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On September 15, 2011, OHR community member Spoonweaver announced plans for the 2012 OHR Random Collaborative Contest, where members could blindly sign up on the contest thread and get paired with a random partner via a dice-roll program. It was a bit like Russian Roulette with a side of short-term marriage, all with a game-making spin. No one knew whom they’d end up with, or whether or not the collaboration would even work. It was a risk on every design level possible. One genius paired with one slacker would equate to a great game with one designer and two names on the label. Two geniuses and no slackers working together ran the risk of overcooking the pot and designing a game that would become too ambitious for its own good. Two slackers and no geniuses working together ran the risk of having two people scratching their heads and complaining a few times and the game never getting made. It was a recipe for the insane. Ten people entered; on October 10th, five groups were formed:
Team 1: Gizmog & Nathan Karr
Team 2: Charbile & marionline
Team 3: Voltie & SDHawk
Team 4: thespazztikone & mjohnson092088
Team 5: Skullduggery Studios & MasterK
With everyone knowing who was working with whom, the journey into the unknown was set in motion. Each of these five teams had many months to put together the most fantastically awesome game they could create. In fact, in a move rivaled only by the Heart of the OHR Contest (and the less popular Epic Marathon) Spoonweaver gave them until July 1st, 2012, a marathon of a deadline, to finish their games.
And then progress started to hit its lull.
On December 2nd, 2011, Spoonweaver decided to add some spice to the contest. In an effort to shake things up a little, he introduced a separate mini-contest to supplement the main contest. The intention was to spur some activity. The hope for a return to progress was noble. This side quest,” in fact, was simple, requiring no thought and little participation from contestants. Each contestant had to upload a screenshot with his or her game journal by December 30th to earn up to 40 points toward his final score. That amounted to nearly a month for a contestant to post a single image of his game – something that takes less than a minute to accomplish. By December 22nd, no one had bothered to post anything. In fact, the journal for the contest had reached a standstill. The contestants were silent. Moderator Spoonweaver’s frustration began to mount.
On January 9th, 2012, after no one had participated in the first mini-contest, he tried another one. This contest, aptly named “Mini Contest #2,” had a small demand: each contestant needed to post a 400-word description of the game he was working on. That’s it. A simple request. Spoonweaver had even given contestants up to January 20th to write it. The promised prize was a package in the mail. It was a mystery that would’ve made Surlaw, the father of the annual mystery pack, proud. By January 26th, only Charbile had bothered to upload the description. Because only one person entered Mini Contest #2, Spoonweaver decided it would be silly to send out the prize package, so he canceled that and all future mini-contests.
And that’s when the shocking revelations involving the 2012 OHR Random Collaboration Contest began to surface. Master K confessed that his partner, Skullduggery Studios, vanished in November after they had agreed on a plot and Skullduggery had chosen to work on the graphics. RMSephy (who wasn’t a contestant) piped in and reminded Spoonweaver that giving people twice as much time to work on something meant that someone else had twice as long to sit on his hands and do nothing while he waits for his partner to make a contribution. Spoonweaver began to understand that the time limit was probably a little too long for comfort. The next day mjohnson092088 confessed that he and his partner, thespazztikone, had just been working on their own games for much of the time since the contest began. Marionline and Charbile had already determined that they wouldn’t have enough time to work on anything for this contest. It was a terrible case of one thread unraveling from another, from another, from another….
Just a few weeks later, on February 22nd, 2012, just a mere four months and one week ahead of the deadline, Spoonweaver decided to throw in the towel. The contest had been a wash. We would never again see the likes of the 2012 OHR Random Collaboration Contest.
At least, not for a few minutes.
Almost as soon as he closed the first contest, he pulled a phoenix out of his spoon and created the second incarnation of the 2012 OHR Random Collaboration Contest. This time he limited the contest to one week, starting on March 1st, 2012 and ending on March 8th, just three months and three weeks shy of the original deadline. And like the first contest, ten people entered (including himself, which actually meant only nine had entered) and five new teams were formed:
RMSephy & Gizmog
BMR & mjohnson092088
Spoonweaver & Master K
SDHawk & TMC
thespazztikone & James Paige
As expected, a few of the old contestants remained, but a few new ones came in and shook the place up, including two of the engine’s developers who came in with noble intentions but was suddenly forced to battle head to head and drag their hapless partners along in their wakes. It would become a contest like no other contest. A fight against mediocrity, a battle to prove who truly works well with other people, it would become a war of the titans. The Giz versus SDHawk. James Paige versus TMC. RMSephy versus Spoonweaver himself. Who would win? Who would become left in the dust? And most importantly, who would even finish their games?
