The Flashlight: Chupacabra’s Greatest Foe

After a loading screen that politely reminds you that the game is made by MEGO, Chupacabra prompts you to press start. Since most smartphones lack a start button, this is emulated by tapping anywhere on your phone’s screen. Your reward for discovering the solution to this first puzzle is that you’re given control of a goat-murdering vampire and mercilessly unleashed upon the unsuspecting goat population of a 2D version of Mexico. The game doesn’t explain the controls, but I can overlook that because they’re so simple: to run, you do nothing. To stop, you “press start” the same way you did to get past the title screen.

The objective, which shouldn’t surprise you, is to kill as many goats as you can without being spotted by any flashlight-wielding cowboys, who are probably just jealous that you get to be a vampire and they don’t. To kill goats, you simply avoid tapping the emulated start button and allow yourself to sprint through them. Every time you do this, your score increases by one. As an added bonus, you get to see each goat you kill explode into red, tasty pixels of  goat blood. Chupacabra is a messy eater.

You must be careful though. Throughout 2D Mexico, vigilant cowboys sit on horseback, waving flashlights back and forth, hoping to spot the monster that slaughters their goats in the night. If you are caught in the beam of a flashlight, the cowboy holding that flashlight will immediately shoot you. When Chupacabra comes into contact with a bullet, the result is similar to the slime in a video game adaptation of the 90s Nickelodeon show All That: green, pixelated, messy, and completely innocuous to goats. And being innocuous to goats means the game is over.

To complicate matters, the screen constantly gets darker, returning to full brightness every time you kill a goat. If you allow the screen to go completely black, you starve to death and the game is over. This creates a nice balancing act that requires you to slow down enough to avoid the flashlight beams but not enough to starve to death before reaching the next goat.

All of this would make for a great game except for two problems I have with it. The first is that doing well seems to rely, at least to some degree, on luck. If you’re lucky, there will be lots of goats to eat with only the occasional cowboy to  evade. If you’re unlucky, you’ll run into too many cowboys too close together and starve to death trying to sneak past them.

The second is that, if you run for a few seconds without stopping, you switch speeds from moderately fast to extremely fast. When running extremely fast, it’s much harder to stop in time when you see a cowboy. To get around this, I tapped my screen every few seconds to keep my speed at moderately fast. This probably won’t be an issue for everyone, but it kept the game from being fun for me. I hate having to constantly interrupt the game to keep it from giving me something that would usually be, and should be, considered a power up.

Despite its good points, Chupacabra isn’t a good game. To be fair, it’s not that bad either, and I can understand how other people would like it. The bottom line is that I didn’t enjoy it, but it’s a free download, so it may still be worth checking out.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

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.

Don’t you just hate it when you wake up inside a cryostasis pod and the entirety of humanity has become enslaved to an angry, paranoid human hybrid species? Well, that’s exactly what’s happened in Wake Up Call, an ambitious new game from Dark Synergy Studios.

You play as a ‘no nonsense’ ex-special ops soldier by the name of Kyle Rogers. Poor Kyle has been sleeping for the past 150 years and has since found himself in a bit of a situation. Humankind has evolved, and an entirely new species called the Kalders are now sharing the planet. The Kalders are a more aggressive variant of human and wasted little time in dominating their counterparts. Naturally, it’s up to Kyle to save the day.

Built with Unreal Engine 4, Wake Up Call is looking like an ambitious project. Little more is known about the game except that it will focus on ‘stealth-action’ FPS gameplay, and players will have the ability to make important choices as the story progresses. Only time will tell if the team at Dark Synergy Studios can achieve what they’re planning to with Wake Up Call, but the story has just the right amount of sci-fi and apocalyptic doom to grab my attention.

If you want to keep tabs on the game’s development, head on over to their official site or Steam Greenlight page.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

To hell with all these humans, it’s time to show the meatbags just who the boss is around these parts. Asthree Works’ upcoming 2D side-scrolling adventure Paradise Lost: First Contact intends to let you do just that, placing you into the multi-limbed body of an alien species hell bent on escaping from its imprisonment in a shady underground laboratory.

Fans of the older Metroid games need to start getting excited right about now. Paradise Lost attempts to go back to the classic days of large sprawling 2D landscapes, in which you navigate the various corridors and rooms in search of the next upgrade or door key to progress. Don’t expect a carbon copy of the classics though, as the tables are turned for the player in Paradise Lost compared to the old Metroidvania games. You’re an alien trying to escape, not a six foot alien-slaying maiden, and the gameplay reflects this as you’ll have to trade a blaster for the more refined approach of trickery and stealth. Ventilation shafts, storage containers, and perhaps even a body cavity or two will have to be utilised along with a number of strange alien abilities like poison gas and hardened skin if you want to make it out alive.

The game is slated for a December 2014 release date, with the devs stating that they “want to put everything we have on it. It’s on early stage of development so we need at least one year to make it right.” You can find out more about the game on its official website, as well as the current Kickstarter campaign and Greenlight page.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

During this year’s Eurogamer Expo, we got to chatting with Mike Bithell of Thomas Was Alone fame. In the interview below, we talk about Volume, his newest creation which trades the highly emotional lives of rectangles for cover-based stealth action.

For more information about Volume, check out the official site here.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

So here’s a project that’s worth a look. Attack Mountain (also known as ATKMTN) has a Kickstarter campaign running for two games set to be available in one package known as the Attack Pack. Due to their previous campaign for the retro RPG Legend of the Time Star being unsuccessful, the team has scaled back its ambitions, seeking a smaller funding goal and developing smaller games with more flexibility. So what makes up the Attack Pack? Attack Mountain is kicking off their first game pack with SOS and The Grey Man, two games that couldn’t be further opposites from each other.

SOS

In SOS you play as the Agent, a spy with an illustrious career spanning forty years. With an episodic framework, the player weaves the tale of some of the Agent’s most thrilling missions. SOS takes notes from games such as Metal Gear Solid and action movies like Rambo, giving players the opportunity to choose between a more stealthy approach like a classic spy or go in guns a-blazing like a macho man straight out of the eighties. Every decision you make will count–guards WILL notice unconscious or dead bodies left out in the open, will follow trails of bloody footprints, and so on.

The Grey Man

The Grey Man, however, takes a quieter approach. Players take the role of the titular character as it lands on Earth and explores its surroundings. Although things start off peacefully, the Grey Man may make mischief with its powers and catch the attention of the local human life which will inevitably be none too happy with its presence.

Despite their smaller scale, the duo that makes up Attack Mountain still has big plans for their games. While SOS will launch with two episodes, further funding will allow the team to develop additional tales of the Agent. Meanwhile, The Grey Man will receive more content such as new areas in the form of patches. Other stretch goals include voice acting for SOS, comics, and even the addition of a third game to the pack.

I’m really excited for this Kickstarter. Video games could learn a lot from the world of indie comics and zines, and the Attack Pack gives off that comic anthology feel I know and love. Plus, I’ll never let good pixel art and music go unappreciated, and the Attack Pack seems to have that in spades. Especially promising is that the games are already in development and have been for almost a year–the developers just need some help getting them funded and into the hands of you folks, the players. Head on over to the Kickstarter page and check out the video, music previews, and concept art and maybe even make a pledge! Want more Attack Mountain after pledging? Check out their Dev Diary, their official website, and their Facebook page. You can also help the developer out by voting for the Attack Pack on Steam Greenlight.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.