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: Noctis

• Made By: Allesandro Ghignola
• Cost: Free!
• Where to get it: Noctis Site

This old favorite of mine is such a strange one that I thought it can only fit as a mini-review. It’s almost a stretch to even classify it as a game, as there are no problems to solve, no monsters to shoot, and nothing to collect. It is, however, the biggest, strangest, and possibly loneliest experience you’re likely to have in gaming. 

It is many folks’ lifelong ambition to travel through the galaxy in their own ship, but since we’re laughably far in technology from actual starships, faster-than-light travel, moonbases, killer robot soldiers, lightsabers, and everything else any 10-year-old boy dreams of having every waking moment, we have to make do with computer games.

In Noctis, you zoom around space in your own little starship, popping into solar systems, gathering fuel from stars, analyzing the orbiting planets (surface and atmospheric conditions), and then landing on them with your landing capsule. From there you can embark on an epic, lonely journey across vast plains, mind-bogglingly gigantic mountains, canyons, lakes and oceans. You can observe sunrises and sunsets, (different depending on what the atmosphere is made of, or if it even has an atmosphere at all) jump off cliffs at dizzying heights, run through a rainstorm, or search for life. There are, and I’m not kidding, 78 billion stars in this game’s universe. Let that sink in for a moment.

There’s no real goal to reach. You just explore, by yourself. The graphics are ancient looking and the controls take some getting used to, but it all feels pretty authentic and perfectly self-contained. It’s definitely an acquired taste, but for those of you who are into this sort of thing, (you know who you are) this game will haunt you for a long time.