Knytt

• Made by: Nifflas’ Games
  
• Cost: Free!
  
• Where to get it: Knytt page

What elements are important for a good game? When a developer makes a game about exploration, what do they need to include? In the last 20 years or so we’ve seen games like The Legend of Zelda, Eye of the Beholder, Super Mario Bros., Metroid and Star Control, all of which have a heavy emphasis on exploration. It’s generally accepted that games like this include: enemies to kill, obstacles to overcome, varied environments, secret areas, maybe a plot to uncover and a character who slowly gains more power and agility as they progress. These games are all legitimate classics, but if you were to take out the fighting and character growth mechanics, you’d be left with bland, somewhat tedious games. Because of this, you might think that exploration games require those elements; that fighting and blocked-off areas are simply an intrinsic part of the exploration sub-genre.

Nifflas’ Games’ Knytt boldly abandons combat and character growth to give the player a purely exploratory experience. It’s a game about enjoying the scenery, soaking in the atmosphere and seeing just how far you can go in any given direction. 

You play as Knytt, a sprightly little… gnome-thing who’s barely more than a stick figure. In the fashionably brief intro, he’s abducted by the galaxy’s most embarrassingly incompetent alien who, after scooping up our hero and zipping into space, almost immediately smacks into an asteroid and crash-lands on a different planet. As Knytt, you explore this gigantic world looking for the scattered pieces of the alien’s ship so you can get back home. This is done in a style reminiscent of, say, Super Metroid. You can run, jump, climb up walls and… well, that’s it. Unlike Super Metroid, no part of the world is initially blocked off, and you don’t have any abilities to gain. You are free to explore the entire game world in any way you feel like. This tends to get you lost fairly quickly. 

But what a world to get lost in! Each area is unique, with beautifully colored atmospheric artwork, provocative ambient sounds and weird little inhabitants living in the world. As you traverse the planet, you’ll come across platforming challenges and the occasional enemy to avoid, but that’s about the extent of the gameplay. 

It is a true testament to the designer’s vision that this game can have almost no combat and still be an absolute joy to play, albeit a more relaxing one. How many games do you play that don’t have combat? Really, aside from puzzle games what is there? Knytt shows us that there are other things our heroes can do besides massacring entire races of small animals. 

Mini-Review: Mondo Agency

• Made By: Cactus Software
• Cost: Free!
• Where to get it: Indie Games.com

Okay, so maybe Mondo Agency isn’t going to set the gaming world on fire. In a purely technical sense, the game does absolutely nothing that hasn’t been done before. But if you take it as a piece of art, like an independent film or surrealist painting, then you’ll have a freaky, unique experience. 

It plays like a standard FPS, complete with WASD keyboard and mouse controls, with standard level navigation, shooting and puzzle solving. It sounds run-of-the-mill, but as soon as you start playing, you’ll know immediately that this is something far different than your usual FPS. This is, by far, one of the creepiest, flesh-crawliest, just-plain-wrong-feelingest games I’ve ever played. Technically, nothing really scary happens to you; no monsters jump out, no blood appears, no dark corridors to stumble through. Yet every second of the game is dripping with a sense of dread and wrongness. It feels like playing through one of your own nightmares. 

Why is just about the whole game presented in grayscale? Why is the screen covered with film grain? What is that horrible rhythmic breathing sound? What is with the psuedo-philosophical broken-English and backwards dialog in between levels? What does it all mean?? 

Every bit of this game creeps me out in a way I can’t really describe. It probably won’t win any awards or go down in history for innovative or even great gameplay, but playing it was an experience I won’t forget any time soon. Major congratulations to Cactus Software for making such a bizarre and thought-provoking experience through the gaming medium. 

Mini-Review: Quake Live Beta

• Made By: id Software
• Cost: Free!
• Where to get it: Sign up for the Beta at quakelive.com

I know, I know. Ben, you say, Quake Live? What kind of magical fairy dust are you snorting? This is a site for indie games. Look at the facts, Chuckles: It’s free, it plays in a browser, and it’s made by the guys who arguably started ‘indie’ development and have remained this way all these years. Stick that magical fairy dust in your pipe and smoke it.

Anyway, I got in on the Quake Live Beta a couple weeks ago. This is essentially Quake 3, for free, in a browser, paid for by ads on in-game billboards. If you don’t know Quake 3, it was one of the last remnants of an old age of first-person shooters, an age when weapons hovered above the ground like angels waiting to be claimed, ‘camping’ was a veritable faux pas, CTF was the epitome of multiplayer gaming, in-game life lasted but a few seconds and death was merely a temporary annoyance. Ninja-like reflexes, surgically precise aiming, level memorization and resource control were what put you on the top.

