The retreat was an entry for the inaugural McBacon Jam, with the theme of deprivation and/or abundance. The team of Seiromem, Loser & Irili decided to cover both aspects of the theme by providing a plethora of enemies, though actually only the one sprite and a dearth of supplies. So the game becomes more about avoiding combat that entering into it. To that end, stealth is the watchword.

The game opens with, a quite unfortunately large information dump, which is never a good thing, and whilst it is an engaging concept, lone survivor fighting her way clear to return the information that cost the lives of her loyal compatriots to her homeland, the sheer amount of irrelevant information that is provided is somewhat off-putting. It needs to be condensed into something much more succinct, or perhaps the text replaced with a longer visual cut scene to portray the same information.


That pretty much covers the game premise.

Still the opening aside, the basic idea is to avoid rather than fight the enemy soldiers who are patrolling the area between your country and theirs and to ensure the blood soaked pages you carry make it back to the people who can do the most with it.

There are only a couple of maps in the game at the stage of its development, the exposition map and the stealth map, which means the game isn't very long. The stealth map is pure RTP but it's actually also the place where you get a bit of shine to this game. The overheard conversation of the two soldiers at the campfire is actually pretty accurate and is typical of the sort of conversation you get in situations like this. A bit of bravado, a bit of story-telling and a reason to laugh in the midst of a tense martial situation. Unlike the aforementioned info dump at the beginning this interaction flows fairly well. It also allows our guilt-ridden heroine to let the player know that the stealth dynamic is direct line of sight and everything else is covered by the ubiquitous and impenetrable fog of night.

So after retrieving a handy health potion from under the noses of the chattering soldiers at the campfire Bellita must wend her way past those soldiers who are actually on guard. It's not a difficult task as they move in set routes without any random movements to trip you up, so reaching the end of the single 'stealth map' wasn't much work, and then, well nothing, that's where it ends. There is no exit from the map other than the one you came in on, there isn't even a map transition to a message saying 'thanks for playing, to be continued' it just doesn't go anywhere.

So I decided to find out what would happen if I did get caught, and it's the standard battle, turn based, no special skills or abilities, but then since the game is supposed to be about avoiding conflict, that isn't a surprise. What is is that the punishment isn't harsher. The point is to avoid conflict, if you can just wipe the floor with the enemy why bother avoiding them? Still after killing everything in sight I was done, in and out in less than 5 minutes. Though I did wonder where the demons of the opening sequence were, but I suppose these guys are their thralls.

I can't recommend this game in its current state, and indeed if it hadn't been one of the McBacon Jam entries I would not have given it a run, but anyone that managed to make something from the competition deserves at least a look-see and some feedback. So I did.