Copyright © 2013 The Indie Game Magazine, All Rights Reserved. All game logos, screenshots, artwork, trademarks, etc are property of their respective owner.

Path of Exile Croixleur Antichamber Skulls of the Shogun Primal Carnage

Games Reviewed Inside this Issue:

Issue 31: March 2013

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Copyright © 2013 The Indie Game Magazine, All Rights Reserved.

All game logos, screenshots, artwork, trademarks, etc are property of their respective owner.

Editors Mike Gnade Tom Christiansen

Art & Magazine Design Mike Gnade Michael Heald Erin Williams

Writers/Contributors Matt Suckley Emerson Smith Patrick Holleman Mike Gnade Tom Christiansen Matt Canj Kim Berkley

Website Content Manager Chris Newton

Insider Edition

Indie Game Magazine Issue 31 - March 2013

Staff

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About Our Reviews

We rate all of our games based on their graphics, gameplay, sound, and lasting appeal. Each cat-egory is given a score on a scale of 1-10 (10 being perfect and 1 being horrendous). Games are more than the sum of their parts, so we do adjust our average scores based on our final assessment of the game, its appeal, creativity, uniqueness, and overall value.

96-100% – Masterpiece86-95% – Amazing76-85% – Great66-75% – Good56-65% – Bad0-55% - Terrible

Cover Story: Check out Cardboard Computers IGF nominated game KRZ

Table of Contents+FeaturesThe Indie Difference: Comedy pg 4Fearful Symmetry pg 12In the Land of Indie pg 15

Cover StoryKentucky Route Zero pg 6

InterviewCardboard Computer pg 8Ayu Sakata / Yousei pg 10

PreviewPath of Exile pg 18Expedition Conquistador pg 20

ReviewsSkulls of the Shogun pg 22Antichamber pg 24Primal Carnage pg 26CROIXLEUR pg 28

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The Indie Difference is a new editorial series intended to highlight specific elements that make

independently-developed games special. The series is a celebration of the indie gaming hobby, with a particular focus on what differentiates indie games from their big budget, AAA counterparts. This time it is Comedy that falls under the spotlight.

If you’re reading this, then you’re presumably a pretty avid fan of indie games. We all have our own personal reasons for getting into the wonderful world of independent videogames, but it is likely we all have one thing in common - we turned to indie games because they offered something that mainstream releases didn’t. For me, indie games provided an escape from the po-

faced, humorless realism with which the AAA industry has been obsessed this console generation. My discovery of the smaller, self-funded projects opened my eyes to the fact that there was more out there besides hokum, gritty action - videogames could actually be funny!

By their very nature, independent titles are clearly better suited to comedy than AAA releases. For starters, humor has proven a risky business in the mainstream games market - most big-budget comedy games of this generation have either been commercial flops like Brutal Legend, or lowest-common-denominator tie-ins like Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse. In this climate, it’s very difficult for a publisher to take a punt on a comic title with any confidence. The resulting lack of humor in the market

has left it up to Indies to fill the void, their smaller budgets and lack of publisher-reliance giving them more leeway to explore niche themes.

To get a perspective from within the industry, I contacted some

By Matt Suckley

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The Indie Difference: Comedy

Vidiot Game

Frog Fractions

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independent developers whose games heavily feature comedy. First up is Andrew Goulding of Brawsome, developer of Jolly Rover and MacGuffin’s Curse. He suggested that the stagnation of the mainstream market was just a result of sensible business decisions by publishers.

“The rising cost of AAA development makes publishers risk averse.” he said. “Sequels and licenses sell, so do big genres, such as FPS, so anything that’s not one of those can be hard to get made with AAA publisher money. There are also smaller publishers in the casual/mobile space, but they generally have even smaller margins, so they want to spend a little amount on something that might be a big hit. Sequels, licenses and big genres in this space also apply. Publishers are a business, out to make money, so are after hits, so whatever is popular at the time will be what they want to invest in. This just makes good business sense. So yes, in a roundabout way indies are important for working in niche genres and creating new ones.”

As is the way of the world, business concerns naturally outweigh the search for creative fulfillment in the publishing business. However, in the indie space this is often reversed, with small teams working on games with individual passion and little concern for their resulting popularity. This creative community atmosphere is obviously great for nurturing and encouraging less common forms of expression, such as comedy, and gives the resulting works a far more personal feeling than would be possible in a triple-A game. I contacted Jesse Ceranowicz of GZStorm, developer of surrealist comedy title Vidiot Game, to ask him his thoughts on how implementation of comedy

differs between mainstream and indie releases. Unexpectedly, he defended the current state of humor in videogames.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say triple-A titles are distancing themselves from humor”, he said. “Franchises like Saints Row and Borderlands (just to name a few) employ humor in various ways and are quite successful at it. Indie developers tend to embrace humor in slightly stranger ways, but that’s mainly due, I think, to the fact that Indies work in such a closed-in environment. That is to say, they work in such small groups, if not on their lonesome, that their humor cannot help but be geared more towards their own inside jokes and such.”

He raises an important point here, as it’s important to remember that humor isn’t completely lacking from the AAA landscape. The two examples he gives, Saints Row and Borderlands, have both enjoyed widespread popularity, managing to successfully avoid the curse of comedy. However, I maintain that there remains a distinct difference between how humor is implemented in independent and mainstream

productions. When looking at it from this perspective, one could say that Saints Row: The Third and Borderlands 2 are the gaming equivalent of the big-budget, crowd-pleasing comedies which have a broad appeal in their catch-all brand of humor. Not necessarily a bad thing, sure, but meanwhile games like Frog Fractions and Vidiot Game represent the slightly more niche comedic efforts which have a significantly narrower audience, but are ultimately more rewarding for those in the know. It is their independence which gives them the edge. Their freedom to dabble in surrealism and in-jokes gives them the all-important feeling of something hand-crafted and personal, something which I feel is very difficult to convey in a game developed by a huge team.

In games like Saints Row, there’s the unshakeable feeling that the inclusion of comedy was a decision made at a marketing level. It helped to give THQ a unique selling point and to differentiate their franchise from the oft-imitated Grand Theft

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MacGuffin's Curse

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Kentucky Route Zero by Cardboard Games is one of the most hyped games this year, being an IGF

2013 finalist for:

• Seumas McNally Grand Prize• Excellence in Visual Art• Excellence in Audio• Excellence in Narrative

It would be a shock to me if they didn’t make a clean sweep of these awards.

Kentucky Route Zero is a game unlike anything I have come across. While fitting into the point-and-click genre, it is very different from the rest. The game has a certain feel that you won’t fully understand

until you experience it for yourself. Right from the start of the game, everything about the environment tells you that this cross between a ghost story/mystery will be one hell of an adventure.

The visual atheistic is really something that needs to be mentioned. What you can’t see from the still images is the dynamic scene that changes around the characters as you progress through each “scene”. Angles change and shift, shadows move in the corner, and the dynamic lighting really gives this game a genuine “spooky” feel.

I can say without a doubt, Kentucky Route Zero has the best audio production I have seen in an indie in a while. Not only for the quality, but

the sound effects and music literally make you feel emotion in each scene. As a sound engineer myself, I understand how difficult this can be and the developer nailed it.

The player starts off as the character Conrad, a delivery truck driver on his way to deliver a package to a location he has never been before. He stops at a gas station for directions, and is instantly thrown into this world to try and find a highway called “The Zero.”

The controls are used without any

By Matt “Canj" Cangialosi

Cover Story

Kentucky Route ZeroPreview Act I

"... you won’t understand until

you experience it for yourself."

