Postage Due (and it's Been an Age, Too): Catching Up (Part I)

Once upon a time I used to post monthly or more here, with tales of my toils against the fearsome Backlog Beast. Usually, it went something like this: Wow! I’ve been busy, but look I played these here one or two games. At the end of summer - I haven’t been here since August - things got really busy, and suddenly it’s March. In August I was probably sick of summer, now I’m ready for winter to pack up and leave. But we have more snow starting Tuesday night, if the weatherfolk can be trusted.

So, uh, hi. I’ve been busy. Remember me?

Previously, on LinustheBold:

In late October and most of November, I did two plays in rep, a new devised one called “ReFUSE” (experimental, very sweet, largely ignored) and a debut by comic artist Dean Haspiel called “Harakiri Kane” (a sort of afterlife noir, sold out almost every show in part because it co-starred Stoya, whom some of you may know). Rehearsals, which began in September, were solid and constant and draining, and performances were fantastic. As soon as those two ended I was cast as Inspector Foot in Tom Stoppard’s one-act “After Magritte,” an Absurdist play about Surrealists; from there it was a breathless jolt into “Henry Box Brown: A Musical Journey,” a story of slavery and escape that needed a couple of replacement actors right away for a few big performances (I ended up learning two versions of the piece, the short highlights one and the 90-minute full length, on two weeks of rehearsal). And then our monthly late-night live-theater soap opera, and an amazing festival of one-minute plays, and a short solo spot for Comedy Central … and for real, there was very little gaming going on, and when it was happening - Secret World Legends and Star Wars: The Old Republic, I’m looking at you - it was in distracted chunks, during occasional odd hours.

I’m on a short between-things break right now. Rehearsals for the next play start in 10 days. Oh! And I got a new computer, which can actually run the games I play. Which makes gaming things a little easier.

Finishings: What's Gone By

• 1,000 Heads Among the Trees
  

  3 hours playtime

  6 of 6 achievements

• Crystals of Time
  

  4 hours playtime

  no achievements

• The Mammoth: A Cave Painting
  

  60 minutes playtime

  1 of 1 achievements

• Port of Call
  

  62 minutes playtime

  7 of 7 achievements

• The Room
  

  5 hours playtime

  5 of 5 achievements

• Sacra Terra: Angelic Night
  

  6 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Samantha Swift and the Golden Touch
  

  4 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Samantha Swift and the Hidden Roses of Athena
  

  4 hours playtime

  no achievements

1000 Heads Among the Trees (2015, ABC Challenge, Steamgifts win) is a scruffy, dark, odd little game. My 3 hours spent in the course of a windy night in e-Cachiche, Peru, left me pleased and baffled - how pleased you might be by this amateur indie probably depends on how much you like baffled. Everything, including graphics and instructions, is minimal here. You manifest on a nighttime street, and go walking through town. You peer through windows at slivers of figures, overhearing snippets of conversation. You take pictures of the people, the scenery, and some mysterious events and visions. There’s a history of witchcraft in Cachiche; do the witches live here still? Show your photos to people you meet along the way, and they’ll tell some stories, offer occasional advice, and - weirdly - give you their opinions about people like you walking around taking pictures of everybody without permission. This is a small, interesting, balky game, more murky than penetrating and full of atmosphere. I wished there were more of it, and more intricately crafted, but what there was left me pleased and, as I say, baffled. It’s not for everyone, but it was for me.

Crystals of Time (2014) is one of those games that’s always always there, patiently waiting to be played - I picked this up in an Indie Gala bundle back in October of 2014. Through no fault of its own, it’s showing the intervening years. Crystals of Time ends up being a pleasant and marginal Hidden Object Game, with a bareworn plot and a couple of good conceits. The best mechanic is the (you guessed it) Time Crystals, which move you occasionally from present-day locations to their once-upon-a-time incarnations. I wish there were more of the time-shifting built into the story. There’s a fair amount of solid good sense in the design, and an updated take on this middle-of-the-road fantasy might be a good worthy project. As it is, it’s a bland-ish pleasant play in familiar fields. Mostly harmless.

