Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘Best Garden’ and ‘RunJumpFail’
Small wild games
Best Garden is a small arcade game created by Luke Parker, an indie dev in the UK. Players are gardeners in a competition, hoping to be graded the best garden out of the bunch. But this isn’t just normal gardening; this is speed gardening.
Within a minute, players need to have their garden done to be judged. To do this, the garden is laid out in squares and players will select what they want for each square as seen on the bottom left. These items can be cycled through, from dirt to stone to different grasses and flowers.
However, dirt is the ‘vanilla’ state, meaning that players must tear out a square and ‘return it to dirt’ in order to put something new there. This can add precious seconds to the time it takes to build the garden, and more often than not these gardens will look something like mine above; unfinished, but interesting.
Once the minute is up, the judges will appear and players may win against the unknown opponents, or lose — either or, the gardening fiasco is over. For now.
It’s made to be a lightning round of gardening, and therefore best played in that way; see how fast you can put things down, come up with a plan, and make a great looking garden. I recommend using a gamepad as I found the keyboard inputs to be less responsive, and in a game about speed, response is everything.
Nevertheless, the idea is fun. If you want to try it out yourself, the link is at the bottom.
RunJumpFail is a hilarious running action game created by Luke O’Connor, an indie dev from Canada. Players will follow the tale of HappyMan, a cute little fellow with a permanent smile as he attempts to reach the star in each level. If only he could stand still for a few moments.
At first glance, this is a game about reaching the end by avoiding all of the dangers, which makes sense — there is a star to reach and a guy trying to get there.
The kicker here is that HappyMan is incapable of standing still. Constantly hopping from one foot to another, always running in place, Happyman takes time to ramp up in speed and just as much time to stop. Jumping is especially challenging as players need to press the button while at least one foot is on the ground, and not timing it correctly can cause Happyman to careen off the side of the platform.
It reminds me a lot of QWOP in 3D: it requires a lot of coordination and preparation to avoid the dangers but once a groove is acquired it can be hard to stop.
Where the challenge comes in is that everything can end the run. Just running in to a wall causes Happyman to ragdoll over the floor. Miss the jump and barely have his foot hit the front of a wall? That’s a ragdoll. There are so many ways to fail that it actually becomes more amusing to fail than not. Seeing the avatar just flop around is hilarious on its own, but to see the numerous ways that can happen makes it that much more special.
With obstacle courses and trials to run, RunJumpFail has a lot of game to play. Sure, you might find yourself frustrated at your lack of progress, but at the same time it’s that silliness that makes it fun in the first place.
If you loved QWOP and other games that focus solely on physics movement and nonsensical ragdolling, then this might be the game for you.
