Created in just three days for Ludum Dare 33's "You Are The Monster" theme, this retro puzzle platformer by Team Oni is devilishly cute. In Oni Yu Can Scare Them, you play, well, Oni Yu, a demon who's been chosen to terrify the local populace to get them ready for the arrival of his dark lord, who's been forgotten in the last thousand years or so. Using the [arrow] keys to move and [A] to jump, your goal in each level is to scare all the people by possessing certain things with [S], which allows you to move the object around. Hopping well? Horrifying! Shuffling vase? Unspeakable! The thing is, some characters are dangerous. Shamans, for example, don't fear you and can in fact destroy you, since they can see you unless you're possessing something and not moving, necessitating the need to sneak by, while brave samurai fear nothing!... except the undead, of course. While games about possessing things to scare people aren't really that scarce, Oni Yu Can Scare Them is still executed very well considering its minuscule development time, with some neat ideas regarding the ways you have to scare different "enemies". Though dismounting ladders is fiddly (hit [A] at the top when not moving to jump off), and the unpredictable character movement can mean a lot of waiting and fiddling around at times, Oni Yu Can Scare Them is still fun, and an idea we'd love to see further polished and developed from its team one day.
The hardest part of this game for me was figuring out that you need to press the "S or A" key when it says "Press any Key to Start." Perhaps I'm just special :P
Ok Real Talk
It's not very often you come across a platformer stealth game and certainly not of such minimalist style. I would say that the game as a whole is a step in the right direction and has the potential to be something bigger if refined (Given that it was a Ludum Dare)
After playing through the game I felt somewhat unsatisfied by the ending, but I had to think about "Why" a while. I cam to the conclusion that the mechanic is a decent one though it needs to be worked over with adding more varieties of what you can and should use to scare others. For example, the Samurai could only be scared by skulls. I think this was great and should be expanded upon.
The aspect of this game that left me feeling discontent was that in the beginning, there was the implication of the story. Now I love a good story more than anything, but if this game didn't have the title story and the end slate and was just the mechanic of possession and targets, the game would have been OK.
When adding the elements of a story, it's to enhance the experience of the game. To make the perfect game (in my opinion) is when you're able to have the mechanic and the story work in synchronicity with one another.
We had a beginning and we had an ending.
What we also needed was a raising action and a climax.
The thing I love about low rez or low art games, is that the small changes one makes are really noticed...
Something which could easily remedy this issue would be a simple text to show that the people in the land were getting scared so the emperor send out more samurai and priests.
A great climax would have been to scare the Emperor himself, even with keeping the ending as it was.
I do like this game and it has a great opportunity to grow, if anything I would say to play Yahtzee Crowshaw's game "Art of Theft" for a perfect example of platformer stealth done well.
I never thought I'd have learned something from high school, but the plot progression tool from your English/Literature class really does come in handy when working with story and games.
Always remember to raise the stakes in storytelling!
Hey Dora,
Nice article as always, but I'd really appreciate it if you dropped a link to the LD page so people can vote on it in the competition.
Thanks,
- Squidly.
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=21666
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