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frustration, which can be a problem in some point-and-click adventures. I didn’t feel like I was just clicking around the screen looking for the correct choice. It feels like you are playing a movie, wondering what will happen next.

Act 1 only took me a little over an hour to complete, but it was well worth it. I didn’t get bored and then put the game down like I do with most games of this type. All I wanted was more.

Currently Act 1 is available for $7.00, but you can purchase all acts + soundtrack mps3 for $25 (when they come available.).

All direct purchase will give you the game DRM-Free and a Steam Key for when it becomes available

Available here: www.KentuckyRouteZero.com

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGQOaz1xFOo

Cover Story

Auto. Not to detract from the humor - Saints Row: The Third is a barrel of big, dumb, thoroughly enjoyable laughs - but it felt like the result of a focus group. Conversely, the comedy of indie games is often obscure, surreal and feels human. The appeal is in its absurdity and unpredictability, the feeling that anything and everything can happen, creating more and more amusing gameplay dynamics and scenarios.

Frog Fractions is a great example of comedy that only an indie could have created; a multi-genre arcade game which evolves as you play, posing as an educational game for children. Even more incredibly, it was so bizarre and funny that it attracted mainstream attention, and ended up being promoted by major gaming websites such as Destructoid. Does this suggest that humor can be used to create a buzz around indie games, and help attract new players? Sparsevector, developer of Super Amazing Wagon Adventure, certainly thinks so, and this became clear when he told me of his development experience.

“Humor is a pretty big part of my game, Super Amazing Wagon Adventure”, he said. “In the game you control a 19th century wagon party facing surreal and bizarre dangers as they journey west. I think a big part of the appeal of the game is the dark humor in seeing your party die off one-by-one in strange and surprising ways. At its core my game is a simple side scrolling shooter with some twin stick shooting segments mixed in, but I think with the game’s unusual theme and humor I was able to draw in players outside of the

traditional shmup fan base. While the humor doesn’t really affect the game’s mechanics, it has a big effect on the feel of the game.”

All other entertainment mediums have strong comedic presence, so why shouldn’t games? The growth and development of humor in videogames (nearly all of which is now coming from indies) is surely conducive to the growth of the medium as a whole. Humor has a great quality of attracting people, and could help games to find an audience outside of the traditional ‘gamer’. This has certainly been the case with Frog Fractions, and by the developer’s own account it is also true of Super Amazing Wagon Adventure.

It’s the indefinable human touch which makes the comedy of indie games so great. Never afraid to be nonsensical, silly, or even self-indulgent, you can always count on indie devs to deliver the unexpected. I think it’s a great step forward that humor is showing signs of revival in the mainstream games market, and I have the utmost respect for titles such as Borderlands and Saints Row. However, I think the gaming comedy renaissance will come not from the big publishers, but instead from the bedroom coders and small studios who are willing to go the extra mile.

The Indie Difference: Comedy cont'd from pg 5 ...

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When did you start developing games? What got you into programming and designing?

Elliot: We’ve both done web development work for several years as a day job, but got into programming real time & interactive stuff through our art practices, doing audio/video performance in like

a noise music or gallery context. It was still difficult to make the transition to game development, though, and took some false starts and a lot of small projects to start feeling really comfortable with it.

What game do you remember from your childhood that inspired you to make games?

Elliot: One of my earliest memories, like as a conscious human being, is sitting in front of a terminal in a small apartment in Pittsburgh, playing “Colossal Cave Adventure.” A few years later I made a game in BASIC about exploring a cave looking for treasure; it even had a maze, and a pirate. But most of the games that inspire me I never played in my childhood; most of them are games made in the last few years.

Congratulations on all the IGF nominations for Kentucky Route Zero. How would you describe the game for anybody who hasn’t heard of it yet?

Elliot: Thanks! Briefly, it’s an adventure game about hard times and secret places. It’s slow-paced, driven by exploration and conversation.

From what I’ve played of Act 1, one of the most striking things about KRZ are the visuals. How would you describe the visual style? Retro Noir? How did you come up with the visuals? What was your inspiration?

Elliot: Tamas went through a few iterations of the art treatment, as we went through iterations of what the game would be like, and it’s

By Mike Gnade

Interview

CARDBOARD COMPUTER INTERVIEWJake Elliot Interviewed by Mike Gnade

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changed quite a bit. It could be read as kind of “retro” with the simplicity of some of the shapes and all the aliased, hard edges, but it’s not really referring to any specific moment in the past. The setting, similarly, is a kind of strange and wistful non-time.

What is your favorite moment or feature?

Elliot: My favorite part is how the band appears in this act. Tamas and I talked a lot about where to put them, and couldn’t quite come up with a good solution, and then he just figured it out like a few days before we released the game. So I discovered it almost at the same time as everyone else who played the game.

How did your previous games and experience impact the development of KRZ?

Elliot: I made several games in rapid succession before and during the development of KRZ. Some of

them, like “Balloon Diaspora” and “Ruins,” I approached specifically as ways to experiment with techniques that I thought I might use in KRZ, especially in my writing process for dialog.

We still have 4 more acts to go. When can we expect Act 2 and can you give us any hints as to what lies ahead?

Elliot: We’re shooting for one year from Act I to Act V. So that’s about 3 months each. The game is five acts long. It’s a tragedy. We have the basic plot mapped out, but a lot of it we make up as we go.

What is your favorite indie game right now? Why?

Elliot: Dys4ia and Cart Life are both really wonderful in their honesty, sincerity, and clarity. Those are probably the two games I’ve been most excited about in the last year or so. Lately, “Brace” by Merritt Kopas has been on my mind. It’s a two-player hypertext game made in

Twine. It also works pretty well as a spectator sport, which is interesting given its formal constraints and its subject matter.

What does it mean to be an indie developer?

Elliot: In Chicago we have a group that meets up irregularly called Indie City Games. People show up and participate enthusiastically who are: artists, students, teachers, activists, aspiring professional game developers, people working for large studios but also on side projects, etc ... When there’s a whole spectrum of people in different situations and with different goals who identify with the term “indie,” that’s when the term is meaningful to me.

What one piece of advice would you give to aspiring developers?

Elliot: One of my favorite things about making games is that there can be so many different kinds of work involved: programming, writing, visual art, sound design, architecture, math, etc. So I’d recommend doing these other things too. Learn to play guitar, or practice writing, or learn some obscure programming languages. Just don’t get tunnel vision, I guess.

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Sakevisual, developers of visual novel and otome games and sometime-collaborators with Winter

Wolves, recently released Yousei, the latest installment in their ongoing Jisei series of interactive visual novels. The games tell the story of a boy with the ability to relive the last moments of a deceased person through touch; by chance (or fate), the boy finds himself teaming up with a group of psychic detectives to solve several mysterious murders while seeking answers to the most complicated enigma of all – his past.

I had the privilege of interviewing Ayu Sakata, the lead developer at sakevisual, about Yousei, and the creative process behind making visual novel games.

IGM: To start, could you tell our readers a little about yourself and the current sakevisual team? Ayu Sakata: We’re a fairly small group: three regulars, and two recurring. Beatriz Garcia does the art for the Jisei series and the Ripples stories. She’s been with the team for several years, and I basically love everything she does. Marc Conrad Tabula has done nearly all of the original music for our games. Lulin and Graeme were artist and programmer respectively on RE: Alistair++, and they’re both

returning for our newest otome game, Backstage Pass. Of course, we’ve had plenty of work done by other talented artists, musicians, and actors as well, but those are the regulars. As for me, I’m just the person who finds really talented people and then makes them all work together.

IGM: What motivated you to start creating visual novels and otome games?

