[iPhone] Review - Papa Sangre

[This is an opinion piece on "Papa Sangre", by SomethinElse. The official website is here.]

Strange little game this one. You have to walk your character around in pitch darkness, using sound as your only sensory input. For the most part it works fairly well. You have to collect gently tinkling "musical notes", before locating the exit and reaching it. The main hazard are monsters which are only ever described as "hogs". You will have to let your own mind decide how they look, but they sound pretty nasty. Passing close to a sleeping hog is fairly nerve-wracking, and the first time I woke one up and I listened to it mauling me while my character screamed repeatedly, I decided that this was a pretty good game.

You tap your two thumbs to make your character walk, and pull your finger across the top half of the screen to turn around. The 3D sound is brilliant. Run too fast and you'll fall. Run into a wall and you'll be stopped dead. Since all the graphics are "rendered" inside your own head, the image quality will vary depending on your hardware. If you're running with just Intel on-board graphics (ie., you have the visualisation capacity of  a moron), you might fail to be drawn into the game at all. If you've got a Radeon HD 6990 (ie., a good brain), you'll find things very creepy indeed.

As you progress through the levels, the game introduces new challenges. These include patroling hogs, dry bones that snap when you walk over them which causes the nearest hog to charge to that location looking for you, a crying baby that you can choose to rescue, quick sand which forces you to move slowly ... I'm only about 25% into the game so far, so I expect more variety to come.

It also includes different terrain types within the same level -- for example in the marsh level, you will move through wet reeds, knee-deep water, and the soggy soil of an island in the middle. Of course you have to map all this out within your mind.

The interesting part of this game is playing it with your eyes closed, and forming a mental picture of your surroundings, based purely on the sounds entering your ears. I can't recall any other game making you do this, and I've been playing games since about 1987. So for that alone, Papa Sangre deserves some kudos.

It's not a brilliant game, but it tries something completely new, and pulls it off very well. It's immersive, fresh, interesting, engaging, and occasionally quite terrifying. I'd say most modern triple-A titles fail to tick all of those boxes. And this goes for around $6 I think.

Just make sure you play it in a dim, quiet room.

Papa Sangre - 4 out of 5

-Gray

[iPhone] Augmented Reality Apps

Looked into these apps briefly today. My theory here is that it's a lot of very impressive technology, all coming together to produce something ... not very useful.

Holding up your camera and having points of interest, ATMs, restaurants, whatever, overlaid on the image in real-time sounds like a pretty cool idea. It's just not that useful. Let's face it, you're going to feel like a right knob spinning around in the middle of the street, peering at your phone. It's nothing that a map app couldn't do faster and better.

One slightly interesting app is "AR Soccer" (YouTube vid here). It's not bad. I can't imagine playing it too often. More of a gimmick. But at least it actually provides some type of entertainment. The collision detection isn't perfect but it's quite good. I want to give AR Defender a try but I don't want to waste another $1.20 on something I'll never play again.

Also I noticed AR Girl (YouTube vid here) but if you think I'm paying good money for a non-existent dancing girl, you've got another thing coming. Especially when you can see real girls dancing in any nightclub. Now, if you could reach in with your hand and start removing her clothing and tickling her, they'd be making millions (mostly pre-teen boys would be buying it, I would think).

Guess this is just one more step on the road to holographic, heads-up overlays projected directly onto our eyeballs. Or holographic strippers taking off their clothes on our desktops at work. Either way, we're heading in the right direction.

-Gray