Now that the holidays are over and the gaming market is relaxing after the selling binge I can take some time to get caught up on older things and focus on the indie market. For instance, when you put something on Kickstarter you may want to check for some warning signs before wasting everyone’s time on a doomed project. The fastest method is to go through the list of active and failed projects; if your game looks anything like every other damn thing you may want to stop. If your project looks like it was designed by someone using babies first paint shop you may want to stop. If you are writing the introduction page to your project and the best you can come up with is ‘I have this great idea that is really just a blind mash up of what made popular games good’ then you need to get the hell out. Point being everyone wants to think they have the best idea but if mommy is the only one who tells you your special I wouldn’t take it as a sign of greatness and run straight to the bank.
Recently a couple of titles caught my attention for varying degrees of uniqueness. Refuge is one of those games, a kind of hide and seek where the winner bashes the loser’s skull in or the longest death match ever. It’s gritty, cold and dark and done in mostly black and white so I guess hunting each other down wasn’t film noir enough. The island or ark or whatever the game takes place on is interesting but doesn’t look very large in retrospect, not if you want to be serious about the survival aspect. I do find it intriguing though, hunt or be hunted… unless both people just try to out survive the other in which we have ourselves a very long stalemate. With multiple weapons and classes every character has some advantage or disadvantage that may get them killed in the end. I also enjoy how each character has its own kind of backstory because it adds a bit of life to the game, although it might not last depending on how few characters there are; not to mention there doesn’t seem to be much of a story.
My main concern with the game is that it is not so much a game as a loose collection of music and digital art pieces; which are all very well done and really set the mood. However, actually putting it all together so that it functions is an entirely other matter. I like the ideas the developers have but I’m not really sure how they could work in a game. The weapons work on a point system like a card game so combat makes sense but how would hiding work? Looking at the examples of the map if you just wait around outside long enough you should be able to see the other character moving around; otherwise you can just search building to building since everything just moves up. While it also appears that there are plenty of buildings to hide in as well there is no way to hide once inside. If the other person tracks you down you are cornered and screwed. If any game was just begging for hunger games style traps it is this one. Not to mention who the other character will be played by; is it online two player or is the other character controlled by the game? Either way you have a major problem because online multiplayer can be tricky to program and unless the AI is fairly smart the game will be laughably simple. Not to mention the major problem, does the map change or is there multiple maps? So far we have only seen one map and if the playing field is always the same it will become boring extremely fast as people just exploit what they already know… kind of killing the survival aspect.
This game has some good ideas and a lot of the design work done but design and development are two different things. Which is kind of a shame because I like the direction it is going in but at the same time you can’t just ask for money for an idea barely off the ground; I wish I was made of money to do more adventurous things but alas. There is a lot of work put into Refuge but at the same time it still has a long ways to go. Maybe if there was some kind of demo or early alpha at least I could get behind it more but at this point there isn’t much to go on. It may very well make it though, it has plenty of time to draw people in if the campaign head plays his cards right. To be fair the campaign might not be asking for that much either, I don’t know what the transition from pounds to dollars is but he may think about adding that in his next update.
