Lo-Fi Plays IX: Six Little Indie Games

Best estimates are that as many as twenty computer games are published every year. With that warehouse of downloadables to peruse, finding fascinating titles on the fringe can be like looking for hay in a needlestack. That's why I have a thread of blogs featuring starling-size projects that didn't ever get to soar. In that spirit, here are six more Lo-Fi Plays.

Short Trip

Not to be confused with A Short Hike, Short Trip is an interactive pencil drawing from Aussie illustrator Alexander Perrin. With the arrow keys, we march a feline driver around, taking his clackety trolley to the top of a rural European hill. You have some passengers along for the ride, too. The rails crest and duck, leaving all the sleepy visuals in the middle of the screen.

You can drive your train as an express line or a leisurely Sunday service, but whatever my pace was, every new telephone pole and apple tree made me think, "Wow, someone actually drew this". We don't all understand what it takes to make a game, but we do know what it means to sit down and pencil out a whole mountainside. Artists usually hide the seams of their media, but Short Trip wears every graphite scratch as a badge of honour. Oh, to be a cat driving a tram.

Short Trip is free on itch.io.

a man outside

In Lo-Fi Plays III, I heaped commendations on the horror survey Assessment Examination. Since then, we've seen a rash of quizzes that imply their invigilator is a spectre of doom. However, a man outside doesn't incorporate the same type of quiz nor the same brand of doom. Instead, it is about a teenage student who is home alone, taking a vocab test, when wouldn't you know it, there's someone lurking outside their window. Assessment Examination took an interest in you as an applicant, and the malevolent presence used the survey to scan your mind. In this game, there's nothing sinister about the quiz, but it evidences that even a pedestrian task fizzes with stress when conducted under threat.

Like its spiritual predecessor, Please Answer Carefully, a man outside uses surveillance and stalking to violate your boundaries. Yet, for most of this after-school special, the horror is in the ambiguity. We don't know what the man plans to do to us, if anything, but that lack of resolution is a held note. All the endings had a little something that surprised me, and if you want to bulk up your lexicon, this isn't a bad way to do it. On the Hard difficulty, the exam is downright fickle.

a man outside is free on itch.io.

Silicon Scramble

Silicon Scramble takes place inside a computer. Not like Tron takes place inside a computer where Turing Machines are imagined as phantasmagoric sports arenas, but as in how Linus Tech Tips sometimes films computer parts. PCBs, integrated circuits, and capacitors are our home turf. As a bullet hell produced in the cosy time slot of a single game jam, Silicon Scramble only has one or two ships in its hangar. I wouldn't mind a little extra screen real estate, either. All the same, a three-minute time limit shows a sober awareness of its modest elasticity. As a shoot 'em up, it justifies its existence with a couple of mechanics I'd love to see dispersed wider in the genre.

Mechanic one: A radial meter keeps you permanently aware of the number of points between you and your next life, which is smart when the more important a resource is to our success, the more transparent feedback on it should be. Our number of "extra guys" bounces up and down like a birthday boy on a trampoline. Mechanic two: We may self-destruct at any time to enter a "Fever" mode, which overclocks our multiplier and allows us to chase a line of coins to maximise our score. We must decide in a split-second when to keep cashing in and when we need to strafe from the golden road to avoid sizzling energy bolts.

Silicon Scramble is the espresso shot of video games, not a deep mug you can sit down with for twenty minutes. It wants to get you in, give you a quick jolt, get you out.

Silicon Scramble is "name your own price" on itch.io.

Spin to Win

I almost didn't put Spin to Win on this list. It's hard to talk about games reliant on secrecy without the cat getting out of the bag. I was also let down by its meagre interactivity. But Lo-Fi Plays isn't just about stimulating games, it's also about nifty ideas, and I would overlook a few of those by skipping Spin to Win. A Wheel of Misfortune, Spin to Win is informed both by fictional gameshows of death like Saw and real, inhumane reality TV like Denpa Shōnen teki Kenshō Seikatsu. The player character has been jailed in a brutalist cave bedroom and must claw blood from the stone by spinning a prize wheel. That wheel is the only splash of colour in your sorry existence. With the absence of any CCTV, we have to conclude your captors aren't even torturing you for viewer figures, just for their own amusement, which is its own kind of fucked.

