![]() In LLC, the timer goes the other way and ticks down, counting your remaining steps until inescapable death. The only way to do that, however, is to finish the level, so your stealth is an active measure of avoidance rather than hiding, usually in the form of running and screaming like a child. In Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine, it ticks up, and you immediately want to stop it from doing so. There is less a literal timer and more a race between the mining of opportunities.Ī discrete timing mechanism, though, tickles a very fundamental portion of our human brains. You spend most of your time biding it, trying to see if an opportunity presents itself before you expose yourself. The Assassin’s Creed multiplayer is a fine example of this. You wait and you wait and you wait until your moment arrives. Competitive stealth (or even non-competitive or single-player stealth experiences) is often about lingering. The brilliance of this whole setup is the timer. The games move as quick as a Counter-Strike game but with a lot more breathless stalking and swords swinging. Make no mistake LLC is about stealth, but it is fast and reckless stealth. So the only time you can really catch a glimpse of your enemies is when they attack or turn on their flashlight. True to its name, LLC takes place in some rather low light and ninjas, apparently, are constructed almost entirely out of shadows. The biggest issue, though, beyond the constantly ticking timer on your screen of your imminent death is that you can’t see much of anything. The problem is that to kill other ninjas, you have to either fire off your laser shotgun thing or use your sword, the former costing you 15 seconds of time and the latter only being able to be used while running which drains your energy four times as quickly. You have 60 seconds of power available to you, but you can earn more time and power by killing other ninjas (the point being that you are fighting to determine what the Illuminati will do next). In LLC, you play as a ninja, and in keeping with the game jam theme of endless nuclear war, you are powered by nuclear energy. But whereas Receiver was about delving as deep as possible into the mechanics of operating an actual firearm and using it within a traditional (if minimalistic) video game environment, LLC is about exploring the relationship between power and vulnerability. LLC is back in the first-person perspective, a reminder of their last game Receiver. It was created as part of the Mojam 2 charity drive, so 100% of the money they make off of it will go to either Camphill California, a residential care facility for adults with developmental disabilities, or Blender, an open-source piece of 3D modeling software. To be perfectly clear, LLC isn’t a part of Overgrowth, but it is free with a preorder, though you could also buy it for five dollars. It looks pretty neat and somehow improves on a game no one thought they wanted until they played it, but what’s more interesting is a game attached to it called Low Light Combat. What’s Overgrowth? Well, it’s a “spiritual successor” to Lugaru, though it seems to be directly following the events prior with Turner’s lingering anarchistic maneuvers, but whatever. ![]() For example, one video discussing combat changes to Overgrowth shows how the AI predicts your movement and how that influences player combat. And with most of these uploads, narration accompanies the visuals and offers fascinating insight. Now four-person studio, they regularly put up videos on their YouTube channel detailing design decisions, art assets, development progress, and even songs from game soundtracks. Perhaps what is most endearing about Wolfire is that they’re so open. It’s ridiculous and strange and funny and, actually, quite good, especially considering it was made almost entirely by Wolfire’s founder David Rosen. Consider that Lugaru: The Rabbit’s Foot, their first commercial game, is about a giant anthropomorphic rabbit named Turner with rather advanced combat training under his belt. It’s probably more accurate to just call them an oddity. Wolfire Games is more than an indie darling.
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