LogFAQs > #966440024

#35: Spookware

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/2/4/AAA-H0AADblg.jpg

There is an emerging genre in the indie space, and we need to talk about it. I don't have a name for it yet, but I like to call it the "NPC Quest." This type of game may be purely story driven or it may have some gameplay, but a large portion of this style of game is walking around a world, meeting a series of fun, cute, and increasingly useless NPCs, and talking to them, sometimes to advance the story, sometimes just for fun, experiencing the game's witty writing along the way. Obviously, the big establishing place-setter for this genre is Undertale, without question. It's not the FIRST game to do this, but it is by far the most popular and influential. Yes, Undertale has gameplay, it has story, but it is MOSTLY about walking around and talking to NPCs. And that aspect of the game is great! Undertale has dozens and dozens of cute characters to meet and quotable lines to read. It takes good writing and design to make this type of game compelling, but it can work, at very little development cost, which is why we're seeing a lot of indie games doing this now. Point is, Spookware is one of these.

It also happens to be a horror-themed WarioWare game, which is the meat of the game that you're talking to NPCs to get to.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/2/5/AAA-H0AADblh.png

Spookware has a bit of a confusing history which needs to be addressed, because it's actually three games, and not just one, but they're all 2020-2021 games so no eligibility problems here. The original Spookware was a short game jam game; a short series of games you can play in just a few minutes. It's like WarioWare, which I probably don't need to introduce; you have extremely short minigames that pop up with their own control schemes and goals, and you have about five seconds to figure out what to do and beat the game. It's fast and frantic and Spookware really understands how to capture that same feeling. The horror movie aesthetics, which range anywhere from 'spooky skeletons' to 'slasher flick', are also a lot of fun; you can just tell the dev had a fun time designing the visuals and putting the games together. They all have a sort of handmade style to them like someone took a lot of clip art and made a puppet show out of it - that's the best way I can describe it. It's an unpolished jam game that lasts a few minutes (although it took me a few tries to beat), but it's a good proof of concept. And they built upon it.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/2/6/AAA-H0AADbli.jpg

The second game is Spookware @ The Video Store, which is itself part of an anthology of horror games that I didn't play and don't remember the name of, but I just love the idea of an anthology of short horror video games; it feels really true to the tradition of the horror genre. This is only a little bit longer than the jam version, having a couple of sets of games, but it also introduces a framing device; three skeleton brothers named Lefti, Midi and Righti, and the microgames take the form of horror movies that the brothers are watching. This framing device is a lot of fun, but it's still not a full game yet. Both of these previous games are available for free as Spookware: Watch Party on Steam, and I recommend checking them out.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/2/7/AAA-H0AADblj.jpg

Then there's Spookware, the fully realized version of the game, and this is the one that's available in the Ukraine bundle, if you bought that. Well, I say fully realized, but it's episodic - only the first three episodes are out right now, so as of now it's an incomplete game, but I'm talking about it anyway since what's there lasts for probably about 2-3 hours and holds up pretty well on its own. In Spookware (just titled Spookware), you again play as the three skeleton brothers, watching horror movies in the basement, but then the game takes a turn into the NPC Quest thing I was talking about earlier. In between playing sets of microgames, you wander around and talk to people and have a madcap series of adventures, occasionally discovering more microgames to play along the way, until you get to a new set of microgames at the end of the chapter.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/2/8/AAA-H0AADblk.jpg

Walking around and talking to people could overstay its welcome pretty well, but the skeleton NPCs that populate the game are fun to talk to, and the game's writing plus the occasional microgame getting thrown into the mix keeps things fresh. The game also manages to not overstay its welcome by having every chapter be different; not only are the scenarios different but the theming and style of games and even the framing mechanics around them change, new gimmicks showing up along the way. And the microgames themselves are a fun reward for playing through the game; it's always exciting to get a new batch of them, and the anticipation for them makes them more fun, in a way.

The best thing I can say about it is that I'm really excited for further chapters to come out - what's here is still a pretty long game, so once all the promised chapters are out this could turn out to be a pretty long adventure game with a full WarioWare's catalog worth of microgames to play, and the thought of that is pretty enticing. I'm looking forward to seeing where this one goes and I feel like it might be worth revisiting on a future goty list. I figure that developing a lot of microgames takes time with having to make new assets and controls for each one just for 5 seconds of gameplay, which is why the game paces them out with a story in between, so I expect it'll be a little bit of time until we see further chapters, but hopefully it'll be before Deltarune comes out.

Next up: Remember when I said I had three Time Loop games on my list? I lied, because I'm an idiot and miscounted. There's four Time Loop games on my list. This is the first one of them, and also I think the first game on this list that was really taken seriously as a GOTY contender.