Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘Insufficient Adjectives’ and ‘Ring of Fire — Prologue’
Experimentals ahoy
Insufficient Adjectives is a puzzle game created by Razbury Games, a solo studio run by Dean Razavi, with assistance by Cooper Knapp, art by Kenney and Music by Play On Loop. Originally commissioned by Playcrafting for their 2019 Play NYC Convention, players will attempt to guide delivery trucks to the proper destinations. Only problem? Nobody is exactly sure what is in the trucks.
The trucks will be leaving through the centre industrial building, with a few of the surrounding buildings labelled with their professions and others being empty. These trucks do not have specifics on what is within their cargo, but hovering over them will show three adjectives to describe their delivery. Using deductive reasoning, players will guess which store the delivery truck needs to go to, and then use the five tracks on the bottom of the screen to direct the truck. For every track used, a random one will replace it so that the players cannot run out of tracks to use, but also cannot predict exactly which tracks they will have available.
There is no control over when the trucks depart. Players will need to keep track of the centre to see if another truck has sneaked out while they are trying to guide the other. No matter where the truck ends up — even on the side of the road — it will reveal the cargo that was described earlier. If that cargo is at the correct location, congrats points are gained! Otherwise, it is deemed a crash. Too many crashes, and the game ends.
This might seem like an odd game, but Insufficient Adjectives has a specific goal in mind; using this game as a vehicle to talk about how we describe things in our lives. Without the exact terms, we resort to using adjectives to assist in describing what something is, be it an object, a place, or a person. With only these descriptors, we immediately make associations based on our own lives and past. Sometimes this can pay off, and sometimes it blows up in our face.
This game forces you to make those snap judgements to showcase just how difficult it can be, and while it can feel a bit rough around the edges it also is a great time for anyone who enjoys slightly stressful titles.
Ring of Fire — Prologue is a detective narrative game created by Far Few Giants, the UK indie studio that brought us The Night Fisherman earlier on in the bundle. This time around, players are stepping in to the shoes of Detective Grovenor in a grizzled future. A brutal murder puts her in to pursuit of a terrifying murderer known only as the Ring of Fire killer.
Set within a ‘solarpunk utopia’, players will visit the scene of the most recent crime with Grovenor’s latest partner Nacir. By searching the room, interrogating witnesses and investigating pieces of evidence the scene is slowly built. Conversations between characters on the scene give players the ability to choose how they wish to respond to reveal different pieces of information and change how they are viewed.
Is Grovenor a pure hardass that swears at everyone, almost as if they don’t even care? Or are they manipulatively nice, slowly prying away at everyone around them until their barriers drop? However the approach, players will need to keep an eye on every piece of information given, no matter how trivial it may seems. Visuals and text are both important, so let nothing escape.
This leads in to the first real ‘deviance’ from what one may expect from this style of game, for it encourages a ‘pen and paper’ approach. There is no place to write down notes in game, and Grovenor’s prompts during conversations rarely give ‘prompts’ for information that may have been missed. Instead the conversations are about tone, and players need to use the information they have to determine what tone and angle they want to take to ensure that they get what they need.
This notetaking extends to the database and SatNav that players can use. The database can be used to extract more information about suspects, locations and even previous cases. If players want to go anywhere, it needs to be placed in the SatNav. Even the locations need to be documented or else players will be stuck in the apartment for the entire time.
While short — it is a prologue after all, and advertised as such — Ring of Fire Prologue does a fantastic job of setting up more than just the characters that you’ll be spending time with. It sets up a curious future world full of sunlight and masks, where everyone has so many alter-egos you are not even sure who is who anymore. You’ll be delving in to a brutal world, and hopefully finding out how the Ring of Fire killer is caught — or if they ever are. Nevertheless, there’s implications for Grovenor’s career on the line, so good luck.
Currently the game is on hold, so if you finish the prologue you’ll just have to wait.
