Space Spy
Posted by Guest Reviewer Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:43:00 GMT
[This is a guest review and interview by Fuzz.]
“I don’t remember my line…
Snow snowball dreams ghosts white ele (elegy) stripes…
Talk with eyeball in the bed…
Mental station…
I passionately like how helicopter flies under the eye nerve…
Undercarriage of the airplane, which looks like the blood vessels…
Am I not healthy?
On the aviation field planes fly away one by one…
This story of the broken equilibrium is about a guy, who was in the psychward, but once flew away…
My art does not suck…”
Space Spy is a puzzle game by Vasily Zotov, the creator of Quite Soulless. It is a series of 5 vignettes set in and around the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. What starts off with a seemingly innocuous shot of keys dropping into the sewers escalates into an adventure of epic scale featuring the hypnotization of police officers, 8-sided eyeballs in psychiatric wards, a romance between an actress and a yeti, and the destruction of a courtroom by a fascist with a rocket launcher. And all the while the crazy director Canavati is watching you…
The graphics can hardly be considered “good” by any stretch of the imagination, but they are fascinating in an eerie, surreal sort of way. An IGF judge described Zotov’s art style as “so amazingly complex and interesting that it’s almost ‘folk art’”. The models and backgrounds are obviously very amateur, but they have a certain charm and atmosphere to them which would just not be quite the same if they were more polished.
The gameplay primarily consists of puzzles involving various objects being pushed to certain coordinates on a grid. The solutions are often quite obscure, but the developer includes a walkthrough for each level within the game so there’s no need to fret about how to complete a particular section. The lack of sound and extremely slow movement were the only real barriers to my enjoyment of this wonderfully insane creation, but neither of those are major problems. Those who must consistently be absorbing sounds can just listen to their own music, and slow movement, while annoying, didn’t particularly bother me.
Vasily Zotov released his magnum opus, Quite Soulless, about a year ago as shareware, but this game is free. You can view the trailer here and play the game online or offline here.
Hit the jump for an interview with the creator, Vasily Zotov:
Read more...