Ayu Sakata: I enjoy telling stories, and visual novels are a really fun medium because you get the rare opportunity to explore “what if” scenarios and different outcomes. I love the idea that I’m telling a story along with the reader. Together, we work out how things are going to turn out.

IGM: What inspired you to come up with the characters and story of the Jisei series?

Ayu Sakata: A friend of mine drew a random sketch of some twins, and a passerby asked “What story is that from?” Rather than admit that it was just a random doodle, we immediately made up a tale of a young boy detective cursed with psychic abilities and all the cases he solved. The twins were his psychic friends and they would go around solving mysteries together. It wound

up sounding kind of interesting, so I sat down and wrote it all down, then rewrote it until it became a cohesive plot. The characters came from a lot of places, but the majority are shamelessly stolen from my own life. If I meet an interesting person or have interesting friends, I use that as a base for a new character. It’s never a direct copy, but it’s always nice to have a foundation to work off of.

IGM: There are several features in Yousei that have either been added or updated from the previous games. What specifically is different this time around, and what were the reasons for these changes?

Ayu Sakata: The textbox has changed a little bit, and there are now handy icons for skipping, autoplay, and the quicksave feature. That was added mostly because the engine upgrade allowed it, and we like things that make playing the game more convenient. There’s also a cell phone to get hints from all your friends. That one came about almost as an accident. I wanted Kangai to have a phone for a couple crucial moments, but it also felt strange to deny him use of the phone during the rest of the game. I had also been looking for a way to include an optional hint system, and

Interview

Interview with Ayu Sakata about YouseiThe creative process behind making visual novel games.

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By Kim Berkley

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the phone and hint system wound up fitting each other very naturally. The exploration system also got a light upgrade with a little bar on the screen pointing out which room the player is about to enter. After Kansei, a lot of people mentioned that it was easy to get lost. With a bigger area to explore than before, it wound up being pretty necessary to help readers figure out where they were even going.

IGM: You posted a notice about voice acting auditions back when Yousei was in production. Could you talk a little about the casting process?

Ayu Sakata: The online casting process is a little bit different from the standard kind, although it’s definitely become more common in the past years. Basically, I’ll post up character images and descriptions along with a couple of lines from the script. Anyone who is interested will record the lines and email them to me. After auditions close, I pick out the ones most suited for the characters, and I call up the actor on Skype (or the voice chat program of their choice). Then I listen to them while they record the lines, and I direct them. The nice thing about online is that there aren’t any scheduling restrictions, and you can get a larger pool of applicants.

IGM: Not to sound impatient, but how far are players from solving the big mysteries of the series? Are you planning on several more games in the set, or will the next one be the last?

Ayu Sakata: There will be five games total. That was the plan from the start, and so far we’re sticking to it. The first two I’d call “question” games that set up the story. The second two are “answer” games that give answers to (nearly) all of the

questions. In Yousei, we already got a good deal of the twins’ tale, and there’s enough out there to at least have a good idea of where Li Mei came from. The fifth game is the conflict game, where Kangai and his friends finally face off against the main antagonist. The rest of the answers will be given there, but you’ll probably already have a good idea of where everyone is from by the time the fifth one rolls around.

IGM: You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that you prefer the Ren’py engine for creating visual novels. What about it particularly appeals to you?

Ayu Sakata: The fact that it’s free certainly doesn’t hurt, but I also like the fact that it’s multi-platform (not common in VN engines), and it’s got a really easy to learn scripting language.

IGM: What’s the current status on some of your other projects – like Every Sunrise, Swan’s Melody, and Backstage Pass?

Ayu Sakata: The short answer is they’re all “in progress.” Every Sunrise and Backstage Pass are actually on track to be done this year. Swan’s Melody is just a fun thing Beatriz and I are working on in our spare time, so I honestly have no idea when we’ll be done with that.

IGM: What do you envision for the future of sakevisual? (Any plans for world domination?)

Ayu Sakata: Haha, oh dear, no. Unless by world domination you mean, “Making cupcakes for everybody.” In the near future, not much more than finishing some nice VNs and making sure each one is better than the last one. For the far reaching future, I would really like to

see one of our series animated. Or more than one. That would be cool too.

IGM: Which game(s) would you most like to see animated?

Ayu Sakata: The Jisei series is probably the best suited for an actual series, since there’s a dedicated plot. I would kind of like a shot at making a RE: Alistair++ OVA set within the Rivenwell world, though. I think it would be fun.

IGM: Finally, are there any parting words you’d like to share with your ever-growing fanbase?

Ayu Sakata: Um... well, first off, thank you. It probably sounds cliché to say things like “You guys mean so much to me!” but that’s basically how it is. Your encouraging words, enthusiasm, and support for the work we do has carried me through some pretty rough times. It’s also very encouraging to see our work inspire other creative minds to make their own VNs. I feel very honored to know that what we do encourages other people as well. I hope that in the future, our stories will continue to inspire.

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From about 1979 until 1999, the majority of videogames focused on single-player experiences. Naturally,

most of the great game design innovations of this time were single-player ideas. (Consider how many “multiplayer” games were just single players taking turns trying to get a higher score.) Designers wanted to figure out how to make games that gave people compelling experiences even in the absence of friends, and they succeeded. Obviously, multiplayer caught up to single player in a big way. It would be hard to measure, but I expect that mainstream multiplayer videogames have overtaken strictly single player games—or if not, they soon will. One of the reasons for this surge in multiplayer popularity is that people really like playing with and against other people in games—and they always have. For thousands of years, games were

almost exclusively multiplayer. Everything from Tag to Chinese Checkers depends on the presence of an opponent to make the game work, but people loved those games then, and they still love them now. Still, since 1979 there have been so many compelling single-player experiences that designers can’t ignore the contributions of videogames to the field of design.

In particular, the development and huge variety of power-ups and level-ups available in single-player games has spilled over into multiplayer arenas. Out of that mélange the electively symmetrical game has emerged.

It seems odd to say it now, but Counter-Strike was originally an indie game. A lone developer made the first three beta versions of the incredibly famous Half-Life mod. Valve eventually took the product over, but by that time the core design principles of the game had been firmly established. The really interesting thing about this is that Counter-Strike, developed in 1999, would go on to exemplify a design trend that would span numerous genres and has continued up until the present. That trend is what I call electively (i.e. choice-based) symmetrical multiplayer design. An electively symmetrical game

By Pat Holleman

Fearful SymmetryDesign in Indie Multiplayer Mods

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offers players the chance to choose a set of abilities at the beginning of a match that will greatly affect how they play that game. This is in contrast to chess which is bilaterally symmetrical. Black and white always have the exact same pieces and can’t alter the starting conditions. Counter-Strike allows for very significant choice: at the beginning of each round, players choose to purchase a limited set of weapons and equipment.

This equipment changes the gameplay of the round for each player in a profound way; does a player pick body armor and a shotgun, or flashbangs and sniper rifle? So much is contingent on this decision; it affects the game far more than any opening move in chess, Stratego or even football ever could. In fact, the metagame inherent in choosing can be as intricate as the actual play!

The electively symmetrical game is a favorite for the part of the indie game community we often overlook: mods. Yes, Day Z gets a lot of love, but most people don’t think about the fact that League of Legends

(LoL) is also an indie game and the game is based on a mod. (It has a very big budget, but developer Riot Games answers to no other company in the gaming industry. That is independence.) The original game that inspired LoL, Defense of the Ancients (DotA) was a Warcraft 3 map mod, created in the truest small-team, no-budget, no-publicity indie fashion. League of Legends, like DotA, is an electively symmetrical game. The pre-game choices are fairly obvious: which champion does the player choose? This choice informs the rest of the gameplay in an unmistakable way, because the champions are very different.

