Bundle Fever continues to wrack the internet. It seems that some bundle sites are starting to run out of steam and interesting new things to offer… but apparently not Indie Royale, who have just landed back on the scene with a very unique lineup called The Graduation Bundle. It’s a very strange set of games this time round, but all good quality fun, and with one particularly notable item that probably deserves a mini-review of it’s own.
At the low end of the bundle is 1000 Amps, a cute but simple platform puzzle game from over somewhere in Desuraville. Two more games jump ship from the Xbox Live Indie Games store – Lasercat and Dead Pixels – the former being a super-oldschool ZX Spectrum style platformer with great music, and the latter being a fun little co-op zombie masher with random levels and a dash of River City Ransom in the design.
The real meat of this bundle comes from two games. The Ship (a game which almost everyone on Steam already owns, admittedly, due to an enormous giveaway some time back), coming first, is a multiplayer murder manhunt. Great when played with friends who’ll stick to the rules and actually try to remain stealthy/innocuous, but it does admittedly fall apart when played on public servers where it quickly becomes a no-holds-barred deathmatch with umbrellas and fire-axes where everyone loses. Star of the show, though, is undoubtedly The Void. Released in 2008 by experimental Russian studio Ice-Pick Lodge, it’s… well, it’s utterly unique, although strangely reminiscent of the very earliest first-person 3D adventures such as Driller and Castle Master.
The Void is the biggest item here, a first-person survival/horror/experimental art adventure. You step into the translucent, naked form of a lost soul in a dark, purgatorial realm. Your goal is to rise to the surface where possible redemption or reincarnation awaits. The path to the top is dangerous and – bizarrely enough – filled with politics and philosophy. While The Void is a very difficult game requiring careful planning, precise use of resources and efficient expenditure of Colour (your universal mystical power-source, cultivated and harvested from withered gardens that you can set to bloom once more) in combat, the main drive comes from the Sisters and the Brothers – two groups of paired beings living in the Void itself.
The Sisters are beautiful, oft-nude (the game somehow manages to get away with a lot of nudity without seeming tacky at all) siren-like figures who are both prisoners and gatekeepers of the Void itself, and will try to convince you to feed them Colour in order to allow your further ascent. The Brothers are twisted, nightmarish creatures tasked with the protection and control of the Sisters, and as horrifying as they look, the situation isn’t nearly as black and white as you might first think. Some of them are even rather friendly – so long as you play along. Just to make things nerve-wracking, the Brothers are blind and believe you to be one of them, so you must carry out the tasks they assign while serving your own needs. It’s a dangerous balancing act, and a very unique experience as a whole.
And topping off the bundle is a Steam beta key for Airmech, one of my most eagerly anticipated games of the year. Essentially a direct modern update of 1989′s Megadrive/Genesis action-strategy game Herzog Zwei, you directly control a Macross-esque transforming mech around the battlefield, ordering the construction of units on the fly, and picking up and delivering them manually to where they can best be used to assault and capture the various bases. There’s a dash of DOTA and even a bit of Advance Wars in the graphics and design, but the core gameplay is almost unchanged in nearly a quarter-century. The fact that it holds up so strongly to this day speaks well of the design. The Graduation Bundle also includes an item that gives you a handy permanent 5% XP boost for the lifetime of the game.
The one weak-point of this bundle is that, aside from 1000 Amps (which is available for Mac), everything is Windows-only. There’s no Linux support at all. Steam keys are offered for everything except the XBLIG refugees, though, which is always a popular move. There’s also a still-unannounced bonus game due to be announced sometime later into the bundle. A vague hunch is that it may well be Ice-Pick Lodge’s silly physics-puzzle adventure Cargo: The Quest For Gravity, but that’s just wild speculation at this point. The Graduation Bundle as it stands now is easily worth a few dollars. The Void by itself could easily command that price. You’ll almost certainly have never played anything quite like it before.