With renewed energy the contestants raced out of the gate and started posting development journals like there was no tomorrow. And already trouble was beginning to brew. RMSephy and Gizmog threw out their original idea on the fifth day of the contest. They were now staring in the face of a 48-Hour Contest game by turning their multicore gameplay into a last-minute rhythm game. After spending much of the week working on a few graphics and killing engine bugs, TMC was worried that he was single-handedly making a mess of his game, and for awhile it was looking as if the game would fall apart at the deadline. And no one even knew of the fate behind James and thespazztikone’s creation, as they rarely, if ever, posted on the public journal. It had seemed that only Spoonweaver and Master K were making any kind of progress – in fact, because they had released a day early, it had seemed they were the only ones who would even have a functional and complete game. In Spoonweaver’s own estimation, it looked as though they had the contest in the bag.
But on the morning of March 9th, the contestants began to show themselves. Games began to crawl onto the game list. Dreadful Occupant was the first to make an appearance, as Spoonweaver’s diligence allowed it to appear a day earlier than scheduled. Shortly afterward, Gizmog announced that his and RMSephy’s game was taking on a new direction at the beginning of “crisis time.” Five hours and twenty minutes following Giz’s announcement, the mostly secretive James Paige released his colorful entry, The Death of Von Stabbingmore. One hour and twenty-one minutes later, The Giz announced that he needed to talk to Sephy about a new idea. Best case scenario: They’d be 48 hours late. Worst case scenario: They’d never finish it. Eight hours and two minutes later James reminded Spoonweaver that some cultures lived by a ten-day calendar week. One hour and one minute after that, TMC, after having skipped sleep for two days, turned in The Ortega Colonies.
Spirits were lifting now that three teams had turned in their games. But two teams remained. One team, the team of BMR and mjohnson092088, hadn’t posted anything since the contest started, and no one knew the fate of their entry, or even of their collaboration. Even as March 9th arrived, their presence was silent. The other was the sinking ship of RMSephy and Gizmog. With the time limit now passing, no one knew whether they would ever produce the product of their weeklong frustration. Would they deliver? Would they crack under the pressure? Would they even bother to finish now that time was up?
On the wee hours of March 11th, Gizmog finally answered the question that all of us were waiting for. Yes, after spending 24 hours attacking the heck out of their graphics and plotscripts, Gizmog and RMSephy produced for the world the rhythm game we now know as Alice Falls Asleep.
And thus, on March 11th, 2012, with four out of five teams having delivered the goods, the 2012 OHR Random Collaboration Contest could finally be deemed complete.
What no one had ever anticipated, however – not even Spoonweaver – was that each entry would be so fantastic in the eyes of the community that nearly every participant would find the inevitable voting period nearly impossible to handle. Does this mean that the contest was a smashing success? Or would it be forever remembered as the contest that broke everyone’s expectations?
The following review will explain why the 2012 OHR Random Collaboration Contest, after having endured such a turbulent path to success, should always be remembered as that one infamous contest where everyone involved went crazy and no one knew how to vote for it. The games released for it will be presented in release order.
Creators: Spoonweaver and Master K
When Spoonweaver revealed the first screenshots of Dreadful Occupant on Day 5, I realized that I wasn’t that interested in playing it. It wasn’t a knock on his hard work or anything. I just had flashbacks of a former random collaboration contest and remembered that I wasn’t too interested in playing the games for it. As it turned out I wasn’t much interested in this contest, either. Even if the sight of a thermometer on the screen piqued my curiosity, I didn’t think it was enough to engage me. So I put it out of mind.
Later on, after the game was released, Charbile appeared on the forums and complained that the hero wouldn’t stay hidden for him. Spoonweaver said it had worked. Charbile told him a day later that he really wanted to enjoy his game, but he just couldn’t make the hero hide. That was on March 8th. Incidentally, as of March 17th (the date of this review) that was the last time anyone has seen or heard from Charbile.
