Stealthy Divorcés And Killer Astronaut Bears: Some Peter Molydeux Game Highlights


Since writing it up on Monday, many more games have been added to the full list of playable prototypes from the goofy, high-energy Peter Molydeux game jam.

I haven’t had time to play even a fraction of the nearly 300 game prototypes available for download, but I have had a chance to play some of the ones that made an impression at the event. Fortunately, there are now videos of many of the games, so you can see them for yourself.

Without further ado:

Unbearable Or: How They Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bear


This one cracked me up, partly because it’s a combination first/second/third-person game but mostly because it has analogue hugging controls and uses hilarious crowdsourced twitter photos for all of the characters. Several games covered the “Bear hugging for oxygen” tweet (one was even also called Unbearable!), but this was my favourite. (OSO2 was also very good and funny.)

Dance Like There’s No Tomorrow


This one is based on a tweet about refilling your health by dancing. The game is actually played with a Dane Dance Revolution pad, and you can watch someone playing the game here. Looks fun!

Coo


One of several “Bird who brings businessmen things to keep them from jumping off buildings” games, Coo was the nicest looking and also the funniest. It’s a surprisingly long game, and really is worth playing, particularly if you can make it up to the ending.

Secret Dad


There’s no video of Secret Dad yet, unfortunately, but I really dig this game anyway. The idea is that a dad who has lost his wife and kids in a divorce still wants to take care of them, so he sneaks through the ducts in his house to undertake household tasks. It’s a very sad concept when you think about it… something like Splinter Cell meets Mrs. Doubtfire. No new mechanics here, but the concept is a killer nonetheless.

Parlance


This one is about a text-adventure game where the text is real, which is a very fun idea. Actually, a very fun idea that was played with a bit in Alan Wake (though not as a text adventure game). Personally, I’d love to see a game like this, where you actually type words to make them real, and then manipulate them via text.

Recidivism


Another one I highlighted in my first post, now you can see it in action — the tweet asks developers to imagine if when you kill someone their death animation loops and burns into your screen so you have to watch it for the rest of the game. And watch it you do! The trick here is that the death animations make the game much more difficult to play, since you can’t see hazards. The sound effects don’t really come across in this video, but they’re very funny.

So, there are a few I liked. But there are many, many more! If you’re interested to hear more about the game jam from the people who organised it, organiser Patrick Klepek has a cool, thoughtful look back up at Giant Bomb, and Brandon Sheffield did a full-on Gamasutra post-mortem that lists all the things that went right and all the things that went wrong.

MolyJam 2012 Games [Official Site]

Top image: Kari Clark

Comments


2 responses to “Stealthy Divorcés And Killer Astronaut Bears: Some Peter Molydeux Game Highlights”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *