2018 has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride for me. So, what better way to tie up the year than to look back at some of the games I will remember the most from 2018?
There’s a trend running throughout my picks, which is about how we tell stories with games. Bound Together is a bitsy narrative title which explains the world through two characters’ conversation. Dungeon Deathball is a tactical combat game whose stories are are told through the narratives create in our choices – through our gladiators surviving their death sentence. Data Agent is a murder mystery game where all the cases are assembled through Wikipedia crawls — a story generated through historical association.
Even without this theme binding them together, they’re all exceptionally clever and fun to play.
Bound Together
Bound Together, from John Vanderhoef, was an easy selection for my 2018 highlights. It’s a compelling story of accidental companionship and the threads of fate which bind us. It’s also all told through the delightfully approachable Bitsy engine.
Being a Bitsy game, it is quite a short experience, so I can’t spend too long writing about it. However, the writing is fantastic, the characters are well-realized, and the dangerous fantasy world they exist within is varied and fresh. It’s all built on a very simple concept – a journey to justice – however, the two characters (symbolized by one tile) quickly start to find parallels between their starkly-different lives.
Its no secret that I am a fan of John Vanderhoef’s worlds and stories, and Bound Together serves as a wonderful introduction into the ‘slice of life in strange times’ style of creations which I associate with him. As a creator, he dabbles with various creative tools, but it is always the story which is more important than the way in which it is realized. Bound Together was my first of his games, and as a result of that, I’ve played each released since.
Bound Together is available for free on Itch.io.
Dungeon Deathball
A turn-based tactical bloodsport, Dungeon Deathball manages to deliver an intense, unforgiving experience while also keeping things accessible and balanced. It’s also exceptionally good fun.
The premise is rather simple. You and your colleagues have been enslaved by a bloodthirsty alien race and must make your way through a series of brutal arena challenges while the enemies attempt to reduce your people to pulp. Oh, it’s not just a dash to the finish either, no. Dungeon Deathball gives the human players a ball they must take to the end. The aliens have no such challenge, and instead simply need to smash the humans into a pudding.
This means that it is a game of dexterity vs brute strength. Humans, being unequivocally squishier, have to be nimble, and the player needs to be mentally nimble. Perhaps thankfully, the enemy Mad Lads have their next move indicated on the screen. This means that, if you’ve not maneuvered yourself into a bad spot, you can normally get out of the way of most enemy attacks. However, do you use that opportunity to land a clear pass and possibly get the whole team out alive, or do you sacrifice a player to get the team through safer?
The ‘tells’ of the enemies allow for a little bit of chaos as well; you can trick enemies into damaging each other, although focus shouldn’t be taken off of victory, because death is permanent.
Dungeon Deathball is available for $7.99 on Steam Early Access and Itch.io.
Data Agent
Data Agent is a murder mystery game where you play a time-travelling sleuth attempting to track down a disguised murderer. The sweet note about the game is that all of the information is pulled from public databases and stretched over the construct and rules the developers set for the game.
What this means is that, in one case, you’ll be investigating the murder of Albert Einstein, and another Britney Spears. You’ll investigate suspects, locations, and concepts which tie together the individuals. So, for Einstein’s case, you’ll move around his social circle during his time, occasionally stumbling on some of his theories as evidence.
The murderer is, as it turns out, never as well-equipped as the database they’ve taken their identity from. In order to catch the murderer, you’ll need to learn enough about the historical figure they have taken the place of and point out their contradictions in cross examination.
There are, as would be expected from a small, rapidly-assembled project, some odd quirks. Germany is both a country and the Empire. A common thread looks at who was a prestigious student of another person, however, when somebody wasn’t a student, that field still appears. These moments are a bit jarring, but, really, that is just a testament to the amount of raw data which is available on almost any subject — and, to be honest, it is also quite charming.
I’ll definitely remember Data Agent for a long time due to how it processed public data into a clever structure, warts and all. And I do hope that we continue to see procedural generation and data used in games in increasingly clever ways in the coming years.
Data Agent is available for free on Itch.io.
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