Even champions of the same

ostensible role (tank, nuker, pusher) play very differently from one another, and synergize with other champions in unique ways. What’s really fascinating about LoL (and games like it) is that the developers saw how important the starting choices were, and so they monetized them. In order to make the game symmetrical, players have to pay money to unlock all of the options that other players might have. Riot has reaped huge rewards by realizing that the defining feature of their game was the elective process at the beginning, and that players would be willing to pay to access the full extent of that symmetry.

League of Legends can ultimately be traced back to Warcraft 3, which nobody plays anymore. People do still play StarCraft 2, however, which has an even richer map mod scene than its predecessor. Modder/designers have latched onto the idea of elective symmetry and implemented it in a huge number of ways. The most popular game on StarCraft 2’s “arcade” is Squadron Tower Defense, a competitive tower defense game that features numerous builders and hundreds of different towers. Choosing the right builder in Squad TD is very similar to choosing the right champion in LoL. Builders tend to be slightly closer to one another in terms of effectiveness in all situations than champions would be in LoL, but

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this is probably a product of the TD genre more than a conscious design choice. Another popular game on the SC2 arcade is Marine Arena.

Marine Arena is like DotA/LoL, except that instead of choosing one champion to play and upgrade, the player is choosing an army of that champion. The player picks a combat unit which then begins to accumulate into massive armies. The balance between units is much like the balance between champions, although it has a decidedly more rock-paper-scissors feel to it. Finally, my personal favorite map on the SC2 arcade is Random Tower Defense. In this map, the players are presented with a randomly generated landscape, out of which they must construct the optimal maze. All players have the same amount of resources to start. More importantly, however, is that all players have the same selection of types of towers to use. Whether those towers are multi-shot, high-damage, splash or other types, the player can choose their “main” firing tower depending on their interpretation of the terrain. The towers differ quite a bit, and no one tower can be used in every situation. Ultimately, however, all players have the same choices. In no other game have I seen as pronounced a difference between players who choose an appropriate tower for the map and those who do not—even if the two best players on the map have chosen different towers that are performing neck-and-neck!

One of the reasons I wrote this article is because elective symmetry is a design idea that is friendly to indie game staffs. Balancing an electively symmetrical map is time-intensive, but it can be done by a team with a limited data-

gathering apparatus. Because all elements of the game are perfectly symmetrical except for the first choice, it is relatively easy to gather metrics on the performance of those champions, towers, or whatever else the player is electing to use. One or two indie designers can go through that data and spot player choices that are routinely over-performing. That over-performance

can be mitigated easily—which brings us to the last important point about elective symmetry. In almost all electively symmetrical games, the number of player abilities per choice (champion, tower, etc) is quite small. LoL champions only have four abilities, and Squad TD builders almost always have fewer than 8 towers to build. Players can satisfy their appetite for variety by switching between choices—but any single choice can only over-perform with one of its four abilities, which the designers will usually spot. Elective symmetry, properly done, allows designers to quickly pinpoint the source of an imbalance and correct it. Moreover, every correction to game balance helps everyone (well, everyone who wants a fair game) equally, since all players have the same choices! Because of this, look to see an increasing number of electively symmetrical indie games—if the many clones of League of Legends are any indication, this trend is just getting started.

You can chat game design (and other crazy things) with Pat Holleman on Twitter @tgdfweb

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It’s easy to name things. Without knowing what a thing is, what it does, or where it came from, I could point at

any given object right now, let slip a mouthful of syllables and call it whatever I like. I could call it Bob, if I felt so inclined. I could don my invisible hipster glasses and label it “too mainstream” simply because word association is fun. I don’t have to know what mainstream means – I don’t even have to know what the thing I’m pointing at is. Defining things, however, is difficult. Definitions require knowledge and understanding – and, most important, clarity. So how does one define an idea, a name, as vague and controversial as “indie”?

Some feel that the term has already worn out its usefulness and is no longer relevant in the gaming community. David S. Gallant, the developer behind games such as Apocalypse Later and I Get This Call Every Day, argues, “We used to refer to ‘indies’ as such to distinguish independent developers

and teams from the rest of the professional game industry. That distinction is almost meaningless now. Whether a game is made in one’s basement, in a Starbucks, at a coworking space, at a small studio, or at a large studio; whether it is made by one person, or by a small team working remotely, or by a group at a game jam, or by a hundred-person conglomerate; none of this matters. Games are games.”

Yet most of us continue to make the distinction, relevant or not. So what does indie mean? Most agree on the basics: to qualify as independent, a game must be created by a developer without ties or obligations to any outside company or force. The issue of where the financing originates is debatable, especially with the rise of crowd funding – some are all for sites like Kickstarter, some are against it, and some are too busy paying out of pocket to create games to care either way. But as long as the money doesn’t come from some big-shot corporation or

AAA gaming company, the game in question will at least have a shot at being acceptably indie.

Beyond this semi-reliable foundation, however, things begin to get murky. A question arises of whether this is all there is to indie games, or if there are certain, less obvious elements required before the name fits.

Stereotypes are generally the go-to definitions for lazy labelers and the blissfully ignorant. A quick glance at the Optimistic Developer meme sums it up nicely: indie developers are all self-important, idealistic, lazy white guys who talk big but make little money. They are not, under any circumstances, women. And indie games, obviously, are all

By Kim Berkley

In the Land of Indie:The Virtual and The Reality

"created by a developer without ties or obligations

to any outside company or force."

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+pretentious, low-quality copies of old ideas and retro graphics with near-impossible difficulty levels.

In actuality, both male and female developers from all over the globe can access tools, raise funds, collaborate, and publish and promote games provided they have an internet connection, a computer, and a dash of tech savvy. Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes of Team Meat and Jonathan Blow of Braid fame are all from the United States, while Fez designer Phil Fish is French-Canadian, and Markus Persson, father of all things Minecraft, was born in Stockholm, Sweden.

In all fairness, it does seem that some stereotypes may contain a grain of truth. Reality paints a much more diverse (and less pixelated) picture of the indie scene than Mr. Optimistic Developer, yet it is also true that a majority of the developer population does appear to consist of men of the lighter skinned variety.

Gallant agrees. “In terms of independent game developers, that group IS overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly white. As a white male myself, I sometimes feel like a part of the problem. However, there is no zero sum equation here – I am not taking up someone else’s spot.” That is not to say, however, that the majority rules, or that the field lacks diversity overall. “Despite these stereotypes, I’ve found that gamers and independent game developers are often as diverse as games themselves.”

The portrait of the developer as a starving artist is another stereotype not so far from the truth. “‘Poorly funded’ isn’t just a stereotype, it is a reality; very few developers can make a living in independent game development,” says Gallant.

“Believe me, I didn’t get into this to get rich.”

Possibly one of the biggest (and certainly one of the most controversial) stereotypes is that gamers and developers are not women – an idea which appears to be comorbid with the blatant sexism which many women still face upon setting foot into the gaming community. Australian developer Dane Krams, of Krams Design, notes the frustrating persistence of typecasting and misogyny in the industry: “The ideas that some people seem to come up with in comments sections of articles astounds me ... You see women putting independent work forward at times, and commentary starts popping up on whether they would play the game or not based on how good-looking they find her.”

But what about the games themselves? It’s certainly true that many indie titles have nostalgic tendencies; many popular releases, including Spelunky, Retro City Rampage and Hotline Miami, harken back to the golden days of old-school gaming, when 8-bit graphics and side-scrollers were the norm even in the mainstream world. Though indie developers have proven themselves more than capable of creating extremely

polished, high-resolution experiences – Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Dear Esther, and Chivalry: Medieval Warfare are a testament to that – there does seem to be a fairly prominent retro element inherent in indie games.

