First Impression: Paws Of Coal (PC – Steam) ~ Point-And-Dig

Steam store page

Remember a game I reviewed a while ago, called Speed Limit? Well, the developers behind that action game are back with a new title. It’s a point-and-click adventure called Paws of Coal. And it’s a sort of prequel-ish game to another game. A game I actually published the press kit off, when I still did that. Trip the Ark Fantastic. This game is actually a sort of demo for the gameplay for that bigger game, while it’s also a stand-alone short adventure. Oh, and there is also a demo for Trip the Ark Fantastic out, so if you want to give that a go… You can. Now, let’s get our hands dirty with coal and dive into this adventure. Since, GameChuck gave me a press code to review this game, but they always welcome my 100% honest and unfiltered opinion… So, here we go. It’s something I like as well. If you have any thoughts/opinions to share about this game and/or the content of this article, you are more than welcome to share them in the comment section down below.

Editorial note: this review is written when v1.3 was released. While writing, “Month 1” update got released.

Point-And-Dig

In this game, you play as Charles. A hedgehog helping a good old friend. Your friend is a doctor in a mining town investigating a strange illness that’s making a lot of the mining rabbits quite ill in the town. The rabbits actually went on strike since they think the government isn’t doing enough to help them cure the illness. Since our good friend doctor Hopper isn’t able to leave the clinic to investigate… Since, yeah, somebody has to care for the patients… Charles got tapped.

There is no voice acting in this game, not even a bit of grunting. Yet, the writing isn’t affected by that at all. The writing quality is honestly top-notch. I was honestly afraid that the writing was going to be weak or cheesy because this game is essentially a side project, but I was quite surprised. Quite often, I got quite immersed, and the writing actually made me forget that there weren’t too many animations going on while the story is being told.

At one hand, I could start complaining on how it would be more fun with animations that acted out what was being told… But, that was before I realized the style they are going for. This game almost feels like a (grand)parent telling their (grand)children a bedtime story. One with pictures and text at the side. Yet, the content of the story might not always fit a children’s book… it felt somehow nostalgic while I haven’t heard the story before.

I also loved how realistic they made the writing for the story being in an animal kingdom. In sayings, things like skin is replaced with fur and the actual personality of the animals is worked into the writing as well. The only negative I have is that in some spots, it isn’t consistent on how dialogue is shown. Sometimes the text that’s being spoken is in the same style is the text used for descriptions. Apart from that, I barely found any faults. Here and there, a very minor mistake, but most of them were missing ending ” ” ” at spoken sentences.

This game plays like your typical point-and-click game. Yet, there is no real tutorial that explains to you the movement keys. Thankfully, they are listed in the menu behind a button. But is it a bad thing that this game doesn’t have a tutorial? Nah, I don’t think so. Overall, the game is easy to understand and learn. Especially when you have played other point-and-click games like Broken Sword for example. The big difference in this game is that this game is somewhat open-world. You don’t go from one screen/area to the next, you have the whole world open to you from the start, and it’s up to you to find the answers to its many puzzles.

It’s a side-game?

At various moments, I felt that this project didn’t have the main focus of GameChuck. The following paragraphs might look like I’m going to “destroy” this game, but it’s because this game and concept has a lot of potential… but it has some missing polish that’s making the game look bad and unfinished.

One of the best examples is the saving system. The game saves after each dialogue, automatically. Which is great! You do also have three save slots where you can manually save outside of dialogues, no problems there.

But if the save/load slots don’t give the information IF there is a save file in there and/or WHERE that save is… Then we are having issues. What if you are testing things with the different answers you are giving, and you want to see if the dialogue changes from other characters as well? You almost need to write down which save slot is what. Also, you don’t get a message if you want to save over an existing save slot. The current implementation works technically, but it leaves out a lot of information visually.

Something I feel quite conflicted about is the music and sound effects in this game. While this game has some nice orchestral music, it plays too few. There are too many moments of pure silence, even between the tracks repeating. Also, there aren’t enough tracks to play as background music, which means that you hear the same track over and over again. A bit more music tracks as background music would have been amazing.

