Monster by thinkFirst
You, a young boy, collect items for your sick mother and need to bring them to the doctor for him to make medicine for her. Watch out for the Monsters.
Play till the end for the full story :)
Play till the end for the full story :)
Ratings
| Coolness | 70% | 3 |
| Overall(Jam) | 2.89 | 812 |
| Fun(Jam) | 2.45 | 952 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 3.22 | 602 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 2.71 | 763 |
| Mood(Jam) | 3.40 | 311 |
| Theme(Jam) | 2.81 | 920 |
- To play without download click "WEB".
- Continue by clicking "Monster - The Game".
- This will start the game in Unity Web Player.
Yet, if you don't have the Unity Web Player you will have to download it. (It is beneficial to have it for a lot of other Web-Games)
I liked the character art, reminded me a bit of Don't Starve. But the way you set the collision in the trees wasn't good at all. It should be in the trunk, it ruins completely the perspective.
Also there's a problem in the first "door" (the two boxes pushing part). If you push the 1st box a little bit down, it get's stuck, and you can't continue the game.
Good entry overall, nice mood.
Having the 'R' key reload in addition to clicking the R square would be nice.
The monsters can apparently see behind them and through very tiny cracks (when I blocked a door I was still spotted) which makes the game super difficult. I think the boxes may be using some sort of physics instead of just sliding perfectly straight, because occasionally they can get caught on edges.
The mood was spooky.
The game consists almost entirely of avoid-the-guards (in this case monsters) stealth gameplay with no innovations. Common improvements such as showing the line of sight of the enemies, or giving you clear indicators where the checkpoints are, were not present in this game, and being caught felt very underwhelming. The movement of the enemies themselves was also really straightforward, making the stealth sequences rather boring.
The other major gameplay element is Sokoban puzzles, all of which followed simple predictable Sokoban patterns and were easy to solve if you've ever played a version of (or a game inspired by) Sokoban before. The non-tile-based movement of the boxes actually allowed for alternate solutions making the puzzles even easier. (This element could have been used a new twist on Sokoban, but the game did not utilize this design space.)
Between the stealth and Sokoban sequences there was a lot of walking, which felt boring as most of the world looked the same, with no interesting landmarks, patterns or variations to be seen.
The music felt fitting and added to the atmosphere. The monster sounds added a lot from a functional perspective, but didn't feel fitting from an artistic perspective (I wasn't even sure the sound came from the monsters at first). I would have liked to see more audio feedback, for enhanced gameplay or increased impact of certain events, notably for being caught, shoving boxes and picking up flowers/medicine.
The graphical style felt inconsistent and rough. While the individual graphics look nice in isolation, they just don't fit together. Most notably, the walls look very much like artificial barriers and out of place in an otherwise natural-looking environment, and the boxes look like small crates that were scaled up rather than genuine large crates - this may be due to them being entirely in top-down (or side view) perspective while most of the graphics look like they've viewed from an isometric perspective.
The message/implementation of the theme felt predictable and forced. Why are monsters that make weird sounds and wander around mindlessly suddenly Jews? If their graphics had been the Jew image from the start I'd have felt it offensive; they sound like monsters and behave like monsters, and they stick in locations where it would make no sense for a human to stick around. (Hitler considered the Jews to not be human, but I hope you can agree with me that having them behaving in a more human-like manner would really help the delivery of the message.)
Despite all of my criticism, I haven't rated the game a 1 in any category. It's not truly bad in any sense, just very mediocre. You clearly know how to make a game work; now comes the true challenge, which is making games actually fun.
++ to comments above
I got all the herbs, but would also have needed the medical supplies. Since it was not so interrersting up to there, I stopped then.
I like how you play with the sound when the black things are walking around.