Though arcade remakes are fairly common, opting for classic conventions instead of the biggest, loudest, shiniest state-of-the-art aesthetics available to modern developers is not the same as simply rehashing stale ideas. While AAA companies seem to function on the assumption that what gamers are looking for is ultrarealistic environments and a high body count, indie developers may be tapping into something closer to the core of gaming and what their audience really wants.

Krams recalls his first encounter

with the indie scene, when he came across an article about The Blackwell Legacy in a PC magazine. “I remember just being in absolute awe of seeing pixel art once again; I couldn’t believe it! I hated [the] 3D movement . . . I was just desperate to find adventure games that clicked with me the same way they used to, and seemingly out of the blue I found it. It just happened to be by an indie developer. I think that in itself says a lot about indie development,

Erin Robinson

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+about developers knowing what people want to play, even if it is a niche market, and really delivering to that need without worrying about barricades and loopholes to getting that result.”

Trends in genre popularity cast interesting reflections of the mainstream and indie scenes. While fast-paced first-person shooters dominate the world of AAA games, many indie gamers and developers show a preference for adventures and puzzle platformers. This may have something to do with early gaming experiences; adventure games and 2D platformers have introduced many a newcomer to the world of video games. Even people who have never touched a console in their lives know about Pac-Man and Mario.

“Growing up, I was limited by what I had,” says Gallant. “The neighbors had a Nintendo, the kids down the street had a TurboGrafix, and my one cousin had every console under the sun (his dad owned a retail game store for a while). I got to play those on occasion, but the majority of games I played were classic Apogee and Epic platformers ... It’s hard to say that any of these games, or indeed any game at all, inspired me to start making games. I learned relatively quickly that making games is very different from playing them; however, game development is a lot of problem-solving, so it is similar to many of the games I like to play now.”

According to Krams, Lucasarts adventure games and point-and-clicks like Willy Beamish, Leisure Suit Larry, and Police Quest played

a big role in his decision to become a developer later on. “There was something about the worlds they made, the characters, the stories, no other game or medium at all were creating anything like it. I just remember being in such awe of the idea that I was in a story, the same as any on TV or in a cartoon, but I could actually do things and say things to people that would change the world.”

He believes adventure works particularly well as a storytelling medium. “I suppose it has a lot to do with the basic mechanics of the genre and how that forces the pacing to slow right down, it just seems to make for a perfect narrative based setting ... It’s that style of gameplay that just leaves so much freedom for developers to toy with the player, to set up situations and characters and plot points all around this pacing. The gameplay, then, is always pushing the story, rather than other genres that often break up story with gameplay.”

Gallant prefers graphic adventures for similar reasons: “I’m big on narratives, and graphic adventures are perfect formats to deliver narratives while also exploring choices. They lend themselves easily to funny games, and as I’ve discovered, they can handle more ‘realistic’ simulations as well.”

Yet trends do not a definition make, and what truly makes an independent game “indie” is not the pigeonhole a game or a developer can be fit into. If there is indeed a distinction to be found between indie and mainstream beyond the basic

issue of autonomy, it lies much deeper beneath the surface than graphics and genre. The difference has something to do with personality and the personal touch that makes each indie title so unique.

When big companies are involved, game production has an unfortunate tendency to become a business first and foremost – and businesses rely on minimizing risk, rather than maximizing creativity or broadening horizons. Independent developers, on the other hand, have greater artistic freedom to experiment and invent, which allows them to create games with intensely individual looks and feels, exploring themes and ideas which most AAA companies would overlook in favor of more marketable options. In short, true indie games have heart.

“Indie to me means the creator’s vision first and foremost, that’s basically the first thing that comes to mind,” says Krams. “Another important factor I think for someone to be an indie is that it isn’t just a job, it’s not a position they’ve applied for and are getting a salary for in return. An indie developer literally puts their life and well-being on the line for their work. It sounds dramatic, but in my experience it’s very much the truth.”

Indie games are often a highly personal extension of their developers, and the experience of releasing that part of oneself to public critique is nerve-wracking. “It’s like you’re exposing part of yourself, and waiting for people to tell you if you’re allowed to go on doing it or if you have to stop, pick up the pieces, and basically reevaluate everything about your work and your life. All of that sense of risk embodies being an indie developer for me.”

"Indie to me means the creator’s vision first and foremost."

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Grimind

Recently, the Path of Exile open beta launched, and my friends —ever eager to migrate on to the next

free-to-play game, convinced me to give the game a shot with them. After all, they argued, at the very least I’d have a bad experience to write about. I scanned over the Path of Exile website as the client downloaded, not really impressed with what I was seeing. The game looked like a stock Diablo 3 clone, and still being slightly bitter at Blizzard after paying $60 for their one-shot linear 4-level slaughter-fest, I just wasn’t too excited to sink any amount of time into Path of Exile. So, with the odds of my favor already against the game, I loaded up Path of Exile and created a Shadow (aka a thief-class) and named him Shrat.

Two Acts, probably around a half-dozen hours, and a few thousand dead zombies, monster-bears, squid-beasts, and enraged monkeys later…I am having a blast with Path of Exile.

The first thing I noticed about Path of Exile is how smoothly the game runs. Cranked up to the highest visual level, I checked the in-game FPS-counter (F1, for those interested) and I was dancing safely over 100 frames-per-second. With that said, the game doesn’t look bad at all. I don’t know how Grinding Gear Games did it, but Path of Exile looks super crisp, plays incredibly fluid, and is hardly taxing on my system. Granted, my PC was built for gaming, but all of its hardware is 2-ish years old…hardly spearheading any PC-gaming technology race.

The controls and interface are what I expected to find in a top-down Action-RPG like Path of Exile. While hardly innovative, this is not necessarily a bad thing, as I knew relatively instantly where things were and what buttons to press for the different attacks. The only awkward interface design choice I ran into was that by default, players must hold the left-ALT key in order for dropped loot to be displayed

on screen. However, with a simple look-through of the key-bindings in the options menu, I noticed that by simply pressing ‘Z’ the player can turn loot-labels on and off, at will.

While I’m on it, the loot system could use some tweaking. Now, I understand that Grinding Gear Gameswants the loot-system to be a cut-throat experience, and while I do think that is a strange design choice, I applaud them for not bending under pressure and changing something they feel, in the end, adds character to their game. Currently, the way the loot system works is that when something is killed, loot explodes over the ground like a loot-pinata. All of the gray “trash” loot is free for all, but the rarer items are assigned to specific players…but only for a few seconds, and then it becomes free-for-all. If you’re playing with a group of friends, this isn’t really a big deal and you can go by the honor-system, like my friends and I did…leaving the loot that wasn’t dropped for us, and pointing out things that

By Tom Christiansen

Preview

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dropped for someone else if they’re not in the area. That works, and it’s no big deal. But if you plan on playing online with strangers, you will want to be paying attention to the loot as it drops, because there will probably be greedy ninjas about.

Aside from the arguably unfair loot system, I was hard-pressed to find anything else to take issue with. The “pay-to-win” fear that hovers over every free-to-play game is absent from Path of Exile thanks to what Grinding Gear Games calls, “ethical microtransactions”. There are no skill boosts or one-price-unlocks-all bonuses that people can buy to achieve greatness faster than anyone else. Instead, things like added account features (extra stash tabs and character slots), pets (frogs, bugs, lizards, etc.), cosmetic effects to weapons and armor, skill effects that change the default effect to something much cooler, and character animations (time to /dance) are all available for purchase. And the prices are not too bad either, where else could you get a pet frog for roughly $2.50?

