Blendo Special – Retrospective

Brendon Chung, serial modder and ex-Pandemic-ite, is now the man behind indie company Blendo Games.  With their first commercial release, Flotilla, drifting our way, it’s time for a little celebration of all things Blendo and the company’s intriguing output.

Brendon has a long and diverse modding history.  His Barista series charts an eclectic journey through the Doom and Half Life technology, spinning a variety of tales from Barita’s Doom II homage, to the narratorial deconstruction of Barista 2 and 4 using the Half Life and Half Life 2 engines respectively.  Other notable mods include The Puppy Years where you play a baby with superhuman powers and AI team based experimentation in Bootleg Squadrog and Bugstompers.

His newer projects display the same stylistic restlessness and irreverence toward the ways that computer games are expected to tell stories.  Let’s have a look at some you can download and play right now, all for zero monies.

Pilot Light

A lovely little AGS point-and-clicker.  There’s nothing spectacular about it but it’s a fun ten minutes of Schafer-esq humour, gentle puzzling and pleasing artwork.  You’re an intergalactic delivery girl and must courier a package to the Charlie region.  The puzzles are all fairly conventional point-and-click fodder with an inventive hidden object routine to start the engines  on your spaceship.  The dialogue’s generally amusing along with the incidental responses showing that Brendan Chung’s obviously got a good ear for the comedy that often accompanies the best of this genre.  There’s a wonderfully bathetic ending as well which drives home that the game is just another day in the life of its protagonist rather than a trite ker-azy adventure.

Grotto King

Find a monster, kill him, get a reward.  Grotto King’s a little bit like Thief in as much as your only means of interaction is pinging arrows at stuff.  Shoot arrows at targets which activate doors and platforms to beat the light puzzle/platformer elements, and use them to shoot the big, black eye-monster when he appears.

Described as ‘a game for beginners’, its minimal nature and bow + monster based antics actually make me think it’s a bit of a nod to Hunt the Wumpus, in part at least, because there’s also a coin collecting element with Mario sound effects to boot and no Y-axis movement; a tribute to the simple pleasures of retro gaming then, but with a modern 3D environment and cel-shaded flavour.

Confession: I felt a bit bad about blapping an arrow into poor, exhausted blinky at the end.  Am I the real monster?  No, I have two eyes and don’t shoot skulls at people – that’s how you tell.  Spoiler Warning: the King rewards you with cursed gold, the git.  Also, exploding crows.

Gravity Bone

The King of England Stephen Fry once equated the art of sonnet writing with tending a tiny garden.  The structural rules of the poem may be inhibiting and restricted but within those boundaries you can craft something economic, meticulous and exquisite.  Gravity Bone immediately reminded me of this delicious simile; it posses just such an exquisite economy.  It’s a tiny, first person espionage adventure with shades of Hitman, No One Lives Forever, The Ship and a spectre of Mirror’s Edge into the bargain.

It’s able to take you through all the movements we’ve come to expect from first person adventures in about 15 minutes, while still managing to cram in a couple of surprises.  You’re presented with embedded tutorials in the first mission, the second puts a spin on the mechanics required to achieve the objectives, then there’s a betrayal, a chase and a twist.  It’s like watching an awesome spy caper in 32x speed with an unexpected and sombre ending.  To me, it seems like your character in Gravity Bone is merely a goon within a larger game that you never get to play.  Really, you have to go and experience it for yourself.

All the games can be found here – go play!

Continuing our blendobration, there’ll be an interview with Brendon Chung this Friday! squeeee!