I love moral ambiguity in games. I love characters who struggle with intense yet believable emotions, and who are conflicted by their actions and beliefs to the point that they nearly destroy themselves. I love the simple humanity of this, and I love it when this is set against a bleak, gritty setting that offers scope for exploring the darker side of human nature without being too pretentious. I’ll take a plot where simple people tear themselves apart over one in which heroes save the world any day.

I finished playing Iji the other day and it fits that characterization well. Here’s the trailer:

And, here’s why I liked it:

Plot & Character

The game begins with the world’s destruction in a massive alien assault. Any hope for a happy ending is gone before you it has a chance to materialize.

Iji wakes up in a lab in an underground base, having been modified by now-dead scientists with game necessary but plot irrelevant nanotech. She’s confused, lost, and angry at the world in a hopeless, self defeating way. Even worse, she shortly discovers that her brother is still alive, but, though he tries to help her, has become hardened and cold, and expects Iji to get over her fears and save the world.

The basic premise isn’t particularly novel, but the way Iji plays out really works. The insanity of the situation she’s in isn’t dismissed as irrelevant with a short angst session early in the game, rather, she breaks down and cries from stress at various occasions, and it just works. She’s not a hero type, she’s just a person, stretched to the emotional limit.

I just loved this – I can’t recall ever seeing a game in which the hero breaks down and cries over their victims. Probably no surprise given the constant reminders that she’s slowly turning into a killing machine. As you play, you pick up logbooks left behind by aliens; early in the game you find a diary entry in which an alien scout waxes lyrical about his lady love, stationed elsewhere in the facility. You can imagine that this doesn’t turn out well.

Anyway, I won’t go into any more detail for fear of spoiling things, but this was one of the most emotionally satisfying games I’ve played in a very long time.

Level design

Most of the levels are somewhat linear with occasional secret areas. What’s interesting is that you can approach them in several ways. By no means do you have to go on a rampage, killing everything in sight. In fact, it may well be to your advantage not to (certainly, in the later levels you’re almost forced to just run away from things lest they set you on fire). Furthermore, the game’s weapon options allow for a variety of different tactics in confronting your enemies.

Even more interestingly, though, you can play the game as a pacifist. That is, you can make it through the whole game without killing more than two of the game’s several hundred aliens. Unsurprisingly, this results in the plot taking a fairly different direction.

Gameplay

With a range of different weapons combined with various special abilities and an attribute point system, Iji creates a wide range of options for the connoisseur of killing. Different weapon choices require different styles of play, and not all weapons are effective on all enemies. Multiple weapons aren’t special in themselves, but few games use them to produce diversity of play in the way that Iji manages to.

In some games, only the boss fights require much thinking and observation in order to determine how to defeat a given set of enemies, but in Iji, this is frequently the case. Even on normal difficulty, you have to use your brain.

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Iji takes about 3-5 hours to completely, and is definitely worth the time if you can find it. It’s a free download for Windows at Remar Games.

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Oh, and the music’s pretty awesome – make sure you grab the high quality soundtrack. Particularly the closing credits track by Lifeforce.

Short game review: Bubble Tanks 2 is a simple arcade shooter in which you control a small group of clumping bubbles with a gun made of bubbles mounted on top. Strangely enough, you shoot bubbles at enemies made of bubbles, hiding away in a grid of arenas, each of which is actually a large bubble. If it wasn’t for the different colours, it’d be right confusing.

Each enemy destroyed releases pale, little, food bubbles that you absorb, causing your tank to grow and, over time, accumulate upgrades. There’s a tree of upgrades; probably about 20 in all, some of which only appear if you play the game on Armor Games (which the link above points to).

It’s a nice, easy game to get into, and, despite a few small niggles, is good fun. Onto those, then (because complaining is more fun that promoting):

• The arenas are laid out in a grid that you can freely move about. There’s a map so you can see where you’ve been, but it’s off on a separate screen, which makes navigating a little harder. It’s not a complex map, and it could easily have been accommodated in a corner of the screen.
• Given the screen space available to your average flash game (which has to accomodate a range of screen sizes), the graphics are rather large. Since combat in Bubble Tanks 2 is a matter of shooting at enemies while avoiding their return fire, it would be nice if they were smaller so you could maintain greater distance. As it is, you either don’t know where you should be shooting, or you’re right on top of them, sucking down the bullets.
• The game requires a lot of clicking so you can fire your gun. This isn’t a problem, except that all the sites I’ve seen it on thus far have it surrounded by a ring of advertisement links. So, if, while frantically killing dudes, I move the mouse off the edge, I end up being shunted to another website. Not desirable. In the end, I got around this by downloading the flash file and playing it locally.

