PEGBRJE: Veiled and Peckin’ Pixels
Scared and Farmed within minutes.
Horror doesn’t stop because Hallowe’en is over.
Veiled is a small narrative horror title created by Regularly Scheduled Programming, an indie studio based out of Canada focusing primarily on horror titles. This is one such case in which an unknown protagonist awakens within a home covered in strange occult markings with an inability to escape. Perhaps… dabbling in the occult will get them free.
Unknowing the reasoning, the player is stuck within this house with nothing but an old model cellphone and their wits, and must explore the location to discover exactly what may be going on and how to escape. The phone will text cryptic messages at certain stages of the game, less assisting the player’s ability to solve the mysteries and more adding to their misery. However, it is finding a strange compendium that the player is given direction, and by following the ritual itself they can hope to possibly break free of whatever is keeping them there. Many of the rituals revolve around simplistic solutions, but are masked behind that same cryptic language which makes half of the puzzle understanding exactly what the book is trying to say. Granted, the fact that some pages are missing might be a blessing in disguise to ensure that players don’t end up lost in the occult vernacular and confuse themselves; thankfully the puzzles themselves give the pages, and the completed pages are marked off to ensure that forward momentum is maintained.
I’m not going to say that I fully understood everything that was going on in Veiled; the world itself is the storyteller, and it’s up to the player to figure out exactly why you’d be stuck in this house in the first place through the context clues. It focuses on the ‘eerie’ sense of dread rather than trying to jump the player which is greatly appreciated for an anti-horror player such as myself, even when it lead to me not really feeling comfortable climbing a pile of stairs. It’s not a long experience, fitting neatly within a 30 minute play time as it was designed to be played in a single sitting; there’s no save, so there’s no coming back. If you are in to horror titles that don’t need jump scares to make you jump at the sight of a door, then by all means try out Veiled. They’ve got a new project coming too, and I guarantee that I won’t be playing it willingly (I’m scared).
Peckin’ Pixels is a farming simulator created by Waving Walrus Games, a solo indie dev based out of the UK developing cute pixel games. This title features the player as a farmer who wants to grow chickens. That’s it.
Simplifying down the process to make it easier to execute, Peckin’ Pixels will have players feeding chickens until they are able to lay eggs, to which they need to drag them to a nest for them to lay it. If they lay the eggs outside of a nest it will break (barring an upgraded food) which is depressing for an egg farmer. Afterwards, players can weigh the egg as a way of finding out if it contains a chick or if it is just an egg; if there’s a chick, it can be incubated and hatched, while the other can just be sold for profit. Technically, everything can be sold for a profit; the boxes that the orders come in, the egg shells that the chicks pop out of, even those scrambled eggs that are laid on the grass. Nothing goes to waste, and nothing clutters the floor. Now, this is the big loop of the game, where players will constantly be purchasing food for both chickens and chicks to ensure that they grow and produce eggs, weighing them and repeating the process; the more chickens, the more complicated this gets as the number of nests don’t increase. Balancing out to ensure that the chickens don’t all need to lay an egg at the same time is crucial, so thankfully there are upgraded food types in grapefruit that allow for eggs to be laid on the ground.
To continue the expansion, Peckin’ Pixels has a notice board for you to achieve different goals, which rewards you with new colours of chickens to add to the coop. They can all be dressed up in different costumes as well for full customization fun, as you keep expanding the number of chickens until the illustrious rainbow chicken arrives at your door. It doesn’t take long, but it’s a browser game; it’s meant to be a small, fun experience that doesn’t take much to get in to. If you’re needing something like that, give this little time a whirl.
