Joe - Trail of Tales
While it’s easy enough for the bedroom coder to take a chance on an idea and make a quirky game with no audience, it’s somewhat harder for the big dogs to do the same. All the costs and the time investment and bleh bleh makes it dangerous territory for developers struggling to keep their head above the water.
So it’s to Tale of Tales’s credit that they’ve produced two very polished and indie as fuck games, with a third on the way early next year.
The first of their games, which is still undergoing revisions and adapting to holidays such as Easter, is The Endless Forest. Simplicity is the name of the game here. you control a deer in a forest (possibly endless), a pond and a ruin, and can interact with other human controlled deer prancing about the forest.
The visuals are nice and my Radeon 9600XT found the game a struggle, which isn’t bad for an independent game! The game does suffer from repetitive landscape but, pffft, it’s a forest.
There are a couple of activities to take part in, and dangers, such as falling rocks. However, the game centres mainly on the deers’ interactions, which are limited to a range of emotions and sounds. A purported 25,000 people have registered a deer, and the relaxing gameplay has secured it a strong fanbase. Oh, and its free.
The newest game released by the good people at ToT, The Graveyard follows an elderly woman as she walks through a graveyard to a bench. She sits down and takes in the sounds of the sacred place. In her own time she gets up and makes her way out of the graveyard. That’s it.
The gameplay is as simple as pressing forward for a while, then back for a while, but it’s the ambience that makes the game. Someone on the Tale of Tales forum suggested that this is the gaming equivalent of a short story, and you can’t really argue.
However, to experience the story in full requires a $5 donation to Tale of Tales, which will get you the full version of the game, and introduces a new possibility to the gameplay. Death.
Following in the wake of Passage a few months back, it’s typical that Tale of Tales may feel a bit touchè’d, but the game’s visuals send out a strong enough vibe to make an impact quite different to Passage’s.
Aiming for an early 2009 release date, the Path is a modern retelling of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, with some added psychological terror and warping for good measure. At this point I’d hazard to compare it to American McGee’s Alice, but that wouldn’t appear to do it justice. The game follows its protagonist as she goes to visit her grandmother in a forest, far from the industrialisation of the modern world.
The objective is to reach the grandmother, and then to die. Beyond that, I don’t know an awful lot. Gameplay looks traditional third person horror, but again, I hesitate to say so.
Lets hope it hits it’s release window and doesn’t go the way of 8.
Anyone interested in dreamy looking indie games they’ve never heard of and would love to play would do well to NOT click the link above. Doing for ‘Sleeping Beauty’ what The Path will do for ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (albeit it less horrifically), 8 looked to be an interesting addition to the ToT portfolio until lack of funding ground production to a halt.
There has been talk recently of reviving the game after some interest from publishers, and possibly an appearance on the Wii, but for now we’ll just have to w8. Sorry.
——————————————–
Random link - For anyone who tires of Uwe Boll’s videogame movie travesties: www.petitiononline.com/RRH53888/petition.html
Leave a Reply