Life In The Dorms
What We Liked:
The story was funny, charming and random from start to finish. The difficulty was just right. General common sense with a touch of thinking outside the box is required.What We Disliked:
There are several moments when the music cuts out when they’re building suspense. But without voice acting those moments can jar. Slow opening. I worry more people won’t have the patience to stick with it before the gloves come off and the story gets crazy.Life In The Dorms When I cast back my mind to my first few days at University I can assure you it wasn’t as mad, chaotic stressful as Dack’s Life In The Dorms, the protagonist in the XBLIG Indie game ‘Life in the Dorms’. As the title suggests the game is about your [...]
Life In The Dorms
When I cast back my mind to my first few days at University I can assure you it wasn’t as mad, chaotic stressful as Dack’s Life In The Dorms, the protagonist in the XBLIG Indie game ‘Life in the Dorms’. As the title suggests the game is about your character taking his first few steps in his life moving into a dorm and meeting the weird yet interesting characters within this world. The game follows the classic point-and-click styled adventure, use this item with that, but you control Dack with your analogue stick. At first glance after seeing the introduction montage of photos that plays out Dack’s school life and you’re thrown into the game it may seem the appeal for such a game might not be there. What would you expect from thinking a game was about the life within a dorm? Whatever you could come up with throw that foresight away as it’s no ordinary sim based game attending to daily tasks such as using the toilet and seeing how long you could survive and around the first corner the game reveals Life in the dorms, excuse the pun, isn’t what it seems.
After being dropped off by your parents into your new room cluttered with your possessions in moving boxes you’re introduced to
other characters that through several tasks you’ll get to befriend and understand their quirky behaviour. Every character is paired up with a roommate apart from yours due to yours being very late at arriving. The guys behind the game build up an interesting story of playing on childhood fears of the unknown and you’ll soon see Dack frantically trying to work out if the absence of his roommate is due to his being a killer. The bizarre road that this game takes you down throughout became more and more farfetched that it’s what made it enjoyable and had several laugh out loud moments.
The one thing that Life in the dorm cried out for was to have voices in the game. Which each character successfully holding our attention and being appealing through text the thought of voices would have been the icing on the cake. But don’t let this sway any decision as it still was an awesome read but it did slow the pacing down. The graphics on the other hand was alright as we didn’t expect anything spectacular and what the game offers is something easy on the eye, adorable and colourful. The animations weren’t anything offensive and for an indie game we were happy to sit through and complete 6+ hours playing.
The game itself wasn’t too difficult in terms of problem solving. There’s some common sense puzzle solving as well as random thinking outside the box solutions. I would love to type here most of my favourite moments when I solved random tasks but we would want you to feel that same accomplishment after kicking yourself for some time too. It was presented well and tackled breaking the 4th wall nicely and if you’re a fan of any point-and-click adventure then this shouldn’t disappoint. Who knew trying to work out if your room-mate is a killer, trying to get to the bottom of a stolen possession and trying to outsmart a bear would be so fun?
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