To find the tip top entries, we immersed ourselves in the clear blue waters of Ludum Dare for the past few days and emerged safely with a load of games tied to our ankles. One might say we dove “Beneath the Surface” to find even more obscure releases. Hey, that just happens to be the theme of this Ludum Dare as well; what a coincidence! All right, time to shut up and showcase everyone’s great work.
Descent
With a vibe espousing pure horror describing dangerous catacombs where only your brighty cloaked figure can survive, Descent seems like the perfect template for a longer roguelike if it ever became a full release. It’s setting falls in line with the genre. Not to mention its harrowing tale of heroism in a place littered with the corpses of previous Prince Charming wannabes. Then again, I wouldn’t say you necessarily look handsome, but I think someone would probably go for that neon-hobo look crossed with a little corner market robbery appeal with that ski mask. The game’s combat is simplistic as you merely swing your sword at weird crab people crawling towards you or the grim reaper conjuring forth lightning bolts to shock your system.
One thing I do appreciate is the visual static that shows up over your screen as you near death. You can only survive ten hits or so, and the absence of a health bar or anything is really refreshing. A clean HUD is the way into my heart. It only has three levels, but its difficulty should keep you playing for a while in pursuit of the end. Come for the pretty visuals; stay to see if there’s some person awaiting your rescue in the end.
Hi It’s Julian
Inevitably, quite a few ludum dare games will come out with one portion or another left unfinished. Hi It’s Julian says that from the outset, with developer baboun admitting that he spent almost all of his time on the introduction. It’s brilliant too, with a series of risque pop-up ads constantly deterring you from downloading his Ludum Dare game. The impending maze that makes up the game is really lackluster, but that’s the point of Ludum Dare – finding a simple nugget of an idea that tickles our fancy for those few minutes. It also does crazy stuff with your computer, so I recommend trudging through the brief amount of time Julian asks for it. It’s worth it, even with the constant barrage of penis enlargement promises he throws at you.
Atomicle
I know pretty much nothing about molecular models. I haven’t taken a chemistry class in nearly five years, and so Atomicle serves as a decent impromptu crash course on the subject I have abhorred since finishing up the high school final. From what I gather, your circular neutrons swallow up protons like Dionysus gobbling grapes, while triangular tritons slash apart your pristine molecular skin like a kitchen knife. Meanwhile, red electrons start your neutron spinning in the opposite direction. Working through the puzzle mechanics of Atomicle as I switch energy levels on the rings to avoid tritons, I discovered that chemistry is far more fast-paced and delightful than I remember. Not to mention the strange coincidence of my high score of 65 mirroring my chemistry grade. Remember to balance your charges, kids!
Epilepsy
I have always been lucky enough to be able to skip through all those epilepsy warnings every game flashes before its title screen. Epilepsy by Guilherme Gasques tries to help you envision what exactly it may be like to have those sort of colorful images dancing around in your brain, pelting your consciousness with an endless barrage of pain. The original screens have a calming demeanor, the kind that resonate with Schizoid’s other work on The Way of Yiji. That sense of tranquility ends quickly as intermittent screens of contrasting color flash overtop, destroying your retinas in the process. The actual game entails stopping black blocks from enveloping your character in the darkness probably representing the seizure an epileptic may suffer from. It’s simplistic, but informative, and it doesn’t hurt that everything on screen is gorgeous. Even if it blows out your eyeballs.
Beneath The Surface
One of many games that took the jam’s theme to heart when naming their game, Beneath the Surface looks like a skyline some architect probably designed while sipping on a bit of bourbon. Despite its jagged appearance, the puzzle gameplay works out smoothly. You have to guide the tiny, orange triangle through each little maze until it starts falling through the airspace to whatever awaits you on the other side. Surprise! It’s another maze, but each one gets progressively hard as you work to avoid the blood red portions while hopping safely to the calming blues. It’s a little like playing lava when you were younger, except there are a lot of convenient checkpoints in Beneath the Surface to help alleviate frustration, while avoiding the pratfall of many ludum dare puzzle games.