The idea of hiding from a ghost did not intrigue me much, but three days later, on March 11th, I decided I’d play the game anyway (more on why in the next game review). This was, after all, a Spoonweaver game, and I’m usually happy with his OHR accomplishments, sans Technoship Funkatron. I figured that if I actually gave the game a chance I’d probably enjoy it. Plus, Charbile hadn’t been back on to make any more complaints about the hiding function, so I thought that maybe everything was working fine now. The struggle between playing and dodging it then came down to a battle of wills: do I want to play an OHR game today, or do I want to do something productive? The struggle didn’t last long. It was a Sunday. I was already bored. Why not just play the games and become part of society again?
As soon as I started it up, I was greeted with a title sequence that alternated from title screen to introductory narration. A creepy thunder strike, the kind that rips the flesh off of puppies, sounded every time the screen changed. I thought, “Great, another one of those games.” I’m not a fan of survival horrors, especially the ones that I can hardly see because everything is so dang dark, so I was even less motivated to play through this now.
But I gave it a chance.
For my first play-through I just let things run; I wanted to see how the system worked. It was simple. I had to find an object I could hide behind, select “Hide,” and then my sprite would disappear. There was no special animation that showed me slipping under a box or anything. I’d just become an invisible sprite. Simple mechanic. Pressing any button would snap me back into visibility. Probably not the best system for people with twitchy fingers, but it worked. As I’d hide (or stand around, or read text, or type in my notes for this review), the giant thermometer in the upper left corner of the screen would gradually drop. Once it reached bottom and turned blue, the ghost, or “dreadful occupant,” would appear in the doorway and wander around for a few seconds, and then disappear. The first time it showed, I was out in the open (getting ready to hide), and then the bloodcurdling scream erupted in my speakers, and I was once again staring at the title sequence and listening to that terrible thump sound effect. Now I understood how to play.
It wasn’t bad. As far as survival horror games were concerned, Dreadful Occupant was pretty lighthearted. So I played through it. Little by little I found my way around the house. I picked up a hammer in the garage, a butter knife in the kitchen, and a bunch of other knickknacks around the place in my valiant effort to find a way to escape. But it was a little stressful. The thermometer continued to drop. Often I’d have just enough time to race from one box to another before that nasty ghost would arrive again. Even while I read textboxes explaining to me what I needed for the particular object I was trying to access, that thermometer would drop. There was no time to get comfortable. It was better to spend half the game hiding than it was to run around looking for things. I didn’t want to mess this thing up. There was no way to save. A game over was recipe for a restart.
Part of the challenge for me was to actually see where I was going. At work I’ve got access to monitors that show every color as it’s meant to be seen. The gray floors stand out, the dark outlines of chairs, or boards, or whatever happens to be sitting in the middle of the living room, are visible, and the general layout of the room can be determined by simple sight. However, on my home monitor – the one I use to actually play OHR games – I can see hardly anything darker than a normal gray. Finding my way around the hero’s house, therefore, was an exercise in not only patience but in trial and error. “Is that the room’s exit to the south? Crap, I’ll have to check in a minute after I run back to that box over there.” It was for this reason that I had missed discovering an entire room, until TMC told me about it about thirty minutes later. Incidentally, it was the room that hid the shoes, which was the last thing I needed to escape the house. I had wasted a lot of time thinking the game was unfinished because of that.
Needless to say I finally found the shoes, reached the exit, and found my way to the ending. There, I was treated with a neat sequence crosscutting credits with an endgame story showing how the hero jumped from the balcony onto his pillows, how the power eventually came on, and how other things occurred that you’ll just have to play to see for yourself.
In the end I was happy to play it. The game reminded me of an older title called Locked, which I had played a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed. Like Locked, the puzzles are absurd – in this world, butter knives are used to open doors – but they’re fun to discover solutions to. However, unlike Locked, not every item is needed to unlock the next secret. Some items are scattered around simply to give the hero something to collect and take with him. Also unlike Locked, but on a happier note, finding the last item does not equal end of game success. You still have to escape the house, which I appreciate. That was always the main problem I had with Locked; as soon as you found the last item, it was game over – no need to actually walk to the exit. Dreadful Occupant takes care of that inconsistency with logic.
Do I wish it weren’t fun to play? Kind of. I’m not comfortable with enjoying a survival horror game (if that’s really what it can be called – I see it more as a timed adventure). But I did enjoy it, despite the dark screen, despite the occasional instances where I’d hide and the ghost would still catch me, despite the random speed in which the temperature would drop (might’ve been more interesting if the temperature fluctuated, simulating instances where the ghost might actually float farther away from the hero’s location), and despite the uncertain spot in which I had to walk to jump off the balcony. And that’s a problem because that just made it harder to vote for my favorites from this surprisingly excellent contest.
