Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘Wondee’, ‘Disobedient Sheep’, and ‘Star Escape’
TRIPLE HEADER
Wondee is a curious arcade game created by Garret Polk, a solo indie developer with a fascination for shapes. Originally created as a way to learn how to make games and how to launch them on Steam, players will follow a small sphere named Wondee with the goal of eating all of the Dots and avoiding all the Pointies.
The core of Wondee is to fulfill the objective given by the area through moving across three rails and avoiding dangers. Wondee can only move left and right (in a general sense), but can switch between rails by going up and down — it does not matter if one is using controller or keyboard.
Collecting Dots always gains Wondee points regardless if there is an objective, and the Pointies can either be dodged by going to a different rail or jumping over them. If Wondee runs in to a Pointie, damage is taken, but this can be recovered by finding a heart on the track to refill the life.
The other major item on the track are these curious orange Dots, sometimes doubled up, which turn Wondee in to the ultimate life form changing from Pink to Orange. In this form, Wondee is immune to damage by standard Pointies and can destroy them for more points — hence the Pac-Man parallel.
The game modes are what give Wondee its flair, as each mode’s goal can be completely different in feel and flow. Timed just has Wondee surviving on infinite rails until the time is up, collecting as many point as possible through whatever means while avoiding the Firewall.
Chase Challenge and Evasion are nearly identical to each other, as both have the player complete specific challenges within a short amount of time to reset the timer and elongate the run before exiting. The difference is that Chase Challenge has the orange Dots to fight back against the Pointies whereas Evasion does not (at least, I never found any).
Finally is Dark mode, a peculiar version that has the best music and the trippiest aesthetic as the colours become dark and foreboding; in reality, it is quite similar to the previous modes but everything moves in reverse.
It’s simple, but that’s the best part about it; you get sucked in to the simplicity of just going back and forth, dodging things and gathering all of the points possible. There are even hats you can acquire to alter how certain interactions work, like the beret I got that let me suck up Dot from farther away.
Just by playing around in Wondee will you get the satisfaction of Pac-Man with the silliness of hats. If you love that combo, then you’ve got a game.
Disobedient Sheep is the aptly named cooperative/competitive arcade game created by Laurie James of Wales, better known as sicklydove, with assistance from Damion Sheppard (apt last name, no?) and Bradley Smith. Players will select one of many cute dogs that are tasked with keeping the sheep safe in this utter minefield of a field, or compete against each other to see who has the best discombobulated sheep herd.
Let’s start with the basics of both game modes; players will run around as a dog in area populated with sheep. These sheep, as expected, do not want to be near the dog so they run in the opposite direction. Dogs can charge up a bark that effects a cone in front of them to speed this process up to the point of nearly launching the sheep that are affected by the bark.
With those mechanics solidified, here’s the kicker; the two players share a controller. In the base version of the game, every two players will be sharing a single controller with player 1 controlling the left half and player two getting the right half — if there is a player 3/4 then another controller is needed. Since there is only one action in ‘barking’ and the rest is movement this makes sense, but it also brings an extra level of chaos like the old Flash games days where multiplayer was played on the same keyboard.
This is where similarities end, however, and the game modes dictate the outcome. In co-operative, players will be attempting to keep as many of the sheep alive as hazards attempt to destroy them. Both modes of co-operative are the same in the gameplay sense, with the main difference being how the players perceive time. Survival has the clock winding down to a zero and seeing how many sheep are still alive, whereas Endless starts at zero and sees how long players can last til all sheep are destroyed by the bombs and anvils.
‘Versus’ changes the formula to be PVP and brings three different modes. The one seen above is King of the Hill, where players will compete to see who can have the most sheep in the inner circle the longest.
Survival is the same as previous, but now it is about keeping the player specific sheep alive and letting the rest get conveniently removed.
Sheepball is probably the mode many would’ve associated with a sheep-herding game immediately, involving players trying to get generic sheep in to carts to be taken away. Interestingly after so many sheep (I believe three?) are put in to one cart that cart is removed and that player must wait until it is brought back to continue their onslaught. More than likely it is to allow players to catch up, but also frees up that one player to be an utter nuisance to everyone else.
With little pickups and large hazards coming from the sky to spice up every game, Disobedient Sheep is a perfect co-op/competitive game that can be brought out to any function. It balances the line of hilarious absurdity with controls that are super easy to pick up and learn, while being juuuuust difficult enough to control to make things challenging.
If you are not a fan of sharing controllers for any reason, there is an accessibility option to turn it off so that you and your friends can still play without getting too close for one’s comfort.
If you need a great party game, then you’ve got sheep right here. Nobody will fall asleep, I promise. Probably.
Star Escape is a chaotic competitive arcade game created by Ampersand Game Studios, an indie team based in the United Kingdom. Players will select one of the many colourful characters and find themselves in a party of up to nine before getting sent to a planet and immediately told to jump for their lives.
The goal of Star Escape is to survive longer than anyone else in the game by continuously jumping from planet to planet without getting swallowed by the supernova that is below. This means that if players go below the screen, they are ‘killed’, so the idea is that ‘up is good, down is bad, keep going up’.
To do so, each player will use whatever input device they have to point in the direction they want to jump before releasing the jump button — it can be charged up to allow for a larger jump. Once midflight, collision with a planet will immediately orient the player’s character so that they can do it all over again.
Missing a planet makes things wild as it then takes in to account the gravitational pull of the closest planets and whether or not the player would be affected enough to allow for physics to do its work. If not, the player will continue on their arc until they go through the bottom, hit another planet, or hit the wall. The wall conveniently bounces the player quite a bit, so aim for that if unsure.
It goes without saying that this game is fast. Immediately upon a level’s start, players are bouncing themselves out the gate, and since the screen seems to correlates to where the majority of players are (with bias towards the person in first) those who lag behind in those opening seconds are immediately culled from the game. Even then, once a rhythm is established suddenly there are power ups that players can grab that freeze others in place, swap positions and create black holes.
There are meteors crashing downwards and enemy ships firing bullets that instantly kill anyone they touch. It almost feels like a competitive bullet hell than it does a ‘tower climbing’ game since there is so much to look out for that one might even forget that they missed the planet they were aiming for.
By collecting the points in each map, you and your friends can unlock new characters, upgrades, and even buy out to start at new levels instead of always having to start from level 1 and make your way up. There is a lot going on, especially if you decide that 9 is a totally rational number to have in a game from the start. That doesn’t stop it from being quite the colourful ride though, as it can even be played on mobile so that controllers aren’t as necessary.
If you love your games thick and fast, while also having scalability in a way that rewards everyone for playing with more customizations, then this might be a great game to grab.
That was a lot! Software for the page is tomorrow.