The Mammoth: A Cave Painting (2015), by contrast, is a no-frills free game that plays out a foreordained history in a few busy minutes. It’s one of those short free larks - I tend to like these - that doesn’t hold many narrative surprises, but transmits a surprising amount of simple-hearted pathos in execution. We start as a happy mammoth in a mostly-monochrome world, foraging and caring for our little mammoths along the steppes. We can charge, and we can bellow. Then these pesky little guys with pointed sticks start coming out of the bushes, and they’re really annoying. What with the hooting and hollering, and the pointed sticks. We charge, we bellow. Time passes.

Port of Call (2015) is another simple, ambitious free-to-play indie with satisfying but minimal polish. In this one you appear on a dock, and board a - well, a fabulous riverboat, if you will, a twin-engined paddle steamer. The gruff captain sends you around to collect tickets from the other passengers as he steers for a nearby island with a lighthouse. There are dim silent riders and floating books, a peaceful lounge upstairs and an infernal engine room below. A few vanishing NPCs have a few sparse stories to tell, and there’s a discovery and a choice to make at the end (twice, if you want all the achievements). It isn’t earth-shaking, but it is interesting, in an abstract yes-I-guess-I’m-having-fun way. Port of Call won’t linger in the mind, but it’s a pleasant trip.

The Room (2014) is a spectacular game - you probably know this. In essence it’s just a series of puzzle-box puzzles, glazed with a gentle brush of unlikely magic and some ingenious, twisty puzzles. You begin in a room with a large locked contraption, and you have to figure out how to open it. Once you do, in steps and fits and starts, you’ll uncover another chapter, covering the box locked within, and a set of notes from the designer of the box that lead you ever further inward. Lather, rinse, repeat. The music is perfectly weighty, the design is gorgeous and somber, and the clicking and ratcheting each time you set a solution in motion is pure delight. (And yes, if you’re a certain age, you will think of the Hellraiser movies often.) You’ve probably played The Room by now, and if you haven’t, yikes, get in there! As a late bloomer myself, I can tell you there’s no reason to wait. This is a wonderful game, beautifully rendered. Note that there can be bugs - I had to restart the fifth and final chapter when a puzzle got stuck convinced it hadn’t been solved, and it wouldn’t be un-solved either. Apart from that, though, things went, well, like clockwork.

Sacra Terra: Angelic Night (2011) is an above-average Hidden Object Game mired in its time - it’s nutty and flitty and sometimes barely coherent, and as I played (it’s a little too long, I think) I could almost hear the artists chuckling as they kitchen-sinked every possible demonic twist and effect into their lunatic scenes. The excessive over-stuffery actually makes the game a little hard to get hold of, as the scenes tend to be disjointed (every one is a set piece, after all) and it’s ultimately hard to navigate. After playing for a while, I’d come back the next night and be stuck trying to remember if the rune table is on the right up those steps from the plaza, or was it to the left beyond the chamber and across the river? But whatever, everything is bombastic and ostentatious, overwrought and fraught and giggling. And it’s all kind of infectious. Silly, chipper, masquerade-ball fun.

Samantha Swift and the Hidden Roses of Athena (2008) and Samantha Swift and the Golden Touch (2009, Steamgifts win) are two back-to-back Hidden Object Lite games - they seem clearly intended for children, though there are some oddly difficult moments in the first one, so perhaps they were meant for parent-bonding play. We are young Samantha Swift, a clear-eyed chipper young woman adventuring around the world to collect artifacts for her museum collection. Everyone on her team is, like Sam herself, impossibly young to be doing the work of multiple professors and doctoral workers, but hey. Her team is back at the Museum, doing research and providing breezy facts while Sam makes her way through the tombs and crypts, solving puzzles, collecting objects, and generally romping through a cartoony world at a cartoony pace. The second game has a sonar feature that essentially revealed everything I was looking for, sometimes before I was actually looking for it, with the result that there was nothing to engage the interest and it actually got boring through convenience; the first is better, but both are really not playing to the adults in the room. Kids will either dig it or think it’s silly.

Next up: the ones I didn’t finish!