wuv

'Wuv' is a 48-hour contest game by Overkill, made in the Ika engine. The gameplay is pretty simple: there are a number of flowers scattered about the room. You have a set number of hearts, and a timer. Whenever the timer runs out you lose a heart. When you pick up a flower and take it to your 'girlfriend', your hearts get refilled and the timer resets. When you collect all the flowers in the room you move onto the next. There are also monsters running around, which either remove a heart or some time when you run into them. Now here are some Constructive Crits (cc's):

- The reason I wasn't sure exactly what the monsters did was because the timer runs down so quick, and because returning flowers gives you full health+timer again, there was absolutely no need to worry about them: it's easier to run straight through them and just get your health refilled later than try to dodge.

- There looked like some attempts at strategy in the map layouts, with different routes to flowers and different monsters in certain areas etc, but I still just completed them all by running blindly around: partly because the stuff I mentioned before means it makes no difference whether you collect the nearby flowers first or the harder, further away ones first, or because the maps were so big it's hard to see where you're going so you just end up searching blindly.

- The fact that every level basically amounted to the exact same strategy meant it got pretty repetitive, even for something so short (~5 minutes).


Okay, so that is the objective constructive review. The thing is, though, that it makes no difference whatsoever. Not just because this is just a 48-hour game developed for kicks but also because I'm reasonably sure the developer doesn't give a fuck anyway. Look at the graphics! It looks like someone gave LSD to a Commodore! It is so crude and weird as to be virtually incomprehensible, and I kind of admire that. The reason I played this game was because I remembered playing one of Overkill's other games, 'Molasses Meow', where the whole point was to annoy the player as much as possible. There were ridiculous mazes filled with flashing neon lights which actually made my eyes burn for like an hour after playing. And, you know, say what you want about intentionally bad games of whatever but I can't help but admire the GUMPTION of someone who builds an entire game around the sole premise of fucking with you in any way possible.
Wuv is no Molasses Meow, which is both a good and a bad thing: despite what the screenshots show it doesn't hurt your eyes to play it, because you'll barely even notice the graphics: you'll be too busy running around frantically looking for flowers. Even when you do start to think about them, you'll be more vaguely impressed at their originality and strangeness than actually REACTING to them in either a positive or negative way, if you get me. There are also some neat touches hidden away too: the girl you give the flowers to starts to cry if you stay away too long, and the last level has some trap-sprung enemies (which, again, made no difference whatsoever). There was also a kind of interesting idea in that the explanation given for the timer is that love fades away if you overthink it too much, which is a really good idea to base a game around, but as it only comes up in the readme and not the game particularly it doesn't make much of a difference. So that's the good parts of saying it's not Molasses Meow; the bad part is that in adopting a kind of generic arcade-style gameplay, as well as a really stripped-down interface, this loses a lot of the personality that made MM so interesting and cool: it's just an okay game with some interesting graphics and explanations.

So yeah, I wouldn't particularly call this a great or possibly even a good game. By the regular review metric here it is a failure. But it is an..... honourable kind of failure, I think. It's a two-day game with flashes of style and uniqueness and an almost tangible sense of a creator having fun with things, and that impressed me more than any amount of silly custom scripts or lighting effects.

ARBITRARY NUMERICAL RATING: well the chipsets coudl use some work but i likd the cloud strife cameo overall id give it six darkjaks out of ten darkjaks