Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
Recently thousands of game developers got together for another round of the Ludum Dare game jam, creating a mountain of games in the space of a single weekend. The theme for the most recent jam was "Connected Worlds," and plenty of devs took it in unique directions. Among them was the team behind Octodad: Dadliest Catch. Together they produced Antbassador, a game whose comically loose physics and lighthearted attitude make its lineage clear.
Antbassador may be short, but it absolutely left me wanting more. Here's why:
In Antbassador, you control a particularly dapper hand visiting the queen of the ants (Queen Antoinette, naturally) and her kingdom of Antopia. After a long and bloody war, you're set to make peace between the two factions of ant and man, provided you can keep your heavy, clumsy mitts from landing on any of Antoinette's subjects' fragile exoskeletons, even as you flick their hats off.
It's just super rude to squash your hosts, you know?
Antbassador a very short game; it was developed in just a few days after all. If you manage to keep the titular antbassador nimble and avoid any unseemly accidents, you can finish the whole thing in a matter of minutes. In spite of its length and much like the original Octodad, which was a student demo, it's still a well-rounded experience. The premise is ridiculous enough to be entertaining on its own, but combined with the clever writing, deliberately clumsy controls and the consistent fixation on tiny little ant hats -- well, it's all downright enchanting.
And that's exactly why I'd love to see more of it. Young Horses' Octodad: Dadliest Catch is easily one of the most endearing games I've played this year. For all the physicsy fumbling it involves, it tells a feel-good (and totally preposterous) story in a way that put a smile on my face even after I'd spent a good quarter of an hour just trying to grab that damn bottle of soda. It was fun, it was silly, but it wasn't shallow or meaningless either. It never felt like a guilty pleasure -- something without any real substance that I had to justify enjoying. It was a great story told well through a series of very entertaining mechanics.
I've spent much of my summer in anticipation of the free DLC promised for Octodad, but I've been just as interested to see what Young Horses plans to do next. If they came out tomorrow with an announcement about Antbassador: A Tale of Two Colonies (or whatever other subtitle) based on this bite-sized game jam experience, I'd be waiting in that virtual queue ready to buy in on day one.
Don't take my word for it. Download Antbassador for Windows free on their Ludum Dare entry page.
Tweet
Comments