COMPLETE: Animalia
Nov. 12th, 2018 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kjorteoOops, there are a couple days left to go in IFComp and this one looked really intriguing, so I snuck it in. They said you had to review at least five games, which I did, but they never said it couldn't be one or two more.
Animalia by Ian Michael Waddell is a game about four animals in a Muppet Man stack trying to pass as an ordinary human child on a mission to convince the local human population not to invade your home. You have a choice of three specialists for each of the human suit's four positions, making twelve possible overall party combinations. The game is substantial enough that I wasn't able to squeeze a second run before hitting the two-hour time limit on IFComp judging, so I can't say for certain how I'm writing this how railroaded anything is without actually trying different things. However, at first glance, everything sure looks wide open, with each party member having actual outcome-affecting skills and weaknesses and allegiances with one another.
That's not even getting into the choices and attempts to do things that can succeed or fail throughout the game itself. There are relationships to manage, dangerous rescue missions to undertake, and more. IFComp's page describes it with the keywords "Wacky" and "Half an hour" but I don't think either of these are true. The amount of game in this game is dizzying, and it is stressful due to what I at least perceived on my initial run to be a fairly high difficulty (or at the very least, it is very easy to screw things up horribly) with major consequences for failure.
It's fantastic, though. I'm solidly behind this premise, and after getting my hopes utterly crushed and ground into bad-ending paste at the very last moment (I know someone I'm not choosing next time...) I think I need to come back and try my hand at this again sometime. Surely there must be a way, in the seemingly endless configurations, to make my party slightly less doomed. Maybe when IFComp's over and I'm not having to keep an eye on the clock and worry about scores.
Animalia by Ian Michael Waddell is a game about four animals in a Muppet Man stack trying to pass as an ordinary human child on a mission to convince the local human population not to invade your home. You have a choice of three specialists for each of the human suit's four positions, making twelve possible overall party combinations. The game is substantial enough that I wasn't able to squeeze a second run before hitting the two-hour time limit on IFComp judging, so I can't say for certain how I'm writing this how railroaded anything is without actually trying different things. However, at first glance, everything sure looks wide open, with each party member having actual outcome-affecting skills and weaknesses and allegiances with one another.
That's not even getting into the choices and attempts to do things that can succeed or fail throughout the game itself. There are relationships to manage, dangerous rescue missions to undertake, and more. IFComp's page describes it with the keywords "Wacky" and "Half an hour" but I don't think either of these are true. The amount of game in this game is dizzying, and it is stressful due to what I at least perceived on my initial run to be a fairly high difficulty (or at the very least, it is very easy to screw things up horribly) with major consequences for failure.
It's fantastic, though. I'm solidly behind this premise, and after getting my hopes utterly crushed and ground into bad-ending paste at the very last moment (I know someone I'm not choosing next time...) I think I need to come back and try my hand at this again sometime. Surely there must be a way, in the seemingly endless configurations, to make my party slightly less doomed. Maybe when IFComp's over and I'm not having to keep an eye on the clock and worry about scores.