Following Freeware - October 2014 releases
This month you can explore some dangerous ruins or find that a library is not the haven of peace and quiet you had hoped. Perhaps instead you’d prefer to explore the past of a historical figure from a famous fantasy series. On the other hand, an evening at a friend’s house could be fun, with the chance to meet a mysterious relative an added bonus. The year’s top text adventures also offer a variety of experiences, whether recovering a stolen magical artifact, befriending your favourite game developer, or escaping a jungle with the acquired power of animals. All these await in this month’s round-up of releases from the freeware scene.
Steve's Selections
The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo
The choice between staying in with a babysitter and sleeping over at your best friend’s house was a no-brainer. Their parents always provide plenty of snacks and drink and they always have the best games to play. In fact, often they have games and consoles that aren’t even out yet. Their uncle works for Nintendo and always passes along the good stuff. As you settle in for a night of fun, a storm sweeps across the town. As the evening wears on, news comes that the uncle is coming as well, arriving at midnight. But as the appointed hour draws near, excitement turns to unease. Why have you never actually met this uncle before, and why doesn’t he appear in any of the family photos? Getting to meet him at last is a good thing, isn’t it?
Michael Lutz has created a game with a seemingly mundane situation that may not be as pleasant as it seems. The game is text-based, though with illustrated backgrounds, rendered in a soft pastel style. These mostly depict your current location, such as the bathroom or the kitchen. Occasionally – usually for sections where you recall past events – these are changed to more abstract designs. Locations have appropriate background noises, the den where you are spending the night ringing with the sound of video games. There are also event-appropriate effects, like the grandfather clock chiming as time advances.
You navigate through the story using highlighted links in the text. Usually you will be presented with a list of actions, such as playing a game or going off to grab a snack. Most of the time these will be individual words in sentences, often leading to thoughts about the subject in question. A handful of actions advance the clock, with time moving along in hourly chunks. The initial setup could lead the player into a false sense of security, but this is undoubtedly horror of the creepypasta variety. Choices made early in the game affect those available later, and some choices even play out differently depending on what time they are made. There are initially five endings available. Obtaining a particular ending from these first five unlocks a sixth ending, providing a profoundly satisfying conclusion to the tale. There is no save system, so those wishing to unlock the special ending will need to set aside up to an hour to replay.
The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo can be played online at JayisGames.
Kingdom of Liars: Stonepath
A gate between realms has been opened and fiends stalk the land. With this disaster, your time as a member of the city guards known as the Hernessians has come to an end. Now you rove the land seeking out demons and the sorcerers drawn to aid them in return for power. In this quest you are joined by both former colleagues and new companions, including a former witch-hunter and a trainee witch. This pair have a history tied to the opening of the gate, but their skills are vital in the ongoing struggle. Now your pursuit of an evil pairing has brought you to some ancient ruins. As well as your prey, will you discover long-lost secrets inside?
Hyptosis here brings together two series, Kingdom of Loathing and Hood. Playing both is advisable in understanding the backstory, with links to all episodes available at the start. The graphics are the same first-person slide-show format of these two series, with the same dingy watercolour style. The play window is somewhat larger than before, with the greater area used to provide more detail to each scene. Other characters do not appear on-screen. Instead, buttons appear in the top-left corner of a scene each bearing the name of a present character. Conversations bring up a full-body illustration of the character you are conversing with, all dialogue being text only. Animation is limited to background detail, such as falling leaves, and the occasional movement of devices you interact with. A semi-dramatic medieval tune plays throughout the game.
Using simple point-and-click you interact with each scene, using on-screen arrows to move to neighbouring locations. You will start at your campsite, but will soon delve into the ruins. Here you will find decay has taken its toll, with crumbled walls and vegetation everywhere. Some magics still operate within the ruins, such as a mystical force field, though repairs are often necessary to get their controls to function properly. An inventory appears at the bottom of the play window, and items can be highlighted in this for use on the environment. You will need to mix up a magical recipe and locate more than one cunningly disguised combination to reach your ultimate goal.
Kingdom of Liars: Stonepath can be played online at Newgrounds.
