Day 8 - Off-Peak

Walking Sim, Bangers, WTF  · 

Skeeter’s Take:

Let me preface this by saying I have never been a walking simulator guy. Unless the world, or the story they are telling are really interesting and engaging, I have an extremely hard time getting into them. I obviously have a few of these kinds of games that I really enjoy - The Beginner’s Guide absolutely rules to name one, or something like Yumme Nikki/LSD: Dream Emulator that I talked about previously - but rarely do I find this genre engaging.

With that out of the way, wouldn’t you believe it? I did not enjoy Off-Peak.

First, I really dislike the trope of being given an arbitrary thing I have to collect in a game like this where I’m supposed to be exploring and absorbing the world. In this game it’s a train ticket that some guitar player ripped up for you to find. I get that the devs wanted to make sure you saw every area of the train station, but I think that adding a collect-o-thon was not the correct way to go about it. For me, I’m just worried about making sure I don’t miss any ticket parts, and have to backtrack. I find myself spending less time thinking about the space and the world, and more time trying to find pieces of a train ticket. I think there are many other ways to guide the player. For example, dialogue would be an easy way to point the player in a direction. The information desk (which was just a hint system) is probably the best example of this. He talked about how the bar held a really long board game night, and I went “Oh? There’s a bar?”. That created some intrigue, and I wanted to go out and find the bar to see it for myself. For a game that should be about exploring the environment, I think the environment should be what guides the player, not shiny pieces of paper. I understand that it’s an easy way to tell the player the game is complete. “I have all 6 train ticket pieces. I can board the train.” but again, this could have easily been replaced by an unseen list that, let’s say for example, once the player has visited enough places, or talked to certain people Luuuuke the guitar guy would approach you and give you a ticket. I don’t know. I’m not a game designer, I just think there are other ways to achieve what the ticket pieces are trying to do without pulling the player out of the world and reminding them “HEY YOU ARE PLAYING A GAME ONLY 2 MORE PIECES TO FIND AND YOU WIN!” Another example of this comes right at the start:

I love how there was no menu to this game. It just drops you into the world and gives you a quick overview of the controls. That’s really all we need in an exploration based walking sim like this. Then as you travel further towards the main station, you get some text explaining to you how the talking interactions work. This is just not needed at this point. They’ve already given you the controls, one being “Use/Talk” - I know I can talk to people, and the people that talk amongst themselves you can’t interact with anyway. Why is this needed? Give the player a little benefit of the doubt that they will be inquisitive enough to figure this out themselves. Maybe I’m too “gAmEr ELiTe” and have played too many games at this point, so this might be for the “Noobz”, but if you are trying to set an atmosphere, this kind of stuff sucks the suspension of disbelief right out of it.

So now that I’ve complained about small things that probably don’t matter, let’s talk a bit about the story. Perhaps I’m missing something, and this game is actually a lot deeper than I’m giving it credit for, but the way I understood this game is as a heavy-handed metaphor of monetization and those that look to profit off of art.

The whole train station looks like a Banksy Exhibit:

There’s some dude named Marcus who runs the whole station. The people keep mentioning how Marcus doesn’t like this or that, or Marcus only allows certain Records to be allowed into the station that he has to approve first, etc. etc. There’s a little censorship angle going there too, but eventually you meet Marcus:

He talks about how he refuses to sell out to Businesses, but then claims that the only thing that matters to him are the demands of his customers - the consumers. The way I read this is he is just like the businesses he is claiming to be better than. He restricts free art by having the only say on what’s allowed into the station, monitors what the “Artists” (or rather, the shopkeepers) make and sell as it has to be up to his customer’s demands and standards (except for that Ramen guy, I guess he gets to go crazy with Birthday Cake ramen). As the player, you run around to all these different shops run by various people, cookies, records, sheet music, pizza, etc. You are given the option to grab these items, and not even pay for them. If you collect all of the records or pizza, you get a steam achievement that incentivises you to grab anything you can so you can get the next one. I was pretty done with the game at this point, and taken out of the world. I kept saying, “How can I pay for this, everyone has established I’m poor and have no money and everyone is just cool with me running around eating all their supplies and stealing their sheet music.” Then I finally finished collecting my 100 pieces of paper, or whatever it was and went to the train. I was confronted by Marcus and the shopkeepers who were pissed that I had taken all that without paying, and forced me to work in the Ramen shop to pay it back. I actually liked that there were some repercussions to my actions, and that they incentivised the player to take more with the steam achievements. And it made me feel really stupid for being mad about being poor and not being able to afford anything, as that was kind of the point.