All in all, the sound effects are great. But, at certain moments, I feel that there are sound effects missing. Especially when you do an action that doesn’t or won’t work. A perfect example of this is the first time you get the prompt to press the “J” key to open up your journal. When you are in dialogues, you can’t open your journal. I was mashing my “J” key, and I thought I encountered a bug. But no, it’s just that the journal doesn’t open during dialogues. In those cases, I’d either play a sound effect or show a little pop-up that communicates that with the player. That way, things don’t feel rough around the edges.

This is something I felt here and there. That this game has some very rough edges. The controls are another great example of that. Currently, there is support to play this game alone with the mouse. Yet, I don’t recommend you do that in the current version, since going in and out of doors doesn’t work currently. Also, there is a roll feature that lets you quickly roll from one place to another… Yet, good luck trying to do that with the mouse controls! It doesn’t work. I highly recommend that you play this game mostly with the keyboard controls. They work a lot better, are snappy and extremely responsive. Also, the tooltips shown on the screen relate to the keyboard controls anyway.

Going for more

Listen, according to this tweet… This game is the first part of the Ark Fantastic universe. Honestly, this gets me quite excited. Since, if we are going to see more games with this high level of world building, writing and visual presentation, we are going to be in for a treat.

Yes, the visual presentation of this game is amazing. Like I said earlier in this article, this game looks like a children’s book you are reading at night to your children. It’s colorful, well detailed, and the atmosphere makes the art almost come to life.

The game also has a handy “TO DO” list for when you are unsure what to do next. You can also put your current theory in your journal to try and find the actual reason and cure for the illness going around in the Burrows. It’s a great detective/point-and-click game that makes you think about what characters are saying and really take notes. I even had several notes on the mystery sprinkled in between my notes for this article.

You can investigate so much, it’s insane. The comments you get on various things, helps to build the world quite a lot. Like, you can also inspect almost every art work to learn more about the world. There are also sometimes more ways than one to get the information you need. You can either go research it via books, or you can research it by going around and talking to the other characters. I especially love the moments where things click and when I finally have a new lead to hunt down next.

This game might be rather short, but it also manages to have multiple endings, so it also has replay value for a point-and-click game, even. I have to be honest, I have been playing this game for 3 – 4 hours, research it quite extensively, and I haven’t solved the mystery just yet. I feel like I’m close, but I haven’t beaten it yet. That’s why I’m only writing a first impression.

But, this game also gave me an amazing first impression at the future of this game, and its universe. Yes, it has some things to polish and work out, like at one place in the game, you can see the ending of the map. Thankfully, we have a developer that updates this game with various quality of life improvements and since the release on May 2nd, we got 4 small updates to the game. Here is one they can fix in the next update, since the “month 1 update” removes the version number… It might be great to also remove that toggle to show it or not from the option menu, don’t you agree?

Speaking about those toggles, this game has some interesting settings. It also has a setting that gives you somewhat of a behind the scenes look at how the game works and was created behind the scenes. It doesn’t contain too many spoilers, if any, I think. You can also make this game harder on yourself by hiding tooltips, so you have to find out what you can interact with and how. But if you want to play this game, I highly recommend that you enable tooltips to not get lost.

To avoid me rambling too long about this game and maybe going into spoiler town… I’m going to wrap up my article here with the following conclusion. This game might have some rough edges in terms of UI, sound effects and music… But, all in all, this game works and it works good. I think that this game has something for every adventure/point-and-click game lover. Knowing the studio behind this and how they take feedback to heart, I’m quite sure that this game and the next games in this universe will grow and become even better.

Don’t misunderstand me when I say that this game has some rough edges, they are anything but game breaking. I have played this game on and off during this month and I haven’t gotten any crash and a very stable framerate. I was excited to see what this interesting point-and-click game “Trip the Ark Fantastic” was going to be and now that I got my first taste of it, I’m hooked. If the next game also polishes the save/load UI and has more music and uses more sound effects to communicate things with the player… I may be in trouble as a reviewer since I may not have too many things to critique anymore.

