Cover art by @designbyboo
We’re back again with our monthly feature for @PIZZAPRANKS‘ Indiepocalypse, with a glimpse at the historical first-person shooting of Gods and Generals! While the format doesn’t necessarily entail my covering the full breadth of the game’s many, many follies; it does give me an excuse to highlight some of its most ill-advised mechanics, and to wax poetic on the potential wasted. Specifically: With regards to the American Civil War setting, and to its “unique” handling of single-shot muskets.
First things first, the American Civil War setting: More games in general should be leveraging it — now more than ever. There are themes aplenty to be mined, unique perspectives to place players in, and war stories waiting to be told. Now, I’m going to add the condition here that the Southern Confederacy should obviously be vilified for all their rottenness and evil, or at the very least show any sympathetic soldiers to be grievously misled. Gods and Generals gets that bit wrong; by failing to offer anything in the way of commentary or contextualization for your turns as a Confederate character, or seeming to reward you experience points for mowing down scores of fleeing and surrendering Union soldiers. Ideally, I reckon a modern indie take on a Civil War game would either center around the historic “brother against brother” slogan, exploring the deterioration of family around opposing beliefs and politics; or the perspective of African American soldiers enlisted in the Union forces, for whom the work of war was made the toughest, and the ultimate stakes could not be higher.
Games from the bundle I feel compelled to highlight this month include Jeremy W. Kaufmann’s When There Is No More Snow: A ZZT-styled visual novel, with rich ANSI visuals and lots of neat branching paths. I’ve still got to work my way through a handful of the remaining endings, as a matter of fact, and I’m using this bit of text as a reminder to myself to do so. Also included is Dani Soria’s ASMR: A coming out story contained with a simulation of an ASMR video. Some of the sounds and mouth fixation (including some minor dental trauma) stuff might be a little tough for some to stomach, but I found the whole experience to be a neat little bit of experimental visual story-telling. It takes a grand total of roughly 5 minutes to play through, and I highly recommend doing so. Of course, I’m also compelled to recommend the entire lot of games included in the bundle, for an always diverse slice of the itch.io indie scene.