The amount of detail in the environments in Path of Exile is stunning. Every zone looks incredible, and some of the levels are straight-up spooky. From the foggy ship graveyards, to the claustrophobic torture dungeons tucked deep within the mountains, Grinding Gear Games‘ level designers did an amazing job. Also, the lighting effects in Path of Exile put the game’s contemporaries to shame. In the darkest of dungeons, the only source of light comes from your character and the occasional explosion he or she might cause by using spells. This single source of light casts perfectly dynamic shadows on everything, creating a spectacular effect when there are multiple characters on screen at once.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of Path of Exile is something I would never have expected to enjoy as much as I am: the gem system. In short, your attacks come from the gems you find. Players have to strategically place gems in their gear, as most items have a color coded slot that

only a matching gem can go into. Anyone can find any type of gem, but obviously the Witch would have more use for a fireball gem, than a Shadow would. However, there is nothing stopping that Shadow from equipping, and using the fireball gem. The “talent tree” that is the staple for most character progression systems in RPGs, has been replaced with what I like to call a “talent forest”, which is to say that all of the character’s talent trees are connected, and no character is limited to one set of abilities. As a Shadow, if I spend enough points, I can work my way across the talent forest and fill in all of the Witch’s talent points. The only limit is the number of talent points you have, and you get one per level, and some are given as quest rewards.

Path of Exile is the first free-to-play game that I feel compelled to support. Sure, I bought crate keys inTeam Fortress 2, but that’s because the weapons inside came with new abilities. In Path of Exile, you are given the game in its entirety, and Grinding Gear Games oh so politely (and most importantly, ethically) asks that you spend a handful of dollars and support them. Throw down $15 and buy a pet frog and a glowy helmet, support these guys. Because this is how you do free-to-play.

Preview

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+Review

Grimind

Last September, Expeditions: Conquistador was successfully funded on Kickstarter, raising $77,247

... seven-thousand dollars over the goal. Danish development studio, Logic Artists, have been at work finishing development and polishing the game, getting it ready for its February 28th release. I managed to get my hands on a preview-build of Expeditions: Conquistador, and as one normally averse to tactical strategy games, I was pleasantly surprised with what Logic Artists did with Expeditions.

Expeditions: Conquistador puts players in the position of a prominent Spanish conquistador, setting off to the New World. The game starts off by letting you define your character name, his traits, and who you want on your crew. I chose the historically accurate name “Olympus Mufasa” for my

conquistador, and I decided, with a name like that he isn’t too keen on diplomacy, but would be above average at survival and leadership. I left the other three traits (tactics, healing, and scouting) alone. From there, Expeditions allows the player to choose their crew: ten slots are available, and there are five classes to choose from. My crew ended up being composed of two doctors, one

scholar, two hunters, three soldiers, and two scouts. I just wish I could have named them too, perhaps as a nod to the days of Oregon Trail.

The tutorial begins as soon as your ship docks in a port, in what I think was Santo Domingo. One of my initial fears going into Expeditions: Conquistador was that I would spend more time learning the game than I would actually playing it. I like to spend about an hour with a preview-build before I start forming opinions; I didn’t want to spend forty-five of those sixty minutes reading about attrition or supply-lines. Luckily, the tutorials in Expeditions are incredibly noob-friendly, and I had no problem keeping track of what was what and where it all was.

One thing that I particularly liked about Expeditions that I normally dislike in any sort of game, was

By Tom Christiansen

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the text-based dialog. As much as I like to read, I don’t like to in video games, and normally I skip through texty chat windows. But, the dialog in Expeditions was so engaging: you are given options of what to say that are not clearly paragon/renegade, and what you say affects how some members of your crew regard you, and can go on to affect their moral for better or worse. This system helps you to grow familiar with your crew, so when they all die at the hands of your less-than-skilled strategic moves, you feel a bit bummed about it. Not that I’m speaking from experience, or anything like that.

Once the tutorials are over with, I progressed out into the jungle, and got my first feel at how the rest of the game would play out. Basically, I could move Senor Mufasa (has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?) a certain distance every “day” before I would have to set up camp. Setting up camp involves choosing which crew members take over what responsibilities for that night. Based on where your campsite is (road,

jungle, beach, mountain, etc.) there are a number of options available. The tasks include posting guards to keep out the thieving natives; sending out patrols which can result in nice bonus discoveries from time to time; having hunters go out and gather extra rations; and having crew members tend to preserving the meat or putting together medicine from the collected resources (both animals and plants). If a crew member has sustained a wound in combat, assigning a medically-proficient crew member to care for them at night will help improve their condition.

Then there is the combat. Say you don’t post enough guards one night and some pesky natives sneak in and attempt to make off with rations or valuables; Expeditions switches into its combat mode, which will look familiar to anyone who has played a turn-based strategy game before. Of the combat scenarios I played in, I was only able to select up to six of my chosen ten crew members, to take into battle. I had no trouble gradually decimating my crew over

a few combat scenarios, but that’s more to do with my ability than the difficulty of the game.

The combat gameplay is very straightforward, and I wasn’t overwhelmed with minute details about combat maneuvers and avatar placement. There are only a few “tricks” to learn, like using a

ranged character to attack a melee-based character in a neighboring tile allows the melee opponent to immediately counter-attack (I’m assuming to simulate the reload time that was an issue with arquebuses). All together, the part of the game I was most hesitant about, was not a bad experience at all.

Expeditions: Conquistador has a planned release date of February 28th, and while the Logic Artists website is currently under construction, which could be disastrous for their sales if they don’t get that back online, I suggest that you all give their Facebook page a look for where to find Expeditions, upon its release. Even if turn-based strategy isn’t something you normally go for, I fit in that demographic and I still had fun with Expeditions: Conquistador.

"the tutorials in Expeditions are incredibly noob-

friendly, and I had no problem keeping track of what was what and where it

all was."

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Grimind

Skulls of the Shogun is a great game for the Fire Emblem fans out there that want to get their strategy

fix on Xbox Live Arcade, Windows 8, or Windows 8 Phone (the game supports play across all 3 devices). Developer 17-Bit’s first game is a pretty straight-forward turned based strategy game. Teams take turns moving up to 5 soldiers around a map capturing monk shrines, rice paddies, and fighting enemies. One of the biggest changes is the movement system. There are no tiles, hexagons or a grid to move around in Skulls of the Shogun. Soldiers move freely within a circle. For the most part this works, but the inaccuracy of this free movement and the circular attack regions makes predicting when enemies can reach you a little difficult.

Skulls of the Shogun takes place in a Japanese/samurai-inspired afterlife where you have to sit in a boring old line to make your way up a heavenly mountain. The story follows General Akamoto, who is literally stabbed in the back. Obviously he’s pissed and doesn’t

want to wait in a line, so he gathers up some warriors and starts fighting his way up the mountain. The single player campaign is a good length with a good progression and introduction of additional unit types and wrinkles to combat. It features some varied objectives and also boasts three secondary ‘gold’ skull challenges for each mission. While the story is a pretty straight-forward friend stabbed me in the back I want revenge tale, it never takes itself too seriously and has some witty and humorous banter. Crazy chaos god, Raiden is especially funny and who doesn’t like a good mustache

joke? The plot is simple, but I found myself reading every dialog bubble.

The Asian inspired art style and hand painted graphics are a delight. Each unit has its own easily distinguishable look and charm which is uncommon in the strategy genre. As someone who owned a Sega Saturn, I also really appreciated some of the load screens which showed off some nostalgic type concept art and even a sort of Japanese Sega Saturn box mockup. While the amazing Japanese art style gives Skulls of the Shogun a distinct look, it is also

Skulls of the Shogun - http://17-bit.com - XBLABy Mike Gnade

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accompanied by some solid Asian-inspired music, humorous grunts, and solid sound design.

