Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘36 Days a Week’ and ‘Block Out’
Smol day.
36 Days a Week is an interactive freeflowing narrative game by JohnLee Cooper, the indie dev from Canada that we featured on Monday for his game Life In Captivity. This time, players will not be solving puzzles, but exploring poetry in a more interactive way; they determine the order.
The world is flat and empty, save for our strange little protagonist who is stuck within these walls. The only thing that keeps them company are circles, which upon interacting with will give a stanza of a poem. Each room may have multiple circles, which indicate multiple lines of a poem that may be connected, but the player has no obligation to read them in any order, or read them at all. They can simply leave and go to the next room if they feel compelled to. Or perhaps they wish to ignore some parts of the poem for personal reasons, such as it hitting too close to home?
That is the beauty of it, that there is no semblance of anything really. You get to decide what you want, with the only thing that you cannot do is leave. Making your way through all of the poems may be challenging, especially since they will not always make sense — or perhaps they do, and I just did not have the right mindset at the time of reading each specific poem. Neverthless, you’ll make your way to the ‘end’, and find exactly what you were not looking for. It’s an example of how poetry and narration can be influence by how we interact with the game, and subsequently that not all narratives have to have a perfect ‘throughput’ of a plot. Sometimes, you just need to vibe through it. If that’s what you want, then you’re in for a ride.
Block Out is a top-down arena shooter created by Maddykun. Players will select their game mode and enter in to a world of block violence in which survival is key and shooting is mandatory. The key, however, is not how well one can shoot; but how well one can craft a game mode.
At its core, Block Out contains various game modes that mainly revolve around surviving. Movement and shooting are done in a standard WASD way with M1 mouse shooting, while spacebar gives the ability to dodge away from oncoming blocks. M2 (right click) creates a neon slash which can also defeat enemies, and is especially useful when bullets have run dry.
This all sounds relatively simplistic, but this is by design. While I said it was an arena shooter, Block Out is also an arena shooter creator. Nearly all of the elements that control how the player survives within the game, from the combat to the enemies, can be altered to create a new game mode that is set at the beginning. The player can toggle the ability to shoot, slash, dash and even regain bullets on kills. For enemies, there are ways to alter how they spawn, how many remain spawned at a time, if they can shoot and what kind of enemy is even showing up at all. It’s almost more of a sandbox game than just an arena shooting experience. It emphasizes the player’s ability to alter what makes the game fun for themselves rather than giving a static experience.
Those that love being able to tinker with their games will adore Block Out for this alone, but they’ll still need to enjoy arena shooters and simple survival games to get the most out of it. You can even share the game modes with friends if you are so inclined, which helps to make things even more friendly to all. If this is what you have been needing in a game, try Block Out… out. Hm.
