IndieCade Reviews

A game that caught my interest while scrolling through the list of games presented at IndieCade 2021 was a Tabletop RPG by the name of “Anyone can Wear the Mask”, developed by Jeff Stormer. This is a role-playing game where three players play as the Hero, the Villain, and the City, and each role has their own characteristics and control. It’s a game about superheroes where every life matters and every decision counts. I, for one, am a big fan of the superhero genre, and so I decided to give it a try. I gathered two of my friends, both of whom have never played a TTRPG in their life before, and we got started. I played as the City, the role really dedicated to being the Gamemaster. I controlled who lived where, the districts and neighborhoods of the city, and the overall narrative being played out. My friend Eric was the Villain, a role where he could control the dangers of the city and the criminal underground that held power over the city. My friend Riley played the Hero, the role dedicated to saving and protecting the innocents around him. He had less overall control than the City and the Villain, but his reactions to what transpired had an effect on the people around him as he created his legacy. We had a blast playing the game. The hero of our story was a man by the name of Hillbert Billy Bob, a dude given great gifts after being bitten by a radioactive homeless man. He could throw himself at great speeds while curling himself into a ball. He was the man known as the Pinball, a force of good in the dastardly city of New Boston, a cyberpunk city where the Yakuza and Mafia call their home. While Hunjuku Japan and Big Italy had their own sections of the city, Jiggle Street and Diamond City played their own role into making New Boston what it eventually turned out to be. The villain of the story was the Kirkinator, a test-tube clone of the late Charlie Kirk who could turn others into Charlie Kirk using his blood. His goal was to turn to whole city into Kirk’s in order to carry the flame, honor the gospel, and fight for his name. The story was stupid as fuck, but we had a hilarious time playing the game. As mentioned before, Riley and Eric had never played a TTRPG before, so at first, we had a rough start, but they were both able to get into it, and we entered a flow state where ideas kept bouncing off of each other left and right. Eventually, we had a deep lore that explained everything around the city. We haven’t finished it yet, but from what we have played, we created a narrative that all three of us were invested in using the game’s mechanics, a card flip that determines what actions will take place in the day in the life of the hero. Cards drawn would influence who was in danger, what the danger was, and where it was taking place. It could take place in an area unknown to the hero, or in the hero’s backyard. The actions of the hero were influenced by dice rolls that determined whether or not the person in danger was saved. If the person was saved, the hero’s legacy increased, and he became an icon to the city. If the person died, the hero had to mourn and reflect on his failures to those he swore to protect. As we played, the decisions we made did take an effect on us, and whenever someone couldn’t be saved, we had a moment of silence. This RPG really put us into the shoes of our dedicated roles. I felt like I was affected whenever we created a new piece of lore. I changed and developed over the course of the game depending on what happened. Riley also was affected by his decisions and his role. He wanted to become a change in the city, and so his reactions to the gameplay reflected that. Eric had a fun time being the villain, and crafting lore for his character for sure helped him get more comfortable in the game space than he was at the beginning of the game. As mentioned before, we haven’t finished our run yet, but we are so invested by the story and the mechanics that we have to finish it, and we will, because this game is really good. I give it 4.5/5 stars.

I absolutely loved my time playing Balatro, and I worry I might have uncovered yet another rogue-like I can get addicted to. The game is visually stimulating in all the right ways, strategic, and offers me an opportunity to explore a genre I haven’t really before.

Graphics :

While this game’s visual style is relatively simple, it works incredibly well. I love how the cards all look, the pixel art is great. More than that, the effects that happen when you get high combos scratch a part of my brain and it feels great. I love how the pixel art fire roars to life in accordance with the size of the combo you managed to achieve. It makes me desperately want to achieve the highest combo I can, which brings me to

The Gameplay :

I have never played Poker before, so learning this game was a bit of an adjustment. I need to have a list of all the possible poker hands up on a second screen while I play as I have no clue what any of them are, and the game only tells you what hands are called not what they are comprised of which doesn’t help me at all. However, despite that awkwardness adding friction to my play experience, I still had a great time. With every failure my mind starts to race about what could have been better, and that experience is so exhilarating for me because I have very limited experience with card games relative to the average person (or at least it feels like it as I don’t know how to play poker and am not the biggest fan of card games in general) so so much is new to me and love learning new games like that. Even now, I just keep thinking about how high I can push that number.

Sound :

I like the music in the game, it blends into the background very well. However, more standout than the music is all the sounds the cards make. Shuffling the deck, playing cards, selecting them, every action has a nice sound associated with it that makes the game feel tactile, which is important as it’s a digital translation of something typically very physical.

Conclusion :

I pray this assignment hasn’t given me my next addiction. I love Balatro, and while I need to play it more to see if it deserves higher praise (to see how well the roguelite progression systems hold out, how much variety there actually is and how much it’s systems hold up under extended play) but as of now Balatro is at least  an 8/10 and I think it absolutely deserves it’s Game of The Year Nomination at the Game Awards.

Overview

Atuel is a documentary game about the Atuel River Valley in Argentina. Throughout the game, you learn about the history of the river and the culture/cultural practices surrounding the river through voiceovers done by local residents in Spanish. For English speakers, they provide English subtitles. I agree with the choice not to dub over the Spanish audio for the English version because if they did the testimonies of the local residents would not feel authentic. One of Atuel’s strengths is its breathtaking imagery. Atuel proves that a game doesn’t have to have photorealistic models and ray tracing to be beautiful. The game uses color and sound really well in order to bring out the beauty of simple models for the vegetation and landscapes. Overall, Atuel is a unique 20-minute experience that I would recommend to pretty much anyone.

Gameplay and Mechanics 

In Atuel, the gameplay and mechanics kind of take a back seat. The focus of the player is directed to the scenery and the stories of the local residents. The player moves around the world by controlling the flow of a river, then as fish in the river, as a cloud, as a fox, as a cloud again, as a bird, and finally as the river again. The movement is rather simple, (usually simple WASD movement with one or two exceptions), which allowed me to comfortably read the English captions while still moving around the world. Something interesting about this game is that the player does not control the camera in this game, which allows the developers to dictate the scenery the player sees. For most of the game, this works really well, but for the fox section, I found the way the camera interacted with the movement very annoying. At some points in this section, it felt like I was actively fighting the camera. I felt the camera wasn’t effectively showing me the path ahead and sometimes a rock in the foreground would block out a large portion of my screen. This temporarily broke my emersion and caused frustration in what was otherwise a really zen game. Another issue worth mentioning is during my first playthrough I got a bug in the section where you play as a cloud and have to put out a wildfire by raining, which caused me to restart the game from the beginning in order to progress. 

Performance

The game runs very well. I suspect that you could run it on virtually any machine, which is a big plus for a game meant to educate people.

Final Thoughts

Would I recommend this game? Yes, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a game. I feel like if you recommend a game to someone, they expect some sort of mechanics to improve at. To be able to get better and compete either against themselves or against others. Or they expect some open-world adventure where they spend hours exploring and learning the deep lore behind the world. This is not the case for Atuel. Atuel is more of an experience, and for this reason, I would recommend it as something you should do, instead of a game you should play.