Games You've Never Heard Of

A blog dedicated to indie games, gems lost to time, and games that you thought you shouldn't waste money on but really you should.

[sniv-vy]

i mean there’s obviously a thin line between a genuine personal relationship with someone who happens to work with you or have some sway in your professional field, and trading sexual favours for career advancement. but just because that line is thin doesn’t mean those situations are causal or correlated every time. 

anyway, even if she did have sex with prominent people within the field in exchange for positive reviews and favours, all that does is further prove that the general opinion is despite the fact that women make up almost half of the video game community, they have no place here. if female developers — and zoe quinn herself — were valued at all for their work and their abilities as a developer then no female developer would even feel the need to have sex to advance or promote their work, let alone actually go through with it.

and that’s the crux of the issue here. not with whom zoe quinn had sex, not with how many people, not for which reasons, not her ex-boyfriend’s petty behaviour and actions. the issue is that the video game industry is such a hostile place for women that shit like this even happens in the first place and that people’s first reaction is to attack the woman in question.

[gamesyouneverheardof]

Ah, the early 90's. The height of the fourth generation of gaming, when 16-bit ruled the earth and Mario's eyes were huge so you could tell that he had eyes.

And what would a 16-bit game be if it wasn't a side-scrolling shooter with funky music and a cute protagonist? Garbage. That's what it'd be.

Purple is, in the developer's own words, an "old... experiment" with Game Maker more than a full-fledged game. It's largely unfinished (slated to stay that way) and unrefined, with some bugs and "unfair" gameplay here and there.

In Purple, you play as a small, round, purple creature, killing and breaking things with a frisbee. The controls are very simple, which is good because this is a hard game. Enemies are almost constant with set, but erratic, movements that are hard to aim at, especially since you can only shoot in the cardinal directions and not at angles. The jumping is tricky and it's a little difficult to control your landings. You also only get three hits and five lives to start with, and I ended up blowing all five in the first level and having to start over.

The developer states on the website that, because it was always meant to be more of an experiment than a real game, Purple will remain unfinished and unsupported. Which is a shame because it's a really fun game! It recaptured a lot of the elements of my childhood gaming experience that I have trouble finding in the modern gaming world: its simplistic design and controls lend to an overconfidence that makes defeat so much more hard to swallow, and strengthens your resolve to beat the game so much more. I felt like I was six again, playing a game beyond my skill level and crying into my Dunkaroos when I inevitably died at the easiest part of each level.

If you're looking for a casual yet challenging game that brings back both fond and painful memories, but don't necessarily want a commitment or care about a satisfying ending, then Purple is the game for you.

The developer also offers a video of their playthrough of Purple if you want to experience it but don't want to play it. I highly recommend at least watching the video, as it's a very cute and infuriating game.

[gamesyouneverheardof]

Anyone remember Snake? How addicting it was and how frustrating it was?

flOw, or Flow, is a game that very much reminds me of that grand old gem of a game. It was originally created as a Master's thesis project by Jenova Chen (creator of Cloud and of Journey) and Nicholas Clark as a compilation of Chen's studies of dynamic difficulty adjustment and his studies of Csikszentmihalyi's mental immersion theory.

In flOw, you play as a little protozoan-like creature moving through multiple 2D planes of what appears to be water, eating whatever gets in its path. You simply use the mouse to move and click the left button to move faster. Mostly you just eat floating specks and move on but there are other creatures around you that spice things up and provide different, unique "paths" you can take to dive through the planes.

DDA, for those who don't know, is real-time reaction difficulty changes in video games. It's a concept designed to stop games from being too easy/boring and too hard/challenging. It's meant to keep the player actively engaged in the game enough to get from start to end while also enjoying the game by changing things like speed of enemies, enemy health, and frequency of powerups and health replenishment. Ideally, you won't notice DDA happening because you're too busy enjoying the game to notice that the boss you lost to for the third time is suddenly easier to beat on the fourth try. flOw sets out to examine and implement DDA in less life-or-death game situations than other DDA games like Left 4 Dead.

And mental immersion, or flow, is a relatively simple concept. It's the feeling and moment of being totally, wholly immersed in something. It's the ultra-focussed, fully-enjoyed, total mental and/or physical absorption in a task or concept. Have you ever been so focussed on a task that you've forgotten to eat, bathe, or even feel different emotions? Then you've experienced flow.

flOw is also a great therapy game. It can emulate the effects of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), a kind of relaxing, meditative therapy used to help people cope with post traumatic stress disorder, other anxiety disorders, and general trauma therapy. It's also just a nice game to unwind to: the music is gorgeous, it's only as challenging as you want it to be, and it doesn't require a lot of strategy or things to keep track of. And because you only need a mouse to play it, it's fantastic for physical therapy and for people with disabilities that make using a controller or WASD/mouse difficult.

flOw is also available on PS3, PS4, and Vita!

