5000 dollars, it should go without saying, is a lot of money, and would most likely prevent many smaller developing studios, and especially solo developers, from being able to get onto Steam. Some don't see this as a problem, however: if the game is worthy of being on Steam, the largest and most visible PC gaming platform, then 5000 dollars should be easy to recoup. If they don't happen to have a spare 5000 dollars just lying around, well there are other places to sell their games, such as perennial weird-game favorite, Itch.io.
Itch.io, for the uninitiated, is a PC gaming platform much like Steam, but rather than a huge library of big budget titles and indies vying to be the next big unexpected hit, Itch.io houses smaller games, personal projects, and some really cool and weird stuff. It's certainly a viable platform in its own right, but it's never really felt like a place you go to make money, so I'm not certain "just sell it on Itch.io!" is a viable business tactic for getting onto Steam. Nonetheless, all the attention has made me realize that I've never really taken a look at some of the stuff on the service, unless specifically pointed there. In an attempt to remedy this, I went onto the site, grabbed three games that looked somewhat interesting, and gave them a look-see! Welcome to the first volume of... Very Itch-eresting! Working title. To start with, we have...
The Rainsdowne Players in Opening Night
This game has you controlling two actors, without preset names, who are attempting to open up a theater on the wrong side of the river. In their attempt to get their new business up an running, they have to contend with rowdy audience members with a variety of tastes as they run shows and plan new plays.
When you run plays, you have to dodge various debris being flung onto the stage with correctly-timed button presses, left arrow for the male-coded character standing on the left side of the stage, right arrow for the female-coded character standing on the right. The trash being flung takes on a variety of forms, including standard bottles, tomatoes that fly to the actor opposite the side where it's flung from, and paper airplanes that occasionally won't actually hit at all. It's the closest thing to traditional "gameplay" in the entire thing, but it's honestly very thin, more like a weird rhythm game without any music than a proper engaging Thing To Do. Not to mention, the timing on when the trash needs to be dodged feels off; I've hit the dodge button with what seems like correct timing only to get hit, and hit the button well after the debris landed and dodged just fine. In any case, I'm not actually certain getting hit had any effect whatsoever, as even when I was hit several times in a row I didn't notice any consequences.
When you're not performing, you're either out talking to the audience to get their feelings on how the play went and what kind of play they'd want to see, or planning your next play. Talking to the audience is how you get more "ideas" that you can use for plays, and give you hints for what kind of play you should put on next to get new ideas. The only problem is, this stuff feels boring. You walk around just slowly enough to feel like getting anywhere takes a million years, and some characters can only inspire new ideas or give you hints if you're talking to them with the correct character. If you're the wrong character, you'll have to slowly walk to the back room, switch characters, then slowly walk back out to the audience member and get the proper dialog.
Planning the plays is annoying and vague as well. After slowly navigating back to the planning area and going into the planning menu (an annoyance in and of itself, as the prompt is unmarked and rests between the two cushions you interact with to change characters, often leading to either accidentally talking to the actor you're not controlling or switching characters), you're given a list of "ideas" and tasked with creating a play by determining the Subject, Location, Purpose, Encounter, and Outcome. But there's no limit to what each aspect can be. Do you want your location to be "Bear"? Go for it! There's no real rhyme or reason to it, and it never gives you a sense of what the plays would be like.
As for what kind of play you need to put on, there's little to no help in that field either. The hints are either mindbogglingly blunt, like the audience member who wants to see a Bear get murdered, or opaque as all hell. For example, one audience member complains that bears are passé, and can only be funny or interesting if "they show up out of nowhere!" But there's no way of knowing what they want out of that. I tried setting a play in a marketplace, and having a bear show up in the "Encounter" or twist of the play, but this didn't seem to meet the requirements. The only other indication of whether or not people enjoy your play is the pluses and minuses that appear over heads in the crowd during the play, but much like getting hit with trash I couldn't really tell whether or not this was having a real effect on anything.