Skulls of the Shogun is a solid strategy game with a focus on combat, but hardcore fans may get a little frustrated with some of the more casual mechanics. My biggest gripe is with the movement and knockback system. Both are hard to predict and can lead to some annoying situations where your general is just within striking distance and gets pushed off the edge for a loss. While keeping each

turn to only 5 units keeps the action moving in Multiplayer, I would have liked to move my entire force during the campaign every turn. When units are clustered together, it can also be difficult to select the correct unit and correct action. Honestly, these gripes are minor in the grand scheme of things and something that you can quickly adapt to.

Despite Skulls of the Shogun simplified movement system, it offers a surprising degree of

depth. One thing you’ll quickly learn is that it’s all about eating the skulls of your enemies. Eating a Skull wastes a unit’s turn, but also heals it; eat 3 skulls though and you’re transformed to a badass samurai demon that can perform two actions per turn rather than just one. The game features 3 core unit types (archer, soldier, and cavalry) and 3 monks (Fox, Salamander, and Crow). Think of monks as your mages. Monks can only be summoned by capturing a shrine and just as easily killed if

the opposing team captures it. The monks are among the coolest units in the game since eating skulls unlocks new spells. They are also very varied in strategy and use. The fox is a healer, the salamander is an offensive fire mage, and the crow pushes folks with wind. Mix this strategy with capturing rice paddies, electric defensive statues, and barracks to build new units and you’ve got a diverse and interesting strategy game. It’s not quite the number crunching of some strategy

games, but it’s enough to warrant a variety of tactics and approaches to each game situation.

Skulls of the Shogun is not perfect and has a few mechanical issues, but I would recommend it for any turn-based strategy game fan. The game’s presentation and story is charming. It boasts a great campaign with a slew of secondary objective challenges. If the main campaign doesn’t have enough replayability for you, there’s always multiplayer. Skulls of the Shogun embodies the charm of other great indie games like Castle Crashers and Super Meat Boy, but in a new genre. I’m not sure if the game is an accurate depiction of the Japanese afterlife, but it is an entertaining one. Despite breaking from the grid, Skulls of the Shogun is still a must for any strategy game fan.

REVIEW SUMMARY

Pros: Charming characters and animation, well-paced campaign, great replayability and lasting appeal

Cons: Movement and Knockback system is in-precise, units can be hard to select

REVIEWGameplay: 9Graphics: 8Sound/Music: 9Lasting Appeal: 9

Score 89%

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We’ve seen a lot of puzzle games here at The Indie Game Magazine, but none

of them are quite like this one. Antichamber is a first-person puzzle game developed by Alexander Bruce in which your perception of the environment is the focus of these mind bending brain teasers.

In Antichamber you explore the environment through a first-person perspective similar to most shooter mechanics that we’ve grown accustomed to. Rather than shoot at enemies, you use a gun-like device to manipulate cubes in the environment in order to solve puzzles. Left-click is to place cubes. Right click is to pick up cubes. Everything else you discover by solving puzzles and learning more about how the abstract world of Antichamber works.

Strangely, Antichamber has no explanation for itself or even a main menu. The Unreal Engine logo spins across the screen and you are instantly placed into the game.

In this black room, you can find a door marked “Exit” on the other side of a window, a screen to edit your current settings like screen resolution, a mysterious time ticking down from an hour and a half, a blank screen that will eventually become your map, and a screen in front of you that shows the image of a small, unborn baby and the words next to it, “Every journey is a series of choices. The first is to begin that journey.”

Antichamber isn’t like most games in which there is a clear structure. In Antichamber you make choices about which direction to go in which is limited by your ability to solve the puzzles before you. New guns do give you new abilities, but you can solve most puzzles right from the outset. As you learn more about different attributes that the cubes have and how you can interact with them, old routes that you barely glanced at suddenly reveal themselves, and this is what makes Antichamber such a compelling experience: Antichamber gives you the pure exhilaration of discovery. It’s also very hard, but this can

make the most frustratingly difficult of tasks also become the most rewarding.

“How we perceive a problem can change every time we see it.” “When you absorb your surroundings, you may notice things that you didn’t see before.” Antichamber‘s blank white halls infrequent bursts of color contain seemingly abstract puzzles, but the solutions reveal a metaphorical application for our day-to-day lives. Most of the little quips you will read are very clever. For example, a blue and red staircase are ahead of you with the sign “A choice may be as simple as going left or going right.” No matter which staircase you go up, you always end up in the same hallway. Eventually another screen matters asking you if either choice you’re making really matters if you end up back where you started. Without spoiling the solution, this is just one of the situations you might find yourself in.

Unfortunately, not all of the puzzles are as clever as this one. In many cases there are puzzles in which the solution is not the hardest part.

Antichamber - www.antichamber-game.com - PCBy Emerson Smith

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Rather than test your mind, these will test your will power as these can be some of the longest puzzles in the game simply because the task you have to do in order to accomplish it is mundane.

For example, after falling down a large shaft you have to climb back up, only to find a sign telling you that “Life is full of ups and downs” before you have to go back down into the shaft (which has transformed into another location) to reach the bottom and climb back up the same shaft (which has transformed to yet another location) before you reach the next true puzzle. Despite how difficult to execute some of these puzzles are, it’s worth working through. Antichamber is at its core a journey and if you were to ask the game itself about the absurdity of some of the situations you find yourself, I imagine Antichamber would narrow its eyes, pat you on the back and then encourage you with a genuine smile that it “builds character” and that “it will help you on later in life”. In Antichamber, it does.

With such a distinctly minimal and pristine art style, it’s hard to mistake Antichamber for anything else. Hallways are purely white with only the black outlines on the edges to give the player any indicator of the environment. This is varied by blankets of color applied on different areas as well as some pitch black areas in which you almost have to feel your way around. It can be hard to stare at a bright white screen for extended periods of time and not have your eyes hurt, so be sure to turn your lights on. You aren’t going to want to get up for long once you’ve started.

The sound design is strangely realistic. Soundscapes from outdoor environments as well as bird sound effects for groups of violently moving spheres sets a tone for the game that suggests even though you’re in an abstract world with abstract rules, everything you do here applies to our real world. This disconnect remains through the whole game and gives each screen you find a sense of gravity that wouldn’t be there otherwise.

“Some choices can leave us running around in circles.” “If you never stop trying, you will get there eventually.”

Antichamber isn’t just a game: it’s a journey you undertake and when it’s over, there are still more secrets to uncover in the recesses of this beautiful and mind-bogglingly complex world. It was hard enough for me to put the game down to write this review. Antichamber is not perfect, in fact, it’s far from it. But what’s here is unlike anything you can find anywhere else, and it finds a way of burrowing into the recesses of your mind and the abstract mechanics and their brief, sometimes teasing messages reminding you of how you’ve overcome these problems before.

Antichamber is available now exclusively via Steam.

REVIEW SUMMARY

Pros: Thought provoking context for puzzle solving, Excellent use of color and sound to set the tone for environments, An incredibly well designed complex full of secrets to discover

Cons: Some puzzles are more difficult to execute than they are to solve, Some mechanics are redundant in later portions of the game

REVIEWGameplay: 10Graphics: 9.5Sound/Music: 10Lasting Appeal: 9.5

Score 95%

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Primal Carnage is an online first-person shooter by Lukewarm Media and Reverb Publishing. You

may remember Lukewarm from their work on the Crysis mod, Light Spire: Fortunes Web. In Primal Carnage, the player takes on the role of a human character or dinosaur and fights the other players in online arenas. Released on October 29th of last year, you will find it available for digital download on leading online retailers, such as Steam, RainDG, GamersGate, GameStop and Amazon.

