About This Game Visit a quiet town in the Peruvian desert at night searching for spirits and taking photos, then sharing these pictures with locals who free-associate based on them. This game is based on time I spent with a brujo in the desert suburb of Cachiche, a town that was founded by witches during the Peruvian Inquisition. Here descendants of witches still live and continue to practice traditional healing and fortune-telling.FEATURES Explore a 3D world with ambient sounds, voices and textures from the Peruvian desert, a living environment at night. Use your photography as a means of conversing with non-player characters, revealing what they see as well as what they imagine.See yourself as an outsider, lurking in alleys, eavesdropping on conversations, going where you're not supposed to go.Watch the forces of tourism at work and the conflicts rumbling beneath the surface of a small town.Discover that your camera is not just a passive recorder, but that its act of observation can change the environment.Complete progressively more abstract quests and delusional journal entries.Export and share your photos. 7aa9394dea Title: 1,000 Heads Among the TreesGenre: IndieDeveloper:Aaron OldenburgPublisher:KISS ltdRelease Date: 11 Dec, 2015 1,000 Heads Among The Trees Download Easy 1000 heads among the trees The only thing in this game that is creepy ... is you!!!The objective is to basically be a dark alley pervert as you eavesdrop at windows into people's conversations and take abstract snapshots often through windows of dead animals, children at play and naked women and then proceed to go around town and ask various locals what they think about your pictures.What most people playing this game will not understand is that this is supposed to be a documentary/art game. The documentary part comes from Baltimore developer Aaron Oldenberg ( https://aaronoldenburg.itch.io/ ) who in 2013 literally travelled to the 'REAL' place known as Cachiche. This is a small Peruvian town particularly famous for being a safe haven during the Spanish Inquisition witch hunt and even several of the townsfolk today are actual descendants from those, on the run, witches. Needless to say, today this little town prospers from the generated tourism due to its flux of ghost stories, it’s practitioners of special handed down traditional medicine and its fair share of fortune tellers who are more than happy to oblige their visionary talent for a price.The biggest and liveliest character both in game and in the real town is a local known as 'brujo' which basically means sorcerer. He in real life is known as Don Miguel Angel, a palm reader, who also runs the local restaurant where he is able to tell tourists their fortunes inside a self-made pyramid within the establishment. I guess nothing quite like fine dining with an alcoholic 'spirit' medium connoisseur. I state this because he also openly claims to be able to leave his body and roam the countryside as a spirit and help others reach that same sense of attainment.On this 4 day work holiday with the sole intention of game design, Aaron Oldenburg photo’d the town layout, extensively interviewed many of the towns locals collecting notes and audio logs and even recorded the actual town environment so that he could use these 'actual' audios within the game itself.After returning, he began to map the town using Unity 3D and create the characters he met in real life using the program ‘Makehuman’. This he did to give the gamer a compelling experience to the memories and experiences that he himself had as he walked down the dusty roads to the ambient sounds of the town and received various confession remarks from the locals as he shared his snapshots of the town with those people. This is the documentary part of the game.The realism of the documentary is soon hacked away from the nonsensical liberties that come from the artistic perspectives of the game, from the houses that move like Nevada rocks, your camera turning into an x-ray machine for dogs and a portal that explodes in a house and the spectral list goes on. Unfortunately there is a big difference between game and art which namely is this, games need rules, and artistic expression does not, and while the two tango in this game as the choreographer tries to connect a factual slow waltz of realism with the odd mumbo jumbo nonsense expressions that would originate from the dancing plague.A town like this, undoubtedly attracts people like the protagonist who are seeking to acquire undeniable proof in the supernatural through ghost photography. Hence your primary objective is to photo a ghost, you show your captured snapshots to the locals who then begin to give their 'literal' remarks on the context photographed which builds up a portrait of the town, its individuals and their experiences and the effects that generated tourism can inflict on those. Problem is that since the audio and visual explanations matched with the photos is based on metadata, non-related expressions can by-product reminding the gamer that the documentary is not based on any realism but more on a procedural algorithm. Hence the travelogue based documentary, soon becomes a laughable NPC fiction.For instance, I take a photo of the night sky and the NPC responds...'I can cook!'(For some reason I think the game assumed I took a photo of a chicken?)The name of the game apparently has some loose connection with flying witches which I personally was not able to discover what that connection was. The problem with this game is that there are so many loose snippets of information, that overall there is no clear and precise message, so more often than not, the gamer will be robbed from a powerful experience. While self-examination in a few, may draw meaning from this game based from personal vaguely connected experience, the wider audience will simply remain question marked as to the developers true intentions.For instance being stranded in the end in a hostile environment reminded me of when I as a tourist was mugged in England. I was at the wrong place at the wrong time even though I was warned about the local dangers. Fortunately for me two police were at the right place at the right time for me and if they hadn’t just walked around the corner during the mugging which involved switch knives and broken glass I probably would not be alive today to write this. This experience had a profound effect on me, as I began to contemplate the many variables that must have taken place for this to happen. Was it divine long thought out intervention? Or was it simply a God delusion based on coincidence?The experience made real how dangerous it can be being a tourist, as there are unfortunately unsavoury selfish predators that prey on the gullibility and naivety of the visitor. Yes even some that can seem to be helpful serving on some type of official basis, some that play part as a spiritual guru in fact may have more sinister intentions. However none of these noble sentiments are concreted in this game as your laughing demised by shadows which again completely ruin the realism of the documentary experience.In final, a unique travelogue documentary concept which I applaud, but the implementation and execution of this concept thanks to ill-advised metadata, supernatural tom foolery, and pointless snippets of information which amount to as much vanity as gossip flatulence. Given the credentials of a developer who literally makes a living from teaching others about game design in a University and given the fact that apparently two years were spent in creating this experience still left me with disappointment. Golden opportunity missed and the fact that the developer is so proud of this makes me think that the game should be renamed from ‘1000 heads among the trees’ too ‘1 head among the clouds’. Wait for a sale…PS: I hate all Peruvian camera smashing dogs, stay away from them. PSS: You can jump on a chicken and ride it baby…Below is photos of some of the real places the game has in it…http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1287098830Below a sample of someone else play through…https://youtu.be/Yd1R09i5yycIf you enjoyed reading this review please subscribe to my curator page. Thanks...http://store.steampowered.com/curator/6843548/. What the actual...? Do not pay for this game. Boring a f walker, super fast 100%.. Really mysterious and atmospheric game!. 1,000 Heads Among the Trees is a scruffy, dark, odd game. My 3 hours spent in the course of a windy night in e-Cachiche, Peru, left me pleased and baffled - how pleased you might be by this amateur indie probably depends on how much you like baffled. Everything, including graphics and instructions, is minimal here. You manifest on a nighttime street, and go walking through town. You peer through windows at slivers of figures, overhearing snippets of conversation. You take pictures of the people, the scenery, and some mysterious events and visions. There’s a history of witchcraft in Cachiche; do the witches live here still? Show your photos to people you meet along the way, and they’ll tell some stories, offer occasional advice, and - weirdly - give you their opinions about people like you walking around taking pictures of everybody without permission. I found this an interesting, balky game, more murky than penetrating and full of atmosphere. I wished there were more of it, and more intricately crafted, but what there is left me pleased and, as I say, a little baffled. It’s not for everyone, but it was for me.. The game is really awful. Bad graphics, bad controls and bad music. Typical indie garbage. Horrible.. This game made no sense. It ran very poorly considering there was little to no textures or mechanics. It was about as spooky as Jared Leto.. short, janky story game with an interesting photography mechanic. definitely worth a play if you like unitycore
enereptracar
Comments