Day 6 - No Players Online (Demo)
Horror, ARG, Creepypasta ·
Skeeter’s Take:
Under normal circumstances, I probably would have given more time to this game, but Hades II came out today and I would rather be playing that than anything else right now, so I was a little distracted. This review will probably be rushed as, did I mention? Hades II came out today!
The game starts with you touching a flag and then fades to a computer login screen. There were a couple named profiles and one that said “guest”. Clearly I am a guest, so I clicked on that profile (I wouldn’t want to be disrespecting other people’s privacy after all).
The first thing I did was jot down some important notes into a text file so I wouldn’t forget them later.
I played a bit of Mine Friend, but wasn’t very good at it.
I then found a minefriend.txt file in the Documents file and changed the mines to “1” - EZ win.
I went ahead and opened ichat so I could talk with some cool friends online, but realized I didn’t have any friends, so I tried to send one to my good buddy Sam. It wouldn’t let me since I was a guest - LAME.
I went on some gaming forum, but it was all distorted, and I couldn’t read much. Then I received an email from some nerd named “quinn_winn”. I tried to type “fuck you” in response, but the game forced me to say “hey, who are you?” instead. So much for player-agency.
After madly mashing buttons on my keyboard to get through this riveting conversation, quinn_winn invited me to play a game with him. He said it was a capture the flag game, but he doesn’t care about the flag and only plays for kills. Yeah, wonderful. Just the kind of guy you want to have on your team. If this was set in 2017, he’d be the guy who insta-locks Widow in Overwatch, gets solo’d the whole game by the enemy Winston, complains that the healers aren’t doing a good enough job of healing him, brags about his silver medal in assists, and refuses to get on the point in overtime because he doesn’t want to “mess up his KDA”. Sure, yeah, let’s play with this guy.
After this complete stranger sent me a sketchy link to a zip file, I naturally downloaded it without scanning first, gave it admin access to my computer, and hit play. I created a room, named it “Go Away Quin” because it wouldn’t let me fit “Go Away Quinn Nobody Wants to Play with Your Stupid Ass”, and set the player count to one. Better luck next time Quinn, turns out I winn.
I ran around the empty map firing my gun over and over at nothing pretending like I’m getting crazy kill streaks and running the enemy flag back to my base to score points. Someone enters the game lobby as a glitched out name and I’ve played enough of these types of games to know there’s going to be some spooky man who shows up who shouldn’t be there. This is like creepypasta 101 at this point. Sure enough, some spooky shadow man shows up and attempts to jump-scare me a couple times. He doesn’t seem to pose any threat so I’m not really sure what’s so scary about him other than his appearance. Eventually the capture the flag game glitches out and I have to restart the computer. When I return to the main menu, the guest profile is all glitchy.
I did not do the other profiles. I have Hades II to play. Why didn’t we just talk about Hades II. Did I mention Hades II is out? I’m going to go play Hades II.
In all seriousness, there’s probably more going on here as there are other profiles to explore, and the aesthetic is pretty cool, but I didn’t feel like I saw anything I haven’t seen in these kind of “creepy desktop get’s glitchy and spooky thing corrupts your computer and tries to kill you” games. But maybe there is more to it than what I got to - perhaps next time we will find out.
Hades II.
Recommend: Yeah, it’s just the demo and I could see some people getting a kick out of this. I mean, it’s not Hades II, but you can tell the dev(s?) have put some time and passion into it. It’s just a demo right now, so it’s low commitment. Then after you’ve tried that you can go play Hades II.
Replay Percentage Chance: 70%
Time Played: 18 minutes I could have spent playing Hades II
Sam’s Take:
Friends, this one is a bit complicated. As these reviews start to fall into place I keep asking myself what this is for. Obviously the primary goal is Skeeter and I just want to get back into writing, and forcing yourself to write at least a little every day helps form the habit. What about the contents of the review though? Do we just want to be funny? Do we want to try and promote cool games to our few friends who read these? Do we want to try to give advice to the creators of these games on the off-chance that they google their own game and find us?
I bring this up because today’s game has put me in an awkward position. It is a 3 person dev team, extremely high effort, and also just… not very good. Despite the brevity of Skeeter’s review (may your Hades 2 runs be blessed my son), he touched on the one word that really matters here: Hades Creepypasta. It’s not just the glitchy textures that Skeeter mentioned but also the fact that, even while just playing Minesweeper on your fake desktop, there’s MEGA CREEPY droning ambience letting me know that I’m playing a SPOOKY GAME! Everything in both sound and visual design just beats you over the head repeatedly reminding you that you are indeed, supposed to be scared right now.
