surreal and intriguing experience that I had not come across before.
In a ruined desert, a strange golden dust transforms a free-spirited bird into a determined young child. You are not the only one to have undergone this transformation however and the world around you is littered with evidence of a world that was once far more than what it appears to be today. Your transformation sets in motion a chain of events that will reshape the world, hopefully for the better.
Vane’s art-style is quite unique with its direct influences coming from the Team Ico games of old. That’s combined with a weird glitchy aesthetic, which gives it this strange sci-fi overtone. Indeed the styling of the world is equal parts fantastic and high-tech, giving you this feeling the environment is stuck between the fantastic and the real. Given I’ve played far too many low-poly indie games of late it’s nice to see a developer take a different angle with it instead of simply using the aesthetic as a way to get out of needing to texture too much. There were a few poorly optimised areas, mostly the larger open areas when the heavy particle effects were going, but other than them the game ran perfectly smooth.
You’ll encounter a wide variety of puzzle mechanics whilst playing Vane as it starts off as a kind of walking-simulator-esque experience as you soar around the desert looking for places to land. From there the game evolves into a kind of puzzle platformer, requiring you to explore the level to figure out how it works, look for where you need to transform and so on. Later on the game then adds in what I’ll call the “rebuilding” mechanic which appears to reconstruct the destroyed world around you. It makes for an interesting progression in terms of mechanical complexity, gradually ramping up the challenge over the game’s short length.
None of those mechanics are well introduced unfortunately, making figuring them out a rather laborious endeavour of trial and error. There’s hints around, of course, but it can be hard to tell when the game is trying to nudge you in a direction or if it’s just something that looks like it should be investigated. Vane isn’t the first game to suffer from a problem like this and it’s one of the more challenging elements to get right; making exploration worthwhile by challenging the player and not just filling the world with random rubbish to seek out.
I’d probably be a bit more lenient on Vane if it weren’t for the absolutely god awful controls that it has. Flying is honestly a major chore and it’s far too hard to perch on something, especially considering that’s one of the core mechanics. Indeed I managed to spaz out the physics engine multiple times by flying too close to something and it not being able to figure out if I should land, bounce off or do something else. This continues with the controls on the ground which feel far more wonky than they really should be. This is most aptly demonstrated in the part of the game with a procedurally generated level, often resulting in you getting stuck on geometry or sliding around randomly as the game tries to figure out how to place you. For a game that gets so much right to get a basic thing like controls so utterly wrong really perplexes me.
The story is interesting, even if it’s so hand wavy in what it shows that you could really make anything out of it. It’s obvious that you find yourself in the ruins of a once prosperous world, one that’s ravaged by what appears to be a never ending storm. However from there everything is pretty much up to your interpretation. On a hunch I just checked and there are 2 different endings although really it seems either of them are as about as satisfying as the other. All this being said I don’t think that the story of Vane was the developer’s overall focus and, whilst it’s somewhat interesting to contemplate, it’s not really the main thrust of the game.
Vane is a weird dichotomy of excellent craftsmanship in some respects and down right negligence in others. The art of Vane’s world is an eclectic mix of old world fantasy with sci-fi overtones all built up beautifully in low poly detail. The puzzle mechanics grow organically throughout the game, ramping up the challenge gradually. However the lack of any direction with the puzzles coupled with the absolutely trash controls means that the game experience is far more frustrating than it needs to be. I’ve dealt with vague puzzle mechanics before, and I can somewhat forgive them, but controls that are that wonky just makes everything worse. Hopefully future titles from Friend & Foe Games don’t incur this penalty as what they’ve built here has the makings of something truly awesome.
Rating: 7.5/10
Vane is available on PC and PlayStation 4 right now for $28.95. Game was played on the PC with a total of 2.7 hours playtime with 39% of the achievements unlocked.
BirdGut: The Hatless One.
Free to play used to be a taboo word for me, usually indicating that the game was some microtransaction infested hell hole that would do little more than soak up my time in an effort to get to my wallet. More recently though it seems a lot of developers, including a non-zero number of really talented ones, are choosing to release their games for free with no other strings attached. To be sure most of them are usually pretty short and light on other features you’d see in big name titles but I doubt most of them would lose many players if they’d asked for a dollar or two. Such is the case with BirdGut, a bizarre hand drawn platformer that is equal parts fun as it is weird and obtuse.
A bee hatches in the hive, but something’s wrong. Born different from the others, the bee is exiled from the hive and forced to survive the world on its own. That is, until a bird attacks and eats it. Inside the bird, all of the bugs that it eats are brainwashed and put to work in fantastical, mechanical factories that exist in the place of its organs, except for the outcast bee, whose very disability prevents them from being brainwashed. The bee takes it upon itself to destroy the massive bird from the inside out, and free all the enslaved critters within.