But I don’t want to complain. In short, there’s a good chance you might enjoy it, too, even if you hate dark games with ghost stories attached. Sadly, for a contest that invites competition, however, you may also discover that this was not the only game that might garner your enjoyment. It was certainly my discovery.
More to come in a moment.
Creators: James Paige and thespazztikone
Speaking of games that are hard to rank, we next come to the game submitted by a chronic obliterator of rival contest entries, James Paige, and his latest Robin, thespazztikone. And like his other contest entries in times past, James’s cartoony charm boils to the surface in this whimsical tale of greed, uprising, and revenge. If one were to marry Monkey Island with the story of Marie Antoinette (loose reference), you might have an idea what to expect from The Death of Von Stabbingmore.
(Time to take a quick breath.)
On the day that James released his game, he posted a screenshot of Duke Aaldrick Von Stabbingmore walking through the village telling the peasants to bow before him. In this picture one could hardly shy away from the realization that the characters were tall, Walk Tall tall, and it was beautiful. In fact, James had even once claimed on IRC that the scripts for his game came from his old 32x40 sprite demo. It was the image that convinced me to try out the 2012 OHR Random Collaboration games. I just had to see what crazy ideas James had dreamed up this time.
I was not disappointed. While the game’s exploratory features were shallow, its clever use of puzzle battles were inspired. But before I could even check out the nature of the battles, I first had to get to know the characters. And it seemed that all the characters spoke with socks in their mouths like those silly creatures from the Banjo-Kazooie franchise do. It was a subtle addition to the usual charm one could find in a James Paige game.
But what of thespazztikone’s additions? What did the creator most known for his Doom adaptations add to this comic tale of peasant exploitation and brutality? Houses, if I’m not mistaken. Maybe some of the violence. I don’t actually know! But it was brilliant.
This, of course, brings on a giant question mark to the 2012 OHR Random Collaboration Contest. Who exactly did what in each game? If the games do not come with credits, how can we be so sure who was responsible for which piece of the puzzle? What makes the random collaboration so special if James’s signature is heavy and thespazztikone’s is hardly noticeable? Does it become like a real team game? Do I have James to thank for my ability to clog a sword with a potato, or thespazztikone? Well, thankfully, there are credits in this game, but they’re part of the endgame sequence, and they’re ambiguously sandwiched amid a string of fake credits (kind of like something I’d do). If, say, thespazztikone was a producer, then what in the world did he actually produce? The idea? The characters? The potato sword? How long can this mystery endure?
I don’t know whom to thank for the heart of this game. But the heart is still one worth beating. And so is the game. Stick with the three-tiered puzzle long enough and you will be treated to an endgame sequence that would make even Steven Spielberg proud. It has drama, suspense, and a cheesy happy ending. It’s perfect. You can’t actually lose, so there’s no reason not to try it. Did you try to throw a tomato at the duke and he just swatted it out of the air? Don’t worry, you can try to slap him, too, and you’ll still survive the retribution that follows. Try anything and everything if you want. Or, you can try to think your way through the battle logically. Or, you can cheat and read the walkthrough that comes with the game (but conveniently doesn’t offer information on who was responsible for making what). Through a series of decisions made in battle, decisions that play out through transmogrification effects, you’ll eventually win the game, and it probably won’t take you long to do it. It’s much faster and kinder to the player than Wandering Hamster or those Doom adaptations.
But will playing it also make you a better person? Perhaps. Maybe it’ll inspire you to defend the poor. Maybe it’ll teach you how to insult bureaucrats with grace. That would depend on which character you’d identify with. Are you Team Florette? Or are you Team Von Stabbingmore?
Perhaps you should play it and find out and then tell us your choice.
(And now it’s time to exhale.)
Creators: SDHawk and TMC (The Mad Cacti)
Next we come to the game that was almost a catastrophe. Day upon day, SDHawk and TMC shared journal entries with each other and the world explaining how little got done today because the curtains needed vacuuming, or how a lot of work went into development, but the save button was somehow never triggered (because of power loss), and both agreed that the concept they came up with was too ambitious for a weeklong contest game. Sometimes the report was that tile graphics were worked on, but not a lot of them. More promising was the announcement that a random map generator was complete, but the follow-up message that it only worked well on the outside was disheartening. Less promising was the frozen state SDHawk found himself in on Day 3 when he was so overwhelmed with all the work he and TMC had in front of them that he wasn’t even sure how to start. In short, there was no reason for these guys to ever finish this ambitious thing on time. TMC’s record already played party to this feeling. His other contest games generally fell short of the intended design thanks to the sudden rush of a deadline upon him. SDHawk had good reason for concern. But they fought on past the halfway mark, into Day 5, Day 6….
