Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘Barrel Roll’ and ‘樺ヶ原脱出 — Escape from Kabagahara’
Jam Day I guess?
Barrel Roll is a gamejam arcade game created by Matthew Lawrence, a solo indie developer. Players get to fly a cool figther plane to the end goal, collecting fuel to avoid running out. What’s this? The game jam theme was ‘restricted movement’? Oh no.
Yes, if it were not obvious from the title, this is a game in which the jet has had a serious malfunction and is constantly spinning out of control. The only thing players can do is press ‘SPACE’ which activates the jet’s engine and temporarily halts the spinning. To give some redirection, the SHIFT key pulls up on the jet allowing it to hopefully aim in the direction that is desired.
Here’s the kicker though; once the players stops pressing the engine, the rotation of the barrel roll reverses. If the previous was in a clockwise rotation, this next barrel roll will be CCW. This is what makes it so challenging, as players will need to time both their thrusts and lifts to the tune of both rotations, which can be super tricky if a gas can is missed.
It’s almost more a puzzle game than anything, one that has you going round and round and round and round to get it right. There are quick resets thankfully so that you don’t have to wait until the gas runs out to try again, which is handy.
I will say that this game definitely won’t be for everyone, especially those that may not enjoy being spun virtually for 80% of the time. If you can get past that, it’s a neat little game about movement that might be worth your time.
樺ヶ原脱出 — Escape from Kabagahara is a text-based adventure game created by Edouard Moinard, a solo indie dev based in Japan. Featuring both a console and some sweet art, players will be delving in to a strange forest known as Kabagahara and unravelling why they are there; if there even is an answer.
Text-based adventures don’t get a lot of love or show up often in the bundle, so to give a small recap; players are given a console window to type specific commands. Here, the commands are seen either through the ‘HELP’ option or with red bolded letters. Typing those command words in will perform an action, such as examining the current surroundings.
Many of the action words require a target, such as ‘GO’ which needs a direction or ‘USE’ which needs an object within the player’s inventory. This is to keep everything clean and concise so that both the player understand what they can input and the game itself does not get lost with minute details.
Escape from Kabagahara on its own decides to spice things up a bit with the text based by giving a first-person view on the right of what the player can see. The majority of text-based games I’ve played over the years rarely have visuals outside of a top-down map or still images of the items/rooms they might enter. This first person view instead updates with whatever the player does, transitioning from different areas while walking to even having dangers occur in real time.
Yes, dangers — the forest is not a safe place, after all, and it might require a bit faster typing than one might expect from a text-based game. I would say more, but where’s the fun in that?
While it only takes 20 minutes to complete, Escape from Kabagahara is a brilliantly executed game. It focuses on giving players the ability to know what they can type while also providing visuals to reinforce the experience.
To top it all off it was originally created in a few weeks for the ‘Haunted Hunting Jam’, and then built further to its current form. It may be ‘finished’ more later with more stories, but for now just enjoy the one we have available.