The World Beneath
Illumination as a game mechanic is a tad underdone in my opinion. I like shooting down lightbulbs or handling a torch in horror games, but using light as a core mechanic to create a sense of discovery is something I would love to see more of. Instead of providing jump scares with its darkness, The World Beneath creates an innate curiosity. Most of that stems from the startlingly pristine and polished backdrops that surround the entire area.
I’ll admit I didn’t find a whole lot of purpose to exploring since I couldn’t find the finite ending if there was one. Then again, a lot of the time pursuing an end merely erases all any memory of the steps it took to get there. Stumbling upon a rabbit hole straight out of Alice in Wonderland that sent me careening into the depths of a sunrise orange room happened entirely on accident. Those sorts of moments are what darkness can provide. There’s a feeling of awe when you throw one of the finite torches you can collect in The World Beneath and see it splash the walls with a neon blue light to help guide you through. Seeing this as a fully fleshed-out concept with purposeful goals would make me feel just as eager to head beneath the world once more.
30 Days Remain
The world’s infrastructure is slowly crumbling. A “thing” has invaded society, causing havoc and turmoil while disguised as a normal human being mimick. You play a border security agent tasked to seeking out these mimics (you can tell if someones a mimic if you’ve seen their face before) and punch them with a weird green fist. After thirty days, the government will have completed a weapon capable of destroying these beings, but until then, you need to keep the panic down. After each day, you see an updated newspaper headline: missing peoples, government cover-ups, riots, enforced curfews.
I tried keeping the peace, but it grew more difficult as the panic spread. Each day resulted in heavy innocent casualties as more and more mimics got away. I was instilled with keeping the order, but we all knew that we were outmatched, outnumbered. My officers feigned optimism, even giving me upgrades for a job that made me more of a murderer than a protector. It all ended on day 25, when we finally lost the Capital, and all order crumbled against an enemy that finally grew impossible to fight. Either that or I just really sucked at this game. Otherwise, 30 Days Remain was very cool to experience, something that I could actually see grown into a larger, more developed political game.
Ramen Master
In this game, you play as a ramen chef, preparing each ramen based on the customer’s requests by dragging the correct ingredients to the ramen bowl. The requests are what really make this game for me. The customers never give you an explicit ingredient, just “meatiness” and “fillingness,” lots of words with a -ness suffix. Also, they say “dang” a lot, like “give me some dang starchiness.” I just kind of gave them what I felt like they should be eating. I am a ramen master, after all.
It’s a pretty fun and silly game, plus I really dug the music. Lastly, this game gets the award for “Most Forced Usage of Theme” by saying that “you must must make sure the correct ingredients make it BELOW THE SURFACE of the [ramen] broth.” Don’t worry; we ain’t even mad.
Delve
Really more of an art exhibition crossed with a tactile, faux Where’s Waldo, Delve sends you into the fantastical creations Connor McCann crafted for this competition. All you do on each screen is move your primitive cursor around the screen in search of the one spot that will send you slipping into the next dimension. Transporting you from the pencil-laden screens of a gonzo classroom to a tubular universe where open cylinders rule the world, Delve is a peculiar exploration in clicking acumen. It doesn’t take talent or even more than a minute of your time to complete it, but it’s more than worth the brief excursion into McCann’s dazzling series of portraits.
Mind Hacker
Taking over people’s bodies is a favorite pastime of mine. I think it is a useful addition to a lot of puzzle games and forces people to conceive of their plans several steps ahead while planning for two different points of view. Mind Hacker tries to approach this level of complexity, but never quite reaches it. There’s a lot of backtracking and sometimes clumsy design elements requiring a sometimes esoteric level of specificity to reach the next checkpoint. However, there is still the kernel of a more grandiose game in here, particularly if the idea of these other sentient beings losing their consciousness was a more central element. I like the little voiceovers included, though, especially when you casually smack into another human being or throw yourself off a ledge. The rather apathetic “AAAAAA!!!!” that follows is a nice reminder that maybe some of these people locked in a mind control facility wouldn’t mind the quickest exit out of the place.
