Indies for the weekend

meloveyou

Well, the title says it all. Actually no, no it doesn't, really doesn't at all. This one is really out there both in terms of setting, but also in the environment, art style and story. This is a different game and in this case different is good. You will get a lot by reading the game's description on the game page but that is usually not the entire truth. You are, as what seems a process in a computer, a garbage collector. What a garbage collector usually does inside a computer is that once a process finishes it will take back the resources that the process has used and return them to the computer for some other project to use. Here it's something else though, here it just reads messages that it finds during your journey. The messages you find though are very strange, as one part is very ominous and foreboding while the others are kind and "loving". Of course, not all is as it seems and it's up to the player to figure out what's happening. I gotta say that this one had me hooked. Not just because of the mystery around the goings-on but I also found the setting and the art style captivating. This is like a said earlier a very different game from what I'm used to, but different in a really good way.

Neon Code

This one is one of the most ambitious ones I've played so far especially since it's a one-man developer team. You play as a detective out to solve a murder and as per usual you go out looking for clues and talking to people, trying to figure out what has happened and why. Taking place in a futuristic city with enough cyberpunk influences the only thing missing was Harrison Ford showing up in a trenchcoat. The presentation is top-notch with some pretty nice visuals and the environment really staying true to the cyberpunk aesthetic. The music, even though there isn't much of it is a nice complement to the overall experience. The conversations are mostly done by text and here I would have wished that the developer had taken help from someone that is a native English speaker since some of the dialog comes off pretty strange considering the grammatical errors. There are also some technical issues that I hope get ironed out in a later iteration. At one point I fell through a wall finding myself inside a room that apparently shouldn't have been part of the game. On another occasion, my car flipped over and I wasn't able to flip it back around and thus making it unable for me to finish the quest I was on. This prompted me to restart from an earlier checkpoint which was so for back that I needed to re-complete several missions once again. So the checkpoint system would need to be looked over as well. Still, though this really was a nice surprise and I hope the developer keeps working on this or at least a sequel, especially since the game ends on a cliffhanger