Following Freeware – June 2015 releases

Beyond Eternity: Episode 1

At West College, two professors vanished into thin air almost at the same time. Blake Evermore and Rebecca Jones were present at the disappearance of their respective teachers, and are determined to find out what caused it and where the two professors went. In their search for the truth, they will have to learn about electromagnetic waves, do some sound testing, conduct chemical experiments, talk to the other teachers, and walk long distances through endless corridors.

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Brent Eakin’s Beyond Eternity: Episode 1 is not your average adventure. The game world is quite large and contains many buildings on the West College campus. Unfortunately, these buildings all look alike and consist mainly of corridors and small rooms. The world is presented in third-person view and is drawn in simple cartoonish pixel art. Almost all building walls are brown, as is the furniture, which gives the locations a drab look. Because the walls look the same everywhere and most doors don’t have nameplates, it’s often hard to find the right room. At least the people are drawn in bright colors, injecting a much-needed bit of life to the place. The music accompanying the game can be chosen using the mobile phones Rebecca and Blake carry around. You can select between no less than five different tunes, all sounding a bit funky and electronic. The few sound effects in the game, like the opening of doors and drawers, are adequate. The voice acting is okay, but there is little emotion from the two protagonists. Rebecca especially is very bland and doesn’t show any surprise or shock when something unexpected happens.

It doesn’t matter which mouse button you use, as both interact with or make the protagonist take an item you click on. Blake and Rebecca start with very little information, so they must first find out what they need to know. While this makes sense, in practice it means endless walks through very long corridors, a lot of talking to people who give only minute bits of information, and a lot of fetching things from the strangest places, which means even more walking. Particularly in the beginning, this makes the game rather tedious. You later you get the ability to run, which speeds up the game somewhat, but you still need a lot of time, patience and perseverance to finish. There many different puzzles along the way. Some require using your inventory, which appears when you move the mouse to the top of the screen, but mostly they consist of finding out how to do what, whom to ask the right questions, and where to find the things you need. But there is also a Rubik’s cube puzzle, and a very difficult challenge in the library involving buttons that make ladders move. The game’s author explains the many long corridors and challenging puzzles, some of them requiring hundreds of mouse clicks to solve, as representing the struggles we all must go through in life to reach something important. This may be true, but I play adventure games to get away from real life, not to relive such difficulties in a virtual second life. Beyond Eternity: Episode 1 is certainly an interesting game with considerable effort put into it, but its deliberate inaccessibility may well be a steep barrier to entry for many gamers.

Beyond Eternity: Episode 1 can be downloaded from the AGS website.

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Fridge Follies

For a fresh slice of starfruit, there’s nothing better than being eaten, wouldn’t you say? Our hero certainly thinks so, and his once-delicious friends who share the fridge with him agree. Many of them have been disappointed: the celery has gone limp, the ice cream complains that it was put in the fridge instead of the freezer and has melted, and the sauerkraut complains about everything. They all want to be eaten soon, before they expire for good. So they decide that making a horrible stench is the best way to make someone open the fridge door and find all the nice food inside. Since he is the freshest of the lot, the starfruit is chosen to achieve this goal. For that he’ll have to make the celery upright again, cause the sauerkraut to do his bidding, and steal a rubber band from the broccoli, amongst other tasks.

Fridge Follies, made by Baron & Ponch, was the winner in November 2014’s food-themed MAGS competition, but now voice acting has been added. And the acting, done by Baron himself, is excellent. Accompanied by a drawing of the food speaking, every character has its own voice and accent: the pepper sauce only speaks rapid Spanish, the chili leftover has a strong Texan accent, the sauerkraut says very funny things in German, and the fish speaks Scottish in such a way that you are glad there are subtitles because otherwise you wouldn’t understand a word of what he’s saying. The gameplay is accompanied by a well-known Wild West piano tune and some suitably chosen sound effects. The fridge is shown from the side, with the door on the left and a wall removed so you can see the inside. Everything is drawn in a simple, colorful cartoon style with enough details to make out what everything is.

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The game is played with the mouse, of which only the left button is used. The inventory is shown right of the fridge, together with a so-called Stink-o-Meter, which indicates the strength of the stench being made. The puzzles are quite easy; the biggest obstacle you face is how to make the starfruit get from one shelf to another. All of the puzzles are inventory-based, and since you will not use more than three items you can easily finish the game in 15 minutes. But I advise you to take longer and try every combination of items possible, just to hear all the funny dialogue. Most characters speak lines that can be interpreted in multiple ways, for instance when the celery is stiff again it says: “Yeah! I’m ready! Where’s the action?!” It never gets really dirty though, and I would be surprised if small kids get the innuendos. There are also a lot of amusing jokes about the places the characters come from. All jokes are simple and you have probably heard them before, but their execution is very good. I was grinning and laughing a lot while playing this small gem.

Fridge Follies can be downloaded from the AGS website.

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Sherlock Holmes 2

Mr. Charles Williams bursts into Sherlock’s room with just enough time to tell Sherlock that he is accused of… MURDER! He installs alarm systems in the houses of rich clients, and he was asked by one of his customers, Mr. Jack Jimmie Johnston, to look at his system. But when Charles arrived, Mr. Johnston talked so much that there was hardly any time to look at the alarm system before Charles had to go home again. The next morning, Charles read in the newspaper that Mr. Johnston was… MURDERED!  After telling his tale, Charles is taken away by the police, leaving Sherlock Holmes with another… MURDER! case to solve.

Sherlock Holmes 2 is the rather unimaginative title of the second mystery by Carmel Games, following last year’s The Tea Shop Murder Mystery. Sherlock has changed somewhat since his first adventure. His drooping moustache and slouchy appearance have disappeared, and before us we see… well, not an attentive Mr. Holmes, but at least a Mr. Holmes who seems awake and more or less alert. The game is played in third-person mode, with scenes portraying Holmes’ surroundings drawn in a cartoonish style using bright colors. Sometimes animations like the burning fire in the hearth, blinking eyelids and moving leaves give some nice extra atmosphere to certain locations. During the game you will hear an irritating trumpet or saxophone playing an endlessly repeating jazzy tune, which can luckily be switched off. The voice acting is very good, as we are used to from these developers. There are also some solid sound effects here and there, such as an alarm going off and Sherlock lighting a candle.

The game is played using only the left mouse button, with the inventory on the lower right side of the screen. On the lower left there are buttons for the main menu and a walkthrough, which I couldn’t get working on my Mac. Fortunately the walkthrough can also be found on YouTube. The puzzles are what you might expect from a detective game. You have to do some interrogation, examine every location (comprising Sherlock’s home, Charles’s apartment, the mansion and the police station) closely for evidence and other useful things, and use some of the items you find in imaginative ways to solve the crime. Although it doesn’t contain the funny jokes Carmel’s first Sherlock Holmes adventure had, Sherlock Holmes 2 has a much better story and an unexpected ending, together with puzzles that are not extremely easy to solve, which makes this another Carmel Game worth playing.

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Sherlock Holmes 2 can be played online at JayisGames.
 

Other new releases

Not all games are created equal, and freeware games especially come in all shapes and sizes.  Not to be overlooked, the following list might also be of interest, though these games may be significantly shorter or less polished, more experimental titles than those detailed above, some perhaps only borderline adventures to begin with.

There is No Game by Kamizoto – There is no game here, so clicking on this link will definitely not take you to a surreal and intriguing challenge.

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