No Eyes Willy
Willy is a coal miner. His primary occupation involves blowing up excessive amounts of dynamite in hopes of hitting that black strain of coal, like Daniel Plainview stumbling upon gallons of oil in There Will Be Blood. The only problem with Willy is that he’s a daft idiot. Instead of shouting, “Fire in the hole,” from a safe distance, he takes the quick way out and just lights the fuse right in front of his face. It seems a little nonsensical and inefficient, not to mention that it muddies up his glasses every time he tries to move those rocks around. As such, it’s up to you to help him find his way through these fairly well-lit mineshafts by placing bridges and clicking on his bearded face to help reverse direction. The goal is to get him back to his exasperated wife, Martha, whose homely dress seems a tad out of place in a gritty mineshaft. No matter, though; she always has a bucket of water ready to splash on her husband’s dirty bifocals. It’s an entertaining puzzle game that only features a few mechanics, but the old-timey vibe give it an air of novelty that make getting Willy’s old ass back safe feel worth it.
Surf Camp: The Legend of Surf Ace
I’m a big fan of games that take the ludum dare theme, reinterpret the theme so that its words basically mean something entirely different, then craft their whole game around it. Tense Conds from Ludum Dare was a particular favorite of mine, and Surf Camp with its Surf Ace is another gem from this ludum dare fans who enjoy derivations. Surf Camp has the chops to back up its changed description as well, though, as you take part in a daily surfing contest to try and unseat the entrenched champion, Surf Ace. Initially, the tricks you can do are very simplistic – just a few 360s, a couple 720s, just typical Bucky Lasek stuff if he was a surfer. Please excuse my lack of pro surfer knowledge.
As you start besting other campers scores, however, it cuts to a sequence in the cabin later that night where they offer you various tips and accessories to help you beat Surf Ace. For example, at one point, you get a board that helps you spin far faster. To continue the outdated X-games analogy, it’s sort of like going from Bob Burnquist to Tony Hawk or something. My only issue with this advancement is that you have to best your opponents in a game of Rock Paper Scissors, which can get pretty arbitrary and annoying when you’ve lost for the sixth day in a row, despite destroying their score every time. It’s also impossible to beat the Surf Ace until you’ve worked your way past the four other competitors above you. It’s not a huge problem, but it does sort of derail the “upstart coming from nowhere to unseat the king” narrative. Still, Surf Ace is one of my favorite LD games I’ve played so far, and the 16-bit graphics work perfectly with the arcade-style surfing mechanic.
Skolgbor
Nik Sudan always makes the prettiest Ludum Dare games. Well, everything he makes is rather pretty, but it is a constant joy to stumble upon his LD games, even if most of them take place in the darkness. His newest concoction, Skolgbor, doesn’t deviate from a reliance on darkness as you guide a sort of robot-humanoid who has just awoken from some deep slumber through a sketchy cave. The sketch lines in each art environment make the entire ambiance feel even creepier than the blackness implies. Using only your mouse, you control when your headlights are on so you can continue forward. Flying Gaznogs are traversing the area as well though, but you’re hidden from their disgusting forms when the darkness comes over you, so managing your progress in bits and pieces is key. Also, Flying Gaznogs sounds like some type of perverse Wonka candy, probably a Nerds rope, wrapped in white chocolate with gobstopper wings. Disgusting. Now you know why you have to avoid them. Skolgbor is straightforward in its linear gameplay, but there are tiny story points that hint at a larger narrative Sudan will hopefully expand on in the future.
Badrock Machine
This game makes me think of living in Jimmy Neutron. From the wacky metal captain, Badrock, to the over-the-top fire that spurts throughout the station when one of your ship’s sides takes a beating, everything has a pleasing cartoon look. The point of the game is to gather as many gems as possible while guiding your ship through the mess of rubble present in this mining expedition. If your ship starts flaming, you have to shift stations to whatever side may be engulfed in flames and start spamming the space bar in hopes of putting out the lights and continuing your lucrative gem search. It’s really a process of managing each of the three sections evenly without ever losing track of one part of the sequence. It may not be the most complex game in the Jam, but for Mr. LeePerry’s first game ever, transporting me back to the yesteryear of pretty average Jimmy Neutron episodes is enough to tickle my Nickelodeon fancy for awhile.
