COMPLETE: Abandon Them

IFComp continues.

Full disclosure: I slept very poorly due to absolutely gutting bad dreams last night, and have been groggy and sluggish all day. It's almost dinnertime and I feel like I haven't even woken up and started the day yet, let alone... like... done anything. Xyzzy seems to be a bit out of sorts too, though, so who knows. Maybe there's a kind of general miasma going around my friend circle lately. Or maybe IFComp is just cursed with all-consuming depression this year, since this is my second downer game in a row.

I will try my best to set general feelings of blurf aside and judge this game on its actual merits, because I tend to just copy/paste these reviews into IFComp's actual score submission with minor edits as necessary, and "I'm a mess today so I'm going to dock points because I'm just not feeling this one" isn't exactly fair to the author.

Anyway. Next up we have Abandon Them by Alan Beyersdorf. Its copy:

"What exactly happened during the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel? How do we separate the fantasy of the folklore from the realities of starvation and abandonment?

"While often viewed as a fantasy story, my intention was to view this story from a psychological perspective.

"If you were a character in their story, what sorts of choices would you make?"

( Spoiler cut I guess, though it's one of those less-than-fifteen-minute games and it's very railroaded, so there's almost nothing here to spoil. )

ABANDONED: Downwell

There was a limited time thing where this game was 100% free on the Play store, so I grabbed it because literally why not. "Because it's a mobile port and those never have playable controls" is why not, of course, but it was free and shut up.

Anyway, Downwell is a procedurally-generated pixel action game about trying to make it as far as you can before you die. There are powerups to be earned between levels and in stores, but you start from scratch with every new run.

I tried and kind of bounced off of The Binding of Isaac years ago because this particular formula isn't really to my tastes. In BoI's case, I guess I was expecting a game with checkpoints or saveable progress that could eventually be beaten, and the "do a fresh random run and get as far as you can" approach makes it hard to feel like I'm actually accomplishing anything. This isn't to say these sorts of games are bad or that it's a failing with them; rather, I think the lesson here is just that Roguelikes are not my genre.

So it is with Downwell, which I tried a few times and then got frustrated with the controls, because of course I did, it's a goddamn mobile port. However, unlike games that I might still be interested in if they were presented in a more playable format (I recently re-purchased Anodyne on Switch; we'll see how that goes if I ever get around to it someday) I just... really didn't care about this one enough to want to bother reuniting with it elsewhere. Sorry.