It’s so peaceful here this time of night. Until the fish rain begins.
Yes, yes — your list of gaming accomplishments in 2014 was very mighty indeed. You circumnavigated a fractious steampunk world in eighty days. You single-handedly recovered the Golden Fleece of Yendor from the clutches of demon wizards and goblin archers. You conquered the Earth, then saved it, then avenged it.
But did take the form of an omnipotent mountain floating in outer space? Did you become a hacker exposing false flag operations in a Russian puppet state? Or become a global superpower by selectively breeding an army of cats?
No? Then buckle up, compadre — let me show you the very weirdest stuff of the year.
Mountain (styled as MTN on iOS) seems like an executive desk toy at first — the kind of thing you’d find at the Sharper Image App Store if such a thing existed. You are presented with a majestic, genuinely beautiful view of the titular geologic oddity hanging idly in space. The app assures you of Mountain’s power (“You are god,” you’re told) but Mountain doesn’t actually do anything. Besides moving the camera about, there’s no game controls of any kind — just some chimes. But if you wait around long enough (or learn the right chime sequences), Mountain starts to let you in the joke. Strange stuff crashes into Mountain (fire engines, meteors, grim reapers, fish) without warning, and it will occasionally utter a pseudo-profound zen koan, accompanied by a single musical call to meditation. Eventually it will resemble a cosmic yard sale that spits out fortune cookie papers every quarter of an hour or so.
So it turns out that Mountain is a droll take-down of type-A motivational paraphernalia, and a damned clever one. If you don’t use your iPad much at the office, prop it up on your desk and leave Mountain running while you work — discovering what absurd thing the app will spring next is one of 2014’s great delights.
Mountain is on iOS as a Universal app and on Android and PC, too.
Full-motion video games may have died with Sewer Shark and that one game where you rummaged through Dana Plato’s underwear drawer, but Alfa-Arkiv is making an admirable effort to bring them back. This FMV title shares some sensibilities with Republique: like that game, you’re an observer of the game world rather than a cast member, but you have opportunities to interact directly. You’re a hacker recruited to help bring down a government in a fictional former Soviet state, uncovering corruption. The game eagerly busts down the fourth wall at every opportunity: it interacts with you through your iPad’s camera and sometimes asks you to leave the app entirely to go hunt down characters on websites that have been set up–ARG-style–on places like Change.org and Wikileaks.
On the whole, Alfa-Arkiv is probably too ambitious for its own good — the game started to feel a bit like work to me after a while. But the production values are off the charts here. Videos feature convincing acting and the documents you scrutinize for clues are disarmingly authentic-looking. This is an extraordinary, unusual object.
Alfa-Arkiv is iPad-only and it’s free to try, with a single IAP unlock for the full game.
The Battle Cats is a free-to-play game that takes a few pages from Alpaca Evolution‘s book, poking fun at the endless array of “card combining” games on the App Store. You take armies of cartoon cats (which look like Achewood would if Chris Onstad OD’d on uppers) into castle defense-style combat, earning new cats which you then combine to form stranger and stranger comedy felines. It takes itself exactly as seriously as it should.
The Battle Cats is on iOS (Universal) and on Android.
10000000 creator Luca Redwood took a break from working on the sequel to his 2012 hit to create Smarter Than You, a multiplayer-only duel game where the only monetization came from players tipping their opponents for a match well fought. Misanthropes and Randians: fear not. The game’s unusually altruistic monetization scheme didn’t make Redwood a billionare, he told me a couple of weeks back. But the game found a hard core group of players who are still online having duels right now.
To raise awareness for the game, Redwood invented a fictional AI called METIS who taunted prospective players with her haughty superiority — and she might have been right. At least, sort of. Redwood has accumulated data from all of the matches of Smarter Than You that have been played since launch and fed it into a real METIS AI that he claims will beat a human more than 70% of the time. Stay tuned for more details about that when we interview Redwood in the new year.
Smarter than You is an iOS Universal app.
Finally, we’ve talked so damned much about Dream Quest this year, but no list of the year’s most off-the-wall stuff would be complete without it. This is a weird psychedelic trip of a game, turning the usual fantasy dungeon-crawling tropes around into a dreamlike journey about expanding your mind with hallucinogens.
But it’s also a true game designer’s game, the way Louis CK is a comedian’s comedian: every single developer I’ve talked to about Dream Quest has come back to me to rave (or rant) about it. Its marriage of deck-building card game with permadeath roguelike is irresistible to certain types of game nerd, and the relatively short gameplay sessions keep you coming back to it again and again.
Dream Quest is an iOS Universal app. No trailer for Dream Quest (the dev needs to save money for that art overhaul!) so here’s Comrade Brad from 164 playing it. Skip to about the 19-minute mark.
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