Day 6 began with SDHawk mumbling nonsense: “sjfkasf skldjf askldfdjas jaksdjakdj day 6
arrrrrrrrrrrrrghsjdfhsjf sjfhs afl aslfshd faskljfh alsdjfkah slfj hfjlsdh flajsdhl askfjh. djsfahfjkashdfk fhasjkld fhasfl shaf dhjsdf j!” He had effectively snapped.
TMC countered with a ray of hope. He had finally entered “contest mode.” With only a couple of days left in the contest, he was ready to knock this thing out of the park. And then reality struck: “EDIT: I take it all back; we’re doomed.”
The fate of The Ortega Colonies was uncertain (until then, the world still knew nothing of this game, so if it had in fact been doomed, no one but SDHawk and TMC would’ve been the wiser). By Day 7, even SDHawk was vocal about his ulcers and panic attacks caused from having worked on such an overbearing project. But he blamed himself. He blamed himself for getting too used to Gizmog’s style and not adequately preparing for TMC’s polar opposite approach to game design, which is to go to that place of OHR impossibility. With The Giz, he’s used to “least-effort options.” With TMC, he had to learn a special plotscripting tool not available to the public called a script preprocessor (a tool I got to use last summer in an attempt to streamline one of my games; it produces an output of scripting types based on a compressed line – don’t feel bad if you have no idea what I’m talking about; I hardly know myself, and I didn’t particularly like using it for that reason). This collaboration was breaking down, and the game’s future was in the hangman’s noose. SDHawk had no choice but to pass the game along to TMC, trust that he’d come through with the final details in time, and go to sleep. The fate of the game was now out of his hands.
On Day 7, TMC went through the design rush of his life. By the seventh mini-update of the day, TMC questioned whether he was still awake. The contest had robbed him of needed sleep. By the eighth update, delirium had set in. Like SDHawk on Day 6, TMC was now typing in gibberish. By the ninth update he confessed that he was angry with his code. It was riddled with bugs. By the tenth update (after having to go to class on such lack of sleep), he encountered a complaint from SDHawk stating that his code had crashed the game. There was still much to fix, and only about twelve hours left to go before the deadline. There was no way this game was getting released in a playable state. By the fourteenth update, TMC was drawing a bed for the game and lusting over its niceness – he was insane from lack of sleep. Two updates and four hours later, he was still awake, and panicking. He now understood that OHR contests were the very things terrorist groups like to use to torture their captives. By the eighteenth update, and eight minutes before the deadline, he finally drew the hero graphics. This was his “screw it” mode. It was time to just zip it ship it.
As it turned out, the end result was actually functional, and interesting to play.
The Ortega Colonies is a game that randomly generates every single game piece involved, from the map’s locations, to the interior placement of walls and treasures, to the very creators who worked on the thing. It is truly the definition of “no two games play the same way.” Even if you think you know where that trusty bed is hiding, you can’t be certain. If you’re playing a new game, then you really can’t know where anything is until you explore. Think that water’s safe to drink? Think again. Well, maybe it is. But you can’t know until you drink from it. It’s random. Only a saved game will keep things the same as they were the last time you played.
That alone should fascinate the fans of a good roguelike, but what about those people who like resource balancing, or deteriorating environmental conditions that can eventually kill the spaceman if he doesn’t take care of his needs? Yes, they, the same people who enjoy protecting their sims from urinating on themselves in The Sims franchise, can find some level of entertainment in The Ortega Colonies. Players must keep multiple resources in check as they travel the cold planet and explore its mysteriously abandoned fuel depots, resources which include oxygen, power, temperature, food, water, and sleep. But this is no easy task, for outside the various depots the spaceman loses oxygen and fifteen minutes with every step, but inside the clock is always running, and for every minute the timer ticks down, one of the spaceman’s vitals is slowly depleted. If any vital reaches code red, it’s over for our valiant hero. This prevents the player from ever taking a moment to breathe.
