Developed by Swedish developer Teotl Studios and published by Tripwire Interactive, The Ball is one of those indie darling games that won the ‘Make Something Unreal’ competition Epic put out for indie developers. The Ball has been released since the end of last month and the puzzle adventuring first person games got a demo now. I’ve given it a try and below are my impressions…
The back story behind the ball is that it takes place in 1940 Mexico, far away in an archeological dig site. You fall into a ditch(as usual in such archeological digs, they should really be careful around these old dig sites) and you find yourself in a mysterious ruin in the middle of nowhere. Your colleagues tell you not to panic, help will arrive in a few hours and encourage you to explore the underground caverns. Sure, nothing can go wrong in an old abandoned ancient cavern, right?
In the caverns, you find that it is not naturally formed and it is a man made structure or perhaps made by ‘something’ not quite man. You learn something about the humans betraying some mysterious group and stealing a giant ball. You find a hammer gun that you will be using to manipulate this ball and other puzzle objects.
The objective is to use this ball to solve puzzles the game throws at you. The ball will be the primary way you will interact with the world and there’ll be plenty of areas that’ll force you to use your grey matter a lot(it gets tricky). You’ll need to be observant of your surrounding. So don’t be careless! Look around for hints in the level. There are often symbols and items that sort of give you an idea on what to do.
You’ll come across puzzles that require you to use the ball to propagate elements like oil or even electricity. It gets quite challenging exactly how you solve a puzzle in an area and the games got this very useful hint system(you press ‘H’ whenever you are stuck) if you hit a frustrating puzzle you can’t figure out. It spells out for you what you have to do. There’s some smart puzzle design here but I felt they chose and odd design idea of adding monsters into the game. You don’t get weapons other than this hammer gun(which can’t even hurt these monsters) and this ball.
The only way you kill monsters is by using the ball mostly(there are some levels where you can use the environment). This primarily involves attracting the ball to your hammer gun and wailing this ball around and clobbering the monsters. Very disorienting and there is nothing particularly compelling about it. And this issue is especially obvious in the survival mode.
On top of the campaign, there is a survival mode where you are dropped into an arena that has traps you can use against the monsters. Monsters get spawned in waves(basically a horde mode). Again, I’m not a huge fan of combat in The Ball as I found it too limited. But the survival modes combat is a tad bit better as it introduces traps which you can use against these monsters. It’s still frantic, chaotic and many a times, makes no sense.
While the combat is an oddity, at least the battles against boss enemies are fun and require some puzzle solving, which is the strength of The Ball. And hey, any game that has a giant undead ape as a boss gets my thumbs up any day. The Ball is a very pretty game and is an excellent first effort for a young studio(this is their first game). Despite my disdain for the combat in it, I still enjoyed the puzzle elements quite a bit.
You can try out the demo here or from bigdownload.com here
The ball is available on Steam for USD$19.99
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