Au Sable

it’s intentional that the mouse cursor is off by default, it’s to make it seem like the character has never used a weapon before, so they can’t easily handle it.

also, there’s some weird grammar in the post. it should be “platformers which _focus_ on delivering dark and creepy feelings”.

Amazing ambient, love the graphics and the music. Very dark game, but very enjoyable.

But those aren’t low res platformers and their creators aren’t attention whores.

p.s. i’m the last person to defend 2d lo-fi platformers, i get bored with how they dominate tigsource as much as the next person, but this one is kind of special among them, much like glum buster and seiklus were

@Paul Eres – well, I see your point but I guess what I’m getting at here is that, for example, if it wasn’t for indiegames.com, I would still be clueless about the release of GSB, which is, I believe, for most of us higher up the priority ladder than this Au Sable. Then again, I could be missing the point of this particular independent gaming related information source.

I like this websight, if only it was as informative as some other indie sources.

When you read TIGS or the forums you have to keep in mind that there’s a certain type of game, art style and type of polish the community goes for. The more “mainstream” it looks the less attention it’ll get. God forbid it’s 3D. Gamedev embraces other games more but people there would rather write tech demos all day than participate in the indie scene. The ugliest lofi mundane game will get gobs of attention here because it looks a certain way or is just “weird”. That Gamasutra article on the indie aesthetic couldn’t be more dead on, poor Craig Stern got rocks thrown at him for that one when he was 100% right.

i don’t believe tigs is meant to be informative, appeal to any particular aesthetic sensibilities, or favour any game over another. it’s just because this is quite a brilliant game, and paul played it and liked it, that it is posted “instead of” gratuitous space battles/rocketbirds revolution (neither of which i think are particularly good games). and i don’t know how you can think amon26 is an “attention whore”; he doesn’t advertise himself at all beyond his blog and the tigsource forums.

@Paul Eres — while i might agree with everything else you’re saying, to compare this game/all of our friends are dead to glumbuster/seiklus is outrageous!

As a response to Mr. Podunkian, I’d like to weigh in that Au Sable succeeded in offering me the same degree of emotional immersion I experienced with Cave Story. Somehow, this was accomplished with a fraction of the finesse seen in Pixel’s impeccably polished work.

Cave Story’s narrative was very minimally integrated into the gameplay, unlike Glum Buster (probably my favourite independent game). Seiklus struck me as fairly emotionless, and I could not fairly compare it to Au Sable’s particular brand of immersion.

Personally, I would definitely put Au Sable in Glum Buster’s camp of emotionally immersive games, right up there with Virtanen’s Seven Minutes. These three games would seem to be incomparable in terms of mechanics, scale, and polish, but I would say that they’re trying to accomplish the same eerie reaction–with varying degrees of aggression. Perhaps the linearity has something to do with it.

I’m trying to be unbiased, but if anyone finds my comment inexplicable, it’s probably because I espouse a somewhat Cactus design philosophy.

Also, shotguns.

I didn’t mean the front page news as much but point taken. You guys do an awesome job but I just wish the community was a little bit more open to different aesthetics and gameplay. Didn’t mean anything personal.

paul, why are you so worried about your readers being sleepy lately =/

plvhx, because he wants to link to my videos

Tigsource does a great job in selecting the games it reviews. They have posted many, many articles and updates about GSB.. other “smaller” games deserve attention sometimes.

I’m late to the party, but I think tigsource does a great job of selecting games to review and put on their home page.

I find, in general, the games which are promoted usually have less “fluff” about them and the core game play mechanic is never far off. The game featured on this page included.

So it’s fun, you know? One doesn’t have to wade through 1/2 hour of settings, familiarisation of controls, intros, etc. to have a good time. I can roll out games I download from time to time and have a bash, then put them away.

To me, this is the great feeling I got from games of a bygone era and I like the fact that there is a place (tigsource) where I can still experience games like this.

Okay, maybe I’m being a bit melodramaic, but it’s how I feel about it :-)

well I finally got around to playing Au Sable and… to some extent, I have to agree with the above ramblings. won’t go as far as to say that anyone who likes this is a dumbass but there really doesn’t seem to be any actual substance to this other than pretentiousness and desperate attempts at OMG SO DARK AND DEEP – which by itself wouldn’t be a problem if the platforming part wasn’t so bad and bug ridden.

all of our friends is much better, gameplay wise.

I must say, despite how much I wanted to like this game, it just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny; the art design is dull and haphazard (there isn’t enough clear distinction about where the player may or may not stand), and the instant-death mechanic is rather annoying, considering the slew of box-fetch puzzles in almost every stage. The cryptic dialogues and surreal cutscenes make no sense plot-wise, instead trying to ‘disturb’ the player using a rather cheap gimmick.

