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Wednesday, October 11, 2017

IndieCade 2017: Games Pt 2

We had fun trying not to let or emotions out too much with Emotional Fugitive Detector. This game has you trying to fool a computer program by showing enough emotion that your friend looking at your face can tell if your sad or happy, but not the computer. You and a friend will stare at each other as you try to figure out how to convey emotions using subtlety or be killed by the robots of the future. You'll get a nice little print out, like a receipt, if your found guilty and will be killed or if you're a model emotionless citizen, in which you'll live.


Let's go meet that Alien G-d creature and see what it can do. Santiago is an interactive VR experience that has you touching a fish statue that can change reality. Weird and trippy visuals make this a delight to try. We just want a story down the line. So by touching the statue in VR you change the environment and music that you see.


It's clear you won't escape the Fear Sphere! Though it kept breaking down, we had fun being trapped inside of it. You and a friend team up to to play. One enters the sphere, the other will explain how to escape from a monster chasing you inside. Through an ingenious flashlight, you'll see the game world projected in the Fear Sphere. Controls are a bit hard to master. The concept is a fun idea of having someone direct you from the outside with a map to a safe way out while a monster is after you.


Ghosts of Miami had me since before I even entered IndieCade. The eye-catching visuals make it look more like an anime you've never seen than a mystery game where you're trying to find missing people in Miami during the 1980's while part of a pop band. You play as Chelo Martínez, looking for her Dad and chatting with her band mates as she tries to find other missing people. I chatted with Creative Director & Tech Lead Conrad Kreyling who told me that though the game is cheerful with some dark subject matter, the first go at the was even darker.

Some games we didn't get a shot at were Feast, a storytelling/role-playing game for five players about power and memory, that's played during a communal meal and uses eating and tasting as game mechanics. And Vignettes with visuals similar to GNOG. The game is a casual, but unique exploration game without text or characters, where objects shapeshift as you spin them around to wander through a kaleidoscope of different moods and settings.