OK, I had to skip a rotation of this column to take care of a little chore — moving doesn’t happen in a day — but I’m happy to be back on the Indie Scene.
With the first five letters out of the way, this edition is brought to you by the letter F. I can’t say all the games below were fun, but they weren’t short on creativity, which is sometimes equally satisfying. Can I interest you in an interactive drama or a game that can’t be completed?
Let’s dig in…
F:
Façade (PC, free)
Façade is a game I first heard about years ago. I think I saw a blurb about it on X-Play and wanted to check it out — and why not? It’s a self-described one-act interactive drama in which you pay a visit to some friends, an on-the-rocks couple — Grace and Trip — whose tempers are hitting the breaking point.
From that point on you interactive with them any way you choose. You can type phrases in to talk to them or use the mouse to interact through hugging, kissing, and other actions.
The idea intrigued me, but I actually didn’t play this way back when after a friend told me it wasn’t that hot. That’s what I thought at first too…but then I just started messing around with it and began to have fun.
While Grace and Trip don’t recognize all the vocabulary you’ll try, they pick out key words and respond…sometimes. Façade can get mighty frustrating when you try to start a conversation and they answer something way off base (I’m not talking about you, Grace!). It’s also disconcerting when you are typing, they start talking, you finish the phrase and hit Enter, and they freeze and stare at you momentarily before acknowledging. It’s like they’re a pair of aliens logging in to their universal translator.
I didn’t give up on it, though, and continued to play it, eventually reaching a conclusion. The journey kept me hooked: Getting to the end involved a few ups and downs, two glasses of wine, and one big emotional explosion.
Façade isn’t a game I’d boot up to turn off my brain or release steam, but when that curtain closed, I was glad I made the time.
Frog Hunt (PC, free)
OK, so Façade has avant-garde covered. Not to be outdone, my next stop also stretches the mind, but in a far different way. Frog Hunt is flat-out bizarre.
Looking at screens and hearing your objective makes it sound simple enough: Catch as many frogs as you can. It’s nothing like that, though. Sure, you’ll pointlessly chase those buggers around the screen, thinking you can achieve mild glory if you could just grasp their slippery skin, but you won’t. And then the elephants start bounding in, leaving a discolored pile of something fetid in their wake.
It doesn’t make sense, and the game’s homepage says as much. In fact, it claims Frog Hunt is broken and just might be the worst game every made…and I’m not one to argue. Through numerous playthroughs, I was never quite able to make what I’d called progress. In fact, I may hate this game. Yet I still wouldn’t mind playing it again….
Frozzd (PC, free)
I finish off the Fs with the most traditional game of the bunch: Frozzd. And even this one isn’t exactly cookie-cutter material. It’s a platformer at heart, with a Super Mario Galaxy twist. The action has you hopping among planetoids — when you leap off one, you flip and stick to another if you’re within its gravitational pull.
The game is a 2D sidescroller, but thanks to the planetoid twist, you’ll be traversing in all directions as you try to free mubblies, blobby little creatures who follow you and live to do two things: attack or unfreeze. And that sums up the game. You order them to either attack enemies and unfreeze frozen comrades.
It was just tricky and challenging enough to keep me occupied for an hour-plus as I unlocked more planets and eventually beat one big-ass boss. And that was that — good times.
Is it just me, or is appropriate that the games this time were a little effed up? Hope you enjoyed yourself regardless, and as always, if you have any suggestions for future games, simply drop them in the comments below. If you’d like to read a previous Indie Scene entry, simply hit the appropriate link: