Intro

"The Caldwell Incident" is a short adventure game developed by a team of developers if the end credits are anything to go by, but it appears only one of them has an account on this site. Oh well, at any rate this game was developed by SundownKid and company using RPG Maker XP as part of the TIGSource Fall Folklore Competition. A competition that doesn't have prizes. So it would probably make more sense to call it a game jam, but at any rate it gave developers or teams of developers about a month to put together as many games as they wanted around a folklore based theme.

Story
Summary

The story begins with Todd being woken up by Jenny chucking rocks at his window. After all, she saw something mysterious land in the forest and swears she saw an alien with glowing red eyes. In all honesty, my best educated guess if this wasn't a game is that she saw one of these bad boys.


This owl has yellow eyes, but when exposed to certain kinds of artificial light they glow red.

At any rate Todd decides to go along with Jenny's request since he probably isn't going to get any rest until he satisfies her demands. So it's time to be sneaky and try and ask for useful information without being to obvious about it. After all, "they" might be listening to us.

Suffice to say after a few conversations as well as a few interactions with objects on the ground we manage we get the keys to the gate blocking the pathway to Site 15 and set off on our journey to discover the truth about what is going on.

Of course being a suspenseful comedy game with a title screen that has a horror theme to it. The ending contains a few twists and turns to say the least. And since I don't want to ruin them I'm going to end my plot summary here since I think it's better for people to experience those twists for themselves.

Strengths and Weaknesses

On the plus side the game is definitely on the lighter side of the horror genre if it even counts as horror at all. So if your not a big fan of said genre you'll probably be able to enjoy this game in my opinion. Though on a minor gripe it's kind of annoying just how clueless Todd is in this game when it comes to Jenny and her feelings.

Gameplay

On the gameplay front "The Caldwell Incident" is a rather basic adventure game. While you do run around picking up objects and using them to solve problems. The game does all the solving for you if you have the right item in your inventory. To make matters worse the game even highlights where a lot of the important items are with sparkly fairy dust. And the few that aren't highlighted are pretty easy to find by just interacting with every person and animal in town.

The only real twist we get is that Jenny will punish us if we act too suspiciously as we go about trying to unlock the pathway to Site 15. Though considering how easy it is to avoid raising suspicion in this game. You'd probably have to go out of your way to become too suspicious. And I wasn't curious enough to see what happens if you do that.

Graphics

On the graphical side of things the game features a lot of original art assets. Unfortunately the quality of those assets is rather amateurish to say the least, but at least they are consistent in terms of style and quality. Plus, I've seen far worse in other projects like "Jesus Christ RPG". So one can definitely do worse as far as custom assets go.



Though I think Jenny needed a slightly more feminine look.



Though, I suppose her rather masculine appearance is meant to be part of a joke about her telling Todd not to look up while their climbing into the ranger's office via a grappling hook.

Sound

On the sound side of things the game does features original tracks. Though I'll admit the title screen music really steals the show and rendered everything after it rather forgettable in comparison. It just really set the mood and is hard to forget. Sort of like I can't watch "Gremlins" without getting the theme song The Gremlin Rag by Jerry Goldsmith stuck in my head for a while.

Conclusion

I suppose some might argue this story isn't on theme, but considering all of the folklore surrounding area 51 over the years and that this story is told from the perspective of a reporter after the fact. One can easily argue this game is on theme especially with the digits for the site everything takes place at being Site 15. For those that haven't caught it yet 15 is just the digits for 51 reversed. So I sort see this project as what if Roswell happened to a small town in Alaska.

As far as quality goes the game is rather solid in some ways in my opinion. It has a great title screen song, has a few witty lines, and a plot that twists a few times for good measure. On the other hand the art isn't that good so the game isn't particularly enjoyable to look at and the game holds the player's hand a little too much for an adventure game in my opinion.