[gamesyouneverheardof]

You are not alone in the house.

Scratches is a point and click horror game developed by Nucleosys, a company that went out of business soon after releasing their second and final game. I was heartbroken when it happened because I adore Scratches. It's my indie/unknown point of reference for horror games, much like how Silent Hill 2 is my P.O.R. for AAA horror games. Scratches was an ambitious project, and was the first commercial (and commercially successful) video game to be developed and released from Argentina. After Nucleosys disbanded, one of its co-creators went on to found Senscape. But that's a topic for another post.

In the game, you play as an author who wants total seclusion for writing your next bestseller a la Deadline, so you set up shop in an abandoned house that has death, disappearance, and mystery surrounding it. There's also a side-quest/extra story that picks up at the very ending of the original game with a new character.

Scratches isn't like most pnc games that I've played. Its camera is more dynamic: you can rotate your view 360°, rather than have a static camera and clicking on the edge of a screen to shuffle to the next scene. It comes at a bit of a cost, though. It feels less like you're spinning in place and more like you're on an out-of-control carousel. I found myself jerking the mouse back a bit because I'd gone too fast and the camera had spun too far. I have vertigo and I frequently had to pause the game while I re-oriented myself. There's a slideshow option that makes it so that there's a cursor in the middle of the screen that corresponds to your mouse's movements and you click every time you want to move the camera an inch in any direction, which is more inconvenient than the regular camera. And you can adjust the camera's speed, but that's more for initial-moving-of-the-camera speed than it is camera speed. Overall, though, I appreciate the camera and the 360° static position view.

The controls are simple: your mouse does literally everything. I initially bought this game because it was a pnc game and for the longest time I only had a trackpad on my laptop, not a mouse, and it was super easy to play with the trackpad. If you turn on the hints, the main character gets sassy with you and says stuff like "Logic dictates that when my hand makes a grasping motion, I can pick up an item using Left Click". To be honest, that's my biggest gripe with this game, and with any game -- is when they talk about controls as if it's an every-day thing ("To jump, I just press the circle button" no you don't, you crouch your legs all up and then release them and fly away there are no buttons in the real world). It's pretty much the only thing that breaks my immersion in any game ever.

Anyway, enough about my pet peeves. The graphics are pretty decent for a 2006 indie game. There's a huge amount of detail for things that I didn't expect (like there's a camera zoom right at the beginning of the game that shows off your car's canvas/leather roof and that looks so realistic I wanted to rub my hands on it). It was weird what their graphics priorities were. I mean, the concrete path leading up to the house and around the grounds was almost too realistic, but then the stone surrounding it looked like a The Sims texture. But at least I didn't have any screen tearing or weird geometry, so A+ job there.

I lied before. Another gripe I have is that every time you quit, no matter where you are in the game, the credits show. You can just press esc and they're gone but like. Did you really have to add that extra step in quitting the game? I dunno, it bugged me a little bit.

If you're looking for a nicely-paced, genuinely scary game that focuses on atmosphere and not jump scares, then Scratches is definitely for you.

[gamesyouneverheardof]

This game contains references to, and depictions of, self-harm and suicide.

Okay, so show of hands: who here would spend money on a game called The Cat Lady, of all things?

If you didn't raise your hand, then well, you should have.

The Cat Lady comes from Harvester Games and R. Michalski, makers of Downfall. They boast that they focus on mature, plot- and thought-driven games within the horror genre. I'm not sure if they hit the mark with The Cat Lady, but they did make an enjoyable experience.

In The Cat Lady, you play as an older woman named Susan who has rejected human company for that of her cats and is contemplating suicide. You play exclusively with the righthand arrow keys (which was a new experience for me). I'd compare the game, overall, to probably Scratches or Exmortis. It's more an experience than a game. There are no real objectives other than to learn the story and figure out what is going on. You're given tasks in the game to complete, but I found myself more absorbed by what was happening and Susan's reactions to her surroundings than my set objectives. It's kind of atmospheric and slow, as most story-driven games are.

The controls are more like your fingers turning the page of a book rather than controls proper, which goes well with its image. Its art is something reminiscent of a Tim Burton film. Grotesque features, odd angles, and a defined 2D plane lend to uneventful scenery upon which the real meat of the game can shine. It tends to play with perspective, with lots of visual disturbances by way of foreground objects like tree branches. It almost gives the illusion that you're stalking Susan, watching her while trying to remain hidden. Almost like cats do.

