I love a good crowdfunding success story. Coming from a solo developer by the name of Lente, Spilled (stylized as Spilled!) blew past its funding goal when it was on Kickstarter, raising three times what it initially hoped for. From there, I followed its development as Lente documented not only the progress on the game, but also her time living on a boat in the Netherlands. It was fascinating seeing this game about a pollution-cleaning boat come to life from someone with first-hand experience of living on one, and while the actual interactions with the boat in-game are fairly limited (it’s not like you’re going inside to customize the interior or performing maintenance on it), the passion for life on the sea nonetheless shines through.
Tag: Top-Down
The Muddled Politics of Technotopia
Sometimes you play a game and can tell right away that it’s going to give you Thoughts™, but that wasn’t the case with Technotopia. My time with it started out the same as any other game, doing my best to get absorbed into the world it crafted and gameplay mechanisms it implemented, all the while taking notes on the side to prepare for the inevitable review. And then things changed. The narrative beats slowly began to go off the rails and I went from raising an eyebrow occasionally to having one permanently cocked. Futurist stories have the capacity to hold up a mirror to our current world or speculate on what tomorrow may bring, and yet Technotopia frequently feels like it gets so lost in critiquing what’s happening now that it forgets to provide that extra layer of futuristic abstraction. This is less satire, and more someone stating their beliefs directly to the player. And let me say, some of those beliefs are … questionable to say the least.
Coin Factory Review
I don’t know if I get Coin Factory, and that’s weird, because really, what’s there to get? It’s a game about making money, plain and simple. It’s so straightforward on the face of it that the tutorial can be completed in less than a minute. And to be clear, I understand what the goal of the game is: place down tiles to create a little money-making engine until you’re able to generate ten trillion dollars and buy the Box tile that ends the game. Continually tweak and optimize your designs so that you can cut down the time it takes to buy the Box on a given level, or branch out and try different maps to test your skills under an assortment of restrictions. It’s really not that deep, which is why I find it confounding that it baffles me so. Perhaps, then, it’s silly for me to be writing about a game that on some level I find completely inscrutable. However, it’s my hope that in doing so, I’ll be able to achieve some level of clarity on what Coin Factory is trying to do, and whether it succeeds.
Olive's Game Garden 