Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘perfect park’ and ‘#EscapeRoomSimulator’
Simulation Station
perfect park is a physics racing game created by tjern, a solo indie dev based in Sweden. Players will be joining in a radical race in the hopes of somehow parking perfectly — where that parking spot resides, however, is not ‘normal’.
The cars that each player will get do not function in the way that many might expect. Every action to alter the car’s direction is fueled by rockets; yes, full on super-powered rockets. This mean that every turn is high powered, every rotation can become violent, and propulsion through the air without contact with the ground is possible. This all allows for brutal drifts and lightning-quick accelerations in all directions in order to reach the objective; that objective is a target to ‘park’ in, and I do mean an actual target.
Regardless of the game mode, players will fly in to massive red and white targets in order to win, which is easier said than done. As anyone who has played a physics simulation knows, they can be incredibly finicky to the point of impossible to perform specific actions. I spent thirty minutes just trying to get through a single time trial because I kept missing the target by fractions and having to go back to the start to try again.
The draw is that you won’t be doing this alone. Perfect park is a multiplayer game at heart, and while there are single player situations to play in it is best with others who are crashing in to you as you go. Finding new ways to cut through the map while your friends and foes do the same, accidentally colliding at a bizarre angle and then flying in different directions just never gets old. So start your rocket engines, honk your horns, and get ready to just floor it everywhere. Good luck!
#EscapeRoomSimulator — Alpha Access is a sandbox simulation of virtual escape room proof-of-concepts by Liam Twose, an indie developer and #PitchYaGame Creator based in the United Kingdom. Players will dive in to a series of escape rooms found in the digital space, hoping to find the solution to each room’s puzzles while opening the door to escape rooms in all spaces.
Upon entry, any player familiar with escape rooms will recognize the scenario; the player is trapped in a dark room, there’s a large visible sign and a lack of power. Using vague hints and their own intuition, players will enter each room and attempt to uncover what exactly the puzzle is so they can move to the next puzzle.
Half of the fun of escape rooms is not knowing what the puzzle is immediately and having to uncover the solution while also finding out what they are trying to solve. It is why so many escape room players have tales of accidentally ‘brute forcing’ puzzles, like how I forced through the keypad solution. It is not bad, but since players are looking for what the puzzle is at the same time it can lead to hilarious interactions with the room where the puzzle is solved before the player even knows there was a puzzle.
While not necessarily a cohesive ‘game’ in the same sense that many may be expecting, #EscapeRoomSimulator does give a fantastic proof of concept for making escape room-like environments for players to explore and enjoy. There are lasers, dorky bouncing puzzles, and much more that normally would be hard to pull off in a real world scenario. I’m not sure if this is still supported, but it is still a fun little game.