Willem's Winners
A Day at the Library
A Day at the Library, by Carmel Games, is the sequel to last month’s Sweet Revenge. After his adventure with the candy shop in the first episode, Crazy Dad has become even wonkier in the head than before, and on doctor's orders has found himself a nice quiet job in the library. Unfortunately for him, the library has free Wi-Fi, which means it is filled with teens playing games on their iPads and generally being a nuisance. So now Dad has his hands full getting rid of the kids.
Although the game is short, it is quite funny and presented in the professional, cartoony style we've come to expect from this developer. Crazy Dad's eyes roll about in their sockets while he grimaces from sheer craziness, most of the kids look and act like real obnoxious teenagers, and the whole environment radiates a wackiness even greater than in the 'normal' Carmel Games titles. As always, the world is presented in colorful, detailed screens in which everything is a bit crooked and almost no lines are parallel or even straight. The voice acting is superb, with Dad having a hard time making normal sentences and the kids talking like teens do. All spoken text is subtitled in one of the seven languages that you can choose from at the beginning of the game. Of course there are good sound effects and in the background there is a nice but repetitive, ever-present musical score, though you can turn the latter off.
The one-button, point-and-click interface that Carmel Games uses in all its games is also present here. The puzzles are almost all inventory-based and not very hard, but they are logical and well designed. The solutions Crazy Dad comes up with to reach his goal are worthy of a true adventurer. Some of the objects he uses include glass shards and a bomb, and he removes the kids without any regard for private or public property, ensuring that they will never come back. However, none of the kids are really hurt during the game.
A Day at the Library can be played online at Epic Break.
Memories of a Snake
Memories of a Snake, by Marion, is a full-length fan game that tells the story of the well-known Harry Potter character Salazar Slytherin from his birth almost to his death. The game shows how and why Hogwarts was built, and what happened to Salazar after that. We learn why he hates Muggles, and how his early youth made him the man he was when Hogwarts was built. Players will help him build the Chamber of Secrets, breed a Basilisk, and much later you will find him back in the rebuilt castle of his parents.
Memories of a Snake is presented in third-person format using backgrounds lifted from Sierra's King's Quest and Quest for Glory series, and they do indeed look very much like the mid-nineties Sierra games. They also do their job very well: the castle where Salazar grows up is dark and gloomy; the neighboring Muggle town is also a bit dark because its inhabitants are afraid of the wizard in the castle, but Hogsmeade is a cheerful town painted in bright colors. In many screens you see people or animals walking around, going about their business, with water flowing and birds flying or sitting on branches, all of which give the game a lively feel. The music, offering a wide variety of tunes, fits the situations you encounter very well. The other sounds are also well done, including the likes of a crackling fire and the footsteps of people walking or voices talking in the background. There is almost no voice acting other than when people talk to snakes. All dialogue is shown as text on the screen, with a different color for each character.
The game uses a simple two-button mouse interface with the inventory at the bottom of the screen. Right-clicking on an object tells you something about it; left-clicking lets Salazar interact with the object. The game contains a mix of fetching, inventory, spellcasting and conversation puzzles. Most of the puzzles are not hard but they all fit neatly into the story. The game was originally made in French, leading to the occasional translation issue, but this is never really a problem. What is a problem is that the game contains a nasty bug: after Salazar rebuilds his castle he can’t travel to either Hogwarts or Hogsmeade anymore because the game either crashes (Hogwarts) or prevents Salazar from returning to his castle afterwards (Hogsmeade). Fortunately, if you keep that in mind the game is perfectly playable to the end. Here and there Memories of a Snake is a bit slow, but it's definitely worth playing if you are a Harry Potter fan.
Memories of a Snake can be downloaded from the AGS website.
(Editor’s note: If it seems like we covered this same game a year ago, well, we did. We blame it on a Confundus charm. But hey, you can never have enough Potter, and – hey, look over there… Obliviate!)
