Din

Dude! The Any key. If you don't mind...

Type:
Free Download
Developer:
Diefenbach, Gory & Lee

Din is hilarious. Mind you, I'm not sure it's playable (although it's a lot easier to play on my home system with good speakers than off a laptop at the Game Jam). It's also not a game that's going to take over your life -- it lasts 3 minutes, and you aren't likely to play it more than a few times, I suspect. But it's worth a look for its novel approach.

You're Billy, a crudely-animated character with an awkward walk cycle sidescrolling down the street. As you walk along, people who are apparently friends of yours start to walk along with you, chatting inanely in snippets of dialog that seem likely drawn from the 20-something slacker lives of the developers ("Billy! Last night we hit a bar you'd really love. All '80's music....")

Every once in a while, one of them asks you to press a key ("Billy, I know it's a lot to ask, but would you mind just pressing the '1' key for me?") Each time you respond, within a reasonable amount of time, you score a point. Easy when only one of them is walking along with you, but when six of them are chattering away simultaneously and three requests come in, in short succession... well, good luck.

Supposedly, humans have an amazing ability to screen out ambient noise and concentrate on a single conversation, but the problem here is that you're trying to monitor a whole lot more than one -- and, of course, lo-res toons don't exactly lip-synch perfectly with the words, so you have no supporting visual cues.

It's cute, entertaining, and if not high art, at least an attempt to do something different.


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