Jan 5
Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘Desastre Colectivo’ and ‘Shrine to Anubis’
Little short games
Desastre Colectivo is a chaotic arcade game created by NebulaProjects, the studio seen twice this page already. This time, players assume the role of a teacher trying her best to keep the bus calm so that the bus driver doesn’t crash.
In this strange bus, each student has their own seat to which they can get up to all kinds of loud mischief within. As the teacher, players will go up and down the aisle and need to discipline the student individually when they begin to act up. This is most obvious by a change in their sprite, from text appearing when talking too loud to a light shining on their face when using their phone.
The only way to tell if the player is doing well is by the bars on top. The first one is a bit dubious to understand, signifying the collective points gained by silence. The red is a constantly increasing bar based on the number of students creating noise, which will happen constantly unless the player can somehow get to everyone instantly.
It’s an short game, as the devs even stated this was a fun little game jam based around education — even if the theme has been somewhat abandoned. Nevertheless it lets you finally shut up those kids on a bus that you’ve may have always wanted to do but didn’t have the courage in real life to do. Totally not speaking from experience.
Shrine to Anubis is a grand platformer created by Stuart Foley Games, a solo indie developer whose first commercial launch was this very game. So what can we find inside?
Well that’s the thought of our protagonist as well, who is a researcher hoping to prove their fellow professors wrong by delving in to an ancient tomb to prove that the Egyptian gods were real. As one might guess, this may have disastrous consequences.
As to be expected, players will be jumping across various platforms to reach a door that leads them to the next level of the pyramid. Many of these platforms are hazardous in their placement, while many others contain the hazards as the platforms. This can include pits of fire, continuous spike traps, and even repeating arrow launchers — I’m now deadly curious to see who maintains those.
All of this and more wants to keep our protagonist from discovering anything, which in turn drives them to keep going even farther to see just what is behind the next door.
Thanks to the setting it is easy to become immersed in the silly excitement of ‘tomb raiding’, even if the game is simple and short. The soundtrack pulls a lot of this weight as well, and I found myself drawn in to it more than I was expecting from such a concise title.
You won’t get a super hard platformer — I was able to reach the ending within the hour which means you could probably find the end in 15 minutes if you were ‘hardcore’ about it. Yet the fun of finding the gold pieces and simply jumping around with our little squishy professor and their silly hat is just enough of a treat that you might want to slow down and enjoy yourself.
However you play, give it a whirl if you have an hour to kill.
There is only one game tomorrow, which is convenient for me as I would only be able to finish one as I have an engagement. This page has been way more full of games than it has been in a long while, so it feels strange to finally reach its end. Oh boy, there aren’t many pages left. See you tomorrow.
