You Know What Else is Dangerous? BundleStars – Part Four: Brain Eaters Bundle

I took advantage of the Halloween sale to pay $2 for a collection of zombie-themed games. I wasn’t particularly wild about any of them, but hey, it was two bucks and I got a couple hours of amusement out of trying them all.

I, Zombie - Stealth/puzzle game where you play a zombie and need to infect all the people in the level without getting blown to pieces. There are only 20 levels, so it's a short thing, and some of them are irritatingly hard because you need to run in a careful zig-zag pattern to eat someone who's shooting at you, or you need to time things absolutely perfectly. (You slow down as you're hit, so if the first shot lands and you're not already on top of the guy, you're losing the level.)

Enola - A melding of first-person and adventure puzzle game, with the same sort of problems I had with many of the games from the Nightmares bundle: I don't particularly like the FPS controls, and combining them with point-and-click moon logic puzzles doesn't help. I'm curious about the outcome of this game (it opens with a women who comes home to discover that "Angelica" is missing and that her home has transformed into a bizarre psychedelic landscape), but I don't actually want to play it.

Dead Pixels - Side-scrolling beat-em-up: It's the NES game River City Ransom/, but with zombies. (And also much more emphasis on guns with limited ammo, and less on melee attacks and improvised weapons.) I was turned off by the limited resources but unlimited enemies, and the very repetitive gameplay.

Zombie Killtime - Arena-style side-scrolling endless-wave zombie-shooting game. Clearly designed with multiplayer in mind; the single-player game is short, deadly and not particularly pleasant. (It has permadeath, despite there being a zillion upgrades and weapons to buy.) Also, the graphics are basically bloody squares: heavily pixelated endless zombie hoards. Basically, you need to be very good at the game to get to the point of buying the cool upgrades (or playing with friends where respawning is apparently an option); and presumably by that point you really need them.

Burn Zombie Burn! - Arena-style top-down endless-wave zombie-shooting game. You're a well-greased redneck who kills zombies of all stripes with all the usual weapons. Much more designed for single-player and the casual mode is moderately fun, but it's basically just an endless game of Gauntlet without all of the exploring or escaping to lower levels. (Can I also just state for the record that I don’t really like the WASD-plus-mouse standard controls? They irritate me.)

All Zombies Must Die!: Scorepocalypse - The military, particularly Chuck McJagger, are rescuing civilians from the zombie hordes. This is a more complicated top-down shoot-em-up, with a "home base" and side quests and item crafting and all that jazz. But the control scheme is essentially the same as Burn Zombie Burn, and I'm not super-fond of it. And if you aren't really into the primary gameplay, all the bonus features in the world won't save it.

The Music Machine - Haley, an eccentric 13-year-old girl, has a complicated relationship with her old friend Quintin. He's a ghost now, and he's puppeting her body with the intent of finding a satisfactory way of killing her. This is a first-person exploration game by the same folks as The Moon Sliver (which was in a different bundle that I also bought; and which you should play first, to get certain references). There doesn't seem to be anything that can kill you—except in a very unpleasant area near the end—and the puzzles are relatively benign. (Which doesn't mean that segments don't get freakin' terrifying.) Basically, you're there to take in the atmosphere and unravel the story.

Overall: I’m not that into arcade-style zombie shoot-em-ups / survival games. Now I know.

You Know What Else is Dangerous? BundleStars – Part Five: Nightmares Bundle

These games were very much a mixed bag, because I tend to really like psychological horror games, but I kinda hate first-person setups—especially when they involve stealth or combat, or when you need to fight with the controls because of a poorly grafted-on puzzle interface.

The Moon Sliver - A first-person atmospheric exploration horror game. You are someone on a mysterious island, and you need to piece together what's going on from the fragments of conversation / memories you can find. The fact that your flashlight can run out can be a little panic-inducing, but that's really the only "game" element in this half-hour story. It's clever.

The Path - A curious game that reminds me in some ways of “Sleep No More.” It doesn't really have a narrative beyond "go through the woods to Grandmother's house and stay on the path"...and if you want to see anything at all, you need to not do exactly that. There are lots of strange sights and curious items to find in the woods, but nothing really means anything beyond what you ascribe to it. (And the "success" state of the game, to the extent there is one, involves getting eaten by a Wolf.)

1Heart - Point-and-click adventure with many hidden secrets and obtuse puzzles, and a freaky rough-hewn art style. The fact that there are no skips and very limited hints--in a game that's old-school obtuse--is irritating. There's a "don't touch the walls" maze near the end that greatly irritated me, and when I finally got through that I had to waste a hint because I was doing the right thing but in ever-so-slightly the wrong place. And then I got stymied very close to the end by an overlapping-lines puzzle. Oy. I mean, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed this. But aspects of it pissed me off.

Kraven Manor - A first-person horror exploration game crossed with an adventure/puzzle game. I found the controls difficult to use and the lack of an inventory screen problematic (you can only carry one item at a time, and any mouse click drops/throws it). The gimmick--assembling the haunted mansion with the model pieces you find in it--is interesting, but the creepy haunted suit of armor that I had to clumsily flee (using controls I don't like) from wasn't my idea of a fun monster, and I don't get them impression there's enough plot to pay off playing through this.

Betrayer - An FPS horror game that, I'm not going to lie, is really beautiful. A black and white mysterious island with splashes of red, that never has a chance to seem idyllic before monstrous, crazed inhabitants try to kill you. So you end up with both action and stealth gameplay that doesn't really work for me. (Though I’m tempted to look up a Let’s Play.)

Montague's Mount - Another first-person horror exploration game crossed with an adventure/puzzle game, though this one for some reason seems less threatening. (Though I also discovered an interesting problem: When I focus too intently on small things in a moving first person view, I get nauseous.) It's also very pretty, though the fact that it's constantly raining, which causes the screen to darken into black and white, means it's hard to see things and I get frustrated rather than enjoying the scenery. Also, after the first few, the puzzles get very fragmented and obtuse, and FPS and pixel-hunting for items don't mix well for me.

Like the Brain Eaters, there were several games in this bundle that didn't grab me at all, so I didn't even try them.

Overall: Again, I didn’t get a massive amount of gameplay time out of this, but ~5 hours for my two bucks is still totally worth it. And hey, I learned important things about my game tastes.