Give this game a chance when it sounds at all interesting to you. It’s a great experience and I’m conviced that with our feedback the developers can bring us amazing games in this interesting and rich universe. Now, I have to write my usual ending paragraphs and publish this article so I can go back to solving the mystery of the illness. Maybe we should discuss theories in the comment section? I’ll repeat it for the last time, yes this game has rough edges but the positive outweigh the negative by a lot here. Besides, a lot of the rough edges can and may be patched in the future… So yeah.

With that said, I want to thank you so much for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to welcome you in another one! But until then, have a great rest of your day and take care!

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Game Quicky: All You Can Eat (Steam) ~ Are You Hungry?

Official website – Steam page

Some time ago, I published a press kit about a game that GameChunk is developing. This Croatian indie developer is creating a title called Trip the Ark Fantastic. Now, I discovered that this isn’t the first game developed by the studio. They created an adventure game called “All You Can Eat”. And that’s what this review is going to be about. The developers provided me with a press code for the game. And of course, in this review, you will get my 100% honest opinion on the game. In any case, let’s dive right into the comic game that’s “All You Can Eat”. And as usual, feel free to leave a comment in the comment section with your opinion on the game and/or the content of this article.

The good meal.

In this game, you play as a lazy slob that is living in a diner. A few years ago, the diner started doing an all-you-can-eat buffet for the low price of 2 bucks. The idea is that he can keep eating for free unless he leaves the diner. But after some peaceful time, disaster strikes and the chef Luigi gets an offer he can’t refuse. He is going to sell the diner for a million bucks to build a parking lot on it. So, now you have to get into action to try and save your precious diner from closing by collecting a million dollars as quickly as possible.

The humor and story of this game is spot on. It’s quite enjoyable and fun. There aren’t too many characters and they don’t get a lot of character development but the chosen stereotypes are just great. Now, after you have beaten the game for the first time, you get a new game plus. Here two of the developers explain a lot about the decisions that they took in creating this game and they tell a lot of interesting details I didn’t pick up in my playthrough.

You might have already picked this up from the screenshots in this article but the visual style is something unique. The developers tried to mimic the way that newspaper comics worked. Those three-panel comics you see in the newspaper. In the end, you can also print out your playthrough as a sort of comic book you can print out. This is an amazing feature that really surprised me. This also explains the reason why there isn’t any animation in the game. Otherwise, the whole printable comic idea wouldn’t work.

Now, this game is really short. You can finish this game in a few minutes. It’s possible to see and do everything in one or two hours of play. While you can argue that this is negative, I honestly think that this isn’t such a bad thing. Since the developers actually explained in their commentary that this game was a sort of taste test, to see if people were interested in this style of game.

Now, this game has been translated into German, Russian and Chinese. Thank you to the translators that made this possible. In addition to that, the additional options you have in the options menu to stop the camera shake, colorblind mode, mute the game and such are great additions. But I wonder why the colorblind mode was added since the whole game is in black/white. So, if somebody can explain this to me in the comments that would be amazing.

The controls of the game are quite simple. The only thing you will need to play this game is the mouse. You can use the left mouse button to interact, speak and combine items. When you use the right mouse button, the main character gives you his opinion on the object in question. This is also a very helpful hint system if you are stuck or new in the adventure game genre.

That funny bad aftertaste

The sound design of this game is decent. Since this game didn’t have a big budget, the game doesn’t have any music and doesn’t have a lot of sound effects. Now, this in itself isn’t such a bad thing. Remember, you can print the story as a comic at the end and if the game relied on music or sound effects, the comic wouldn’t work at all. The negative part is that I wished there were a bit more ambient sound effects. Like some sizzling in the kitchen or some police radio noise in the police office.

The printable PDF is a cool feature but I had my mess up with my first playthrough. I was going to send it to the developers but something happened. I started the playthrough of new game plus for this review and that pdf overwrote my broken pdf. So, it’s possible that your comic printout gets a bit corrupted.