Also, there’s so much activity outside of the empty multiplayer lobby, that the game’s namesake begins to fall to the wayside. More and more, your time gets taken up by downloading and combining other game’s exes to make weird hybrid games. It’s implied that this combination process is what led to the HAUNTED capture the flag game’s creation. As you progress through the demo you see more and more signs that the developer of the game within the game was having marital troubles and the wife’s soul is probably trapped in the game and then my eyes roll into the back of my head both because I’ve seen this a million times and also to remind you that this game is MEGA CREEPY HAUNTED!
Downloading and combining other games through a semi-satanic program to create new ones is absolutely a worthy idea for a game. It’s so worthy that it completely takes away everything inherently interesting about a creepy story told within the confines of an old derelict multiplayer capture the flag game. As I played, I thought this would probably work better as just a simple game that only took place within this capture the flag lobby. Normally this isn’t the kind of thing I’d want to mention in one of our reviews, while I may think a simpler in-lobby only story would work better, I don’t have any evidence of that. Except I do. Because they already made it.
No Players Online Classic is basically the exact same game EXCEPT with all the Hypnospace Outlaw desktop elements removed. With this idea in isolation, the mismatch of being alone in a space built only for events actually takes an emotional toll. It feels more empty than nothing, there’s an awkward safety to it. In both the classic and new versions of the game, this moment of uneasy serenity followed by the text in the bottom of the screen “so-and-so joined your game”, brings in a quick jolt of tension. I’m barely sure why I’m in this game, why the hell are THEY in this game?
Unfortunately both games release this tension with a spooky glitchy black ghost getting closer to you and making a loud noise. You can not control your view/movement, you can’t get away. You see it once, and the illusion is dispelled. You’re not in a lobby, you are in the creepy game. You’ve seen the monster that’s under your bed, and it’s not nearly as big as you imagined.
Then they lore dump a bunch of stuff about the dev trying to preserve his dead wife in the video game again. Eyes rolled, creepypasta, around and around we go.
But… What’s the point in saying all that? I’m not going to recommend this game, so no one is going to play it due to reading this review. The devs have already released a fully playable 90 minute demo, so they’re WAY too far into production to read some random guy’s internet review and say “hold up! We’re changing the whole project RIGHT NOW BAYBEEEE”. Maybe it’s just for entertainment, maybe it’s just to get a sampling of what’s out there. Maybe I’m kidding myself in pretending this is about games at all, maybe it’s just about me.
Then I realized the game I was asking for is out there. A game where you just walk around an empty capture the flag map. Where you soak in the ambiance of a dead game, feel it’s the uncanny void that it would take at least 7 others to fill. We simplified once already, we can go one level deeper.
My screen’s resolution was set to 1176x664, almost certainly an artifact of Macbook Pro gaming days of the past. All the textures were set to low. I set everything to proper specs, then set up my lobby.
I had never noticed the ambient sound design in TF2 before, but with no gunshots and voice chats to distract me, I could hear the whirring of the servers whenever I went down to check on our flag, the safest it’s ever been. I saw the corner where my two Engineer picker friends and I would put one turret, and block the entrances with dispensers.
I went out to my spot by the stairs, where I’d use a more vulnerable turret as an alarm to let my friends know when enemies were approaching.
I left our base, headed underground, and came back up on the other side. There was the spot behind the wall where I would always set a teleporter, destined to get found/destroyed eventually, but far enough into their base to effectively respawn our offensive force into their side for a few minutes.
I walked back and forth, taking different routes each time. Walking by the normie engineer’s turret spot.
And that terrible rooftop area where snipers shot at each other and got nothing else done.
I have had a lot of trouble writing over the last few months. I’ve found games or ideas that inspired me to write, but just couldn’t come up with anything. My motivation was low and my self confidence was lower, and I was honestly considering just not writing any more.
I thought about this project as I walked back and forth through 2-Fort; what was the point of this whole thing? I’m not blind to the irony of opening up TF2 for the sake of this review. With its wife-soul trapping storyline, No Players Online is obviously suggesting that we need to let shit die, and here I am doing exactly what the dev team is satirizing… but if the devs of this game are allowed to wallow in tropes that became old a week after the release of Five Nights at Freddy’s, then I’m allowed to walk through the halls of 2-Fort without shame. If these devs are allowed to remake their game and add so much crust that the original concept gets lost, then I’m allowed to write a review a day about whatever I want and however I want.
These guys are making a game they want to make. It seems from the comments that people like it and want to play it.
These reviews will rarely, if ever, be seen by any of these game devs. A few friends may read them, but what a joke to pretend I’m doing a favor to my friends by writing these.
Making something for yourself isn’t selfish. It’s the only way to make anything.
If, somehow, the developers of this game stumble across this review:
I do not like your game.
Keep making it.
Recommend: No
Replay Percentage Chance: 15%
Time Played: New Version: 90 Minutes, Old Version: 15 Minutes, TF2: 7 Minutes
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