Reus

I like independent developers, people who can prove they can make a living without having to turn to some big named company are those I can respect, as long as they’re not bragging about it. The problem with not licking the toes of big named companies is that it’s kind of like moving out of your parents’ house; once you no longer rely on someone who is more financed than you are then you basically have to fend for yourself. That’s why most indie games are shorter and graphically inferior to games that are supported with hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertisement.

What I find appealing about indie games is the creator’s desire to break new grounds in the videogame industry, like a grave-digger trying to find a place to bury a corpse in a crowded cemetery. Indie developers try endlessly to experiment with what they can do with videogames, and a successful project could actually change the public’s views and definitions of virtual gaming and could raise our standards of what we expect from technology in the future. That’s more than what multi-million dollar companies are willing to do today. At first, experimentation was key, but when their projects became more and more successful then developers would live off of their ideas (or the ideas of others) by reselling them every year with different paint-jobs and delivery, that is, until they got fired and their work stolen from them and lived off of by the guy who fired them. That’s why we have so many Call of Duty, God of War, and Mario of something clones and sequels.

            The independent game I’ve been playing this week has been Reus and, like a lot of people, I don’t know how to say that. Is it Ray-oos, or Ree-us, or is pronounced like Zeus? Then it would sound like Roose and that’s kind of weird. Anyway, the point of Rie-is is that you can control four giants, each with the awesome powers to create mountains and oceans and move at an annoyingly slow pace, have them tread across a 2-dimensional earth and make it healthy enough for humans to survive on.

I generally enjoy god games, especially when you can watch your people develop their own civilization. It’s like watching ants enter into a tiny industrial revolution. It’s particularly more fun to summon a giant shovel to land on their cities at a devastating impact whenever you get bored, which might be the real reason why god flooded the lot of us while we were un-stimulatingly eating bark off of trees for nourishment.

Once I had a village settled on a small patch of forest I was given a job to send resources to the village in order for them to further advance their society. Once I completed the mission I could see the tiny tent homes evolve into stone hovels. This is promising so far, I’m eager for my next task! So I waited… for a long while… with very little happening… then the game said “Um, you do know you can speed things up by building more villages, right?” so I did just that, but only because I wanted to, and not because the game told me.

            Five minutes in and my planet was booming with several different tribes. I was given more missions to keep myself occupied, but they kept coming at a disquieting pace. Several tribes were wanting me to help them build farms and temples, forcing me to switch my giants back and fourth (who, by the way, fail to understand the concept of getting a rush on) desperately trying to keep everyone’s  love and respect for me, completely unlike how I am in real life. I have to be careful though, because the more you give to the tribes the greedier they’ll become and the more likely they’ll attack other villages, which is a lot like watching your own children claw at each other for the final bowl of cheerios, but at some point the game goes “In order for this tribe to advance further they must first win a war against the Snuffle-Rabbit clan.” Um, excuse me game, I worked very hard to give my planet the peaceful equivalence of Candy Land, how on Ra’s green earth am I going to have enough time to rally up an army and how do I know if they’ll attack the right village or if they’ll even win? And so I failed the task, and the village showed their understanding that I can only do so much by throwing spears at my giants, and they were instantly plagued with a toxic disease, which was purely coincidental.

            You can be awarded special abilities to give to your giants, allowing them to improve the efficiency and quantity of resources, but you can only gain abilities by accomplishing missions, and they get more difficult each time. Just then, I thought of a little cheat I could use to exploit the game. First: raise a village, complete the first, easy missions, gain the award and then destroy the village with an earthquake, a new village will settle and restart the first, easy missions; repeat this procedure until your giants max their potential. I felt pretty clever, in a manipulating, genocidal sort of way. The plan worked, for a while, but by the fourth time I did this I would no longer gain awards from the earlier missions. So I guess the developing team was smart enough to keep people, like me, from cheating their game. Jerks.

So what can I say about Reese’s Pieces? Well, it can easily switch dramatically between tedious and stressful at times, but the visuals are nice, the music is calm and therapeutic, and, again, it’s very satisfying to watch the little ant colonies build tiny clay huts. This might not be the game for you if you like your games to be adrenaline-fueled, thriller rides, but if you want to take a break from shooting nazis and decapitating demons, then why not? Give this game a try.