BirdGut’s visuals are all hand drawn in a greyscale colour palette. Honestly the amount of effort that went into putting these visuals together is quite phenomenal, even for a less than 2 hour game. Each of the screens is its own little unique world, filled with all sorts of random detail. The animations are buttery smooth too, something you don’t see often with hand drawn games. This is all then juxtaposed with ludicrousy that this is all supposedly taking place inside a bird’s digestive system, something you’re reminded about in the most weird and unusual ways. It was this weird styling that first attracted me to the game as it’s rare enough for a game to be done this way and rarer still for it to be free.
The main game mechanics are puzzle platformer based with all the usual tropes making a showing in BirdGut’s short play time. You’ll start off slow, just needing to jump your way past a handful of obstacles, and will gradually move up to more complicated maneuvers, many of which will require semi-precise timing to pull off. The game’s simplicity negates many of the opportunities for emergent gameplay to occur so if you find yourself struggling against a particular challenge it’s quite likely that you’re approaching it the wrong way. Other than that there’s not much more to the game other than trial and error.
That of course means that the main increase in difficulty comes from the lengthening of time between checkpoints and the game exploiting that relentlessly. The later platforming sections consist of minutes long timed encounters that will take you at least a couple tries to get past as there’s no way of knowing what obstacles are coming up before you hit them for the first time. I’m not a huge fan of these “fuck you player” kinds of moments as it just punishes you for not knowing something that you had no way of figuring out. That being said it’s not like these challenges waste a ton of time but it still feels like a kick in the pants every time you have to repeat the same section again.
BirdGut’s story is lighthearted and tongue in cheek, with some sparse bits of dialogue providing some comic relief between the longer puzzle sections. It’s not particularly deep but I didn’t expect to be so it did its job of providing a little bit of background whilst I stumbled my way through the various platforming puzzles.
BirdGut was a surprisingly fun distraction that I still can’t believe is free. The hand drawn visuals alone warrant a small entry price and the decent platforming with the lighthearted story make it all worth playing. Is it perfect? Absolutely not but even at $5 I’d say I got my money’s worth with it. So if you’re in the market for something quick, concise and a little weird then BirdGut is likely to fit the bill.
Rating: 8.0/10
BirdGut is available on PC right now for free. Total play time was 88 minutes with 50% of the achievements unlocked.
KIDS: Pitter Patter.
I am…truly at a loss to set the scene on this one.
In my regular dive through the dumpster that is the Steam new releases page I came across KIDS and, given that it was free, I figured it was probably worth the price of admission. What followed was a surreal 20 minute experience that could be a commentary on how we interact with each other or some kind of weird ASMR tech demo.
Suffice to say it’s the first game where I’ve felt that screenshots aren’t going to be sufficient to demonstrate the rather bizarre mechanics it brings to bear.
There’s not much to say about it from an art style or graphics point of view, it’s just hand drawn black and white sketchbook art. The sound design does stand out though with all the animations being accompanied by some great foley work. There’s nothing quite like hearing the footsteps of a few onscreen figures slapping around before it turns into an ungodly stampede of the buggers trampling across your screen.
Mechanically it’s like 2D walking simulator as all you need to do is click in places to make things happen. Given that it’s only 20 minutes it’s really worth just going and playing it to see them for yourself but some choice moments are: moving through what I assume is someone’s digestive system, throwing countless figures into bottomless pits and starting a mexican wave of claps.
Like I said before, truly bizarre.
KIDS feels like the kind of game you used to find on places like Newgrounds or Albino Black Sheep. It’s a surreal experience that doesn’t really have a premise or a story to tell but it’s intriguing all the same. If I didn’t think it’d horribly scar children in some way I’d say it’d be a great little title for the iPad as the interactivity had a very tactile feel to it, even behind a mouse. In all honesty I have no idea if this game will appeal to you but for 20 minutes of your time I don’t think that’s a huge investment to find out either way.
Rating: 8.5/10
KIDS is available on PC right now for free. Total play time was 19 minutes.
Snakeybus: Long Bus is Long.
Sometimes I just want to play something dumb.
