Following Freeware: September 2017 releases

Willem’s Winners

10 Ways from Sunday

Debra is sleeping in church when she hears the voice of her recently deceased brother Timothy calling to her in her dreams. Something is wrong with him! But what? For that answer, Debra devises a cunning plan to get God’s attention so she can ask him what is wrong with her brother: she will break each of the 10 commandments! However, sometimes things don’t exactly go as planned…

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10 Ways from Sunday, by HanaIndiana, was the winner of August 2017’s MAGS competition with  its “Bible” theme. It is shown in a very simple third-person pixel art style, but despite its basic presentation, on my machine the game was excruciatingly slow in full-screen mode, even at the fastest setting. In windowed mode it ran much faster and was properly playable. The world consists of the church, a downtown street, Debra’s house and the radio studio where she works. The characters are fully voiced with excellent acting, although the quality of the recordings could be better, as some lines sound much clearer than others. Subtitles are also displayed, with a different color for each speaker. The few sound effects present, like the ringing of a phone and a thunderclap, are adequate, but there is no music except in the church where an organist sometimes plays.

The two-button interface uses left-click to interact and right-click to observe, the mouse cursor itself making very clear which button does what. When the cursor is at the top of the screen, a bar appears containing the inventory and an icon that opens the game’s menu. Breaking all 10 commandments presents a bit of an ethical challenge, and Debra has to do perform some acts she hopes never to have to do again. The diversity of the commandments yields very different puzzles: some of them are inventory-based but there are also conversation puzzles and sometimes Debra just has to do something naughty. None of the solutions are hard, but the game’s length, the number of puzzles and the excellent voice-overs make 10 Ways from Sunday an outstanding MAGS game. Although some may find using the Bible this way to be insulting or blasphemous, this is quite a funny and lighthearted game that isn’t meant to be taken seriously.

10 Ways from Sunday can be downloaded from its AGS webpage

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Symploke: Legend of Gustavo Bueno – Chapter 1

Benito Retamosa has finally arrived at the university’s Philosophy department. It’s exam time, and because he hasn’t attended any courses yet, having been too busy partying and generally being lazy, Benito needs notes so he can learn the material. Of course, nobody wants to help somebody they don’t even know, so Benito has to make some friends first. This means engaging in such tasks as stealing a graded exam from the dean, gaining access to the pantry and mixing a drink.

The debut installment of Symploke: Legend of Gustavo Bueno, by Videojuegos Fermín and developer Juan C. Buzón, is presented in third-person mode with a brightly colored cartoony style in which all characters have big heads that show their expressions quite clearly. The game world for this first chapter limits itself to some rooms in the Philosophy building, along with an outdoor field and some woods on the campus. Loud and very repetitive music that can thankfully be switched off accompanies the action. The characters are fully voiced in Spanish and the acting is quite good (according to a Spanish-speaking person I asked). The English translation of all spoken text is shown on the screen next to the person speaking. The sound effects, such as slamming doors and a bottle opening, are realistic.

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