Interactive fiction competition 2014
Though they’ve long since been replaced as the dominant commercial adventures, the classic text adventures that were so popular in the 1980s and early 1990s still have a thriving fanbase and an active indie developer community. There are many text adventures still being made today, and their authors compete every year in the Interactive Fiction Competition. This year was the 20th edition, and no less than 42 games were submitted. Here is a small overview of the three games that came out on top.
First place: Hunger Daemon by Sean M. Shore
In a magical world that looks uncannily like the real one, you are a servant of the cult of the Great Old Ones. During a long and boring ritual, you nip to the kitchen to grab a bite. There you find the guard unconscious and the Heart of Something or Other stolen from the Ark of Whatever! (You never were good with Mythos names.) You'd better get that Heart back or it could be you who becomes part of the ritual! But it will take a lot to find it: magical rituals, getting blood from a giant dead serpent and asking a favor from your ex-girlfriend are just a few things you must do in this slightly surreal and funny game, which is not very hard and features handy HINT and SAVE commands, making it ideal for beginners in the genre.
Second place: Creatures Such as We by Lynnea Glasser
In this game about relationships, you play a steward in a company that offers tourists a week on the dark side of the moon at a specially constructed base. You don't like your job very much, but in your spare time you find solace in the computer game “Creatures Such as We”. As you play the game (a violent fighting game with zombies and the like) you develop a special relationship with your ghost companion Elegy. After you and the ghost die in an ending that you find particularly unsatisfying, you go to bed and find out the next morning that the next group of tourists consists of the game’s development team! During their stay, which is shortened by one of the group being ill, you develop a relationship with one of the members of the team. As time passes, your relationship with that person and the circumstances surrounding it turn out to be remarkably like those in the “Creatures” game. Can you save the group member? Can you save the ghost in the game? These are some of the questions you discover the answers to in this intricate and very philosophical interactive story.
Instead of typing commands, this game lets you choose your next action from a list of options every time input is needed. The game also lets you choose your looks and gender and the person from the team you like best. This is quite a long game with no save option, so be sure you have 2 - 4 hours to play it.
Third place: Jacqueline, Jungle Queen! by Steph Cherrywell
As 20-year-old Jacqueline McBean, you are chosen as a foreign correspondent for a special assignment (though you’re never told what exactly the assignment is). Unfortunately, on the way to Golanaland's capitol, your pilot abandons the plane in a hurry with the only parachute, and you are left to crash into the jungle. Fortunately you survive, but you land in a tree very high up with no visible way to get down. When you get out of the plane, you see a green idol set in the bark of the tree. You don't know why but you just have to touch it, and doing so gives you the ability to acquire the special powers of animals by mimicking them. Armed with this knowledge, it's now up to you to find a way down the tree and out of the jungle. On your way, you’ll have to deal with many perils such as a piranha that guards a key in an aquarium, climbing steep walls and cliffs, and getting past a ferocious ape. While playing this fairly straightforward game, a map of your surroundings forms at the top of the screen, and there are compass pointers that indicate where you can go, along with lists of your inventory and the objects you see. There is also a link to a walkthrough that can be found in-game using the HINT command.
Other new releases
Not all games are created equal, and freeware games especially come in all shapes and sizes. Not to be overlooked, the following list might also be of interest, though these games may be significantly shorter or less polished, more experimental titles than those detailed above, some perhaps only borderline adventures to begin with.
Proxy by Sonoshee – A group of people trapped in a lift find themselves in a battle of wits with a murderous spirit.
Why Am I Dead?: Rebirth by Peltast Games – Solve your own murder in this improved version of a game from 2012.
Grimma by microsheep – A brave guard takes on a wicked witch in this playable demo for a light fantasy game.
Ugal’s Embrace by formica – Can you persuade more acolytes to hurl themselves into oblivion than the leader of a rival cult?
It by JakTube – Escape from a man-eating humanoid in this 1980s-style text adventure.
Eien by Mateusz Skutnik and Jacek Witczynski – Find hints, solve puzzles, and explore a towering, strange structure.
That’s it for this month. Think we’ve missed a gem or want to tell us about your own game? Then pop in to our Adventure forum and tell us about it!
Stephen Brown and Willem Tjerkstra contributed to this article.
