Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘Timebomb’ and ‘TorqueL’
Spatial awareness is hard.
Timebomb is a mobile arcade game created by Isoteric Games, a solo indie dev based in the USA. Players are attempting to get as far as possible as a size-changing circle, but unfortunately time is not really on their side.
As stated, the goal is to reach a high score based on the amount of time that players can ‘survive’ in a world reminiscent of Flappy Bird and other ‘tap to fly’ games. Instead, however, the circle remains in the centre of the screen and has a time-to-explode on it.
How you extend this timer is the source of the fear and difficulty, for holding one side of the screen shrinks the ball and the other makes it expand. This is necessary as there are actually two circles in play here, with the second being a ring around the darker one. This is the ‘graze zone’ as I call it, and if this hits the pillars the timer is extended so that players can keep going.
As it might be inferred, if the darker-inner circle ever touches a pillar, the game is immediately over as it explodes. It’s a game of spatial frustration, as expanding the circle too fast to meet the upcoming massive gap can instantly lead to a game over, but not grazing enough pillars will lead to the timer running out. Each pillar zoomed by is a missed opportunity to get more time and a hazard being successfully dodged out.
Once this truth has been completed, the game is exactly as you might expect; keep going and beat your own score. It’s meant to be a fun little arcade title to play during some short downtime, one that you think will only take a few minutes until you finally break your high score and get addicted to doing it all over again.
If that’s your style of game, then this might be a good one to grab for your phone. It is only for phone, however, unless you’ve got one of those fancy emulator-type things.
Note: there are two ‘games’ here, with version 1.1b being the one I played and dubbed the ‘intended difficulty’ version. The other is 1.01, the original difficulty, which I can only assume is much harder.
TorqueL or トルクル is a puzzle ‘platformer’ created by FullPowerSideAttack.com, an indie dev in Japan. Players are put in the cube of a hat-wearing protagonist with the goal of reaching the other cube.
The objective sounds simple enough, similar to all platforming games with a puzzle element. The trick here is that the cube cannot necessarily ‘jump’. Instead, players use the four face buttons on the controller to extend their corresponding side of the cube, pushing out from that side.
The cube can still be pushed side to side by the joystick, so force can be applied at any time to create a strange rotation while a side is pushed out. Create a bridge from a side, retract it to push out another, and continue onwards — if it were that simple.
Since physics is involved, gameplay reminds me more of QWOP than anything else, as players will bumble their way along trying to hit the side at the best possible time to rocket themselves forward, although the majority of the time will be spent getting stuck.
But this is just the beginning of the game; where the real fun starts is when the paths begin to diverge. Multiple endings begin to litter the levels, and whichever is picked will set the player along a different route with different challenges to complete.
While some may pick exits based on preference, others may find themselves forced in to some exits due to an inability to reach the others, so the player’s gameplay can effect how they interact with the ‘story’ itself. There’s even a secret ending hidden amongst the rest which I have no idea how to acquire, so I cannot even spoil it.
It’s a simple game with an easy to digest premise, yet the intractability is what makes TorqueL so intriguing to play; you get to choose how you play the game and how it ends. You can go the majority of the game utilizing the bare minimum mechanics — even avoiding some of them entirely — and still reach an ending.
If you like platformers but wish you couldn’t jump in them, you might get a rise out of this.
