I’ve been reviewing Liberated Pixel Cup Games. This is one of the 48 Games.
Disclaimer: I’m competing in the cup too! I am not a judge!
Obok and Gossip [Download me] [Game's Website]
This is probably the craziest game I’ve ever played. No, wait, scratch that. Games. Obok and Gossip isn’t one game, it’s actually two games with wild, unique concepts and theme that are also quite fun to play.
Getting the game to compile requires installing ocaml and ocaml-SDL. There’s a handy “build” script that compiles the code_entry binary. It throws a couple of warnings, but if it built the binary, you’re good to go. As for the game…
Obok
This is a Single Player Game. It’s a shooter, of sorts. The author (Mark Weyer) states that Obok is a “time-reversed” version of Kobo. I had never played Kobo and decided not to check it out until after I had played his version.
A bit of a story has your character on a steam-powered scooter trying to water some “Adamantea Trees”. There’s some hilarious dialogue in the cutscenes which always made me look forward to the next one. As for the gameplay, you have to spray water on the tree, and it grows a bit. Most of the time, you see branches waving at you, you have to water those too, to make it grow bigger and bigger, until it can’t grow any more.
On later levels, Bees are introduced, and it’s quickly explained that you can’t shoot down bees with water because “they’re flying too high”. The Bees head to the flowers that appear on the trees (And in later levels, the Liberated Bathhouses, hah). The last level had the Bees fly around in circles in a 3Dish effect that looked amazing and made you run (in your steam scooter!) for your life while attempting to water the Adamantea Tree.
You lose a life whenever you crash into a wall or crash into an Adamantea Tree. Bees don’t kill you, but if you pay attention to the life-faces below, you’ll start noticing bee stings every time you’re touched by a bee. Eventually, the bee stings take away your life-face.
I really enjoyed this game, I thought it was pretty clever and unique. As for Kobo, the game this was inspired on. I found a video on the ‘Tubes.
Gossip
This is a Single Player Game. The game has you go shopping around with a real gossip addict… You see, she really can’t stand not talking with someone, and as the game kindly puts it, she’ll always go north, because there’s always a window facing north. Your challenge is to keep her away from the windows and walk around the town while she tries to complete her shopping list (Accesible by pressing Tab on the keyboard).
I highly suggest you hold Shift, to run, as walking just won’t cut it here. Oh and watch out for lakes and people carrying buckets, because she only has 3 dresses, and getting one wet can really ruin her shopping experience, so she’ll have to go change (And you go back to the start of the level).
This is a “reverse platformer”, in that the gravity pulls you up, instead of down. It is cleverly done, and quite hard. I managed to sneak around to different areas, but I couldn’t complete the shopping list.
The game does include a ‘cheating mode’, triggered by running the game with the parameter ‘cheat’. It’ll grant you unlimited lives on both games, but Gossip is still quite difficult. I would’ve lowered the gravity / her need to gossip, to make it easier.
The fact that Mark managed to make two fun, unrelated games in a month is really impressive. Do give these games a try!
