While I watch my character walking slowly towards the sunrise at the end of Valiant Hearts: The Great War, I take a look back at the road that has brought me here. Considering that for the most part it lead through the battlefields of World War I, the journey was surprisingly rich in variety, and it entailed even some nice memories besides all the horror. Yet it has been exactly those contrasts, these emotional ups and downs, which make these sensations so intense. Its beginning seems almost a bit unreal now, but soon the story will come to an end, and I cannot remember when I had such a feeling of accomplishment at the end of a computer game.
Mutiny of the Things for sure made me curious of what's inside, as it hardly provides any hint of what it will be. Things can, by definition, not be alive or even stage a mutiny. The intro, styled as a newspaper interview, tells me of our hero (Jack Flash) who plans to use his so-called Succ-O-Matic to literally suck the life out of these animated things again.
Though let's start from the beginning. A certain Prof. Dr. Eng. E. Eddison – also going by Evil Eddie – a mad scientist, has put life into everyday utilities when experimenting with energy generators: shoes, false teeth, pressing iron, pencils, snowmen, but also pumpkins, carrots, sunflowers and much more. All these things now want to found their independent city in the middle of this beautiful country. On a government mission, it is now Jack Flash's task to contain this out of control horde and destroy the energy generator in each level, which they need to survive. If everything else fails, he can also dissolve aggressive things into a cloud of ones. You may ask, why do they dissolve into ones? I assume this is an allusion to the digital origin of the objects, a kind of rematerialisation into zeros and ones. They went for a child-like motif. So there could be no blood or explosions. Which is why we get ones. In general, the graphical presentation is rather playful, almost cute and should appeal to kids. A couple of simple music tracks accompanying the entertaining jumping and running do the rest. However, each track is fairly short and therefore the melody will dig its way even into ears trained by screaming children until you won't be able to get rid of it anymore. Unfortunately, there is no way to individually control music and sound effects so that you will finally have no other option than to disable sound completely.
The Chaos Engine – a steampunk take on the Gauntlet concept. Let's say it's not that far fetched to assume there were fans of William Gibson's The Difference Engine among the Bitmap Brothers at the time. Though where said novel, although imaginative, is still well grounded into an alternate reality which does not sound all that far fetched, this game presents a scenario more akin to an apocalyptic horror movie: A Victorian scientist has built a machine able to influence the very fabric of time and space. That being fairly shaky anyway, what he unwittingly causes is the world turning into a surreal, monster-infected mess.
