Review

Crashland is a sci-fi adventure game made by Oshidead. You play as Clarke, a confident, oblivious space explorer looking for treasure. His ship has an engine failure and crash lands on a planet that doesn’t appear in his space charts. The game’s scenario involves trekking through a forest inhabited by dangerous lifeforms and retrieving his missing part so he can repair the ship and escape. To do so, Clarke must solve a series of puzzles that use the RPG Maker battle interface in a novel way. 

Like Mossbrook, Crashland takes some cues from old point and click adventure games. The puzzles all involve picking up items and guessing at how they’re supposed to be used to overcome some kind of environmental hazard. Where Crashland differs is in its interface and overall structure. The game is set on a mostly linear path that has you inspecting objects in the field and then getting into “combat” where you must use specific skills or items to solve the obstacle in front of you. This was a pretty cool use of the battle interface that felt like an adaptation of the old “verb” systems from LucasArts adventure games. I really like this as a proof of concept, though I wanted to see a bit of escalation in the complexity of what the player uses this system to do. For example, some obstacles where the player needed to use multiple items to reduce an obstacle’s “HP” within a set number of turns or perhaps having to use skills in a certain order would have been an interesting twist on this basic idea. 

The puzzles themselves are a mixed bag. I really didn’t like using “brutal bludgeoning” to defeat a snake or a log to prop open a hippo's mouth for two different but related reasons. For the snake, the “bludgeoning” skill seemed to follow no hint or observable fact about the snake other than that it was an animal that could perhaps be attacked. The electricity element felt like an unintentional misdirect, as it tells you something about what you get for attacking the snake rather than how to do so. This can be fine, but here it’s ultimately unclear both why and how you interact with the snake, leading me to figure it out through trial and error rather than following the game’s logic. Similarly, the hippo puzzle didn’t sit well with me because it felt like the log was only a solution due to happenstance; the player isn’t so much solving a problem here as they are trying something and having it work by a miracle. On the other hand, I felt the mirror and bird puzzle was well-hinted, and having the player return to town to figure out how to clean the mirror was a great choice that had the player do more than just walk forward in a straight line. Overall I think this was a good showing for the scope of this game, and displayed some out of the box thinking with respect to how it communicates with the player. For some discussion on effective puzzle/adventure game design, I would recommend checking out the Special Topic in the Mossbrook feedback, which talks about making a puzzle chart and letting the player encounter multiple obstacles and solutions at once. 

Puzzles aside, this game has some cool aesthetics to it. Transitioning from the very well-tiled spaceship (loved how the game used dioramas to create a cockpit view!) to the more natural environment of the planet made Clarke’s path to the missing engine feel more like an expedition into the unknown. Even though the spaceship is a tiny part of the game’s story and setting, letting the player be there even just for a bit goes a long way to making the game world feel a lot bigger and the story feel like it’s got a lot of “movement” to it. The wilderness path felt a little cluttered, with a lot of environmental objects I wished I could interact with, but its structure was strong. I liked making the stop in the cabin and opening the shortcut using the rope on the cliff. Overall, I felt Oshidead showed off some strong map-making skills, and in particular they really made lemonade with the RTP here.

Finally, I wanted to briefly touch on the plot. It took me a bit to get it, but I think Oshidead was going for Clarke being educated but oblivious. The joke where we find out the true nature of the planet he landed on at the end really drove this home, and it was a fun twist. Still, I spent quite a bit of the game wondering who Clarke was exactly. It’s not so much that I wanted more dialogue, but rather that I think the existing lines in the game could have been better calculated to put Clarke’s interesting personality front and center. A little less sciencey exposition and a little more time getting to know Clarke would be great here, especially because it could help make the joke at the end work better. 

Overall, I had fun with this entry. It’s a short and sweet experiment that lays some good groundwork for further experimentation with the engine. I would love to see what else Oshidead uses their sense of humor, their mapping skills and this puzzle battle system interface to make.

(As the Special Topic I would write for this game would be more or less the same as Mossbrook’s Special Topic, I will just link to that one)