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Otago Daily Times
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Well worth a look
LOOK OUTSIDE From: Francis Coulombe/Devolver You have strange dreams tonight. A familiar voice beckons you to your window. There are stairs leading into the night sky. You awaken just as you begin to ascend them. You have an urge to look outside your window. You get up, cross the room, and pull back the curtains. It's beautiful ... Look Outside is a turn-based RPG survival horror game created in the ever beloved RPG Maker engine. You play as Sam, just your average unemployed guy living in an apartment building, waking up at home after a dream with a voice whispering to look outside. Now, you could look outside, but I'm far more interested in that eyeball, peeking through a crack in the wall. The eye is the one whispering to you, but she seems to shake herself out of it and warns you that looking outside is very dangerous and you probably shouldn't. Her name is Sybil and she explains that you have to survive for 15 days. The game runs on an in-game time system, where basically every action you do will pass time. From playing video games, to exploring outside your apartment, you only have so much time per day. Passing time inside the apartment will give a chance for someone to knock at your door, and you can let them in or send them away. They can range from a pizza guy to a cleaver-wielding, hockey-mask-wearing maniac. The main gameplay occurs when you leave the safety of your apartment. Outside is where you can find items and enemies. Enemies wander in a random pattern and when you venture too close they give chase, forcing you to fight or run away for a bit. Combat is a turn-based affair, but given enemies can be extremely dangerous or draining, choosing to run is often a better choice. Look Outside draws from other survival horror games by being a resource management nightmare. Getting into fights will slowly but surely drain you of resources, and there are very few full restores in the game. You have your health and mana like other RPGs but you also have to worry about your money, food supplies, weapons and weapon durability, ammo, crafting materials and, most importantly, time. You also have hidden stats such as hygiene. Being smelly, for example, attracts monsters from further away. The time system affects you outside your apartment as well. The longer you venture outside and look into new areas, the more time that passes, the more dangerous it gets, and the more bonus experience you gain when you return. Sybil will be available if you have gained enough experience from this, and she acts as the game's save system. On each trip outside you could lose an hour or more if you die, making it a thrilling press-your-luck experience, especially as you explore the more dangerous parts of the apartment complex. While the gameplay is excellent, it's only half the fun. Look Outside is an incredible mystery horror story about trying to piece together what is really happening. The game doesn't really hold your hand, instead placing little clues and visual storytelling to help you figure out puzzles and progress. You meet some fun and likeable characters, some of whom can join you and become party members. There's nothing that shows the horror aspect of the game quite as well as the art, which provides an amazing level of body horror. The enemies you fight are rendered in an almost uncomfortable level of detail. Teeth completely covering a person's arm. Mounds of flesh and bone that used to be people. Someone in a cloak who is growing more and more faces, all of them whispering something different. What probably disturbed me the most was how a lot of people seem to be happy — joyously so — at their monstrous transformation. I really appreciate that the game doesn't jump-scare you, but instead allows the disturbing imagery and implications to weigh on you. My main issue with the game was how difficult it was to regain health. This makes things tense, but can lead to some really brutal moments where you fight the wrong thing and limp away with basically no health. You then have to either get a ridiculous amount of food or waste time in the apartment sleeping to regain some health, which grinds the pace to a halt. The difficulty of the game is daunting, but it has an easy mode, which adds autosaves and makes life far simpler. Overall, I absolutely adored this game. Survival horror games have always been a fave and I think Look Outside has the potential to become a classic. Great story, great gameplay, punishing and, best of all, replayable. It begs to be played and replayed in a hunt for new sprites, new dialogue, better and better paths, and the satisfaction of using your hard-won knowledge to master it. If you have the slightest interest in horror and don't mind something that's harder than it seems, I can wholeheartedly recommend this one. By Michael Robertson
The Guardian
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
I made the worst role-playing game of all time – and loved every minute of it
It is said that every 100 years, a small fishing village on the southern coast of an unknown fantasy realm holds a magical artisanal cheese festival. As an adventurer and fan of ethically produced dairy products, you are determined to attend the fabled event, arriving at the dock on a small boat with only a few gold coins and a dream. This is the backdrop to the worst role-playing adventure I have ever experienced – and, entirely coincidentally, the only one I have ever designed. The game creation package RPG Maker has been around since 1992, the first version launching on the Japanese PC-98 computer. Since then, development has been passed from veteran Japanese developer ASCII to Enterbrain and then Chiyoda-based Gotcha Gotcha Games, and dozens of instalments have appeared. Although it has become increasingly complex over the years, RPG Maker remains a remarkably intuitive way to make adventure games with no development experience at all. The package comes with thousands of pre-made maps, buildings, characters and items, which creators can use and modify; but you can also start from scratch, crafting your own assets to make unique games. Your projects can be shared with the RPG Maker community and several acclaimed indie games have been built with the program, including To The Moon, Corpse Party and Omori. I can tell you that Artisan Cheese Quest will not be joining them. To be fair, the game only took me and my 19-year-old son Zac about two hours to make, using the PlayStation 5 version of RPG Maker (launching on 21 February). At first we chose the Swamp location from the huge variety of pre-made maps, which mostly offer traditional fantasy and sci-fi options. Then we selected a character – a cute little anime-style warrior. From here you start the actual process of making a game that offers challenging things to do. Everything that takes place in the world is called an Event, and to create one you need to construct a set of conditions using a very simple visual programming language. If you've ever tried Scratch, the popular coding tool used in schools throughout the world, you'll be right at home. Say you want to hide a magic key in a treasure chest: you place the chest on the map, then use the menu system to place a key inside it. Add a locked door then place a condition on that door: if the player has the key, the door opens, if they don't, they get a fail message. With the same system, you can add branching dialogue with characters, plan enemy patrol paths and eventually craft a combat system – everything is controlled via a series of if/then commands. During lockdown, Zac and I used Scratch to make a very simple maze game where you guided a mouse towards a block of cheese, so we decided to stick with our established game design expertise here. We built a tavern, attached the tavern interior to a building on the main landscape map, added characters to provide hints and hid an artisan cheese festival pass in a treasure chest on a small island. We didn't use any original assets but we did write all the dialogue, and the story – find the pass, open the tavern door, eat cheese – was entirely ours. Please keep us in mind for this year's Bafta games award for best narrative. Most importantly, the process was enormous fun. You're able to select background music and sound effects, and going for wildly inappropriate options had us crying with laughter: we put very dramatic combat music in the most innocuous areas; our treasure chest screamed when you opened it; villagers randomly barked and growled. And however basic the final result is, you still get that thrill at having made something that functions and looks a lot like an actual game. As you get used to the system, your ambitions grow: we later added a zombie who wanders around the map complaining about his lactose intolerance. I'm not going to lie – although the system is intuitive, it gets extremely demanding when you start thinking about creating multi-stage boss encounters or designing a levelling up system for your character. If you're not used to working with lengthy routines and sub-routines and game mechanics that all mess with each other, you've a long road ahead. True, any time we weren't sure how to make something work, the game's online community helped: there are hundreds of videos on YouTube and lots of helpful people on Reddit. But I feel we're some way from making anything even slightly resembling a commercial game. Perhaps at some point in the future, Artisan Cheese Quest will be one of the finest fromage-based fantasy role-playing adventures available on PlayStation 5. For now, we're just going to keep adding stupid sound effects until it stops being funny. Honestly, don't hold your breath.
