Category: The SBRI

Time to scratch another Indie Gala Trash Game off the good ol’ Steam backlog – I’ve played and finished Spooky Cats.

Spooky Cats is a very basic platformer, and it looks and sounds like it’s a Flash game from 1998. Hell, it probably is, but I’m not about to go and do the research. That’s against my policy. I much prefer to just talk out of my butt and sound like a complete moron.

Anyhow, the game is like, I dunno, 22 levels long, and many of them are just barely larger than a single screen. So it’s a brief game. There are a few longer stages, and one or two of them do have some semblance of a challenge. It’s not enough to save the game, however, because it’s really not very fun. In fact, I only powered through to the end because I realized almost right away that it was going to be an investment of less than an hour of my time. An easy write-off.

The levels are very basic, mostly just about getting to the end while avoiding monsters and spikes. Some require you to grab a key to unlock the exit door, and others task you with finding a little girl’s body and then reuniting it with her disembodied spirit. Yeah, it’s a little weird. You will also collect pennies throughout your travels, and a certain number are required to unlock the final stage. I don’t remember how many you need, exactly, but it’s low enough that if you grab pennies very diligently, you’ll have way more than necessary by the time you get there.

Only one thing really stood out about Spooky Cats, and that’s the aforementioned final stage. It’s a boss battle of sorts, against a witch-cat sitting in a toilet. Said witch is invincible while on its throne, and will periodically fire off magic blasts that become monsters if they hit the floor. The objective is to get to the little girl body behind a locked door, but I had no idea how exactly you get the key. After getting killed four or five times, it seemed to spawn completely at random, finally allowing me to finish the stage. Once you put the girl’s body and soul back together, the witch starts flying around, and you just have to dash into it a couple times. After that, the screen jump-cuts to an ending card that says “you finished the greatest game ever made!” or something to that effect. And that’s it. So it goes.

Would I recommend Spooky Cats? Not at all. If you want to throw away an hour on a no-budget platformer about a little pink blob, stylized to look like a cat, in a haunted mansion, then I guess this is for you. But for the rest of the world, there’s absolutely no reason to bother. Spooky Cats is not fun, it’s not engaging, it’s not especially nice to look at, and it has no plot. It is entirely pointless and I’m glad that I can consider it to be a free “bonus” that came packed in with other, (hopefully) more worthwhile games.

*NB: This game costs $2.99 USD on Steam. I paid $5 CAD for the 10-game Indie Gala bundle it came in. That’s a hot deal if I ever saw one.

In the super-spoopy Halloween bundle that I bought from IndieGala, I received a game titled simply You Deserve. I knew nothing about it, save that it was horror-themed in some way, and that the thumbnail they used to advertise it caught my eye. Maybe this isn’t the best way to choose what to play, but the way I see it, most indie games will either only last two hours at most or I’ll get bored and quit before then. Not an especially big commitment.

Let us start at the very start: the title. You Deserve. It’s not a good title. But after playing the game, it makes a little more sense. Not from the context of the plot of the game, but rather from the context of I am 99% sure that English is not the developers’ first or maybe even second language.

Although reading that sentence back, it may sound like English isn’t my first language, either. It sounds better when you read it with the proper cadence, I swear.

Continuing that thought, the game was likely not developed in English, but it was translated fairly well. It’s got a few grammatical oopsies here and there, but that’s something one comes to expect after having played so many no-budget indie games. What really gives it away is the voice acting. In the odd instance that your player character speaks to herself out loud, it’s very slurred and heavily accented. So much so, that I’m confident that the actress does not actually speak English, but was just taught to read her script phonetically.

That’s small beans, though. Who really cares about whether you can understand the voice actress anyway? We all just want to know more about the gameplay! Because gameplay is king! Nothing else matters! This exaggeration isn’t funny!

You Deserve is what the kids would call a “walking simulator” but there is a little more to it than just gambolling from plot trigger to plot trigger. You will have to pick up items and find where they belong, solve some very simple puzzles, collect a wide variety of keys, and sometimes punch over a stack of boxes to continue forward. So, yeah, it’s pretty much a walking simulator, but with some adventure elements. It’s slightly more interactive than The Park was, for comparison.

What is annoying about these adventure elements is that the game is dark, and the items you need to collect don’t always stand out from the environment. They don’t flash or sparkle like items in other games. I spent 15 minutes looking for a crowbar once, because it was placed on a surface with a very similar texture and it was very difficult to pick out. Also, some items are in semi-randomized locations, so something might be found in one spot, and then magically show up elsewhere (albeit nearby) if you die and need to pick it up again. Super annoying.

Sometimes, a glitch will cause necessary items to simply not spawn at all.

That’s the kind of game this is.

The best puzzle in the game is one where you need to magically unlock a door by opening a set of lockers in the right order. It’s not terribly difficult, but it did seem like the kind of puzzle you’d find near the beginning of a Silent Hill game.

