I’ll be reading this in game descriptions forever…
Post script I am putting up top: as someone who has been around this community a long time there are certain topics that begin to feel a bit… chilly… and clammy, so if this goes off the rails and ends up closed or nuked can someone please move this to the random games bundle topic thanks.
There sure are a lot of words in here and I’m gonna ignore most of them to go back to the initial “good games good/bad games bad” thing as I’ve played nothing but giant bundle games for the past couple months and hence have played a fair number of both. I want to take this opportunity to write way too many words myself about Star and Light, a clearly bad game.
It is seemingly a flash game from 2011 made by I believe a solo developer from Senegal who had no real grasp on what one would consider “best practices” and this is both a legit problem and what makes the game interesting.
I forgive the game for its spelling and grammatical errors as it is clearly not the creator’s primary language. Basically one day your dead parents appear in front of you and tell you that in the future a girl dressed in red will be butchered in the temple behind you and that you should maybe not let that happen. Also you should trust a blue guy when you see him. All of this happens over slowly advancing text spread across several different identical scenes as they seemed to arbitrarily put a line per scene limit of around three. Given that there is a brief fade to black between these scenes it becomes difficult at times to tell initially if you are repeating the same thing or not.
The game itself for the most part is basically a barely functioning platformer. WASD (or whatever you choose) has you move/jump/duck and you have the standard double jump, wall jump and wall slides except for the most part they feel as if they are implemented wrong. The wall slide (press against a wall when falling to slow your descent) basically breaks the wall jump, you have to wall jump a lot and have to be sort of pressing towards the wall to jump off of it and that is also how you wall slide. The problem ties into the big mechanical notion behind the game.
(Yes, how much of the screen the game takes up does shift frequently)
In most rooms you can only open the door to the next room via lighting up all the platforms in a stage, but once they are lit up they become lethal (they won’t kill you until you break initial contact with them and touch it a second time). Platforms can be oriented both horizontally and vertically, which brings the wall jump and slide into the forefront. The problem is that if you wall slide the platform lights up and due to how it is programmed if you let go of the slide early you will almost always die because it is then lethal. It is a big problem but it also affects how you have to approach the individual rooms, which are already weird puzzle platformer traversal challenges that can focus on figuring out the optimal path to light everything up and then reach the door; the door on occasion will move its location after every platformer is lit up or if you get too close because the game is like that.
What this produces is a weirdly playing game with a base concept that is just a bit off from normal further distorted via either bizarre design choices or programming shortcomings. Here is a video from its store page showing the creator playing it (they are rather good at the game and they still die a decent amount).
It doesn’t look great, and it isn’t, but I put it on the list of games to try as it seemed in its own way odd, and that there could be something of value in there. I eventually noticed how the character will sometimes have bits of dialogue near the top of the screen, but what took longer to note is that it often changes if you die and have to replay the room which means that you will only learn certain things (if only how the character feels about a given room) if you don’t initially succeed. She also appears to be wrong from time to time.
Where it gets more immediately odd and what the video does capture a bit of (the vid jumps around a bit but some of those stretches of rooms are accurate) is that despite it being 15 stages long what constitutes a stage is inconsistent at best. Between rooms that are numbered as stages you will get sequences like the numbered bridge repair ones except in both situations the numbers are never actually right. Certain stage numbers never came up, or came up in the wrong order, or you end up in stage 9.1 when there had never been decimals before. You have a rough map that shows 5 levels to gauge rough progress, but otherwise what the game initially portrays as a straightforward path becomes very vague and uncertain in a way that directly affects the experience of playing it.
And then after a bunch of jumping through this temple in the midst of what seems like a mythical fairy tale narrative you have to collect a bunch of wrenches to fix your old JetMoto.
Yes, the main character is randomly singing in the text. Also I have the screenshot from the room after this and it is labeled stage 12.1/15. And yes, they in-game call it a JetMoto.
Things continue to be randomly odd, to get past one room you have to find a mango for some sort of monkey who will only take it after you light up every platform but will then throw a lethal door at you that you must flee while trying to find the real door, there was a room where rather than light up the platforms would fly in a labeled direction towards death but when you activated all of them a red force field would drop and let you approach a bouncing devil creature (in 90% of the game screens there are no enemies) that I never figured out how to deal with and had to press the skip stage button to bypass (the game only lets you skip certain stages by the way).
After an indeterminate number of rooms and odd gimmicks that are sometimes sensible you finally reach the final room (labeled as such; it isn’t) and… well I took some screenshots and will put them behind spoilers (which will likely break them and force you to have to C&P the links) to show the exact direction the story goes:
https://i.imgur.com/Ij6NJbc.png
https://i.imgur.com/MlHEvna.png
https://i.imgur.com/ErvRu4f.png
Yes, that is the blue guy from earlier who lacked arms and yes he is using the red girl to fix that.
That isn’t even the oddest narrative twist at the end. Anyways you get to what should be the end with an actual arrow that points towards the end… but if you go in the opposite direction you end up at a library that contains tons of random info about things that did not exist in the game in any form until five minutes prior, but hidden in that library you find other rooms that lead to other things that further twist your view on what has happened including the still living decapitated head of the blue guy who is now imprisoned and eventually you go to the end, are warned that there is no going back and end up at a screen showing that you have accomplished maybe 5 out of 25 achievements, have missed stretches of the game, that there may be an entire extra hidden dungeon, you remember various doors you couldn’t bypass and text that seemed very out of context at the time and go “…huh”.
Don’t get me wrong, it is clearly a bad game in most ways but it captures the imagination by having a wide… let’s say range of possibilities within it. Some would say that I am merely enjoying a bit of goodness in an otherwise bad thing, but what I am positing is that the value I get out of these aspects of it is higher than the value I get out of certain good games in their entirety in which case the natural follow up question is then which is more valuable. Can one of them be labeled as bad and have more value than the one that is good, and if so doesn’t that sorta fly in the face of the necessity of connoisseurs who will then point us towards the less valuable experience?
5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Video game connoisseurship
I don’t know why but putting the UI options randomly in the middle of all of that just made me chuckle.
I am here for Eva Unit 1 voxel posters.
I wonder how horrific True Hate looks…
…did not quite expect that, but at least I have the familiar comforts of a blacksmith game…
I had always suspected that blacksmithing was really just about matching 3 similar designs together.
Did not expect this to be Colonialist Farmville but hey
mostly it’s the super white-looking assistant giving me bad vibes against the little sprites.
i hate it
world’s first kiss ’em up? Chulip would like a word
Sounds like somebody hasn’t heard of hardware disease.
I don’t know if I am supposed to blame this on kerning, but I feel like I have to blame something. Also some real good options hidden in there.
this one is by this “Renegade Sector Games” guy who has made a billion different sort of quick low-fi 3D action games (he calls them “low poly pulp games”). been meaning to check them out at some point in the future.
I assume that they meant Satan, but who knows!
