Day 17 - Plain Sight and Machinarium

Plain Sight 

I wasn't sure what to expect from this title based on the screenshots. I got a little worried when I saw XNA in the boot flow, as that's rarely the sign of a professionally made game. Plain Sight is a multiplayer game that pits robots against each other in small deathmatch arenas. Gameplay is fairly fast-paced, with robots jumping and boosting around, locking onto enemies and charging towards them. During all this, gravity is behaving very questionably, and any surface can be stepped on. It's all very disorienting, at the very least, and one of the greatest challenges is simply navigating around with the constantly changing horizon.

Your goal in Deathmatch is to kill enemies, which allows you to gain their energy (which starts at 1 but also includes the energy they stole through kills). Once you've passed a certain threshold you can hold E for a few seconds to detonate, turning your energy into points. You'll get multiplies in two ways: from normal kills and from self-destruct explosion kills. The multiplies will greatly increase the amount of points you gain from the self-destruct. Until you do this, however, you're vulnerable to being killed and losing all stored energy. It doesn't help that as your energy goes up, you become bigger, which helps you kill but also makes you a bigger, more tempting target.



If you can get past the chaos of it all, the game is actually pretty fun. There isn't much to the single-player experience, though, this is really a multiplayer game. I probably won't play any more beyond the 37 minutes I played, but I would bring this game out at a LAN party without hesitation.

I'm probably not doing a good job of explaining how fast paced and chaotic this game is, and how disorienting it can all be, so I've included gameplay footage of two short deathmatch games I played against the medium AI.

Machinarium 

Today is robot-awareness day, apparently. Machinarium is a flash game sold on Steam. I'm not even joking. Right-clicking, instead of being a useful button, brings up that annoying flash context menu, which is a terrible shame. You take on the role of a robot, and for no explained reason you start making your way towards... the right side of the screen, I guess. Gameplay consists on clicking to move to, interact with, pick up, use and combine items and the environment. You only use one button, and never the keyboard, in this title and it's infuriating at times.

Puzzles primarily consist of looking around to find what you can interact with, and then figuring out how to use it to move on. It's not terribly complicated, but the items usually blend in with the background environment and can be difficult to find. Combining items into others is usually pretty straight-forward, but the game doesn't allow any creativity. There is one, and only one, correct way to accomplish any given level, from what I saw.

The visual style is very unique, and probably the game's strong suit. It's got a hand-drawn style, and the world is a very interesting twist on robots living like humans. It's unfortunate that it's double letterboxed, but I really don't expect much from a flash game. I had no idea what the story was, or what was going on, but rather focused on progressing in the only direction I could. The main character occasionally has thought bubbles that appear to show him being bullied by the other robots, which I guess is leading up to why he's doing what he's doing? I don't know, as there's no text or speech there isn't much opportunity to tell a story.

I like this style of game, and I could look over a lot of the technical flaws if the game wasn't so damn slow-paced. The robot walks so slow, and that's only if you're the correct height. If you forget to adjust, and try walking while shrunk down or stretched out you'll waddle along at a snails pace. The fact that there's no way to interrupt walking to your destination doesn't help either. I played this game for 47 minutes, and I do not see myself coming back to it.

Notes

I went and got the Pillar of the Community badge on Steam the other day in hopes of getting invited to the new Steam Community Beta. No luck, so far. In order to do that, I had to upload a video, so I've been messing around with Youtube a bit. Yesterday I posted a video from my Quake 3 session, and today I added the Plain Sight gameplay video. The process to record, edit, compress and upload a video is a bit more time-consuming than I'd like, so I probably won't do these as a regular thing.

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 017