One of these people is breaking the rules. Can you tell which one?

No Photos, Please! is a social stealth game in the works from The Basement Studios that has passed Greenlight on Steam, and after playing a few rounds of it with my little sister, I’ve come to the conclusion that it has a lot of potential. Two players share a screen with an isometric view of a museum and race to figure out which of the many 8-bit characters they are controlling. After this, the photographer must phase through each exhibit to take a picture of it, (no, I don’t get how that works either) and the security guard must get within range of the photographer and apprehend him. Anyone who’s played the Assassin’s Creed multi-player will feel right at home with this game. You spend most of your time not knowing which of the many avatars in the room are hunting you or breaking the rules, you have class-specific abilities to combat your opponent, and you have to trick your friend, sister, or mortal enemy into believing that you are just another brainless, computer-controlled drone. I really like the concept. The problem is that the photographer is overpowered.

When playing as the security guard, I won about half the time. When playing as the photographer, I never lost. That includes the time I was blindly fumbling about because I never actually figured out which character I was. There are two main things that contribute to this. One, as the photographer, you don’t really need to know who the other person is. If you act like an NPC, your anti-security abilities will delay the security guard long enough to get all the pictures. As the security guard, you need to figure out which avatar is yours, which one is your opponent’s, and then you need to get close to your opponent without giving away that you are more than another NPC enjoying a day at the museum. The other thing that tilts the game in the photographer’s favour is the time limit. When the photographer takes the first picture, a two-minute timer is started. If the security guard doesn’t find and apprehend the photographer before the timer goes off, the photographer wins. In fact, I found that the easiest way to win as the photographer was to take one picture and run out the clock.

The good thing is that this is Sparta! beta. No Photos, Please! is still in development, and if the classes are balanced, it will be a great game that I’ll have no problem recommending. No Photos, Please! is scheduled for release later this year. For more information or to watch some gameplay videos, check out its Steam page.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

The game tells the unintegral story of a goldfish that accidentally got dropped into “the SACRED SPRING” one day and, deep in the water, began a life of eating little dots that caused him to balloon, squirt out little fishies with every sixth one he consumed, and then return back to his original size to begin the process over again.

You control Chicken (who sports a halo and is evidently a Saint, so evidently he’s dead, but it is unclear why) as he winds his way through ocean caverns with the goal of eating enough pellets to produce 25 offspring in each of the game’s eight levels. You unlock later levels by escorting the smaller fish to each level’s “relic” (sunken treasures and statues). This is a bit easier said than done because, though Chicken is invincible, the fish tailing him are vulnerable to the deadly sea creatures (electric eels and stingrays) that swim in horizontal lines across each level and kill the little fish in one hit. Further, these baby fish do really badly on their own. If they’re left behind for more than a few moments, their health quickly deteriorates, so Chicken must repeatedly summon them to stay close and regenerate from his magical glowy dead powers.

The game is easy to control. All you need to use are the arrow keys to move and the spacebar to summon your offspring. You can also control with the mouse by clicking where you want Chicken to go and clicking directly on him to send out your summoning waves. The keyboard control feels more intuitive and fluid, but it’s nice that the mouse option is included. The graphics are simple and do the job, including important details like your offspring going from glowing to skeletal as they decrease in health.

The sound effects are also functional as your fish release an obnoxious little cry when nearing death and a little “ding” increasing in pitch chimes with each pellet you eat until you hit six. There are two extremely simple background tracks that fit the game’s leisurely swimming around theme and pacing, but they get repetitive before long. You do have the option to turn the music off, though it stubbornly turns itself back on each time you return to the home screen.

The game’s core mechanic, as mentioned, is that Chicken grows each time he eats a dot with his size resetting after the sixth one. It’s a mechanic that seems clever at first, but it’s awfully basic, something that becomes apparent very quickly. There are amazing games based on one to two simple mechanics (Super Mario Bros., Klonoa, Rhythm Heaven) but they manage to be so good by virtue of introducing new situations to use those mechanics in that make them feel continually novel and fresh even though the player never has to learn any new controls or moves.

The problem with St. Chicken is that it doesn’t seem to have any idea of what to do with itself. With its gimmick, the only challenge it can really muster comes from including situations in levels where you need to be small enough to enter a certain passageway, so you either have to make sure you haven’t eaten so many pellets that you can’t fit, or you need to go find some more to eat until you’re returned to your original size. Either strategy requires backtracking to retrieve pellets at some point and, simply put, there’s nothing fun about backtracking. In fairness, the game doesn’t place a huge amount of importance on this and I believe there is only one level in which you can actually end up being stuck too big to collect all the pellets and offspring, but this means that the game’s only major mechanic goes almost completely ignored. It’s as though the developer recognized there was little he could do with it, so the game is content to mostly let you wander around eating and excreting fish without any strategy in mind. Some of the levels are solidly designed (for example, the classic concept of the level that begins with the ending in sight though not yet reachable makes an appearance), but making your way through them isn’t hugely absorbing.