With all the bubbles, my mind is inevitably drawn to Yog Sothoth, and so I was a little disappointed that most of the bubbles were blue and a little flat looking. I’d have been much more impressed with iridescent clumps of bubbly death. Oh well. You can’t have it all.

Three and a half shimmering orbs out of five. From one to four hours distraction.

Thought I might give a quick little plug for Ainevoltas 2, a quick little platform RPG..

Basically, you’re a guy with a sword, and there’s a castle full of monsters. Slay them, gain experience points, go up levels, and gain stats. Collect gems and other items to gain special abilities. Nothing special so far – what makes this game interesting is its flat genre mocking sense of humour, and all the little secrets that it’s full of. It’s not difficult or drawn out, just distracting and funny.

A few quick reviews I wrote back in January..

• Aquaria – probably the best indie game I saw in ‘07; it’s an arcade adventure game with a lot of depth, as well as a lot of breadth. That is, its game play elements provide for diverse and interesting experiences, and there’s a lot of them. You play a Naija, a water nymph lost in an underwater cave system, full of placid scenic schools of fish, great crabs, forgotten temples full of strange magic, monsters in the hidden depths, and back again. It’s very well constructed – the music, graphics, and game play fit together seamlessly to create moods ranging from calm relaxation to rampant fear, all strung together into a non-linear game of exploration. An absolute delight – I thoroughly recommend it. Windows only, unfortunately.
• Battle for Wesnoth – fantasy turn based strategy game with a whole pile of user-created campaigns, some brilliant, others not. Feels a lot like Fantasy General (1996). Units gain experience and skills as they go. Nice, deep, interaction between different types of weapon, terrain, armour and unit. Pretty well-balanced, and fairly addictive. Worth a look, even if you’re not into strategy games, simply as it’s provides an example of a user-expandable game design done well. Available on most desktop platforms
• Chromadrome 2 – simple, mouse based game of skill. You control a marble, racing along a track covered in traps and obstacles with variable speed, attempting to finish in the shortest time possible. Slick, flashy visual design. Surprisingly deep play, despite its simplicity. Highly addictive. There’s a lot of game play packed into the demo, so it’s well worth a download.
• Chocolatier 2 – a thoroughly addictive blend of management, recipe construction, and light weight adventuring. You start as a young entrepreneur hoping to challenge the great Baumeister chocolate empire in San Francisco of 1925 or so. After learning to manage the supply of ingredients and completed chocolates, you slowly move into wider markets, with new ingredients ranging from six types of varietal cacao, exotic spices and so forth. Essentially a classic production management games, but with sufficient diversity of factors and supply chains to manage that it becomes challenging without declining into furious mouse clicking. Simple, well implemented, distraction. Addictive, but not too long – the core game has about 15 hours of gameplay – long enough to suck me in, but not long enough to drive me mad with boredom.
• Darwinia – not a new game, but one I’ve only recently gotten into, Darwinia is from Introspective, a three man game development studio in London, also famous for Uplink (a surprisingly realistic hacking game), and Defcon (a game of Mutually Assured Destruction). To some extent it’s a real time strategy game, in others it’s more a tactical shooter with a top down camera view. You are a programmer who has intruded into Darwinia – a simulated world in which a researcher, Dr Sepulveda, has been experimenting with artificial life. However, many of his creations, the Darwinians, have been corrupted by some sort of viral infection that turns them violent and unpredictable, destroying most of his research, as well as the simple, placid life of the uninfected ‘green’ Darwinians. Game play consists of creating and controlling squad processes with which you eliminate viral infections, engineer processes which harvest the souls (resource allocation units) of lost Darwinians, and various other units that allow you to affect the otherwise independent Darwinians such that you can lead them to freedom. Though there’s only about 8 game levels and the basic premise of play is laid out clearly in the first, there’s quite a lot of depth and diversity. In many cases, your enemies can only be defeated by carefully prising open their defenses with skillful use of your squads, then pressing your advantage with legions of Darwinians. Unfortunately, the Darwinians have minds of their own, and often require substantial cajoling before they’ll willingly enter battle on your behalf. Lots of fun; the real time strategy formula is present but subverted by indirect control
  and a focus on tactics rather than economics.