Mandagon and Baezult

Mandagon purports to be loosely based on Tibetan philosophy. My knowledge of that is limited to slogans seen on bumper stickers and t-shirts, so I’m not exactly an expert on it. Something about free betting or something like that. The basis sets up a no-fail-condition, combat-free platform adventure where you learn the value of sacrifice. There’s really not a whole lot of game here, and the story bits are told in rhymes that I think are meant to sound deep, but really just made me giggle. When I finally got what the story was supposed to be about, I actually felt bad for the developer. Mandagon is too minimalist for its own good. I know minimalism is all the rage in Indieland, but not every story you want to tell is suitable for it. That’s the case here. Even the use of a totem as the player-character makes it impossible to feel any connection to the plot. Don’t get me wrong. The foundation of something really good is laid here. Solid platform controls, a decent fetch quest, and beautiful 2D pixel art (not to mention being a freebie) make this worth a look. And a brief look at that, as you should be able to finish Mandagon in under thirty minutes. I’m giving it my Seal of Approval because I enjoyed the exploration and gameplay. The developers couldn’t have botched telling a story more if they had tried to use smoke signals to deliver the Song of Hiawatha to a blind man.

Screen from Mandagon. After renouncing crime, the Riddler became an advocate for organ donation.

Another free-to-play title I checked out was Baezult. It forgoes any pretense of depth or meaning and instead just aspires to be a fun little puzzler/punisher. It does start out fairly fun, with some borderline inspired puzzles that I would have appreciated a lot more if the controls weren’t looser than Gary Busey’s grip on reality. In general, I’m not a fan of punishers, but at least Baezult avoids a lot of my pet-peeves. Rooms are (mostly) short, so if you die you don’t have to replay too much. The time between death and restarting is quick, so there’s almost no down time between the agony. My two biggest issues are as follows: (1) sometimes Baezult asks for precision placement of items like dynamite to clear blocks, but the method for throwing it out is anything but precise, necessitating a few replays. (2) The game relies far too much on timing-based movement with objects falling far too fast and your controller being far too floaty.

Screen from Baezult. Falling objects fall too fast to really get a feel for timing. Maybe if the controls had been tighter it wouldn’t be as bad, but really, the dev should maybe think about dialing the speed of any moving trap back a notch.

But honestly, this is one of the few punishers with bad controls I’ve played at IGC that I kind of dug. Maybe because it’s the only game I’ve reviewed that has married puzzles (one of my favorite genres) with a punisher (one of my least favorites) and the puzzles are actually worth playing through. In fact, Baezult was only tighter play-control away from possibly cracking the top 100 on the IGC Leaderboard. And hey, again, it’s free! Baezult is worth a look, even if it sounds like something a Frenchman says to you when you sneeze.

I don’t know why each of these developers decided to make their games free. Look, we all like getting free stuff, and yea, people are more likely to enjoy something they got for free than they are if they have to pay for it. That’s one of the main reasons I pay for all the games I play at Indie Gamer Chick. For me at least, I think it helps me to focus on the value of a game. While I enjoyed both Mandagon and Baezult, maybe I wouldn’t have liked them as much if I paid for them. I don’t know. I do know that, as flawed as both are, the developers clearly worked hard on both and I can’t really justify the lack of a price tag on either. This goes to all developers whether I’ve liked your games or not: the vast, vast majority of you work hard on your projects. Your time is worth some money. Hell, throw a $1 price tag up. Something. Anything. Even if you feel you don’t need the money, just save it up so that you’ll have a war chest for the future and might not need to turn to something like Kickstarter just to get a title screen on your future projects. Or put a buck on it and give the money to a charity like, say, one that provides resources and education towards the ongoing fight against epilepsy that might some day make a certain moderately popular indie critic be able to watch fireworks without having a seizure. Just sayin’.

Mandagon was developed by Blind Sky Studios and is free on Steam.

Baezult was developed by Atapki and is free on Steam.

Both games are Chick-Approved and Ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.