The absolute worst part of the game is the very end, where you’re dumped out into a massive area and have to collect three items. As I mentioned before, they don’t necessarily stand out enough, so they’re very easy to pass by, and also there’s an insta-kill monster on the loose and if you die you end up back at the start, having lost any items you collected. It’s a massive pain in the butt, and the point where I no longer had any patience for the game, so I quit and watched the rest on YouTube.

So if the gameplay is wanting, the story should be strong enough to push the player through to the end, right? Well… not especially. You begin in a strange park-like area, with an inexplicable catacomb beneath it. Or at least that’s what I took away from it. Your character has no idea where they are or why they’re there. Then you’re ambushed by a monster and wake up in the basement of your character’s high school. This is the point where you can start to suss out who you are and what’s going on, should you read the files scattered about. I wasn’t really interested enough to bother, and read any files I happened upon, but there were definitely a few that I missed. Then you wander through another park, a haunted house, and finally, an expanded version of the aforementioned park. All the while, very little story is happening.

To summarize said happenings: the plot is about a girl in some sort of nightmare realm created by the zombified remains of a former classmate. This classmate allegedly committed suicide because she was bullied by your character and her clique. So zombie girl leverages her lingering hatred to pull the offending kids into a nightmare and kill them off one by one. Your character is ostensibly the last of the crew to go. Then at the end you try to exorcise the zombo-girl, but in typical horror story fashion, the success is a short-lived fake-out. Did I use enough hyphenated words in that sentence?

I think the fact that I didn’t care enough to remember a single character’s name says enough about how invested I was in this tale.

Personally, I think that I spent too much time with this game. It’s only about an hour long, but I faffed about and got lost enough that I doubled that, and then some. I think that if you know all the passcodes and where the items and keys are located, you could probably clear the whole thing in under 20 minutes. Me, I had trouble with some events triggering and ended up running in circles for far too long before consulting a guide and resetting to correct the bug. And then the aforementioned issue with the key item that failed to spawn.

All in all, I found that my expectations of You Deserve were met, but that’s not saying much, because said expectations were about as low as they go. The title screen may have been the most impressive part of the game, which set a pretty poor precedent. Would I have enjoyed it more if I had a more powerful machine and it ran at full speed? Maybe. Would it be a better game if the bugs were ironed out? That’s debatable. Would streamlining the fetch quest at the end improve the game dramatically? Certainly. But none of those things are going to happen, so You Deserve will forever languish in mediocrity. To be 100% truthful, I would suggest that even if you get this game in a bundle, even if you’re given a free copy, that you just shuffle it over to the category of Steam games you’re never going to touch. It’s not worth your time or effort.

Last month, I bought a bundle of games from IndieGala, as I am wont to do. I purchased it for less than four Canadian dollars, and it contained exactly one game that I was actually interested in: Dragon Fin Soup. I still have not played this game.

However, I did install and play Apartment 666 right away. I had a pretty strong feeling of what it would be from the name, and I was partially correct; it was in fact a barely interactive scare-em-up. What I did not anticipate was that it is also a junky PT clone. That is to say, it’s a game where you keep walking through the same hallway over and over as progressively spookier things happen each time.

It was a pretty crappy game, with exactly one moving object and a record number of typos. If I have to say something nice about it, it’s that the developer at least tried to give it a unique story. I think. I’m not entirely clear on what PT’s plot is.

Also, since I’m a huge baby that gets scared by his own shadow, it did spook me well and good enough that I Alt+Tabbed out of the game while chanting “nope nope nope nope” on at least two occasions. So there’s that.

In addition to Apartment 666, I installed and played NEO-NOW! on a whim, and was similarly disinterested. To be fair, though, at least this one is an Early Access game, while the former is considered to be a complete experience (if that’s actually something you can call a video game these days).

NEO-NOW! is a very odd game. You begin by selecting a character model from a group of about five, and then a woman appears in the background, and suddenly your motorcycle is crashed at what looks like a gas station.

It’s a top-down action-type game reminiscent of old Zeldas or maybe Gauntlet? You waddle around shooting/stabbing enemies and collecting the odd power-up. They start out with a sewer level right out of the gate, which is never a good sign, and then once you finish the sewer, you’re immediately swarmed by guys who blow up once they get close enough. This kills you immediately, of course.

There was no hook for me in this game, so I got bored after about ten minutes, when I had exhausted my small supply of bullets and got repeatedly blown up while trying to stab the kamikaze guys to death. I couldn’t find a path forward on that screen, so my adventure was as good as over anyway.

I don’t know if I’m going to go back to it. Probably not. It’s not like it’s a notably terrible game or anything. I’ve played (and paid more money for) far worse. It’s just that NEO-NOW! presents nothing that makes me want to keep playing. Like I said, it’s got no hook. Also, there aren’t enough bullets and trying to stab your way to victory is no fun.

So there we are. Two more games down, neither of them worth my time, but fortunately I can write them off as having essentially been free with the purchase of another game I was more interested in. I’m going to try to get through the rest of the bundle by the end of the month, but no promises. There be many more interesting games on my plate right now.