Bramblelash is a multiplayer battle game made by a small company from Perth, Australia, which is the city I lived in until recently. I had my friend Camden over to help me play it. Camden is a talented digital artist [you can see his work here]; like me, he also recently moved away from Perth. We ended up recording ourselves discussing it, some of which I compiled into the above video. It is good to try new things.
(But apologies re: the sound quality and the haphazard nature of the production and conversation. Also if anyone can recommend a good open-source video editor, please, by all means, get in touch. I found Open Shot quite frustrating to use).
There’s a small write-up below, in keeping with tradition.
I should also add, by way of disclaimer, that I went to school with one of the creators of the game, and although we moved in different circles at said school and have pretty much not seen each other since, any judgement I make about it is tainted by association and definitely not to be trusted.
When/Where/Why: I bought Bramblelash in October last year, sometime after it launched, for $7.50 (it currently retails for $10), I guess because I knew of the game through fb or twitter or Perth gaming circles and wanted to support it and try it out.
Time: 3 hours.
What/Who: It’s a top-down fixed-screen battle game. Each player controls a single character/avatar. Each character is defenceless on its own, but can form a lash either by coming together with another player or binding to an inanimate stump, depending on the game mode and parameters. The lash kills whatever enemy creeps or other characters (again, depending on mode) it comes in contact with.
It’s by ByteSprite [official site], at least one half of who is from Perth (but actually it occurs to me that perhaps they are both from Perth, I mean I’ve never asked), making this the third Australian-made game that we’ve covered.
Notes: It’s a modest dosage of fun. Camden and I spend a lot of the above video making small criticisms, but mostly it executes smoothly around its core design/innovation, without getting carried away. It looks nice, sparkly enviro touches and all - although we had some functional problems with the visual design - and it sounds airy and pleasant. I think we got decent mileage out of it, for something so narrowly focused, and for a game which is probably better suited to four players (particularly in its battle mode). Decent pick-up-n-play couchy multiplayer is perhaps a rarer commodity than you’d expect (or perhaps, like Bramblelash, such games by their very nature don’t all that often permeate the global zeitgeist, given their limited scope/ situational utility, and so even if there are lots of them it is hard to just know about them, maybe). To that end Bramblelash is a welcome game to have in the list, and it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine situations where I’d install it again.
Unfortunately we also found it to be, well, unwinnable, owing to a bug in the Story mode’s final boss. Ah well.
up next is Breach & Clear
