I’ve been reviewing Liberated Pixel Cup Games. This is one of the 48 Games.
Disclaimer: I’m also competing in the cup, I am not a judge!
Indirect Assassin [Download me]
It’s hard to pinpoint an exact genre for this Single Player game, but I’m leaning towards calling it Puzzle game. It was built using Haskell, and the compiling instructions are clear. Fedora provides the necessary haskell packages (listed on the readme) to build the game, but if your distro doesn’t, the readme provides instructions to set it up using cabal.
Do keep that readme open, as it basically is your game guide… This game does not have any menus to switch between levels, or even a clear explanation of what your goal is or how to play.
As the game’s title implies… You are an Indirect Assassin. This means that you don’t actually kill people…. your task is to set objects in the way of the professor’s path so that they accidentally die. To do so, you walk around a dungeon, while they’re exploring the same dungeon. The dungeon is extremely dark, so each professor carries a flashlight, while you carry some night vision goggles of some sort. If the professor’s flashlight illuminates you, they find out about you, and you lose.
What you’ve got to do is walk around the map and grab the items, then place them using their predefined keyboard key (Check the Readme) on the professor’s path so that they’ll die or change their behavior so that they’ll die. On the first level, you’ve got a diamond, a tomato and a bee. The tomato turns the professor into a soldier, who copies your every move and makes it easy for you to get caught. As soon as the effect passes, it’ll go back to being a professor, walking around in circles in the small map. You can place the bee on the map’s edges, so that the professor will come across it, and die. The diamond can be used to change the professor’s direction.
Loading different maps requires closing and opening the game, running it with each map’s parameter. In my case, I pointed it to data/maps/mapX.map to load different maps, and the readme also provides instructions on how you can create your own maps to increase the game’s length.
Overall, this is a quirky puzzle game that’s actually interesting. The fact that you need to read the README for almost everything does take away some of the game’s value though. Give the game a try and see for yourself!
