OIO

OIO was originally given away on the 18th June 2018 HERE where it received a positive 86% from 37 votes with 25 comments.

In Brief

OIO is a beautifully crafted indie platform puzzler. You may have to go into compatibility settings and fiddle around with the various choices you have. The game initially froze on me, but when I opened task manager to close the game down, win 10 automatically changed the compatibility settings (never seen it do that before). Thereafter, the game worked okay.

Introduction

Drawing inspiration from the mythologies of Icarus and timeless fairy tales, OIO is the story of a little wooden man, awakened when a stray beam of sunlight pierces the twilight subterranean world in which he and his hand-carved compatriots stand frozen in time. Alone in being reanimated, OIO embarks on a perilous journey through the vast organic netherworld with only his wits and a handful of seeds to overcome the challenges before him and climb towards the light. As the journey unfolds, OIO will learn of the fate that befell his petrified companions, seek a way to free them from their inanimate tyranny, and come face to face with his greatest challenge.

Review accessed HERE 25th July 2020.

The Game

Review 1

STORY: The story within OIO begins as the title character wakes up from a slumber of an unknown length, neither you nor OIO himself knows what’s happened or why, and the main crux of the story revolves around both of you trying to figure everything out. All that’s given to the player is the fact that OIO is the only person around that has woken up, all of his friends are still seemingly frozen in time, stood like statues until you can figure out exactly how to wake them up. Throughout each of the levels are three items which, when collected and the level finished, reveal more and more about the story. These come to the player in the form of images on a board that can be interpreted in whatever way you want, in an attempt to figure out what happened to all of the people of this subterranean world that you’ve found yourself in.

The story is well crafted and heartfelt, most players will find themselves gaining a sense of attachment to the main character even though he only consists of a few simple polygons and never speaks. There’s a charm about the whole game that is often lost in other games, Uncanny Games are small enough to be able to deliver that sense of story to the player without having to worry about delivering something which will sell millions of copies; and that’s exactly what you get with OIO.

GRAPHICS: At first glance a lot of players would probably think that not a lot of effort has been placed into making OIO look good. All of the characters that can be found dotted around all of the levels are made up of blocks with a very low polygon count, however, once the players get to some of the more open areas of the game they will soon understand that the graphical processing power that was saved by reducing the polygon count of the characters has been spent on making some of the environments look simply breathtaking. Walk out of any of the cave systems that litter the game and into some of the cavernous underwater lakes and you’ll be gifted with amazing water effects, some impressive lighting techniques and background art that would make some Hollywood set designers green with envy.

Despite each of the characters’ low polygon count they all have a sense of emotion attached to them that some characters in AAA games, that have had months of development time spent on where that one single eyebrow hair is placed, don’t have. The depth of the emotion that each player will associate with the characters, the main character of OIO at least, is a testament to their design and something that won’t be seen very often at all.

SOUND: The characters within OIO don’t speak at all, so all of the information that you’re going to be getting about how they’re feeling is going to be conveyed through the use of music throughout the game. Music can be a very emotional medium when done well, and it’s pulled off with a near perfect implementation in OIO, when you’re supposed to feel sad – such as when the main character finds out the fate that’s befallen their friends – the music is sombre and heartfelt and the opposite can be said for those moments when something good happens.

Overall the music is beautiful and fits in perfectly with whatever is happening within the game at that particular moment in time. The only real complaint I would have is that because the music is so closely tied to what’s going on in the game, if you’re playing the same part over and over again because you keep dying or you can’t complete a puzzle, the music can get a little grating. The music is amazing, but hearing the same few bars over and over again just serves to remind me that I can’t do something.

GAME PLAY: The main point of the game play within OIO is to collect as many little orbs of light as possible. The idea being that the more that you collect the easier it will be to wake up your friends, who seem to react to the amount of light they’re exposed to. Some of these little orbs of light are easy to collect, being on the path that you’re going to be traveling anyway, but some of them are in out of reach areas that you’re going to have to use your skill at platforming, and your skill at solving puzzles, in order to get to. Thankfully you don’t need to collect all of the orbs in the level in order to move on to the next one, but most players will feel the need to anyway.

The puzzles that are scattered throughout the game usually need to be solved via the use of a pair of special seeds. The green one has the ability to grow plants from little nodes that are on the ground in certain areas. The red one destroys the plants that are created. The player is only able to create three plants at a time and this limitation, combined with the difficulty of the platforming when using the keyboard, makes up the whole of the difficulty within OIO. Sometimes you’ll find yourself needing to creatively choose where to place a plant, when to destroy it, all while jumping and creating a brand new plant in mid air. It all seems fairly straightforward on paper, but try doing it in the game and you’ll find it to be a totally different ball game.