And if I’m allowed to nitpick, the fact that the game hangs and seems frozen when the pdf is being created is a bit annoying. From a programmer standpoint, I totally understand what’s happening. The game is creating the pdf in the background and it freezes the game to make sure there are no additional variables that can interfere with the creation. Now, I would have moved the screen to the visual of “please wait while your PDF is printed” while the PDF is being printed. Not after. At first, I was going to ALT+F4 the game since I thought it had completely frozen.

Now, one other minor nitpick is that the game didn’t close right away when I exited the game. Steam kept saying that I was playing the game while I was unable to find anything running while using the task manager. Maybe it takes a long time to shut down the PDF engine in the background?

There is one minor thing that I dislike about the printable PDF. And that is the fact you don’t see which question or reply was picked by the player. This makes that some jokes like the name of the dinner chef looses a bit of their impact.

Sadly enough, there is one somewhat game-breaking bug in the game. Thankfully, it doesn’t ruin your save file but it confuses the game enough you get into a loop of empty screens. This can be achieved when you use the right mouse button on the empty sign in the MegaSlime Corp. I think this might be caused by a conflict in the code. But, when you move on to a blank square… The best action is to pause the game and resume with the continue option. That seems to fix it. Thankfully, it’s the only location where it happens.

And that brings me to the last nitpick of the game. There is no clickable button to pause the game. You have to use the “ESC” key to get to the pause menu. But, I totally understand why this decision has been made. Since, if you create a button that’s always on screen, I don’t want to imagine the effort that needs to go make sure that it doesn’t appear on the printable pdf.

The rating in the newspaper

This game is short and it’s possible to get all the achievements in 1 or 2 hours if you are familiar with point-and-click adventure games. But, this game is a big breath of fresh air in my opinion. I really enjoyed the references and throwbacks of the plot. The story made me laugh several times.

Visually, this game reminds me of a simpler time. When I was drawing story ideas in my textbooks in the study hall or during a boring class. Or when I was reading comics on a rainy Sunday afternoon. I think my weakness for nostalgia really made this game even better for me.

It’s a shame that there I have a few minor nitpicks with the game. Most of them I can totally understand why the decision has been made. Expect the game-breaking bug, that’s something I wish was fixed.

Even with the game-breaking bug, I still fully recommend this game. It’s an amazing demonstration of what this style of game can do. The potential for this concept is endless. Imagine being able to share your adventures with other players or creating your own comic book. It’s the ultimate merchandising.

It was quite difficult to find things I didn’t like about this game apart from the extremely short length. I want to play more games in this style and I’m happy that I can talk about this game and spread the word. Since there is another game announced called “The Heist” that looks extremely promising.

So yeah, I think this game is totally worth your 2 bucks and with that, you get a coupon to an amazing concept that gives the taste for more. Thank you GameChunk for bringing this game to Steam! I can’t wait to see what your other projects are going to bring us.

And with that, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game. Thank you so much for reading this game and I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care!

Score: 90/100

Editorial note: The developers of this game got a draft of this review and might fix the game-breaking bug in the future.

Publishing: Trip the Ark Fantastic

Trip the Ark Fantastic – an immersive story-driven scientific adventure set in the Animal Kingdom on the verge of industrial and social revolution.

5 December 2019, Zagreb – Gamechuck has just released the first trailer for their upcoming role-playing adventure game Trip the Ark Fantastic, the first Croatian game co-funded by the European Union’s MEDIA sub-programme.

Trip the Ark Fantastic is planned for release in 2022 on PC/Mac/Linux and consoles, and until then Gamechuck is inviting all interested gamers to follow them via their newsletter, Discord channel, or other social media at arkfantastic.com.

SUMMARY

“Under our homes and under our hearths, civilization itself stands on a story. Words tied us all together, and they could unravel the world. 

Find it, Charles; uphold the Myth!”

Trip the Ark Fantastic will have:

• A deep and immersive secondary world set in the Animal Kingdom on the verge of industrial and social revolution, content-rich and filled with intrigue, side-quests, and flavor at every step.
• Completely original gameplay mechanics based on the scientific method: research, discuss, experiment, and finally publish arguments in the Animal Kingdom’s papers.
• An exploration of how myths, science, and philosophy can influence society, and how monarchies, democracies, and anarchies view power, authority, and legitimacy of rule.
• Gorgeous art including frame-by-frame animation and vibrant landscapes inspired by the golden age of animation, as well as music inspired by the works of R. Wagner
• A gesamtkunstwerk approach in which the art, music, and gameplay all tie closely to the story of scientific discovery and the role of myths in different types of societies.
• The entire development completely is done in open-source technologies, including Godot Engine, Krita, Ink, and MuseScore, among others.

