AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!
Where/when/why? The 2011/12 Steam holidays sale, for $2.50 US with DLC.
What/who? The game is a uhm… first-person falling game? Based on BASE jumping, but in the technofuture where buildings and things hang in the air so you can BASE jump forever. The player earns points mainly by falling near these floating objects (scoring “hugs” and “kisses”) without actually crashing into them, which wipes the score and ends the run.
It’s by Dejobaan Games, who are currently working on a game called Elegy for a Dead World.
Was this the first install? Yep, pretty much!
Total play time? Six hours ish.
How’d it go In short, it’s a good game.
It took me a while to warm to it. Everything from the visual style to the humour to the insipid guitar soundtrack irritated me early on. The early stages were (perhaps necessarily) slow and boring. But I was interested enough to play beyond the requisite hour (at which point, perhaps due to the aforementioned soundtrack, my girlfriend declared she was withdrawing her support for my project).
A couple of hours in I was hooked. I have no real life falling experience to compare the game to, but playing AaaaaAA(etc) reminded me a bit of those dreams where you can suddenly jump really far. More importantly, the mechanics felt meaty and tangible, and I got really into the twitchy game-play that the more advanced jumps present. A similar kind of immersion to hard platformers like Super Meat Boy or VVVVVV(etc) where it’s one thing a bit off and you’re fucked, but there’s a fast restart so you’ll give it another go anyway. By this point the shitty music no longer bothered me, even seemed to make sense to a certain degree.
All the mountain stages all suck though. God, what’s with those.
So, finish it? Not quite. A good finishing metric would probably be unlocking all the jumps, and a real completionist would probably try and score five stars on all of them too. As of now I only have maybe 6 stages still unplayable, but it’s gotten to the point where earning enough credits to unlock them involves exponentially more time (and skill) spent perfecting scores on earlier stages. I’m making the call to move on.
I did play through all the DLC though. It was pretty good.
7/10 steamcheivements too.
Come back to it later? Gladly! It has Oculus support, and if an Oculus Rift were to ever find it’s way to my desk, this would be one of the first games I’d load up. As it was, I found myself ducking and weaving my head a bit to avoid virtual obstacles even without the VR.
up next is Alan Wake