Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘Wooden Hearts’ and ‘Mastermind Classic’
Simple and complex shorts.
Wooden Hearts is a small horror game created by Undead Cartridge, a solo indie developer. Players visit a small, remote location on the banks of the water in the hopes of unravelling a mystery surrounding missing children.
Armed with a lantern and a camera, players will wander the halls in search of keys to open doors that can lead them to clues about the disappearances. Puzzles are relatively simple, usually involving the utilization of certain items in a room in order to access the key, or trigger a door. The camera then gives more contextual clues, as taking pictures of certain items (when a prompt shows) will give some narration in text by the protagonist. It’s a neat way of giving players information without having to worry that the poster or wall text is visible to everyone at all angles.
Clocking in at 15 minutes, what impressed me the most was its ability to tell a story without needing to really ‘tell’ anything. You get all the contextual clues you need from the environments and the few pictures you take, and know for a fact that you would rather not be here anymore. Of course, as a scaredy-cat I nearly didn’t finish the game right near the end. Thankfully the game’s jumpscares are not the same as just ‘throwing objects in front of the player and making a loud noise’, so I was able to power through. It’s a neat concept that could be fleshed out more for those that want more horror, but it knows how to use its time well. Give it a shot if you want a short horror experience.
Mastermind Classic is a brutal puzzle game created by criacuervos, a Swiss game dev who has been featured twice before. This time however we are not in an RPG, but a terrifying game of logic and spatial awareness memorization.
The premise is simple enough; guess the order of the pearls. How hard could that be? Well, there are six colours of pearls, and they can be in one of four slots. The pearls can also be duplicated in colour, which means that the sequence does not need unique coloured pearls. I may not be the best mathematician, but that certainly is a couple million possible combinations.
The only hint the player is given is in these little black and white pearls on the side, visible once a player checks their combination. Black pearls means that one of the four are correct in both position and colour, while white means that the position is off. Unfortunately the black/white pearls do not tell the player which one of the four they are talking about, so even the assistance requires mathematical statistics and logic to utilize.
And this was all on easy. I don’t want to know what it was like on the higher difficulties, especially since I have yet to actually win a game — each one of my attempts went to eight only to realize I was one colour away from victory. If you enjoy classic logic puzzles that demand reasoning and patience (while scoring how long it takes you and how many tries you failed) then this might be a game worth grabbing.