One of the only downsides to the entire game, as far as I was concerned at least, was the fact that using the keyboard was very difficult. There is the option in the settings to use a gamepad but every attempt I made at connecting my wired Xbox 360 Controller was met with disappointment. I don’t know if it’s a problem with something I was doing or if the game simply doesn’t support the amount of control that would be needed to pull off some of the more technical things that it requires of players. Playing with the keyboard however, is only difficult during the sections where you have to be very precise about your jumping. Whenever you’re tasked with running, navigating certain areas of the games and collecting light orbs the keyboard and mouse combination more than sufficed. When you find yourself in an area where you’ve got to plant seeds and then jump to land on those small sections of land, then you might be in trouble with the relative inaccuracy of the keyboard.

LONGEVITY: Once you’ve gotten to the end of OIO there’s no real reason for you to start the whole thing over again and go through it all a second or third time, however, for the people that can’t put a game down until they’ve collected all of the possible objects within the game then there’s always the little story objects that they’ll be able to spend some time doing, ensuring that they’ll come back at least a couple of times. Other than that, while I can’t see people starting the game again straight away, the game is short enough and modestly priced so that it’s certainly worth a play through further down the line, just as a reminder of what games can become when there aren’t certain constraints placed on them.

VERDICT: OIO is a small game with a big heart, the artistic direction and design of the characters alone make it a game that’s well worth playing. The game play itself is something that games that spend years in development would wish to achieve and the puzzles are challenging enough at first glance yet often simple enough, once you figure it out, that you’ll find yourself kicking yourself on a fairly regular basis for not working it out sooner. Amazing visuals, and some of the best puzzle mechanics I’ve seen in a while make OIO something that everyone should at least try. There’s even a free demo so you’ve got no excuse at all.

Review accessed HERE 25th July 2020. Originally posted by Martin Baker on October 10, 2011

Review 2

A platform puzzler with some visual flair, OIO sets out its stall early as a title that relies on not only its core game play but also its ability to draw the gamer in. Whilst it can’t quite compare to the slick visual spectacle of games such as Limbo, it follows the same path in terms of creating an atmospheric world and an empathetic central character – namely OIO. The little wooden chap, whose name represents the simplistic line drawing of his face, is brought to us by way of the opening cut-scene; the subterranean world in which he and his people dwell is not as it once was, with his fellow beings now frozen in a state of stasis. A rumble from above and our protagonist awakes – it is not explained, and there are no other indications as to what is happening.blockquote>

It’s a nice, understated manner in which to start a game, the visuals don’t change greatly even if you switch graphics modes to maximum. The diffused lighting from above and transparency effects from water are nothing to write home about, but the basic visuals of any indie game aren’t the point of their creation. That isn’t to say there is no inventiveness to be found – the Henry Moore-esque architecture of the drooping shapes that inhabit the early environments are nicely rendered, complete with watercolor-like stripes that hide any simplistic textures, and the manner in which they are integrated into foreground, middle and background, helping to switch the perspective and sense of scale, is commendable. If anything I’d say the implementation was handled more moderately and with greater finesse than many big budget platformers that use the effect too often, sometimes at the expense of the user’s visibility of the levels (I’m looking at you Sackboy).

Controls are input by way of the keyboard, with the WASD scheme the core; A and D give you left and right whilst W or the space bar instruct OIO to jump. The reaction to your commands is not that of instantaneous, pin-sharp hop-to-it accuracy that some may crave, but instead falls towards the spongier side. Early levels (basically one and two, as there are only twelve in the entire game) help ease the gamer into the idiosyncrasies of basic movement and the world’s staple pitfalls – falling and dangerous obstacles being the two we’d expect of any platformer. The slight increase in acceleration (it is nuanced but effective) of OIO should be gotten to grips with, even when traversing tight double jumps, by the end of the second level by all but the newest to the genre.

With the occasional on-screen instruction we know what we are doing, but not why we are doing it. This is crucial. In what appears a developing trend, it is an ace up the sleeve of those creating small, distinctive titles, that the audience must be impelled to play through for more than the fluidity of the game play and the joys they may bring. The narrative is one of mystery and intends to keep the gamer in suspense, forcing acclimatization to a system of mechanics that might seem too familiar to stick with (one downside of marketing titles in the budget category, much like the potential pitfall of putting out demos, is gamers’ short attention spans – a good story has proven to be the perfect antidote). The central character you can attach yourself to, combined with the puzzle element, shows more than a hint of Oddworld about it.