I also have to make mention of the graphics in the game, which are incredibly bleh. I've never once thought that pixel art has overstayed its welcome and shouldn't be used anymore, but its abundance in independent titles means that you have to do something really special with it to make it stand out. Rainsdowne Players doesn't do that, instead opting for a heavily-simplistic style that looks like a less fleshed-out version of McPixel, or Sword and Sworcery.
The best thing I can say about the game in its current state is that I'm somewhat interested in where the story ends up going. A creaky, run-down theater in a rough part of town being run by two actors trying to do their best with what they have has the potential to go a lot of cool places. There are also hints that maybe some of the characters are more classically-trained than they let on, and only ended up here as a last resort. I'd be interested to see where it goes, but it's all a bit too roughly put together at the moment. I can see myself paying a couple bucks to get it with some additional polish, but it's probably for the best that this first try was free.
The Rainsdowne Players in Opening Night can be downloaded for free here. As of the time of this article's writing, a sequel to the game is also being crowdfunded with a total goal of 500 British pounds, or 622 American dollars. If you enjoy the game and would like to contribute, you may do so here.
Orcish Inn
Orcish Inn is a 2D top down survival exploration game, in the vein of Don't Starve, wherein you gather resources and try to survive in a dangerous wilderness, but unlike its prior counterparts your exploration in Orcish Inn serves a purpose. You play as an orcish settler, hoping to start up a successful tavern in the middle of nowhere, and make your riches.
Or at least, that's what I assume; developer Steven Colling mentions everywhere on the games Itch.io page that the game is currently in Pre-Alpha, and much of the gameplay has yet to be made, including any sort of story. In my admittedly brief time with the game, I also felt like there was a dearth of locations, finding only a fairly-typical forest, though this may have just been where I found myself. The games teaching methods also have a long way to go, even relative to its contemporaries in the genre. The 'tutorial', as it were, is a journal which writes out what it wants you to do. While clearly written, it can still be difficult to follow, as there are no images to show rather than just read and no on-screen cues to guide you in the right direction. Even something as simple as crafting climbing ropes, absolutely vital to exploration, took me a couple of minutes to figure out using the given journal.
Despite all of this, I still enjoyed my time with the game. The art style is cartoony and vibrant, and the music was pleasant. While many of the survival elements weren't in the game yet, and some aspects definitely felt unfinished, I was still able to wander around, chopping down trees and gathering a huge variety of crafting materials. The crafting lists in the game also hint at a deep building system, though I didn't play enough as of the time of this writing to start building the titular inn.
The Steam page of the game (which I did not know was a thing before writing this, and which I admit should maybe disqualify it from this piece but oh well) lists it as currently being on version 0.1.6, hinting at a huge amount of planned content in the future, and based on what I've seen I think fans of the genre will find something really special in the game once it's feature complete. If you'd like to try Orcish Inn for yourself, the current build can be downloaded on itch.io here, or on Steam here. If you like the game and want to help it come to fruition, you can contribute to developer Steven Colling's Patreon here, and help fund the games creation.
Oikospiel Book 1
Oikospiel Book 1 is a game. I say this because I try to hold an incredibly loose definition of the word "game"; I do not try to claim that a true "video game" needs challenge, or a story, or a goal, or the ability to meaningfully affect the results, or any other such thing some have used to try to define video games in the past. If it can be affected by me, directly, at all, then it fits my definition of a "game." I go into this at great lengths because were it not for this belief, and thus my ability to call Oikospiel a game, I honestly have no idea what I would call it.
