Bonesaw

[davidn]

Nowhere near as horrifying as the name sounds at first, Bonesaw is a side scrolling platformer/sort of beat-em-up crossover written by Kyle Pulver (Xerus) - I think it's his first project of this scale, and it's an impressive release. It's also a relief to have it finished, because I was one of the testers for quite a while last year and I know it suffered a lot of unfortunate glitches just before it was released today (as everything does).

The title comes from a team at Clarkson University in New York who play a sport involving Americans zooming about on ice and beating each other with sticks, and while the "sport" bit of that doesn't feature in the game, the beating up is a major aspect of gameplay. (Their nickname comes from something to do with harnessing the power of Randy Savage, but I won't go into the details here.) You make your way through a variety of environments pummeling hockey players from St Lawrence along with fire-breathing onions, giant penguins, and most anything else that gets in your way, either with your bare hands or a variety of sporting equipment.

The game's graphics are relatively simple but gel together well into a consistent, almost Kirby-like style, and the soundtrack is provided by Josh Whelchel, who has really become a standout musician in the Click community in the last few years. His chippy background music reminds me quite strongly of Epic Games' titles in the 90s when Robert A Allen worked with them.

What I really like about the game is that it feels so reactive - everything has some measure of physics applied to it, and you won't find any typical platform game enemies that wander mindlessly back and forth until you jump on them (such as in, for example, mine). Enemies are thrown back by your attacks, can be pushed off ledges and will jump around to chase you, and there are whole sections involving trying to coax bouncing balls or imminently-exploding bombs into the right place. And it's pretty massive - I think there are well over 30 levels, each with multiple 'acts' or sections, and even after that's over you can go back and find Golden Pucks to get yourself access to an even harder section.

It's properly difficult, too - the levels themselves aren't too bad as long as you avoid the deadly sudden-death drops, but the bosses will hold you up for a while. It took me ages to even get past the first one, but importantly, it was the right sort of frustrating difficulty that got me to have "one more go" until I eventually worked out how to effectively damage and defeat it. And if you don't feel like doing that, there's also always the option of going back and charging up your Bonesaw so that you can go in and deplete all their health pretty much instantly, but you do end up feeling a bit of a cheat.

Download Bonesaw here!

Comments

[kaedeko.livejournal.com]

When I see that title the first thing that comes to mind is a cliche horror film.

[davidn]

That's what everyone thinks it is (including me when I first heard of it last year). You do get a literal bonesaw as a special weapon, but it's a bit of an unusual title in any case.