STORY

Trip the Ark Fantastic is a story-driven role-playing adventure set in the Animal Kingdom on the verge of both industrial and social revolution. The story follows Charles, a hedgehog scholar on a mission by the lion king to save the monarchy, but his decisions could end up helping reformists or even to bring about anarchy.

The story revolves around an ancient myth that forms the basis of the Animal Kingdom’s caste system – the myth of the Ark Fantastic. As the myth goes, the ark was built by lions millennia ago to save all animals from a great flood. The king’s gambit is that, amidst whispers of reform and revolution, a reputable scholar such as Charles proving the existence of the mythical ark might sway animals toward a royalist stance, and thus uphold the monarchy.

Charles is accompanied by the king’s trusted advisor Philippe the Fox and the captain of the royal guard – Andre the Boar. Their task will lead them to the fringes of the Kingdom and beyond, in search of elusive truth.

GAMEPLAY

The player progresses through the game by solving the Kingdom’s various problems and mysteries, but his method of solving them is a scientific one – he publishes compelling arguments in the Animal Kingdom’s scientific papers to prove his theories and disprove those of others. Only arguments with sound logic and solid evidence will have the power to sway public opinion and change the course of history. 

The evidence itself can be found by talking to the local denizens (after learning their language, such as squirrels), by using scientific equipment (a microscope, or a chemist kit), or, as a true scholar, by “standing on the shoulders of giants” and using evidence from the works of other scholars found in libraries across the Kingdom.

The player’s main challenge will be finding all the relevant evidence and then choosing the right conclusions, which are then published and reviewed by his peers, potentially resulting in a boost to his scholarly reputation.

Additionally, since Charles’ scientific conclusions can have large-scale consequences on the Animal Kingdom and the monarchy, in particular, there is a looming moral dilemma over whether the player should publish a certain argument or not.

THEMES AND INSPIRATIONS

We draw inspiration for the game from modern fables of classic literature, such as Animal Farm or Watership Down, as well as deep story-driven games from the roleplaying and adventure game genres, and games with unique and experimental gameplay mechanics.

Our goal is to use the game to explore various types of society (monarchy, democracy, anarchy) and to tackle questions such as how the rule is legitimized, what role myths play in the shaping of society, and so on.

The animation is drawn frame-by-frame to be reminiscent of early animated classics, and the music takes cues from 19th-century romanticism with the use of leitmotifs inspired by Wagner and gesamtkunstwerk opera.

The game is developed using open-source software, such as the painting tool Krita and the Godot game engine. Gamechuck studio is also a sponsor to both Krita and Godot Engine and, in the case of Godot Engine, actively contributes to its development.

CONTACT

Lucija Pilić – PR and Marketing

Press mail: press@game-chuck.com

Trip the Ark Fantastic web page: www.tripthearkfantastic.com

Gamechuck web page: www.game-chuck.com

Link to Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxxCXc1ade4

Press kit: http://tripthearkfantastic.com/presskit

Discord: https://game-chuck.com/discord

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tripthearkfantastic/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ark_fantastic

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tripthearkfantastic/

About Gamechuck

Gamechuck is a Croatian game development company founded in 2017 and based in Zagreb. Gamechuck secured EUR 149,400 from European Union’s MEDIA sub-program Creative Europe for the development of the “Trip the Ark Fantastic,” thus becoming the first game development studio from Croatia that received funding from the EU. Gamechuck has also been nominated for the Best Game Idea at the AzPlay Bilbao, the Best Transmedia Project at the Filmteractive Warsaw and Best Game Idea at the Casual Connect London for its debut game “All You Can Eat,” while its second game “vApe Escape” was featured in the Humble Monthly Originals selection in November 2018.