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The Gift I Played
Caz- 07/07/2014 06:27 PM
- 388 views
The Gift You Gave is an RPG where you play as a band of weird misfits, “battling” the audience and running out of “stamina” if the heckles become too much for you. There's Jacqui, the girl who plays guitar but insists on wearing a mask on stage, presumably to improve her confidence; Denis, the bass guitarist who seems to hate everything except drinking and playing in bars while also sometimes emo emo emo emo emo; Francois, the saxophone groovemeister who.. wait, what were you saying? I am lost in the jazz.. I think there was another band member too called Chris.. Chris-something. Ah, no one cares about the drummer! Lets move on!
Who's that mysterious figure at the back? Is it a backing vocalist? Is it a dancer?! No, it's.. oh it's just the drummer, never mind.
INTROWho's that mysterious figure at the back? Is it a backing vocalist? Is it a dancer?! No, it's.. oh it's just the drummer, never mind.
The game presents itself well from the offset. You start out practising in Jacqui's apartment, where it becomes apparent how much focus has been put into art. The map is very nicely done, and I find the detailing of the pixels helps avoid the need for cluttering the map. Though I do feel that perhaps the map is a little too vast for what it is, and could maybe be cut down a smidgen in the centre. It is a similar story for a lot of the game's appearance, though I must say that art has a very heavy focus and has clearly had a lot of (if not the most) thought put into it.
The battle system is thrown at you pretty quickly to start, even though it's just a practice round against a teddy bear as your audience. A lot of info is dumped on you to begin with, and although a lot of the terms essentially just translate to things like HP and “Limit Break” in regular-nerd-people terms, it can seem a little overwhelming in the beginning. Thankfully, a description of each move is provided at the bottom of the screen when you highlight a command in battle.
The aim of each battle is to impress the audience with your moves before they can whittle away your stamina. Sadly, they don't leap onto the stage and beat you to death with broken bottles or chair legs as I had initially thought (and perhaps even slightly morbidly wished for), but they are instead rather tame and resort to heckles such as “the guitar is too loud,” “I could do this better” and “you are a failure at playing games and you should go cry yourself into a bowl of ice cream this instant.”
… well.. alright.. maybe not that last one.
As you fight, you can gather Wave points which act as the aforementioned “Limit Break.” Once your Wave bar turns green, you can do a Solo and crush the audience under your sheer levels of awesome! Take that, oppressive uncle who thought playing guitar would never get you anywhere in life!
In all seriousness, it is rather a pleasant surprise to see a game where conflicts are more about personal progression than mindless violence. Don't get me wrong, I love a good beat-the-hell-out-of-every-damn-thing-fest as much as anyone, but it can sometimes feel like physical strength is the only thing which improves. I think a game like this really expands on the idea that muscle isn't everything and there are more impressive talents out there, but also that personal battles can tire the mind as well as the body. I thought the game dealt with it well, and though the writing could feel fairly hammy at times, I was definitely aware that each character found every performance emotionally exhausting.
Onto some more gameplay-related notes (notes? get it? I'm trying to use musical humour), there was a main story that went in a straight line from one area to the next, but there were a few little requests in each venue for certain ways to play. For example, in the bar there is a girl called Archei-- I mean, 'Arc', who wants you to perform two Solos. If you do these requests, you can gain little rewards that are pretty helpful in battle. You can also look around for treasure in the form of gramophones which will give you Audio Points.
Record.. Get it?! *scoff* ... what, too much humour?
Audio Points (AP) can be used back at the apartment to improve everyone's skills. You can either buy an overall improvement to a character's proficiency, or you can buy them skills. After you buy one skill, you unlock the next, and so on and so fourth.. I thought this was a pretty cool idea, although it sometimes seemed like it was best to just keep buying the upgrades rather than the skills to have pure playing power. I was especially sad that one of Denis' skills resulted in an error when I tried to use it, so perhaps I was burned by the experience and vowed to avoid them.
Nooooooo!! This is the saddest day of gaming!
Not to drone on about that (I'll never stop!), but some animations failed to play in battles at all, which made it hard to tell if anything even happened. Several of Denis' attacks didn't do anything except display a number, which discouraged me a little whenever it came to his turn and I was choosing his command.
I found parts of the game a little weirdly balanced, though perhaps due to my unorthodox playing style and choice of skill purchases. I thought some of the earlier battles were more difficult than later ones, and the last fight was possibly too easy for the impact it should have had. Granted, I did see my characters fall several times throughout the game, but I rarely game over'd unless I wasn't focusing and picking options poorly.
I did find the battle system enjoyable though, I just felt it needed some more polish. With a little more balancing, perhaps fix key presses so holding a button even a little too hard doesn't press it twice, and I think I encountered an issue where part of the GUI remained on my screen after battle.. if all of these were to be ironed out, I think this would be a very promising premise for a game. As I mentioned before, it's very unusual and refreshing to see a game like this.
Naturally I won't forget to mention the music either, being that it is rather a large element of the game. I thought the songs all fitted the game very well and were consistent in style, and some of them even started getting quite catchy after a while. Though I must admit that the title screen was perhaps my favourite song of them all. It's just so jazzy and relaxing..
I also can't forget the portrait art which was great, though sadly presented as very small facesets. I think with the amount of space on the screen, it could've been better to use portraits. Some expressions might have also helped, as the characters seemed to pull the exact same face for the whole game which was particularly odd when they were being rather emotional.
That rather neatly segues onto my next point (you thought I gave up, didn't you?): the story. It was an agreeable story in all, I had no qualms with the concept of everyone's backstories or the motivation of the main game. I did feel that some parts of the writing were possibly overworded, and that some characters seemed to spill their emotions far too quickly. Everyone is very heart-on-sleeve, and although Jacqui's emotions tend to come out in soliloquies, she's still rather overemotional and talks to the player about herself in such a blatant way. I think her actions should speak louder than her words, and some actions shouldn't even require dialogue to explain them.
The game was very enjoyable overall, and I think it was exceptionally well made for something done in a month for the contest. It's a good reflection of the work Ocean can do when he puts his focus on something, and his enthusiasm to mak gam shows well in the final product.