This short is not complicated and isn't trying to be, held together by the simple mystery of what will come down the chute next. That's decided by the almighty wheel, of course. Spin to Win undermines itself by pre-scripting the order of the gifts, which is not what its pseudo-die would suggest it would do. However, I feel all the more grateful for the staple comforts my rotating god awards when I start with nothing to my name. This moment of isolation made me think about our reliance on others and how certain items are useless in the wrong context, e.g. The lightbulb that falls out of the drippy hole only to shatter on the wet concrete.

Spin to Win is "name your own price" on itch.io.

sin(e)s

Natural disasters kill on a scale that a monster or serial murderer could only dream of, and you can't take revenge on a strong wind or bring a forest fire to justice. All you can do is read the safety pamphlets and cross your fingers. That's what you do in sin(e)s, but this isn't the 50s. You don't need to read earthquake survival tips from a dusty old booklet. This is 1989, and you're ready to log onto the information superhighway. Cue a belated reunion with Internet Explorer and the humble informativity of Web 1.0.

Less light-hearted are the photographs of what appear to be the aftermath of real earthquakes. People's livelihoods are in that rubble. The webpages bring home the importance of preparation and cushion you against the worst-case scenario with pragmatic safeguards. Then, the time comes to put that theory into practice. You regain consciousness in an imploded suburban basement. Someone has sneezed Ben Day dots over the screen, and the colour is fried like the contrast knob is turned to its maximum. As you transfer between scenes, the camera rolls back on its neck as though slipping in and out of consciousness.

However containable a collapse felt on paper, in person, being entombed in debris is disorienting and surreal. As in Spin to Win, I feel a sense of helplessness. While my training was all about taking control when the shaking stops, in the heat of the moment, I am dependent on outside rescuers to save me. Although, if you think sin(e)s has left you out of options, I'd recommend checking the TV. I love a minigame that makes me feel like a technical expert, and that's what I get from setting the pulse widths behind the noisy glass.

sin(e)s is free on itch.io.

Dr. Langeskov, the Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist

Haters will say experimental art has held its nose high over the comedic, sternly chucklephobic. This has not been true in any artistic field, and that includes video games. Look at the comedies of Brendon Chung or the playful flirtation in Nina Freeman's We Met in May. Think of The Stanley Parable, for Christ's sake. I don't mention The Stanley Parable just as another example of side-tickling humour. The developer of Dr. Langeskov was also the metallurgist who gold-plated The Stanley Parable for its Ultra Deluxe Edition.

With A Whirlwind Heist, you too can wrack your brains trying to figure out how Crows Crows Crows got British comedian Simon Amstell (Skins, Never Mind the Buzzcocks) to voice the main character of a free indie game. I'm picturing a propped-up crate with a pile of vegan mince under it. Amstell's anxious Queen's English is the appropriate voice for a mansion coming down around our ears. Like many of the top humourists, it's at Amstell's seemingly most stuttering and desperate that he has the most command over his craft.

Audio is something stressed in Dr. Langeskov, as budget constraints mean it can't always puppet its models in front of you. Rather than letting its lack of animatronics be a non-starter, Crows Crows Crows let it spur them to SFX that suggest fervent movement and hungry feline jaws just beyond the plaster. I am waving my arms and shouting for you not to look up anything more on this mystery before you download it, but if you're still not convinced you need this game, unfold the spoiler block below.

Okay, you have to promise not to get mad, but I've misled you, Dr. Langeskov has misled you. Start the program, and you'll enter into the rear of what looks and sounds like a theatre, but this is no performance. An omniscient Simon Amstell explains that someone else is already playing the game, and you'll have to wait your turn to get the green light. Because, you see, the writer and designer of Langeskov is William Pugh, co-writer and co-designer on The Stanley Parable. With any luck, that will have rid you of further nosiness, and you won't click the second spoiler tag.

You clicked the other spoiler tag? Oh, god, why did you do that? If you must know, The Terribly Cursed Emerald is a whimsical performing arts conceptualisation of how a video game might work. It's all a bit Truman Show as you pull levers to pour water or release tigers on/at the player character. When stood next to The Stanley Parable, we find it less probing of its chosen format and putting more of its eggs into eliciting laughs. Although, it does gently rib the industry over how often games glitch and stammer and is a gentle satire on how they frequently they require manic duct-taping to bring them up to code at the last second. Just watch out for the tiger.

Dr. Langeskov, the Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist is "name your own price" on itch.io.

___

I don't know what any of the words I typed mean and I chose them purely at random. I hope they were good. Thanks for reading.