It’s starting to feel like fall, which always makes me want to watch scary movies and play creepy games. So, this morning I went looking for a spooky game on Steam, and I found Port of Call, a free to play indie adventure game. I like to play these quick free-to-play games occasionally, and Port of Call seemed like the spooky game I was looking for. Port of Call turned out to be a very short game, so I won’t write much about the narrative, except to say that it’s pretty dark.
You wake up on a ship full of ghosts and dead people, and the captain puts you to work. You can’t remember your name or why you are there, and you learn your story in bits and pieces from the other characters aboard the ship. There is not much in the way of puzzles, maybe one small one, but you are presented with various options when responding to the other characters. The first time, I played through as the nice guy because some of the response options were things I just wouldn’t say to others. But, after I played through the first time, the story stuck with me enough that I wanted to play it again to see if I could get more details, so I switched to the more grumpy dialogue choices.
Port of Call turned out not to be the spooky game I was looking for; it was really more of a dark story, but a surprisingly well done story. I really enjoyed the graphics and atmosphere of the game. The soundtrack was also well done, all of it together seeming to move from darkness to light along with the narrative. I have talked and written quite a lot about how I get tired of the same old game over and over again, and for that reason, I really enjoy these indie games. Indie developers seem more free to explore a wider variety of issues, and sometimes they end up covering some pretty dark themes, such as those in Among the Sleep. (Trigger warning/spoiler alert: this game involves dead kids.) Because of it’s dark theme, Port of Call might not be for everyone. But, I love a game that makes me think, and this one did. In fact, I’m still thinking about it. According to the game’s Steam page, Port of Call is “an experiment in short-form story telling in an immersive media.” I feel like the developers were able to pack a lot of information into a very short game, and yet, I don’t feel like things were left unanswered.
Because Port of Call is both free-to-play and relatively short, there isn’t much risk in playing, except perhaps a bit of emotional risk. While the game did feel complete, I’m left pondering issues of blame, both how we assign it to ourselves and to each other. I looked up the developer, Underdog Games, to see if they had more games like this one, and I learned from their page that “this game was selected as a finalist for E3′s College Game Competition and was created as part of the University of Texas’s Game and Mobile Media Applications Program.” So, maybe they will make more games, and maybe they won’t, but this is the type of project I like to support even if only in a small way.