Let me recap the entirety of my experience playing Oikospiel, which I will openly admit I did not complete, as far as my hazy recollection allows. Hazy, I should mention, despite the fact that I just stopped playing it. At the beginning, a model of a man without texture, along with models of I believe a cat and dog, were sitting in front of a computer screen, and only the screen, not monitor or any other part, which appeared to be showing a screenshot of the Unity game engine editor. When I moved the mouse, a tone would wind up and down as I sped up or slowed down my movement, which also spun my camera around and spun around the propellers on the wind turbine the man and monitor were sitting atop, which I learned as the camera very slowly panned out. Credits for the game appeared, which I am not sure entirely of the accuracy of, though it included a game development cost of I believe a few hundred dollars and a "value" amount of all effort which went into the assets of the game at over two hundred thousand dollars.
The view of the game then shifted, to a plane flying in the clouds. As I panned around the screen, I spun around the plane, revealing that it appeared to be flying directly into the moon. The game incredibly slowly zoomed in on the plane, or to be more accurate a room located inside of the plane, within which sat several surgeons in full garb, one sitting at a piano with a monkey and computer monitor on top, and another, the actual focus of this moment, sitting behind a man on a surgical table. The man on the surgical table had two noteworthy elements of his appearance: one, he had two cats sitting on his stomach, and two, his organs were clipping out of his body. At this point the game forced me to click on the WASD keys, I suppose to prove I knew where they were, and then zoomed the camera to outside of the airplane once again.
Zooming in again, this time the view was focused on the surgeon sitting at the piano, who was playing the piano but only producing the sound of typing on a keyboard. There was also a monkey seated on the piano. A full screen view of the piano's screen then faded in as the scene, revealing it to be running Oik OS. After a quick login moment and a brief scanning of the screen as a dissonant wailing played, I quickly found a readme file and opened it, and proceeded to read what I imagine explains something of the story I think. It got a little rambly, but I believe the basic idea is: A genius composer, who may also be somewhat insane, has decided that he's going to write and perform an opera to serve as an apology for all the species which are rendered extinct for 100 years before the opera's first performance in the year 2100, and for 100 years after. To this end, and to understand the experiences of animals, they have developed AI of animals I think? And is employing them to contribute their experiences to a vast simulation maybe. Except they are being paid "IN INIFNITY" (spelling intentional, or maybe not) and not in actual money, and are also being explicitly warned against someone named Eurydice, who will attempt to unionize them and give them fair wages which will ruin the artistic vision of the opera. Also the genius composer has figured out how to live forever and is using it to ensure they'll be alive when the opera is first performed. I'm not going to lie, I'm not positive how much of that was correct, it's just what I sort of remember reading, it got incredibly hard to follow.
After reading it, I was transported into what I think exists at that moment of the simulation. I took control of a chicken, which encountered a fox and was immediately killed for food. I then took control of the fox, and went to a person whose model I'm certain was stolen from a Playstation 2 game which I cannot identify who told me to gather signatures so the animals can unionize. I followed the path to a giant spider who I think agreed to sign but I'm not sure? And then followed the path further to a couple of snakes. At this point a simple childlike drawing of the snakes and the fox appeared, wherein the snakes told the fox that they would continue on in the foxes stead so now I controlled the snakes. I ran past some dogs, turned into a spider at some point, and then found the PS2 man again, who shot a house I guess. I took control of a rabbit and ran to the house, which I transitioned into.
Inside of the house was a selection of individuals, posed to appear to be mourning a dead man in a bed, which I could look at through a first person view. One person was over the man, checking his head. A doctor sat in a chair dejected. Another man was on his knees in an adjacent room next to a lion and a gun, head in hands. Eventually I approached a dog looking at birds out a window, which caused the view to zoom in slightly. I turned around and saw a bear standing at a door, which was the only moving figure in the panorama I found myself in, and decided that I was done.
I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that I have no idea what the hell was going on. Maybe I should finish it eventually. I don't know.
If you'd like to try Oikospiel for yourself, you can download it here. If you'd like to fiscally support the game, you can go here for a recommended purchasing price based on the number of people in your household and the households total yearly income, along with working to reduce the price if the recommended price is still too high, and yes I am being entirely serious.
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