During Gamescom 2018, we visited Coatsink, an English development team that has recently ventured into video game publishing. The two titles we went to see, Phogs and Sublevel Zero: Redux, couldn't be more different from each other, but they are united by a pleasantly indie feel and a lot of fun. Let's discover them together with this preview from Cologne.
Phogs!
Phogs!, a contraction of Physics and Dogs (we had to ask Jack, Coatsink's PR Manager, what it meant!) is a game based on wacky physics. Players (two) control two ends of a sort of long dog with a head at each end. A truly peculiar concept that brought to mind several other titles with a similar philosophy such as Octodad and Genital Jousting.
This is a puzzle game in which two players, using two controllers or the same one, sharing an analog stick, a trigger, and a bumper, must traverse an area by solving small environmental puzzles. In the first series of challenges we tackled, we had to feed an acorn to a strange serpent so that we could slip into its mouth, travel through its body, and be spat out from its head at the other end, thus accessing a new level. The difficulty lies, as is often the case in these games, not only in solving the puzzle but in getting to where we want to go. Each player actually controls the direction of their side of phog and can extend its body by holding down the trigger or bite an object.
This makes it possible to pick up objects or even anchor yourself to something while the other player overcomes an elevation change or a point that would otherwise lead to a game over. Later in the demo, we also discovered that the two mouths of the phog are strangely communicative: one player could attach themselves to a water source while on the other side, the jet could be directed towards a sprout which would then bloom into an acorn! Phogs!'s ideas, as far as we could see in the handful of levels we played, are intelligent and capable of posing a decent level of challenge to players. In particular, we appreciated the gradual but steady increase in the game's difficulty, which continued to reinvent itself, forcing us to think a little about the next step to take each time. Phogs can be played alone, but we do not recommend it because we really had fun playing as a duo, even if using only one controller to share can become uncomfortable in the long run. Fortunately, it is also possible to play with a controller each! Phogs!, expected in 2019 on various platforms, is immediate, colorful, strange, and fun.
Sublevel Zero: Redux
Sublevel Zero: Redux isn't a new game; it was actually released on PS4, Xbox One, Steam, Oculus, and GOG in 2015. The new feature presented at Gamescom is the Nintendo Switch version, which will be released in 2018. It's a six-degrees-of-freedom shooter that reminded us of titles like Forsaken and, especially, the Descent series.
The player controls a spaceship that must navigate a series of mazes, eliminating enemies, accumulating points and power-ups, and discovering secrets. This is a game genre that has fallen somewhat out of fashion but is being revived in a rather interesting version by the developers at Sigtrap. We tried a level on Switch in docked mode and were favorably impressed, although, it must be said, we haven't played the console or PC versions. The gameplay is the kind that you either love or hate, as navigating the maze is never easy, partly due to the fact that it's a true 360-degree experience where enemies and passages can be anywhere around us (we don't even dare to try it on Oculus or Vive! 😀 ).
The “six-degree-of-freedom roguelike shooter” genre has nonetheless been modernized by mechanics that weren't part of other titles released years ago. For example, we find a crafting mode that allows us to modify our shuttle's performance and gather various loot. Technically, the Switch version in TV mode gave us the impression of a somewhat ’dirty" image that we would have preferred to be more defined. Unfortunately, we haven't seen the handheld mode yet! We'll keep an eye on it for you!