That’s partly the reason I keep playing Call of Duty; it’s the definition of “turn off your brain” kind of entertainment. But this also extends to experimental games their either throw convention to the wind (like the entire frustration game genre) or just those whose premise is silly enough to entice me. So is how I came across Snakeybus, a new take on the game which made Nokia phones the brand to have back when I was in high school (errbody wanted that snake action). You probably won’t play it for long, nor will you have to try especially hard to get most of the achievements, but it was pretty much exactly what I needed: a silly, short game that provided some good distraction between the myriad of AAA titles that have been banking up on me.
The premise is simple: you pick up passengers, deliver them to a destination and based on the number you deliver your bus gets longer. Initially this poses no challenge but you’ll quickly end up with a bus so long that you’ll be tripping over yourself in no time. So begins the challenge of figuring out strategies to ensure that you can make your way around the map without running into yourself whilst still being able to pick up and drop off passengers. Unlocks come fast as they’re just based off the number of times you play any level or some random currency that you get awarded far too much of. In a nutshell this is a game that does what says on the box and doesn’t make any attempt to stop you from playing it out as quickly as you want.
Snakeybus has simple graphics and each level has its own unique style. The initial level is kind of what you’d expect for your run of the mill indie title, but the later levels include one with cel shading, an outrun styled Miami and even a rotating space structure. At the time of writing performance was unfortunately pretty poor given its simplistic graphics although it appears that the developer has been feverishly at work attempting to rectify the problem, netting everyone a 20%+ performance improvement. The game could also use some more and varied sound tracks to go with it as it becomes repetitive quite quickly, even when you’re only spending a few short minutes in each session. Overall Snakeybus’ graphics are passable which, honestly, is exactly what you’d expect.
The core mechanic is pretty fun and quickly becomes quite the challenge, even in levels where you’d expect to have quite a lot of freedom to move around. Strategies in one level will likely not work in others as their layout will dictate what you can get away with. The above screenshot for instance is all about managing which side of the road you’re using because, if you don’t and snake around everywhere, you’ll have no room to move. Other levels though, like the space one, work best if you weave around like you’d do in the original snake game. Honestly I originally just tried to make sure I took the longest route I possibly could before working out that each level had its own strategy.
Of course part of the attraction of games like this is unintentional shenanigans you can get up to with a less-than-great physics engine implementation. The below screenshot is just one example of me getting into a situation which honestly should have been game over but the physics engine couldn’t really figure out if I was stopped or not. So instead it ended up with this weird tangle of buses all on top of themselves, seemingly flitting in and out of existence before righting themselves again. This cuts both ways of course as there were many times when my bus was only just barely stopped and the game cut me off. Whilst this is technically an issue really it doesn’t detract from the game play. In reality it’s a core part of it.
Snakeybus is the kind of title you play when you don’t want a game that asks too much of you. It’s B-grade implementation, OK graphics and numerous rough edges are all part of the charm of games like this. Sure every single part of the game could be done better but it doesn’t need to be. Snakeybus exists to explore the core game mechanic and little more beyond that. In that mission it succeeds in spades, providing a fun little distraction that you’ll likely play for a couple hours before putting down for good. In the end it’ll come down to whether or not you’re willing to part with a few dollars for something as silly as this. For this old gamer it was very much worth it.
Rating: 7.5/10
Snakeybus is available on PC right now for $14.50. Total play time was 92 minutes with 88% of the achievements unlocked.
Feather: Fly Free.
The biggest problem with having a game you really enjoy is that it sucks up all the oxygen for other titles. For me currently that’s The Division 2, a game that I will definitely review in the near future, but between it, our new baby and work I’ve had little time to look at many of the other top tier titles that have been released of late. So once again I turn to the indie scene, looking for more casual experiences that don’t ask much of my time but hopefully provide a good experience nonetheless. Feather, from Melbourne based developers Samurai Punk, fit the bill perfectly with its simple visuals, great music tracks and stress free mechanics.
The premise of the game is simple: you’re a bird and there’s a big island you can explore. As you fly around it you’ll find different things you can interact with, most notably the large circular totems that, when flown through, change the music to a new track for you to fly around to. There are no objectives, no enemies to fight or even an end to the game; it’s just simply a place to explore with a handful of different songs for you to enjoy. When we’ve been inundated with numerous games overflowing with mechanics, many designed to keep us coming back or to spend more money on microtransactions, it’s nice to have something that is as simple as it looks.
The graphics are a very low poly affair with little to no texturing, just plain solid colours. This simplicity is augmented slightly by the implementation of some more complex lighting effects and the inclusion of a full day/night cycle for the island. I played this on my now 3 year old XPS, which happens to rock a Geforce 970M, and initially had some issues with the frame rate not being the greatest. Granted it’s not as powerful as the desktop equivalent I have in my gaming rig but it was a little disappointing to see it struggle with something so simple. It may just be how the default configuration was set up as it does have a very high DPI monitor and running the game again on my home rig showed no issues.
