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Trumpy Bot

August 9, 2006 By Glenn Turner

Steambot Chronicles Screen 1

Oh Steambot Chronicles/Bumpy Trot. The idea of a free-roaming game that's intended to relax you appeals to me, but its control scheme seems to fight that intention with all of its might. I think Mr. Riley put it best when he said it was "like playing Katamari Damacy with a rock." It's the only game in recent memory where I seemed to mangle the controls more and more with each passing minute.

While the play mechanics definitely didn't help matters, the sound was probably the most disconcerting part of the experience. It simply wasn't there, as in, the ambient sound was often absent. I'm not sure if this was done for artistic effect, whether it existed in most of the game after about an hour and a half of play, or whether it was simply a bug that I stumbled on, but the audio was notably hollow.

I'd run through town to the lone sound of my gait. I'd walk through a small room in a house and would hear nothing but muted footsteps - no room noise, no slight murmur of wind - nothing. For a game that places importance on instruments and tunes, I found this extraordinarily odd.

That said, camera work during dialog scenes was definitely interesting. As I've said before, too few games really take advantage of the camera during dialogue exchanges, but Steambot Chronicles lets its camera fly like a student filmmaker with their first dolly & crane. It flys up and down and zooms in and around its characters, moving whenever a character opens their mouth. It certainly grabbed my attention but it felt clumsy and unmotivated, as if the developers were afraid the only way they can keep you interested in the game is by distracting you with flashy camera movement. It all seems rather antithetical to any sort of relaxation you might find but, then again, the camera kept unpredictably swinging around when I had control of the character, so at least it was consistent.

Oh well. At least playing the instruments was kind of fun, in a Mad Maestro-sort of way, but even that only carried me to about the two hour mark. If only I had all the time in the world to suss out whether the experience improved from there.

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