Developer: William Dyce
Platform: PC – IndieDB

This post is part of a series on The Pirate Bay Bundle.

Platformers are all over the place in the indie community which often makes it hard for any to stand out. Abomination is one title that easily rises above the rest for me. Featuring a strange purple and black “abomination”, your goal is simply to retrieve a teddy bear placed somewhere on each stage. However, getting there proves to be quite the challenge across 25 levels.

One of the things that struck me most was simply that there is no obvious tutorial. Instead, players are quickly taught the mechanics simply by exploring the initial stages. By doing so you realize that the character can climb up walls and what sort of hindrances there are to that. For example, some walls are easy to climb while others leave you sliding down fast.

The art was simplistic enough to get the point across, but still included some flourishes. As you scramble to stay on a wall, pixel sparks fly out in response. When the character gets going too fast they end up bumping into a wall and falling down. Even the skirt that they wear flows as they run and jump from platform to platform.

There aren’t many mechanics to these puzzling platforming stages but the last few were still very difficult! With that said, because there are under 30 stages in all it took maybe half an hour to beat Abomination. It was quite an enjoyable period of time, though. No narrative ever had to explain why the abomination was so invested in teddy bears but I was more than happy to keep collecting them to completion.

Developer’s comment: Abomination was my second Game Maker 7 game. The protagonist is a Frankenstein’s monster meets Edward Scissor-hands: I had a lot of quite ambitious ideas where the theme is concerned, I wanted the game to talk about dealing with rejection and disgust. Basically if your appearance is monstrous is there any reason not to act like a monster? After all people will treat you like a monster no matter what you do. Of course the project never got quite that far, even if the core gameplay is pretty strong.

I made it a point of honour not to include any textual tutorials, so the levels are designed to very gradually teach you new things. This is a big improvement on Supersoldat, my first game, which had tutorial messages on every single level and a huge number of button combinations to remember.

Everything is made by me, William ‘wilbefast’ Dyce except the music, which was created by Henrik Roslund.

I hope you enjoy the game, please let me know what you think!