If this description makes the game sound stressful, that’s because it is. Just as the game’s creators nearly suffered a stroke from making it, the player comes dangerously close to suffering one from the likelihood of his spaceman character dying from hypothermia, or hunger, or hardest to fix, sleep. Though curing hypothermia is as simple as warming the hero’s body in front of a fire, it becomes more difficult to make a fire if he is out of flint. Curing hunger might be simple if the spaceman has food on him, but it becomes less simple if he’s got to kill a lope first. Fortunately, the ability to gain resources can be found around every corner, but he must remain in constant motion if he wants to keep ahead of his state of death. As soon as he stops, he becomes more likely to run out of HP, whether from hypothermia, dehydration, or even lack of sleep. And sleep is the worst of all, because beds are hard to find, and other vitals run down as sleep goes up.
Depleting resources aren’t the spaceman’s only problems, though. Wandering monsters roam the halls of the abandoned stations, seeking flesh to devour to satiate their own hunger. Security systems impede doorways, making the spaceman’s forward journey treacherous. And even the light system is faulty and eventually burns out, leaving him limited to his radial sight. Fortunately, if he has enough power, he can operate a torch to broaden his field of vision. But like everything else on this forsaken planet, he has to find discarded power cells if he plans to continue lighting the dark.
If the tiny overworld spaceman prevails, he can eventually make it to the northern colony and find out why it hasn’t delivered supplies to his mining colony in over two earth weeks. But even as his extra tall self explores the insides of each colony in between, he begins to see that something is seriously wrong. No one is around anywhere. Just the creatures who roam the silver halls. Just those creatures who spot him if he crosses their line of sight. Just those creatures with which he can sneak up on if he attacks from the sides or the back. Just those creatures whose presence can feed him for another few hours if he manages to kill one with the crappy breakable weapons he finds. It is truly a dark world in which he must travel to find the answers to his secrets.
And it’s one that no player can predict ahead of time. Hopefully he can find that crowbar to unlock that sealed door. Hopefully he finds that bulge in the wall marking the sideways doorway. Hopefully he remembers to check for sealed doors in those sideways passages. Hopefully he remembers to check the plants for fruit. Hopefully he remembers to fill up his water bottle with clean water. Hopefully he remembers to keep moving when inside the buildings because time does not play kindly with his vitals. Hopefully SDHawk and TMC managed to get some sleep in the meantime. Hopefully you’re ready to tackle this surprising beast of a good game.
If this is too stressful for you, you can always go back and play The Death of Von Stabbingmore again.
Creators: RMSephy and Gizmog
Last but not least we have Alice Falls Asleep, a game that underwent a number of tonal changes before becoming the rhythm game we know it as today. We’ve already followed its turbulent rise to production in this review’s introduction, but we haven’t followed its life as a released game. How has it affected the community? More importantly, how has it affected its creators? RMSephy confessed the other day that Alice Falls Asleep had several concepts behind it, all of which were too complicated for a contest entry, and ultimately boring for the player. As an adventure it would tank. As a horror it would hardly scare. It would seem that its only real shot at success was to become some sort of musical color-matching game. Actually finishing the game must’ve brought him some kind of relief, even if it was The Giz’s idea to change the concept. But what of The Giz? How would Alice Falls Asleep affect his future as an OHR designer? Would his lesson be a lesson for all? The only way I could find out the answer was to ask him the question.
Giz: Man, that’s a hard question. I don’t know that it’s changed my life, but the music’s kind of stuck in my head.
The music was stuck in his head. Yes, yes. That would foreshadow the ugly truth of what Alice Falls Asleep would become to the common player. Something that burrows deep into the player’s psyche, a factor that reminds us what this contest was truly about. An exercise in patience, strength, and sanity. Or is it the flagrant rejection of each?
Indeed, there’s a darker side to this tale. Playing Alice Falls Asleep would seem like an easy task on the surface to the common observer. What the creators won’t tell you, however, is that each game is like a drug. Once you start, you cannot stop. Ever. It’s simple enough to make you think you can win. And then it pulls some bait and switches on you. It gets faster. And faster. The scores become more stringent. Never mind that you can get through the entire first level without hopping over a single passing block and still grab a passing score. That rhythmic melody that plays with every new color appearing on screen tricks your judgment. You think it’s okay to jump when maybe you shouldn’t. You think it’s okay to collect the next color when you have no idea when the background will change. The classroom is obviously in math mode now. No need to pick up that social studies tile. That blue Pythagorean triangle will do just fine. But the teacher is talking about eating dinner at a mansion – oh no, it’s an English question! Change tiles! Change tiles! Whew, but it’s only Level 5. No need to panic. The rhythm is slow enough. Just get it together. This is no time to wake up. I still have time to earn my 3 points for the correct icon. No need to worry about that 1-point deduction. The target score is still reasonable. I can do this. Level 6. Level 7. Level 8. I can do this. I keep going. Even if I have no idea how many levels I have left to go. I can still learn a lesson.
