chocomarsh (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chocomarsh) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rainbowgames2015-07-14 08:09 pm
chocomarsh) wrote in rainbowgames2015-07-14 08:09 pm
Entry tags:
Strawberry Cubes
This game was released earlier this month and was promoted across a large handful of indie channels, so I don't know whether it qualifies as a "niche game," but! It's obscure, it's probably going to remain obscure, and I like it a whole lot!
Strawberry Cubes is a pay-what-you-want platformer for Windows. You move through mesmerizing, glitchy fixed screens with an expansive, mostly hidden movement vocabulary, climbing plants, ringing bells, and collecting purple icons for occult reasons. The focus is on exploration, both of the game's (jarring but pleasantly benign) space and of its (not at all benign) hidden systems.
Strawberry Cubes feels like staying up all night with your nerdiest friend from high school. It's delirious, strange, and filled with a massive, delirious surplus of wonderfully dorky ideas. The wall tiles forego textures in favor of cellular automata calculated live as you play. The game's audio consists entirely of ambient sounds made in bfxr. There is a key specifically dedicated to spawning frogs in your vicinity. This plays moment-to-moment like the exemplary case of the Solo Game Stuffed With All The Creator's Best Ideas For A Video Game.
But despite its sincerity, Strawberry Cubes is savvy too. It's a nonlinear exploration-oriented platformer -- after all, wasn't your nerdiest friend's favorite game some metroidvania? Mine was. But the space of the game folds in on itself at least as often as it sprawls out. Where other games of this type are didactic about their level design, Strawberry Cubes encourages you to wander. Where others are slow to introduce complexity (either to teach the player or to impress them), Strawberry Cubes assumes you'll enjoy being lost. It does everything about a "metroidvania" the "wrong" way, and comes out a lot more charming for it. Like a lot of solo games made by nerds, it doesn't appear to have been developed on any platform, but is instead a wholly original program. I don't know very much about programming, but judging by other games I've played of that type, that approach tends to engender a LOT of bugginess and low-level fussing in the process of development. That aesthetic effect is 100% anticipated and embraced here. One of the most fundamental movements is a wall-climb that feels deeply wrong, but never unreasonable. The program window that runs behind the main window often provides small clues as to what's going on. The "glitchy"-looking walls make it feel natural that surfaces are sometimes permeable. In fact, one of my favorite things to do right now is to duplicate myself a few dozen times, which makes the collision detection a bit lazier, and try to push through otherwise "solid" walls and floors. I'm almost positive this was accounted for in the level design, and that's delightful.
There is some chaos factor in the overall game. Room architecture is steadily disappearing and reappearing. Graphical "corruptions" are becoming more and more frequent. I am not sure yet what's driving them. I've only played maybe 2 hours so far, including the time spent grabbing these screenshots. So there might be quite a bit more going on than what I've seen and talked about so far.
OK maybe something in that will convince you to play this with me. Tell me what you find! Here's my main piece of advice so far: the Readme encourages the player to draw a map, but I've gotten just as much value so far from listing the uses of the various hotkeys and the functions of the various objects.
Here's the download link again. Good luck!
Strawberry Cubes is a pay-what-you-want platformer for Windows. You move through mesmerizing, glitchy fixed screens with an expansive, mostly hidden movement vocabulary, climbing plants, ringing bells, and collecting purple icons for occult reasons. The focus is on exploration, both of the game's (jarring but pleasantly benign) space and of its (not at all benign) hidden systems.
Strawberry Cubes feels like staying up all night with your nerdiest friend from high school. It's delirious, strange, and filled with a massive, delirious surplus of wonderfully dorky ideas. The wall tiles forego textures in favor of cellular automata calculated live as you play. The game's audio consists entirely of ambient sounds made in bfxr. There is a key specifically dedicated to spawning frogs in your vicinity. This plays moment-to-moment like the exemplary case of the Solo Game Stuffed With All The Creator's Best Ideas For A Video Game.
But despite its sincerity, Strawberry Cubes is savvy too. It's a nonlinear exploration-oriented platformer -- after all, wasn't your nerdiest friend's favorite game some metroidvania? Mine was. But the space of the game folds in on itself at least as often as it sprawls out. Where other games of this type are didactic about their level design, Strawberry Cubes encourages you to wander. Where others are slow to introduce complexity (either to teach the player or to impress them), Strawberry Cubes assumes you'll enjoy being lost. It does everything about a "metroidvania" the "wrong" way, and comes out a lot more charming for it. Like a lot of solo games made by nerds, it doesn't appear to have been developed on any platform, but is instead a wholly original program. I don't know very much about programming, but judging by other games I've played of that type, that approach tends to engender a LOT of bugginess and low-level fussing in the process of development. That aesthetic effect is 100% anticipated and embraced here. One of the most fundamental movements is a wall-climb that feels deeply wrong, but never unreasonable. The program window that runs behind the main window often provides small clues as to what's going on. The "glitchy"-looking walls make it feel natural that surfaces are sometimes permeable. In fact, one of my favorite things to do right now is to duplicate myself a few dozen times, which makes the collision detection a bit lazier, and try to push through otherwise "solid" walls and floors. I'm almost positive this was accounted for in the level design, and that's delightful.
There is some chaos factor in the overall game. Room architecture is steadily disappearing and reappearing. Graphical "corruptions" are becoming more and more frequent. I am not sure yet what's driving them. I've only played maybe 2 hours so far, including the time spent grabbing these screenshots. So there might be quite a bit more going on than what I've seen and talked about so far.
OK maybe something in that will convince you to play this with me. Tell me what you find! Here's my main piece of advice so far: the Readme encourages the player to draw a map, but I've gotten just as much value so far from listing the uses of the various hotkeys and the functions of the various objects.
Here's the download link again. Good luck!
no subject