The enemies that scroll across the levels are another issue. They’re generally fairly easy to avoid, but they always start on the left of the level, swim to the right, and then respawn back on the left side. If you happen to be swimming near the left side when an enemy spawns there, you may find all the offspring you’ve created by that point murdered in one fell swoop. You end up having to navigate these parts of the levels with luck, caution, waiting, and a bit of memorization. Unfortunately, waiting around to see where an enemy appears or trying to memorize their patterns is, again, simply not fun gameplay. There was only one level (the same one in which it’s possible to make some of the pellets unobtainable) where it became a palpable frustration. However, it never felt like the game was becoming more challenging, it just felt annoying and left me pining for the previous levels where I was able to swim about without a care.

Overall, St. Chicken is brief enough to succeed as a decent distraction. Except in the one level mentioned, the game never gets particularly irritating, but, then again, it never becomes truly challenging or exhilarating either. There’s some cleverness to be found in the design of some of the levels, but there’s just very little to actually do or think about when navigating them. You just swim around eating things and hammering the spacebar repeatedly to keep your feeble offspring in line. Ultimately, St. Chicken relies on such a simplistic concept that it never rises above being anything but casual.

Note: There is currently a bug in the game that makes it so it is only possible to collect 199 out of the 200 total offspring. However, the developer assures us he will be fixing this.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

There are six points of contact on the screen, turning Unstoppable Fist into an evolved form of whack-a-mole. And with a touch of your finger, our nameless protagonist delivers a fistful of patriotism or a punishing kick to the enemy. With the inclusion of a vertical swipe, your arsenal is expansive enough to deal with anything on the screen. There is one major problem with this mechanic though; more than three enemies on the screen reveals the ever-so-slight sluggishness of the controls.  Because of this, the difference in difficulty levels is far too extreme. Also our protagonist has a somewhat limited range, so for a number of enemies several seconds go by as you watch, unable to do anything. If an enemy comes hurtling along from the other side, it is almost impossible not to get hit, which feels cheap. A few tweaks to the range would make the game worth being played several hundred times more.

Our unnamed hero and controls for attack

The pixel-art style is wonderfully crafted, and the animation is crisp, with every punch and kick delivered perfectly. But the smoothness of our protagonist only highlights the blandness of the enemies, whose animation cycles are repetitive and look out of place. But for the purpose they serve in the game, it may just be a minor complaint.

The audio design is the perfect complement to the visual aesthetics. Developers Ragtag Studios know just how good the soundtrack is, as they have released it as a standalone purchase. But it also shows how indie developers are looking at different revenue sources outside of an over-bloated in-app purchase system.

It is hard to complain about the lack of depth to the game, because of its price and that the game knows exactly what it is and what it is trying to do. The menus, options and the game play elements are all designed around simplicity. It does suffer from not having the longevity compared to other games of this style. Unlike Super Crate Box, it doesn’t the ability to be played for a minute on the train or for a half-hour in your house. But still, as a short blast for $0.99 it has enough going for it to be recommended.

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Flaming Hammer Games is establishing quite a run this year with its casual puzzle game lineup. Back in March, we reviewed Collaptris and deemed it a solid match-three title. Flaming Hammer is back with Gemclusion, a puzzle game for Android that, while not spectacular, succeeds in its goal of grabbing the player’s attention for short bursts of time.

Gemclusion is built upon a handful of simple game rules. On each level, there are a handful of discs that must be combined together by making them collide. Sliding a finger on the screen in either a vertical or horizontal direction forces all discs to move in that direction assuming there are no barriers. While there are normal stage boundaries, there are also colored walls inserted in the paths. These walls can only be breached by a disc of the same color. When combining discs together, the color of the resulting disc changes. There’s an element of strategy in combining discs neither too early nor too late to successfully get through all of the necessary barriers. As the game progresses, a wider variety of these barriers are introduced forcing the player to think well ahead.

Success is not only determined by whether the player succeeds in combining all the discs, but also in how efficient they are in the process. The number of moves performed and a running timer determine your overall rating for the level. The rating is presented using an Angry Birds-like three-star scoring system. Scoring high marks isn’t just for show either, as there are total star requirements that need to be met in order to progress through the series of levels. Often I was happy just to finish a level, but I would eventually have to go back and try to bump my one-star rating to a two or three. The star requirements are fairly easy to meet early on, but they become much more restrictive after about a dozen or so levels. It’s almost best to immediately retry a successful level in order to improve the score while the puzzle is still fresh in the player’s mind. Thankfully, the level select screen offers a preview of the level so that players can formulate a strategy before the clock starts running.

There’s nothing amazing or awe-inspiring about Gemclusion. It’s exactly what it was meant to be which is a casual puzzle game with a clever ruleset. The 20 levels are just the right amount. It’s enough time to get the player accustomed to learning the rules and bettering their skills, but not so long that the game overstays its welcome. The addition of online leaderboards might’ve given the game some additional replayability, but it’s hard to complain when Gemclusion does the job of hooking the player for its intended brief lifespan. Sometimes it’s best to do something small and do it very well. Gemclusion is available for free through Google Play.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.