Primal Carnage is a class-based first-person shooter in its purest form. There are two opposing sides with five different classes to choose from. Without any exchangeable load-outs or customization options, other than a handful of hats or minor visual tweaks available to

everyone at the character selection screen, there is not much in the way of personalization. This game is about joining a server and then shooting, burning, biting, or tearing the competition apart. Nothing in the game itself hints at any particular backstory: you are simply there to participate in the raw carnage.

At the moment, Primal Carnage contains five large environments and only one game mode: team deathmatch. Lukewarm Media promises long term free DLC support, which will add on more game modes and expand the map list, but there is not a lot of meat in the current package. [Editor's note: the "Get to the Chopper" free DLC is now available, it was not at the time of the review gameplay] The first-person shooting mechanics feel very arcade-like, which is easy to pick up and play. Anyone who has

played shooters casually will feel right at home with the controls.

When you spawn as a dinosaur, the camera shifts to a third-person view, rather than down the iron-sights of a gun. While relatively similar, each dino handles a bit differently, relative to their size and their attack range. The Pteranodon in particular brings an interesting flavor into the gameplay. Being able to swoop down and grab the trailing player in a group of humans and bring the captured back into a crowd of your prehistoric brethren is an incredible rush, and well coordinated attacks, when they happen, keep the matches lively.

The color palette is very bright. Environments are full of lush greens, bright sands, and blue skies. The human characters strike a more cartoony look that

Primal Carnage - www.primalcarnage.com - PCBy Emerson Smith

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"Primal Carnage is not a bland

experience, but it’s not exactly bursting with flavor either ...

if the dinosaurs don’t particularly appeal to you, there isn’t much else that this game

has to offer."

fits the tone of the game, leaving the dinosaurs to appear the most realistic of everything in the game. However, the dinos also feature enough color that each class is instantly distinguishable. Effects like the camera flare from explosions and flares as well as the subtle “god rays” add another layer of realism to the already bright canvas. Apart from frequent visual clipping during deaths and post-death camera angles, the visuals are wonderfully unified.

Characters shout panicked cries for you to shoot the hungry raptors off of their backs and the roars and shrieks of the different dinosaurs sound good. It’s a shame that there is no voice support in Primal Carnage. The ability to coordinate on the fly rather than type out messages to your teammates would allow the game to have more flexibility in the gameplay. You can mash the ‘Z’ key to make your avatar call out for help, but players usually can’t hear you over the glorious chaos.

Games are easy to get into with matchmaking as well as support for a server browser. Levels are quick to load and it’s easy to get into the action. Unfortunately during my time with the game I encountered frequent slowdowns online. Tweaking my visual settings didn’t help the performance of the game, so hopefully whatever issues the game is having can be addressed in the next patch.

Primal Carnage is not a bland experience, but it’s not exactly bursting with flavor either. Their are some unique tricks up Lukewarm Media‘s sleeves, but if the dinosaurs don’t particularly appeal to you, there isn’t much else that this game has to offer. Hopefully future DLC will add modes that allow for more interesting game types and flexibility in the gameplay, like a dinosaur versus dinosaur mode or some sort of evolution twist where your score determines your loadout, or what dinosaur you play as. Until the package expands or the gameplay itself more varied, Primal Carnage is merely an adequate shooter that

feels like it still has a bit of time left in the development cycle.

REVIEW SUMMARY

Pros:

Vibrant visuals and sound, Arcade-like style makes it easy to jump in and play

Cons:

Limited content, Frequent slowdown, Not a lot of long term appeal.

REVIEWGameplay: 6Graphics: 9Sound/Music: 9Lasting Appeal: 5

Score 70%

27

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+Review

The flash of steel, the weight of a well-balanced (and enormously over-sized) sword in your

hand, the bloodthirsty war-cries of your enemies cut short as their life-threads snap with the slice of a blade – ah, the beauty of the battlefield. Croixleur, a new PC hack-and-slash action game developed by Japanese developer souvenir circ. and localized in English by Nyu Media, reminds gamers that battle doesn’t have to be blood-and-gutsy to be darn good fun.

The player character of Croixleur is Lucrezia “Luc” Visconti, a mischievous redhead known as the Vermillion Vortex. (I wonder if she’s related to the Crimson Whirlwind?) In story mode, players find themselves fighting floor by floor to the top of a tall tower to complete a test of strength and skill known as the Adjuvant Trial. As if

defeating hundreds of monsters wasn’t enough, Luc’s competition in the race to the top turns out to be her childhood friend Francesca “Fran” Storaro, the Moonlight Sword Princess.

The game has three modes to choose from. In story mode, players fight to complete the Adjuvant Trial. Score Attack mode is a three-minute skirmish where the goal is to score as many points as possible

within the time limit. Endless mode is exactly what it sounds like – an endless onslaught, against which the player must survive for as long as possible. Though different in format, all three modes have the

same basic underlying goal: kill all the things! Sadly, this is easier than it sounds – even the “normal” difficulty setting poses one heck of a challenge.

The plot of the game is pretty straightforward and may not appeal overmuch to fans of more immersive narrative experiences, but it works well for an action-driven game like Croixleur. The dialogue is translated almost perfectly, with only one or two awkward phrases like, “I learned it off by heart,” which

CROIXLEUR - www.croixleur.com - PCBy Kim Berkley

"good for some old-fashioned, button-

mashing fun"

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+Review

sound a bit strange but aren’t overly distracting. Indeed, if anything about the dialogue is distracting (and not necessarily in a good way), it’s the fact that the first conversation Luc has with Fran consists, for the most part, of the two of them having a rather suggestive discussion about how they used to bathe together. It’s a little funny, but lasts just long enough to teeter on the edge of too much.

The gameplay works exactly as one might expect in a hack-and-slash, featuring various attack and combo options and ten beautifully ornate swords to collect. Each sword is imbued its own individual power waiting to be released by the right

wielder – you, of course! – and Luc can take up to four at a time with her to the battlefield, though where she hides them all is a mystery yet to be solved.

Croixleur looks and sounds a bit like early PS2 titles, with graphics and music that put me in mind

of games like the first Kingdom Hearts and Fullmetal Alchemist and the Broken Angel. The art, however, is exceptionally clean, and the animations are as gorgeously smooth as one would expect of a

modern release. The special attacks and “bombs” (which are not actually bombs – I’m still not sure why the game just doesn’t call them extra-special attacks and be done with it) are especially delicious eye-candy.

Though Croixleur isn’t breaking any especially new ground, it’s good

for some old-fashioned, button-mashing fun, and the temptation to find all ten swords and gain all twenty achievements will be more than enough to bring many a player back for round two (and three, and four, and five…). Though the tutorial could be better (more interactive and less demonstrative, for one thing) and the control system could use some fine-tuning, my biggest complaint about the game is a good-natured one: all that frantic button-mashing makes my fingers hurt!

Croixleur is available to download for $4.99 from the official site, or you can try the free demo (which features Score Attack mode). The game is also up for voting on Steam Greenlight, so be sure to show your support if you enjoy it.

REVIEW SUMMARY

Pros:

Satisfying action-based gameplay, beautiful animations, challenging battles, high replay value

Cons:

Tutorial and control system need tweaking, battles and enemies lack variety (except bosses), concept is not particularly novel

REVIEWGameplay: 8Graphics: 9Sound/Music: 8Lasting Appeal: 7

Score 83%

"all three modes have the same basic underlying goal: kill all the things! Sadly, this is easier than it sounds ... one heck

of a challenge."