Really the most outstanding part of The Cat Lady was the soundtrack. The ending song, "Forever", by Josiah Orsie, is particularly beautiful. It's rather bittersweet, like you're meeting an old friend again after years apart. The soundtrack is also on sale on the game's website, and I cannot recommend enough buying both.

It's a relatively short experience; I beat it in a few hours. It's like $10 on Steam or you can buy it direct from the company. 

I dunno, I really liked it. It's not like a visual novel in that there's not a lot of reading to do. It's short, it's simple, it tugs at your heart strings and it makes you think. If you're looking for something to relax and unwind with, this is the game for you.

[gamesyouneverheardof]

Exmortis » Leffler Web Design

You're walking in the woods. There's no one around and your phone is dead. Out of the corner of your eye you spot it: a text-based adventure.

Except not quite?

Exmortis (and its sequel, Exmortis 2, which I have not played) is an in-browser flash game designed by Ben Leffler/Leffler Web Design. It's a relatively simple set-up: point-and-click controls for something that's less a game and more a story. If you like Cthulhu Mythos-esque high-tension scenarios, jump scares that are reliant on the mood, and absolutely terrifying effects then Exmortis is definitely for you.

I say it's a text-based adventure because the adventure is based in text. Literally. Get your reading glasses on kiddos, because there is a whole hell of a lot of reading to do in this game; only if you want the full effect of the story, that is. It's definitely possible to just skip through the game without reading all the texts -- which consist of journals and translated ancient textbooks -- and still get the scares, and maybe even follow along with the story; I dunno, I read everything because I'm a sucker for the Ancient Ones. But it's entrancing. I'm not generally a fan of dialogue- and text-heavy games (the exception being the Zero Escape series) but I loved all the reading in Exmortis. I was forewarned of all the text (seriously it's like full-sized novels within the game) so I went into this just telling myself it was a visual novel, not a flash game.

Leffler knows how to set the stage unlike so many horror developers I've seen. It's incredible. It reminds me a lot of Nucleosys(Senscape)'s Scratches, except less Poe and more Lovecraft. Most of the scares in the game are... I don't want to say ineffective or trite because those are too negative and really they weren't bad. Let me put it this way: if I showed you a clip of about five to ten seconds of gameplay before the jump scare, you wouldn't be startled. They're contextual jump scares, that's what I'm trying to say. And it works. Leffler pulls it off almost as an art form.

Lest we forget the graphics. Good lord. I wasn't expecting much, to be perfectly honest. I mean, an indie flash game on Newgrounds? What kind of quality could there even be?

The answer is fantastic quality. Each scene is almost like a painting and the sounds are as pure as machine-cut diamonds. There was absolutely no cutting corners or cheap solutions when it comes to audio; it makes real audio sound like 128kbps. Leffler says in the author comments that he wanted to create a horror game that would terrify, puzzle, and amaze. And by gum he did just that.

[gamesyouneverheardof]

An upcoming survival horror game from Pig Farmer Productions, maker of Babysitter Bloodbath and Minotaur, who takes inspiration from terrible 80's slasher films and old-school PS1 horror games to make games that are terrifying in their content and their visual quality.

But Sanitarium Massacre is different from other survival horror games: in Sanitarium Massacre, you play as the horror people are trying to survive! Think Manhunt, where you stalk in the shadows and kill your way through levels. I watched the trailer and I'm not sure how PFG is going to turn you-are-the-killer into horror but I suspect a big cornerstone of it is going to be "don't get caught jitters", much like Manhunt and general stealth games. But I have super high hopes, given how spectacular Babysitter Bloodbath was (HE USED SPLIT SCREEN DYNAMIC SHOTS BUT UNLIKE HEAVY RAIN IT WORKED). I'm hoping a bigger stage-setter for scares is going to be mood because this guy can program a tense mood out of thin air. I eat and breathe horror, and I needed a break during Minotaur to look at something cute for a second -- seriously, if you haven't played Babysitter Bloodbath or Minotaur, download them and play them. Babysitter Bloodbath makes Slender: Eight Pages look like Dora the Explorer for GameBoy.

Sanitarium Massacre was announced a year ago but put on hold due to lack of funding and buggy gameplay, but the website says "TBA 2014" so my fingers are crossed for a reliable release in the near future!

Pig Farmer Games is a single guy making these games (Babysitter Bloodbath and Minotaur were both solid hourish-long games, or more if you're the exploring type, which is incredibly impressive for a one-man production team). If you love indie horror games as much as I do and want to help this talented dude out with models, textures, music, just about anything, give him a shout.

(please help him out this game looks like it'll be so much fun and i don't have any useable skills to help him out)