Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: Bomb Dolls and Peak Bleak Blues (Vol.3)
The emptiness of the world conveyed many ways.
Bomb Dolls is an open world co-op survival game created by girl software. Players will be joining two friends in a wasteland. Their only hope to survive is to Mad Max their way across the desert, collect souls for reasons, and kiss to save lives!
In Bomb Dolls, three cute girls try their best to survive for as long as possible against the dangerous creatures and circumstances that befall upon them. Each one has a starting gun with three bullets (friendly fire is on, by the way) and a single car to make traveling at least somewhat possible. Littered throughout the world are abandoned encampments and strange oases containing loot, dangerous eyeball monsters, or both. Loot can be cool bombs that can definitely kill the players, health, or more ammo to ensure that those meager shots don’t run out immediately, which they will.
The curious aspect of Bomb Dolls is not the cooperative gameplay. It’s how it is used and ties in with the player’s health. While in sight of at least one girl, health doesn’t seem to be affected too much, but over time it will be slowly whittled down by the elements. Wandering off too far from the others will make the player ‘lonely’, causing their health to deteriorate at a much faster rate. Health can be shared to even things out, but without constantly finding resources the players will eventually succumb.
Death of a single player also negatively affects the others. The three hearts are ‘shared’ — each one represents an alive player. If one dies then the maximum shrinks to 2 hearts. Each player’s health is calculated separately, but the maximum is a group effort. It’s an interesting way of getting players to always work together, knowing that if one of them falls it becomes infinitely harder to survive. It also deters players from wandering off to explore individually.
Bomb Dolls is an interesting take on the infinite survival style of games thanks to its lives and respawn (finding souls) mechanics. There is a slight catch, unfortunately. The game requires exactly three players to play. It makes sense when the hearts are explained, but it does leave the awkward moment of having to tell your friend they’ll be sitting out since there are too many of you. This happened to me, and not the opposite problem of ‘not having enough people available so I had to use two controllers in a weird way’.
If you’re able to find two others to play in a cooperative game, it’s a fun ride through a wasteland to bond with friends and put on some cute outfits.
Peak Bleak Blues is actually a collection of walking simulators created by Connor Sherlock, an indie dev based out of the UK. It goes by the alternative title ‘Walking Simulator A Month Club Vol. 3’, which might be a more correct title since Peak Bleak Blues is one of the titles within. Normally I’d thoroughly break these down one by one, but this is a collection of titles that doesn’t need such a lengthy discussion, just an understanding of the experience. As the title implies, this is the third iteration of the walking simulator bundle, with this volume having more of a focus on mood and vast dead worlds.
‘A Sense of Pieces’ brings players to a lush, mountainous world full of flowers and empty spaces, with some slight views in the distance that resemble crashed machines, but are really massive skeletons.
‘Peak Bleak Blues’ is not in fact blue. It is a hazy red world with a single light shining from a beacon, with seemingly nothing surrounding it and only stretching into more fog and misery.
‘Oubliette’ lives up to its name (a French term for a basement/dungeon accessible only via small hatch). Players will drop for eternity before landing in a strange, almost deep-fried world full of rib cages and broken beams that goes forever.
‘The Heat Sinks Without Us’ brings the player in to a grey and dismal city, almost choking them in the fog. Its “sequel”, ‘Part 20732’, lets them see what the future for this place may be, with shades of bright red and sand as far as the eye can see.
‘Veins of Light’ gives a strange scan-line world of greens and blacks with a soundtrack that seems technologically foreign. The opposite emotion is given in the dewy morning forest of ‘The English Evergreens David Bowie Is Running To’.
‘This Is Not A Place Of Honor’ gives another bleak world to explore. This time it is one of rain and spikes, littering the muddy world as thunder crashes above.
Almost poetically, the volume wraps up with ‘Isle of the Dead’, an empty planet of water with a single island containing a single set of closed doors.
I can’t really say much outside of these brief descriptions because they are exactly what they appear to be on the surface; empty, dead worlds for players to explore. There’s no true plot, no direction nor guidance. There are only the emotions that are felt and created by interpreting the colours and landscape. Perhaps you’ll enjoy a world of rain and mud, covered in spikes and invoking the remnants of a battlefield millennia after the conflicts. Perhaps you want something calmer, like a forest. No matter what you want, this volume has an emotional state for you.