Your aims are simple: collect orbs (hardly original, but a concept we can all instantly recognise) as well as secondary - harder to find but fewer in number – objects, this time called “Fresks”. There are one hundred orbs and three Fresks in each level, the finding of which obviously becomes increasingly difficult. The standard jumping of the platform genre is subsidised by an added puzzle element, whereby the mouse is used to aim objects that can be thrown which, when they come into contact with the correct surfaces, can grow new platforms. The simple graphics don’t attempt to hide where the surfaces are, and the early levels hint at a straightforward exploration that is somewhat formulaic; look for a light source above or an area that may not have a ceiling to it, and thus be accessible (we all remember flying up into the clouds in Mario 3 right?) and you’ll likely hit pay dirt.

Don’t be fooled though, as strategy soon becomes key to finding all the Fresks, as the growing of platforms is limited to three “beams” for want of a better term. The initial trunk may go straight up, and the offshoots create an easy path, but when you must switch from one structure to another that you intend to create mid-jump, the mix of cerebral forward planning and split second reactions are woven into a nice all round platform puzzler. Take the first stages with contempt at your peril as the difficulty increases and there will be more than the odd head-scratching moment during your play-through.

There are flaws, which is to be expected with such a budget title; bugs can be annoying in their ability to trap you just when you think you’ve got an area sussed, but the sensibly placed checkpoints and the fact that there seems an infinite number of continues softens this blow somewhat. The latter decision, not to tie the player into a real life-or-death scenario, is either an indication of a lack of belief in the polish of the title or a stroke of genius intended to nurture the player’s intent to get to the finish and thereby allowing the developers to place more ingenious puzzles within the levels. With these rewarding gamers with a healthy sense of satisfaction due to the “why didn’t I think of that” simplicity of many solutions, the latter is more than hinted at.

For what is a small production, OIO has more than enough draw to at least get gamers trying the demo. The subtlety of certain presentational choices, like the inventive score (drips being orchestrated into music on the first level, followed by an array of excellent synth' and electro' beats that give off an atmosphere of mystique that belies the game’s more basic elements) that fades off into gentle distortion upon demise and the cartoonish animation of your character, are neat touches that help wrap a fundamentally playable experience. There are few platform puzzlers about, and fewer still with an organic sense of charm and charisma, which makes OIO an engaging diamond in the rough.

Uncanny Games’ platform puzzler doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it offers gamers a simple yet atmospheric world that rests in all the right places on traditional mechanics, and throws in just enough originality in terms of presentation and game play to be a rewarding but short, occasionally bewitching experience.

Review accessed HERE 25th July 2020. Originally posted by Mark Botwright Oct 3, 2011

Videos, Reviews and other comments :

Other reviews can be found HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE as well as a few Techspot community comments HERE. You can also see some videos of game play HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE (pt. 1 of 2), HERE (pt. 2Of2) and HERE .

Useful Information not related to today's game giveaway

Don't forget to check out the giveaway forums. Delenn has usually posted the latest freebies. The latest games are now available from Epic Games and include Next Up Hero - (A dungeon crawler featuring hand-drawn heroes that hack, slash, bongo-drum, boomerang, and jet their way through Ventures) and Tacoma - (An Abandoned Space Station. A Mysterious AI. And You. The crew of Lunar Transfer Station Tacoma were going about their workaday lives when disaster threw them into chaos); both games would normally cost you almost £30/$40/€37, but are free all week. Next Thursday 30th July we get three more games; i.e. 20XX (A rogue-like action platformer), Barony (A first-person rogue-like with co-op) and Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (A point & click story rich pixel fantasy with a female protagonist). The total cost to buy these would be over £27/$37/€33

Just pop over to the game discussion threads HERE and HERE for links to most of the free games.

The Indie Gala developers freebies are available HERE (latest additions) and HERE (81 games in the Showcase, most full versions). Recent additions include Snow White Solitaire Charmed Kingdom, Adam Wolfe (Complete Edition), Spirit of Xanadu and three games from !C's catalogue of RTS (real time strategy) games: Real Warfare 1242 - (the Mongol Horde attack the huge sate of Russia during the XIII century, the game is based on authentic historical events), Cuban Missile Crisis: Ice Crusade - (what if the Cuban missile crisis had resulted in a World War III) and Theatre of War - (a real-time tactical strategy title depicting the most significant battles of World War II during 1939-1945.), plus a couple I've previously missed in the showcase section called Temper Tantrum and Last Man Standing).

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