Guest columnist Vourbot has returned once again with an exclusive hand on review
We talked to a nice programmer about a piece they made called Lone Wolf. Here’s the details that we found interesting as we learned about this great game.
1. Homemade skeletal animation system, and the animation is great. The characters move as smooth sprite-based marionettes, elbows and knees seamlessly making their bends.
2. Open world, viewed from the SIDE. -The world is not open, it’s a side scrolling beat-em-up, but the locations are large, and you side-scroll deep into the husk of the blown-up cityscape.
3. The art is hand-drawn, almost as if with ballpoint pen and colored pencils, the red ink flows from the broken bodies of the punks and villains that you punch and bodyslam.
4. The programmer was older than me, I’m 48, he said he’d been working on this game for 26 years. 1997 has magically jumped from the screen, in the year 2023.
The reason this game caught my eye is because I can’t get around the idea that pictures are magic on the page, and they are exponentially more magic when made into a cartoon, and exponentially again if joined together into the ultimate art form, “videogame.” To talk to the author and learn that it was the effort of a single person, a single wizard, preparing his spell for 26 years, and then casting it in the back corner of the convention room- it was a real treat.
And the spell is: a beautiful and gritty hand-drawn side scrolling beat-em-up, one to four players at a time, some characters turn into werewolves- that’s as far as I could get during the brief interview, while I was playing at the same time.
There were elaborate cutscenes, comic-book/video game style, with sliding, timed stills appearing on the screen to further the plot, all elaborately drawn. I was unable to catch the plot while interviewing and playing, but it was obviously a beat-em up drama featuring rough and bad toughs, motivated to confront the heroes, who looked a little bit tougher, in an apocalyptic metropolis, destroyed by asteroids, like… the 1997 I would remember if this guy didn’t take 26 years to finish it, while living his life and working for other video game companies. The game had the most personality of any game in the convention. And that’s a strong claim to make amidst a convention with a very diverse collection of styles to show. But yes, the corporate games are the most homogenous, the most independant games are the most flavorful, and this one was just pure flave. This one game touched that end of the spectrum with its hand-drawn art, attention to detail, and obviously copious amounts of personal expression from the author.
That is the kind of game I would like to see more of. That’s the kind of game I would expect to see more of always, but am usually let down by the lack thereof. Games where the personal touch is less subtle, and a little more overt.