Level 9. Oh, crap! Now it’s on.
The icons speed by in a blaze of thought. The yellow social studies classroom changes colors to a science green in the middle of a string of yellow icons. The one green icon I need is coming between a red and a blue. But the classroom changes to red (English!!!) as the red passes under me! I’m falling on a green, and now I’m taking the point loss. More reds are coming. But how soon before the classroom changes color again? It’s insane! And I have to make 60 points or better to pass. My best so far was just over 70. To make 60 points on this lightning round seems impossible. To fail means getting sent back to Level 8. To pass means making it to the coveted Level 10 (the alleged final level). To try means losing hours of my life to a random dream state. And yet, I must try. Why isn’t Alice shaking in her sleep?
Evidence of this addiction surfaced on the evening of March 11, 2012, when OHR member Shizuma livestreamed a play-through of this game and the other collaboration contest entries. As attempt after attempt to clear Level 9 went awry, it only made sense that he’d give up and get on with his day. But he didn’t quit. Nearly an hour passed and he was still trying to make it to the end. In public display. His judgment was severed. His obsession to finish turned to madness. Level 9, Level 8; Level 9, Level 8 – the seesaw ride wouldn’t stop. Why, RMSephy? Why, The Giz? What did you spike your game with to make it so addicting and yet so impossible? Perhaps Shizuma could answer that question someday. I believe he made it to Level 10. The coveted, yet torturous Level 10. I believe. I think. But I don’t really know. The truth may hurt.
Another layer to the torture cake called the random collaboration contest. Another sucker drawn into its tempting lure. Another night spent trying to overcome one’s challenges.
Who can wake Alice up?
In short, Level 10 of Alice Falls Asleep sums up the nature of the 2012 OHR Random Collaboration Contest. Turbulent, frightening, and yet so rewarding if one can make it to the end. The difference is that eight people did make it to the end of the Random Collaboration Contest, while none to my knowledge has made it to the end of Alice Falls Asleep. Like Alice, those who have tried have been stuck in a dream state – a delusion that their dream to wake up can come true. But those who tried to finish their Random Collaboration games did wake up, and now they’re living pretty.
I don’t envy the contestants who have entered this crazy journey from its initial conception back in September to its final conclusion in early March. Much sleep was lost, and for what? Glory? No, not glory. A decent library for 2012. The fact is, 2011’s list of games is about to go up for its Game of the Year unveiling, and only a few titles seem to make repeat performances on people’s lists of favorites. With a flood of shallow OHR movies, adult content games, and the usual forgettable newbie titles populating the list, it seems that the year’s quality games are few and far between. It should be no secret then that whenever this sort of limited turnout of quality happens, it is always nice to see a crop of decent games make a showing for the following year. Fortunately, for the first time in a long time we have been given a contest that not only had a decent contestant turnout, but a solid lineup of quality games produced from it.
The truth is, these games are tough to rank. Every voter has expressed difficulty in picking out a first place, second place, and so on for his list of preferences. Most have forgone the idea of judging by quality and decided to rank exclusively on interest. Those who preferred hiding from ghosts to warming hands by the fire voted on Dreadful Occupant ahead of The Ortega Colonies. Those who liked throwing tomatoes at dukes, but were indifferent to learning about Pearl Harbor were more likely to vote for The Death of Von Stabbingmore over Alice Falls Asleep. But none would dare say that one was better than the other. With four games so diverse from their rivals as these, and each of them worth the quality we, as the players, demand in a release, trying to pick out which one’s the best is like trying to decide which child of four is most deserving of a parent’s love. It’s just not fair. And that aptly describes the nature of the 2012 OHR Random Collaboration Contest. It will go down in OHR history as one of the cruelest competitions all members, creators, moderators, and voters alike, ever had to deal with. Those who were a part of it are likely never to forget the experience. Let’s hope the next contest is kinder to everyone involved.
I believe that contest will be the 2012 Terrible Games Contest.