Other than that, I didn’t really get much out of this game. I didn’t find the world and the train station all that interesting. I didn’t like playing fetch. I didn’t find the dialogue all that engaging. I didn’t feel like I needed to see what was around the next corner, or what would happen next, or what the next person had to say. I just did not click with this game - again, it’s really not my cup of tea, and I like that they are at least trying to have a message and a point to it all. It’s better than 90% of the Newgrounds games we played where the point of those was to either be as edgy or as horny as possible. I sat with this game for a while before I started writing, because I felt like I should have liked it and that maybe I was being too harsh. I landed on this conclusion: No matter how artsy or aesthetic a game is, or what it’s trying to say, it ultimately comes down to if I enjoyed it or not. Enjoyment can come in various forms - Did I have fun playing it? Did the game make me question something I hadn’t previously to playing it? Did the game set out to make the player feel a certain way and achieve that (I’m convinced To the Moon only exists to tear your heart out and I love it.)? Did the game have an interesting setting and good world building? Did the game want to be aesthetically pleasing and have that “wow” factor? I’ll stop there, but there are many, many reasons to enjoy a game, and while I can’t quite put my finger on it - I did not enjoy this. Probably ultimately comes down to personal preference as this isn’t a bad game by any means. It’s frustrating because I can tell there’s a clear vision and purpose to what is being done here, and clearly a lot of time was put into it - it’s just not for me.

Maybe I’m in a bad mood today.

Some things I did like:

The stairwell paintings were cool:

The ambient soundtrack was an absolute banger. Always love me some jazzy saxophone. Honestly, I’d recommend the soundtrack over the game.

I liked that I got a comeuppance from stealing from all the stores.

I like that the reason the station looked like an art gallery was because it literally was.

I liked these nerds playing Magic the Gathering rip-off (Homeboy should have mulliganed):

And one thing I really didn’t like:

Recommend: No

Replay Percentage Chance: 2% - wondering if there’s a different ending if you don’t steal everything. (NOTE FROM SAM: I DID A SPEEDRUN TO FIND OUT AND THE ENDING DOESN’T CHANGE OUTSIDE OF ONE LINE OF DIALOGUE. I TOLD SKEETER AND HE NOW AMMENDS THIS TO 0%)

Time Played: 31 minutes

Sam’s Take:

I was going to write a one line sassy response, but I couldn’t choose which one to go with, so I’ll just copy and paste my notes from the Google Doc:

For real though, Skeeter is right that the tickets are a lame gimmick to escort you around the station, but I think there is enough connective tissue in the dialogue and spaces to give the player something to grab onto. There are multiple events like a circus that several characters talk about, people argue about the quality of the pizza salesman (both he and his critics site his previous store as a source of his cooking capabilities), there’s a strange relationship between yourself, the owner of the station and the man who gives you his ticket (in ripped up form, but still). There is a world here, and it’s weird and funky. Look at this guy alone on the tracks, just dancin:

And now imagine he’s dancin’ to this banger:

Come on now.

This is the kind of game I enjoy and defend until the designer gets on Twitter and talks about how they made the greatest game of all time and people just didn’t “get it”.

To be clear, that didn’t happen. I’m just saying it could.

What am I talking about?

You try doing this every day, freak.

Recommend: Yea!

Replay Percentage Chance: 0% because I finished it, but 100% I make Skeeter buy the sequel

Time Played: 57 minutes

Link to Game


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