The flight mechanics of Feather are pretty great; simple enough to be approachable yet there’s a few subtle things thrown in that you’ll need to master if you really want to explore the island fully. Climbing high and diving down will allow you to approach speeds that you won’t be able to normally and using space bar to hover is a necessity if you want to explore the underground cave system. Unfortunately other players (who will drop in you session from time to time, ala Journey) don’t seem to be as masterful of the controls and so interaction with them can be a little hard. I often found myself and another player going in circles trying to look at each other.
You’re probably not going to spend too long in Feather as even exploring at a leisurely pace would see you get around the island in under an hour or so. That’s likely to make the $15 asking price a little high for some, especially with no plans for the game to grow beyond currently what it is today. This is certainly one of those titles that could benefit from integration with the Steam Community Workshop as there’s already a solid fanbase who love the game for what it is. I don’t usually gripe about price and playtime but it’s sure to be a key deciding factor for many.
Feather is a fantastic, if a little short, experience. The simple premise and it’s solid execution make it a great distraction, something to play if you’ve got a bit of time to spare and don’t want something that asks much of you. However its greatest attributes may be the thing that drives some players away, not wanting to spend their money here when there are many other greener pastures to farm. Still I enjoyed my time with Feather and hope that the concept helps Samurai Punk delve further into developing titles like these.
Rating: 8.5/10
Feather is available on the PC and Nintendo Switch right now for $14.50. Game was played on the PC with 27 minutes total play time and 100% of the achievements unlocked.
Cheeky Chooks: Clicker With a Cacophony of Cluckers.
I never reviewed Adventure Capitalist but boy, did I put a lot of time into that game. It started when I met up with some friends of ours when we were on holiday and one of them kept whipping their phone out every so often to check up on their progress. I had avoided the game up until that point but, with time to kill between things, I installed it and instantly fell prey to the clicker genre. So it was that every spare moment was filled with me spinning it up, checking on my progress and buying upgrades so I could reach that next level. I’ve since then avoided everything to do with the genre, not wanting to fall into that same trap once again. Cheeky Chooks however managed to fly under the radar, seemingly being a farm management simulator on first blush but is really a clicker at heart. Thankfully it’s one that can be completed in a reasonable amount of time and is completely free of microtransactions. With it being free to play I’m not quite sure what Trilum Studio’s play is here, but it’s at least a fun distraction whilst we’re in the middle of a lul in big name releases.
The premise of the game is simple: you’re an aspiring chicken farmer with a small space to start pursuing your dream of raising chickens. You’ll get a set amount of cash to start you off and you’ll build out your farm from there. Once you’ve exhausted your initial cash reserves though you’ll need to rely on selling eggs to make enough money to upgrade your farm. The mechanics follow the usual affair, your base income determined by the number of chooks with multipliers for “egg quality” that come from various sources like rare chooks or buildings that provide a small benefit. This has to be balanced with the chooks’ happiness, so you’ll also have to provide them with various items to ensure that they can happily lay eggs in your little chook pen.
Cheeky Chooks is visually quite simple with most models being highly stylized, devoid of textures and utilizing a very simple muted colour scheme. That simplicity flows through into the menu systems and other UI elements as well, having an almost childlike feel to them. The sound track and foley work is equally simple as well, giving the whole game a very minimalistic feel. Overall it’s quite nice and given that I feel like the game is designed to either be played in short bursts or left on in the background the visuals fit that idea well.
The game starts off with a pretty decent tutorial, walking you through the main mechanics before setting you off on your own. There’s a list of missions for you to do, most of which will help in pushing the farm towards the next level. Whilst you can likely progress without achieving all of them you’ll likely hit most of them by default and others you’ll want to get anyway in order to get certain achievements or just make your life a little easier. Annoyingly the Legends missions will always be highlighted after a certain point and, unfortunately, there’s no way to get rid of it since it’s tied to a specific event that has since passed.
Certain missions are pretty pointless to overall progression though, like the one requiring you to max out the level on a certain number of buildings. As you can see from my nearly completed farm below achieving those meant spamming lots of low level structures so that they could be upgraded cheaply. The game does increase the cost of each subsequent structure as you place them but the upgrade costs remain the same regardless of how many are placed. Sure, if you were truly min/maxing, I could see reasons for using the other buildings in order to jack up the egg quality but for the most part that doesn’t seem necessary. I think I could’ve completed the game in half the amount of time I played if I hadn’t stayed logged in, having the game on in the background whilst I watched videos on my second monitor.