The whole package is all very simple. You install a browser plug-in, endure a quick tutorial and play a one-on-one with Crash, a bot who after the match determines your skill level. After that you customize your settings, look at a list of servers (which also show how your aforementioned skill level matches up with the rest of the group already playing) and click on the one you want to join. It’s very elegant and works perfectly. The game tracks all your stats too and allows you to add friends and such, just like you’d expect from a true Web 2.0 product.

Quake Live has no grounding in reality, nor does it bother with any semblance of context. If you’ve been raised on Halo or Rainbow Six, this might put you off, but if you have fond memories of playing any of the Quake games, then this will be like Christmas. Imagine getting a bunch of friends together and not having to spend an hour getting everyone’s installations up to date just to get a match going. Rejoice when this goes public.

Spelunky

• Made By: Derek Yu
• Cost: Free!
• Where to get it: This TIG Forum post

When you mix chocolate, rock music and Mr. T what do you get? The most awesomest explosion of awesome all over your face, that’s what. Spelunky is a game that mixes tight platforming, loot-collecting, and NetHack-style random level generation. For me, this is the gaming equivalent of getting punched in the face by a giant Mr. T made out of chocolate while he’s playing a Slayer riff on a guitar made of bone and lost souls. Which is to say I love it.

Spelunky is made by Derek Yu, an artist and game designer who became famous around the indie scene after co-developing Aquaria, a game that won the IGF’s 2007 Seumas McNally Grand Prize. He developed Spelunky, however, mostly on his own using Game Maker.

In Spelunky you play as a cute midget-Indiana Jones type character, delving into what appears to be an old mine/cave network in search of loot and all manner of apparently very lost damsels in distress. Your starting equipment is made up of a limited number of bombs, for blowing holes in stuff, and ropes for climbing into and out of deep mine shafts. Not surprisingly, you use your whip to defend yourself against typical enemies like bats, snakes, spiders and, er, cavemen. I guess it makes sense. You navigate each level of the caves looking for gold and gems, various upgrade items and damsels in distress, eventually heading to the exit at the bottom of the level. Occasionally you’ll come across a Golden Idol, and picking it up predictably sets off a huge rolling boulder that crushes everything in it’s path.

It all sounds like a yawnfest when I describe it like that, doesn’t it? Well, the genius of this game is much more subtle than it’s surface features. Every level is randomly generated. That’s right; like they say, it’s never the same game twice. You never quite know what you’re going to encounter. There are lots and lots of upgrade items, and I won’t tell you all of them here, but they include parachutes, glasses, teleporters and shotguns. Every one of these items affects your game in some huge way, but you never know what you are going to stumble on in your travels.

All of the characters, items and obstacles interact with each other in unpredictable and exciting ways, which is what keeps the game so engaging all the time. When you pick up the Golden Idol off of its platform, for example,  the boulder comes tumbling down and bores a long tunnel in it’s wake as it barrels through the cave. I discovered, however that if I managed to get underneath the Idol chamber, I could blow up the platform itself from below and the Idol would simply fall into my greedy, waiting hands without setting off the boulder. On the other hand, in a different session there was a giant, nearly indestructible spider blocking my way to the exit and it wouldn’t budge. So I trekked back a little ways, picked up an Idol, quickly climbed a ladder to get out of the way, and, just as I was hoping, the boulder plowed right over the spider’s stupid face and I could casually stroll through afterward unharmed. This is the same kind of crazy, chaotic happenings that made NetHack so fun, except this time it’s presented using fun platforming instead of keyboard command memorization and all-text graphics. There are so many weird things to encounter and problem-solve your way through, and the discovery is half the fun.

Keep in mind, though, that this game is brutally hard. Health is extremely difficult to come by. In fact, it might take you a while to figure out how to even get more health, because the game certainly won’t tell you. You’ll probably find that you’ll die and start over a few times before you even get to the second level. Don’t let this perturb you though. This is how the game is supposed to play; you’re not playing it wrong by dying a lot. One time I threw a rock at a wall and it bounced back with startling momentum, hitting me in the face and killing me. Embarrassing, but hilarious.

You owe it to yourself to play this game. How many other games let you choose between saving a lady or dropping her in a pit so you can pick up a sweet jetpack?