Sometimes the name of one famous game designer can say more than a few pages of press releases. For example, "Bleszinski" certainly means "brutal animal action", "Molyneux“—that you can’t believe a single word from the interview. But "Tim Shafer"has been implying "an amazing adventure" for many years.
His recent Broken Age was able to meet all the expectations of the fans, but the next project at the time of announcement was very puzzling. The game was called Hack’n’Slash, and in the description there was something like “it’s like Zelda, only with unique hacking mechanics". It was completely unclear what to expect. However, now that the game has reached Early Access, we can breathe a sigh of relief: there were, of course, some surprises.
It’s difficult to say anything intelligible about the plot now – there are not enough chapters that are critical for understanding it. The beta version demonstrates the following: the main character, Alice, gets a USB sword in her hands, and some of the surrounding objects show off the corresponding inputs. And this has an interesting effect on mechanics.
Together with the girl (whose costume is very reminiscent of Link from the “Zelda” mentioned in the announcement), the talkative red ball Bob goes on a journey. In general, no one is pursuing a specific goal: both are cheerfully shouting “adventure time”!» rush to any proposed quest. Until at a certain point another character appears who has the powers of a USB sword.
The story takes place in a fantasy setting with fairies, aggressive turtles and magicians. The only very specific feature of this world is typical “Shafer” humor, unobtrusive, kind and charming. The game looks, sounds and feels like great family entertainment: every character is carefully animated, the dialogue is full of naivety and is devoid of any vulgarity. But after half an hour it turns out that the game’s gameplay is not suitable for everyone.
Let’s start, as they casinofun.uk say, from afar. About ten years ago, almost every game had a console – a command line that allowed you to directly influence events taking place in the virtual world. Knowing the commands left by the developers, it was possible to get any item from the game resources, load the desired location and enter cheat codes. Now imagine that the gameplay itself is built on such commands.
Along with the sword, the main character receives a real developer toolkit. If you tap on an object that has a USB input, a menu with parameters will open. For example, the only property of a door may be its state – “open” or “closed”. You are free to switch it.
Further – more. The menu of an ordinary stone is filled with an abundance of properties that will make real programmers laugh out loud. You can configure “how many times to move the object”, “how far it moves”, “how fast it goes” and even “how many seconds you need to hit an obstacle before it starts moving”. In this case, there are absolutely no restrictions: you can change the values to either negative or infinitely large.
It quickly becomes clear that the usual gameplay is not here. Soon it will be possible to “hack” your own supply of lives, increasing them to infinity. You learn to be creative in solving any problem: for example, instead of setting the enemy’s life total to zero, it’s much more fun to set the damage they deal to negative and see what happens. A person who has never delved deeper into a computer beyond the desktop will find it difficult at first to get involved in the process, but even he will quickly get the hang of it.
We are Alice, and our name is Legion
After half an hour it becomes clear that Tim Shafer did not betray himself and gave gamers a quest wrapped in the most original wrapper. The player is in virtually no danger, but each obstacle requires an extraordinary approach to interacting with the outside world.
Once we are completely comfortable with changing the parameters of surrounding things, we will be offered to go even further: thanks to the magic hat, “hitboxes” will begin to be displayed on the screen. These are conditional squares that indicate the boundaries of game objects: walls, enemies, hero. Moreover, as in the case of a flash drive, this is not an adaptation, but a real tool that the developers used. It allows you to see object names as they are written in the program code, track level boundaries and invisible platforms that have outlines but no textures.
What starts to happen next in the game is difficult to describe in words. Each item in the inventory begins to edit the gameplay in the most daring way: change the speed of movement of objects, distort physics, look for addresses in RAM and give objects new names. Each new toy is dedicated to a separate episode, long enough to reveal the full potential of the idea. The puzzles become more and more wild over time until they reach their climax – changes in the program code.
At a certain point you have to understand the internal logic of the game. True, here the authors made concessions and decided not to use very specific things like real programming languages. Everything works with the help of algorithmic machines, each of which has a number of parameters and performs typical functions: “if X>Y, then …”, “when the program is executed, do …” and so on.
All the previous fun will be, in principle, understandable to a person unfamiliar with the question, but this particular part can cause serious difficulties, because so far it has been done quite roughly and not very intuitively. The “quest” element is sometimes replaced by real algorithms, and this is an extremely dubious decision. However, for people “in the know” this is a plus, because the game gives the main thing – a feeling of such total permissiveness that any “sandbox” would envy.
To date Hack’n’Slash looks like fun that will really give users an idea of how games are developed. After such a detailed immersion into literally every aspect of virtual world programming, the gamer will not get lost in any real editor. The beta version status and some roughness add additional charm to the process – bugs created by your own hands cause sincere joy.
But the big question remains: will the authors be able to make this demo a real commercial product?? Sometimes they go a little too far with the specifics, so it becomes difficult to perceive what is happening. But if the idea works out, then we will get a very, very non-standard thing.
