Steam Free for All: Off-peak Escape the Blameless, Disturbed Game

That's a mouthful of a title isn't it?

After trying out some of the free games on Steam I decided to put up mini-reviews to let you know if they're worth playing!

Escape the Game (Intro)

But you know I will...

In this platformer you are helping a talkative little square with little eyes named Kevin to Escape the Game. The controls and mechanics are pretty good, as are the humorous lines Kevin says, and it's nowhere as hard as Super Meat Boy which is certainly more inclusive to the player base. Kevin does yap a lot though, which for me takes away from his likeability a little - especially at the beginning. Since it's just "an intro" the game is pretty short - and while it's not as good as Thomas was Alone, it's still a nice little time waster. :)

Blameless

As an architect who gets knocked out in a property under construction, you awake trapped inside and must escape before your assailant returns. This first person puzzle solver plays like a much tamer version of Slender and the majority of your game time will be spent looking for items and spots to use them on. The graphics are really nice though, and I do appreciate that there are multiple ways to get through each area. The game doesn't offer a lot of answers though, probably not helped by it's short run time as you will escape in under 40 minutes I'd suspect. The voice acting is also a bit off level during dialog, and the start intro is almost cringe worthy. It gets much better once you start though. If you like puzzly things, then this is one worth trying.

Leave a guy stuck in a room with lots of construction tools... yeah...

Disturbed

I hope you decided "die" because that's whats going to happen... a lot!

This choose your own adventure story with uses nice pencil drawings as graphics, sees you in the shoes of a farmer during a time of deadly blight. Thanks to the many, many blind "You died" options, this is the longest of the games in this list. That along with blind pattern guessing and maze mapping (with insta deaths) makes it pretty hard going at the start. Only when you find particular items do you start feeling that you are making progress.

It's amusing that each death is an achievement though, which means you might actually want to seek them out. I also quite like the minimalistic sounds used as it works well with the bleakness. I liked this game. It's the sort of thing I think I could make, but it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea.

Off-Peak

When you find yourself stuck in a psychedelic train station with no means to leave, your only option is to find pieces of a train ticket! Obviously! That is the main "quest" of this game, but it's more like an experience since the ticket pieces aren't really hiding. They're just scattered across the eclectic collections of art, music and people in the train station. Definitely an odd one, but it has the best intro of this lot for me... none! If you feel like something very off beat, then give Off-Peak a try.

Be prepared for some strange stuff!

Thomas Was Alone

Can a square think outside the box? Thomas definitely tries!

At its heart, this game is a rather tame puzzle platformer (at least compared to Super Meat Boy) that has taken the odd but graphically less taxing path of using squares and rectangles of different colors as the main characters. Art wise I like that despite this, there is still dynamic lighting and most of the levels are tilted slightly. There is also decent piano music and very good narration that helps the player understand what is going on from the otherwise featureless world.

Can you feel the excitement?

While this does help it stand out there are many times that flow just doesn't make sense. That sort of breaks the deal for me as its almost like the Narrator is blatantly lying to the audience at parts, or is just as lost as to why people... *ahem* blocks... keep getting separated story wise and not just because the next stage is designed for so and so. For me, this game was a good idea that didn't get seen through to the end. I give it 2 out of 5 angles, and cannot really give it my recommendation to anyone.