The game was developed in collaboration with the RPSCA to be an educational tool for kids, teachers and parents which is a commendable feat. In that regard it succeed for the most part although nothing can replicate the true horror that is cleaning out a chook cage. That also explains why it’s a free to play game that’s devoid of microtransactions, something which is usually par for the course for these kinds of games. It’s also not an endless game either (although you can play for as long as you want) and given that they’ve only had a single event so far there’s no much reason to come back once you’ve blasted through all the achievements. Of course if you just like ambient clucking in the background and seeing numbers go up then you might get more out of it than I did.
Cheeky Chooks is a simple, straightforward game that many will be able to find several hours of enjoyment in. Whilst it is most definitely a clicker game the more nefarious mechanics that are typical in the genre are nowhere to be found. Instead what you have is a light-hearted take on what it’s like to raise chickens, something which hopefully will have an impression on those who play it. If you just want something simple to pass the time then there’s really not much reason to not give Cheeky Chooks a go.
Rating: 8.0/10
Cheeky Chooks is available on Android and PC right now for free. Game was played on the PC with a total of 5 hours playtime and 100% of the achievements unlocked.
Donut County: 🦆🦆🦆
Given my last 2 reviews have been for MMOs you can probably guess that I’ve been a little strapped for time to get around to playing other titles. It even got to the point where I was playing Destiny and WoW in the same night, something which I knew wasn’t going to be particularly sustainable if I wanted to keep my 1 review per week cadence going. So I went in search of some shorter titles and stumbled across Donut Country, another Annapurna Interactive published title, which seemed to be charming and, thankfully, quite short. Whilst I might have been drawn in by the game’s brevity the visual style, kitschy dialogue and simple mechanics made it far more enjoyable than I was expecting.
Racoons have moved into the quiet town of Donut County, taking over the local donut shop. Every time someone orders a donut however a mysterious hole shows up at their house, devouring everything in sight. The hole is piloted by none other than BK, one of the new racoon residents, who’s doing so in order to get enough points to get his hands on a sweet new drone. However once he falls into one of his own holes he finds the citizens of Donut Country trapped 999 feet below the surface and they’re understandably quite mad about his recent shenanigans. What follows is the story of how the town became swallowed up and their journey to get back out.
The single developer behind Donut County, Ben Esposito, set himself a few constraints when designing the game’s visual style: no lighting effects, textures or gradients. Whilst those rules aren’t adhered to 100% they are the driving force behind the games minimalistic aesthetic. The result is a kind of flat, cartoon like environment filled with bright, solid colours which is really quite charming. Indeed whilst there’s a lot of games with a similar visual style I’m actually struggling to come up with one that’s exactly like it as most games won’t go so far as to abandon the use of textures, nor even simple gradients. As someone who’s worked as a sole developer on a couple projects I can definitely appreciate setting yourself boundaries and working within them; sometimes there’s really nothing as liberating as working within a strict ruleset.
The game’s mechanics are simple: your a small hole which grows bigger as it consumes things (kind of like a reverse Katamari Damacy). There are a bunch of small challenges which will require you to get a little inventive with how you use a few mechanics but other than that the game play doesn’t deviate too much. That being said it’s kind of fun to try and figure out which things will fit and which ones don’t as sometimes you can get away with getting bigger things in if you know how to position them right. That being said this is a physics based game so there’s many opportunities for things to go pear shaped, with items flinging themselves wildly across the level and getting stuck in areas that you won’t be able to reach. Of course you’re only a restart of the level away from fixing that so it’s not that much of an issue.
The story is a simple affair, seemingly reflective of the developer’s own conversational style (as evidenced in their Gamasutra interview here). It’s a lighthearted commentary on their experiences in Los Angeles and it issues they want to touch on certainly come through. Overall though there’s not much to write home about, it’s simply there to set the scene for the various puzzles and to tie the whole thing together.
Donut County is a fun little distraction, combining simplistic art work with lighthearted dialogue for an interesting experience that’s really like no other. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a game idea that was born out from Peter Molydeux; something completely left of center that pays little heed to the creed and conventions of modern game design. After chewing my way through too very heavy game experiences over the last couple weeks I was incredibly glad to cleanse my palate with something a little lighter. So if you like me are experiencing a little fatigue with the AAA barrage that comes this time of year then Donut County is most likely the game for you.
Rating: 8.0/10
Donut County is available on PC and PlayStation 4 right now for $12.99. Game was played on the PC with 104 minutes of play time and 55% of the achievements unlocked.
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