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Posted by Khalid Shaikh on August 25, 2024 at 9:48am 0 Comments 0 Likes
Title: Unheard Screams - King Leopold II's Rule Over The Congo
Genre: Indie, RPG
Developer:
Locomotivah
Publisher:
Locomotivah
Release Date: 11 May, 2015
English
Well... it's a nice little role-playing novel, I enjoyed it. A lot of supplementary material and a bit of imagination can make you feel the spirit of the revolution.. The story suckered me into it, but the gameplay ruins it. The story seems like it's just a series of quotes and a few slides of text after a successful battle. The battle system itself quickly becomes repititive and lacks any variety. The game itself isn't that long, and hour or two and your done, and that's if you carefully read everything. Save your money and get something with more meat and sustenance in it.. Well... it's a nice little role-playing novel, I enjoyed it. A lot of supplementary material and a bit of imagination can make you feel the spirit of the revolution.. This is basically a text-based RPG that tells a revisionist history of colonial Congo, in which the Congolese rise up and overthrow the King of Belgium. (Picture Inglorious Basterds <\/i> in text form, stripped of verbal pizzazz, and with Leopold II taking the place of the fuhrer).
I'll concede upfront that it's not a particularly good game. <\/i> The basic mechanic involves clicking on various villages, recruiting any of the locals that feel like joining your army, and then attacking whichever colonial official is labelled "Very Easy" at that moment. (The game calculates this automatically, depending on how many soldiers and weapons you've got with you at the time). The battles themselves require a bit of quick-thinking resource management, as various options pop up while the two sides trade attacks. Increase your defense, or call in reinforcements? Make yourself invulnerable for four rounds, or take a chunk out of your enemy's stamina stats? This is pretty much the only part of the game that requires any degree of skill, and the lack of clear instructions meant that it took me an hour or so until I realized that I was even supposed to be making some of these choices at all. Once you get the hang of it, though, the game becomes incredibly easy (probably mind-numbingly so for some players).
There's no animation or sound effects to accompany any of this, just a mournful classical music loop that gets pretty annoying after awhile. However, the game is just short enough (1-2 hours) that I didn't get bored, though that's probably due to the fact that I'm a history nerd with a soft spot for a good colonial uprising. I particularly enjoyed the way that the victories snowballed into each other, with your army becoming larger, more and more villagers joining your side, and the momentum of inevitable victory beginning to take hold. (None of this is really communicated by the game; my imagination had to do the work). The final battle against Leopold himself is totally ridiculous from a factual standpoint, but also cathartic: who doesn't <\/i> want to take some revenge for Congo's historical suffering, if only through a cheap Steam game?
Unheard Screams <\/i> is a curio, and probably won't be enjoyable unless you've got a particular interest in both colonial history and experimental video games. I'm gonna go out on a wild limb here and guess that's quite a niche market -- but it also happens to be one that I squarely belong to. So it's a "thumbs up" from me, and a bit of a warning to everyone else.. Positive things first: Good intent in the story and selection of topic. Yet the game leaves the impression that the historical issue was only scratched on the surface. The choice of the actual gameplay mechanic, which is quite simplistic (build up army, fight, repeat, repeat, watch your fatigue) and that of the protagonist seem both quite out of touch with historic realities.
I might have rather played a text adventure as E. D. Morel in the \u00abCongo Free State Propaganda War\u00bb or anything from a western perspective that touches well documented reality, than as Miala, a fictional very vaguely defined native African rebellion leader in his early twenties. Spoiler: He dies after winning the final Battle against King Leopold II himself (seriously?) at age 31? Just Why? <\/span><\/span>.
The gameplay almost exclusively consists out of grinding through battles and increasing the strength of your army by beating the easiest opponents first (conveniently labeled \u00abvery easy\u00bb). The Campaign is beatable in under 30 minutes, probably always in under an hour. Once you figured out what does what in the very abstract fights, it's pretty much impossible to lose the game if you stick to the easiest opponents first. Since there is no variation or obvious alternate endings, the game itself doesn't offer any new content or difficulty in repeated playthroughs. It seems to be strictly linear.
A lot of good chances were missed here and the lack of media other than text is astonishing, no explanatory maps, no short general introduction into the history of colonialism. The game itself transports no feeling of the horrors, only facts. One might want to read Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" or (re-)play Spec Ops: The Line (which is very loosely based on Apocalypse Now and Conrad's Book) and just imagine the setting being transformed to the Congolese jungle, to compensate for that.
But for anyone who starts playing this and eventually learns on elsewhere about the topic and in the process probably gets lost in Wikipedia, I can still only recommend the game and hope for a better more extensive revisit to the topic at large in the future.. The story suckered me into it, but the gameplay ruins it. The story seems like it's just a series of quotes and a few slides of text after a successful battle. The battle system itself quickly becomes repititive and lacks any variety. The game itself isn't that long, and hour or two and your done, and that's if you carefully read everything. Save your money and get something with more meat and sustenance in it.. This is basically a text-based RPG that tells a revisionist history of colonial Congo, in which the Congolese rise up and overthrow the King of Belgium. (Picture Inglorious Basterds <\/i> in text form, stripped of verbal pizzazz, and with Leopold II taking the place of the fuhrer).
I'll concede upfront that it's not a particularly good game. <\/i> The basic mechanic involves clicking on various villages, recruiting any of the locals that feel like joining your army, and then attacking whichever colonial official is labelled "Very Easy" at that moment. (The game calculates this automatically, depending on how many soldiers and weapons you've got with you at the time). The battles themselves require a bit of quick-thinking resource management, as various options pop up while the two sides trade attacks. Increase your defense, or call in reinforcements? Make yourself invulnerable for four rounds, or take a chunk out of your enemy's stamina stats? This is pretty much the only part of the game that requires any degree of skill, and the lack of clear instructions meant that it took me an hour or so until I realized that I was even supposed to be making some of these choices at all. Once you get the hang of it, though, the game becomes incredibly easy (probably mind-numbingly so for some players).
There's no animation or sound effects to accompany any of this, just a mournful classical music loop that gets pretty annoying after awhile. However, the game is just short enough (1-2 hours) that I didn't get bored, though that's probably due to the fact that I'm a history nerd with a soft spot for a good colonial uprising. I particularly enjoyed the way that the victories snowballed into each other, with your army becoming larger, more and more villagers joining your side, and the momentum of inevitable victory beginning to take hold. (None of this is really communicated by the game; my imagination had to do the work). The final battle against Leopold himself is totally ridiculous from a factual standpoint, but also cathartic: who doesn't <\/i> want to take some revenge for Congo's historical suffering, if only through a cheap Steam game?
Unheard Screams <\/i> is a curio, and probably won't be enjoyable unless you've got a particular interest in both colonial history and experimental video games. I'm gonna go out on a wild limb here and guess that's quite a niche market -- but it also happens to be one that I squarely belong to. So it's a "thumbs up" from me, and a bit of a warning to everyone else.. Usually, I really like this type of game: text-based stories or adventures with some interactions (and usually a cheap and fair price).
But, I'm sorry, the final product fail to impress: the base for the story is very interesting (and I didn't know that, so I cheked it), but the game itself fails to deliver any real emotion and the more "gaming" part of the game is too simple to amuse anyone.
On the other hand, the game is priced really good, and I think you can "spare" 2\u20ac for a game like this.
So, this is the classic problem with Steam review: this is a 6\/10 game, and I don't feel to do not recommed it, but also I have to notice how it fails to be... a game! And, at the same time, the story is to thin to "grab" you.
So... 6\/10 (also for the fair price).. its pretty good for its price
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