Final Move
Melancholy and sadness in a game isn’t always the easiest thing to portray, particularly in something made for a game jam. That didn’t deter Team KwaKwa with Final Move however, as they tried to portray the sadness and distance that emerges from death. It starts off in a hospital as you learn that you’ve had the good fortune to return posthumously, Patrick-Swayze-from-Ghost-style. You’ve even mastered the art of touching objects in your spectral state already. Your father stops by the hospital and learns of your passing, which prompts a quick return to your home.
A chess board sits nearby, awaiting one last move for you to reach out to your Dad. It’s implied the two have always been distant, adding poignancy to the idea of reaching out for one last chance at a connection, even if the possibility of having something real will never actually materialize. Final Move basically functions like a quick adventure game, where you have to discover the proper sequence to perform tasks so that you can leave this Earth with some peace. The silhouetted graphics contrast with the stark white backdrop, adding a sense of realism to the entire scene. It’s a bittersweet, tiny tale of trying whatever it takes to comfort your loved ones after you’ve passed.
Blunderer
First off, make sure you can’t get motion sickness before you play Blunderer. Secondly, if you’ve never had motion sickness before, maybe prepare yourself because you’re about to ralph after clicking through to Blunderer. Got it all cleaned up? Okay, good, because I’m about to tell you something you don’t wanna hear. Go play Blunderer again! See, once you get used to having your retinas permanently displaced by the perpetual spinning of the world, it really isn’t all that bad!
Blunderer is a game that’s all about collecting tiny little golden cubes in a maze created by giant red cubes. Conveniently, these big blocks also send your little ghostly dude into an insane tailspin on his ball while the plethora of shapes in the backdrop become a dizzying blur before your eyes. It’s unsettling at times, but when you’re actually progressing through the maze, it’s rather delightful. I would recommend trying the game out on easy mode first to get the hang of rolling this ball around, but once you’ve taken your motion sickness pills, head off to hard mode. Each maze offers the challenge of navigating a wholly disorienting world, but when you finally grab all those cubes, the lasik surgery will seem totally worth it.
Ten Body Disco Party
I’m still trying to figure out what I played after experiencing Ten Body Disco Party, but I liked it. I think I liked it. You get to control ten bald men in Speedos who are jumping off a diving board and into a barrel sitting in the middle of an empty pool for some strange, inexplicable reason. Using the space bar to control their jumps, you really only have one chance with each dude to slot him neatly through the barrel, or else his viscera will be strewn across the pool floor, arms and legs flying off as if they were attached with sticky tape. Messy.
At the end of the game, depending on how many bald, Speedo-clad men you got through the barrel, you either have an awesome dance party in a secondary room underneath the pool with whoever survives, or you have a crappy one with no-one. There’s nothing quite like doing the disco in a secret room as the remains of your friends begin to fester upstairs.
Where Gods Sleep
Where Gods Sleep is the creepiest, most surreal experience I’ve had from playing a Ludum Dare game this round. It’s beautifully out of its mind. A simple exploration game built in Construct 2, you’re not really sure who you are, where you’re going or what to do, but you’re given one phrase at the start of the game to colour the rest of your experience Where Gods Sleep. You traverse as a tall, ephemeral being (which has one of the spookiest walk animations in the history of ever) between two worlds. The world you begin in is light, bright and inviting, while the world below you, that you see when you push the “down” key, is dark, twisted and unsettling.
Where Gods Sleep is a really nice job at doing something out of the box for Ludum Dare, and I’d love to see the idea expanded on with some puzzles or something. I’d definitely play it. Keep those walk animations, though.
Tags: free games, game development, game jam, indie games, indie statik, ld29, ludum dare, ludum dare 29
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