Thoughts & Opinions – Play Blackpool Part 2: Awesome Indies
As I mentioned earlier, I attended the awesome Play Blackpool last weekend. While I was there I got to sample some new and exciting indie games as well as all the Retro goodness.
First up was Positron, which put simply, is the game you always dreamed about playing when you watched the light-cycle sequence from the Tron movie(s).
It'sis a game that's beautiful in it's simplicity; there are only two controls, left and right, which turns your light-cycle in 90 degree increments, leaving behind a solid trail behind you as you go, in perfect Tron style. For a video of the game in action go here.
There are three game modes: maze, in which you must navigate through a series of increasingly difficult mazes without hitting the walls or your own trail; arena, which is a classic duel to the death, last one to not crash horribly wins; and race, which is a combination of the two other event types.
Only the maze mode was playable at Play Blackpool but that on it's own was crazy addictive, sharing the 'just one more go' qualities of other games with simple control schemes such as Super Hexagon. Running at 60fps, this game looks slicker than slick and the controls, while simple, react perfectly to your inputs.
Overall, Positron looked great and played ever better; the game has already been greenlit on Steam and I simply can't wait for the full version.
The other game I got some decent hands-on time with was Substream, which would probably best be described as a musical shooter. Check out their website for a video.
Substream is heavily influenced by scrolling shooter classic Starfox but here, the levels react to the music as you fly through them. Each music track, and therefore level, is unique, offering great variety and replayability.
This game's gimmick, if you could call it that, is the ability to wrap around the levels left to right over and over, meaning your enemies repeat several times but so does your ship and your bullets. This feature was apparently inspired by the original Mario Bros. games where you could run left to right infinitely. It's less complicated in practise than it sounds and it lets you dodge and attack enemies from whatever angle you need to at the time.
The graphics have wonderfully colourful but minimalistic look creating a somewhat surreal series of worlds, which some would probably describe as 'trippy'. Despite being a shooter, the game has a chilled out vibe and reminds me of older 'music games' such as Rez and Frequency.
This game isn't yet on Steam's greenlight and is still in an early build but something that's so damn cool as this deserves a chance.
Both these games are already fun, even in their unreleased states and both deserve to do well. More news about them and their respective releases when I hear it!
(Special thanks to @MartinCaine from @RetroburnGames and @_benbradley for taking the time to talk to me about their games.)
