Spotlight on Greenlight, 17/11/12

In this week’s Spotlight we have nuns, we have werewolves, we have cowboys and we have a reef. Yeah, you heard me, a reef. I’m determined to make PCGamesN the number one source for reefs in games and I’m starting today. From here on, we’re dialling down our coverage to focus on five games a week instead, but five games that we think are engaging and different. So, are you ready? Comfy? Settled in your chair? Then I’ll begin.

Nun Attack

I think it’s pretty easy to guess what Nun Attack is all about but, just in case you’re not clear, it’s a stylish cartoon action game of habit-wearing arse-kicking. In your role as an attacking nun, you’ll have a selection of 80 nun guns and 40 nun missions to undertake, which feature more than 150 nun battles. You also have a selection of 7 different nun miracles that you can cast to turn the tables when the nun combat gets particularly nasty. Here’s a video of some nuns shooting at some skeletons.

Sure, I know that the murky depths of Reef Shot don’t feature multi-limbed alien monsters, convoys of heavily armed Nazi tanks or any rag-tag teams of gun-toting nuns, but I think this is absolutely something worthy of your attention. Reef Shot is a game of underwater exploration, adventure and puzzle solving, where the only shots you take are with your camera. There are secrets to be found in the seas off South America and I’m rather curious about what those might be. Plus, I think I might enjoy some underwater exploration set to a rather soothing soundtrack, and I think there aren’t nearly enough games set underwater. If Tim wasn’t watching, I’d make a sea-related pun, but I know he is.

As soon as I saw that I could construct my own spaceship, bit by bit, Kinetic Void had me in its tractor beam. It’s a “space sandbox” game of trading and combat in a procedurally-generated galaxy and with “toggleable Newtonian flight,” which sounds fantastic. The option to have a real in-space flight model is an excellent one, though I bet it’s hard as nails to master.

There’s something I’ve got to add and, though I’m not at all trying to be mean by saying so, I think the simple, straightforward Greenlight pitch for this is still way better than the one for Elite: Dangerous on Kickstarter. This one just looks so much… cooler.

A game of character customisation, tower defence, strategy and action, with a story that’s co-written by a best selling author, it looks like Sang-Froid has all sorts going for it. Your task is to defend your humble home and your little sister from the legions of vicious werewolves that attack every night. You do this buy surrounding your property with traps and defenses during a daytime strategy section, before the game transforms to a third-person action affair when the night comes. Sang-Froid is full of clever little concepts, such as wolvesdetecting your character if the wind takes your scent to them, and it looks like it has the potential to become a fascinating and challenging game.

Just glancing at a few screenshots of this game brings back a whole wealth of memories and while it’ll be obvious to many of us that Fester Mudd is a tribute to the Sierra and LucasArts adventure games of the early 90s, I’m well aware that some gamers reading this won’t have been alive when those titles were released. Well, back in those days, puzzle solving was all about searching for clues, collecting items and them solving puzzles by either combining those items or finding out where and how you needed to employ them. You had to be sassy and you had to be smart, because what these old adventure games lacked in graphics and flair they made up for in dialogue and devious puzzles.