I believe I said it made no sense “plot-wise”, since I was trying to understand the story throughout the entire second half of the game.

Btw, Paul, are you up for the podcast today? It’s 2 PM PST.

i see, but well, i don’t think anyone said that those things have to make sense plot-wise; the last game didn’t have a plot, and something can have an interesting story without having a plot. this game doesn’t really have a plot, but that isn’t to say those words don’t make sense in other ways

maybe about the podcast, will see — when is that on eastern time?

and yeah, pretentious is the favorite invective of tigsource trolls, so i wouldn’t try to look for any sense behind their words. well not no sense, i think in the way they use it what it basically means is ‘this game takes itself seriously, as if it is good, when it in fact is not good’

the only way to avoid being pretentious by that def is either to be actually good (in their eyes) or for a game to not take itself seriously (like, say, runman, where there’s a lot of over the top silliness)

I fail to see how this is pretentious. Do you moronic trolls even know what that word means in the English language?

‘tired’ is the new ‘whilst’.

by the way, this shit’s great. congrats amon.

Amon, even.

i agree, it’s all individual perspective. the dark, corrupted atmosphere and the shaking would disturb or frighten others but for me it made me feel right at home and i enjoyed it.

the game was a nice experience but i agree about what others are saying about the text. it didn’t work like it did in AOOFAD. maybe you should be more subtle with it or try something different or something, i don’t know

The Path isn’t pretentious in and of itself, but the creators definitely are.

CosmicMaher:

>Is there something wrong with trying to be deep?

Sometimes I think it’s giving them too much to say they’re trying. The following passage sums up pretentiousness.

Being profound and seeming profound – Those who know they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water. -Nietzsche

As for Amon26, I rather liked All Our Friends Are Dead, as well as what little I played of Au Sable. The nature of horror-type games lets me write all the cryptic quotes and flourish off as theme and atmosphere. It reminds me of Lovecraft, so I don’t really think of it as pretentious. For someone people speak of as a beginner, you have some excellent ideas, and I’m interested to see what you’ll come up with as you learn more. I didn’t finish Au Sable, however, because frankly I got kind of bored of it. The mechanics are very simple yet very unforgiving. It’s hard when I can only enjoy your aesthetics by progressing through a game that, were it not for aesthetics, I would consider a waste of my time.

Again, at this point, it’s forgivable. Your games are pretty spectacular for what they are. But there are two ways to go from here. The hard way is to improve on your mechanics to make deeper and more complex games that are as awesome to play as they are to look at, and turn out some of the best games in the western indie scene, stuff worth paying for. The easy way is to ignore me and keep pushing the “art” aspect, and keep getting friendly loving pats on the back from indie blogs each time you release a new game. I don’t really care, it’s all the same to me, and game making just might not be something you want to put it all into.

But either way, best of luck, really. Even if you never made another game, I’d still appreciate what you have done well: two of the few platformers that have successfully instilled in me a real sense of dread and unease.

@SillyRabbit’s comment about the Craig Stern article:
I read that article and I can’t understand how Stern could be 100% right when he contradicts himself. He begins by saying that the “indie aesthetic” favors graphics that are too simplistic and then concludes by saying that the indie scene is shooting itself in the foot by focusing too much on graphics that take too much time and effort to craft. The article certainly didn’t have a thesis, just an intent to bash an undefined “indie” boogeyman. There is, ultimately, no indie aesthetic, just a bunch of us humans with different preferences. I don’t think the “ugliest lofi mundane game” will get gobs of attention here.

I tried two games tonight. One was the demo of Dark Salvation. RPS (Rock, Paper, Shotgun) led me to that one. I thought I was gonna love it because I was in the mood for a Quake clone but the level design was confusing to impenetrable and the animation and voice acting were laughable. Nothing wrong with RPS; I’m glad they led me to that demo.

But, I’m much more pleased that TIGSource led me to Au Sable. Spoony (from Spoony Experiment) has put me into a Lovecraftian mood lately and so this game really resonated with me. I turned the lights off and put headphones on; maybe that helped. Anyway, I thought the main character was cool and I especially liked the bull enemies. I loved the falling scene and the end of the bell scene made me shiver. Gameplay hasn’t really blown me away yet but everything is implemented well enough that I can’t complain. I thought dying could have been more freaky but I suppose that could be annoying and maybe it does latter on, I’m too tired to finish tonight but I will be coming back to it.