Previews// Rezzed Round-Up: Heat Signature, Hue and Inside My Radio

Tireless reporter and Sausage Factory host Chris O'Regan has been abroad again, haunting the halls of Rezzed and playing anything he could get his paws on. Below we've got the next three previews from his time spent taking a whistlestop tour of the best indie games EGX Rezzed 2015 had to offer...

Heat Signature
Developer: Tom Francis
Format(s): Windows PC

What do you take a half a pint of Hotline Miami, a pinch of Homeworld and a teaspoon of Lunar Lander? Well, nothing, because you can't put games into a 'pint' of something can you? Nor can you pinch them or put a portion of them onto a tablespoon. If, however, you take it as a metaphor then you will probably get Heat Signature, a game that I stumbled upon at EGX Rezzed 2015 and was utterly enthralled by once I started playing it.

Cast into deep space, the player takes the role of a mercenary who is initially armed with a very large spanner and their wits. They traverse the universe in a single-person craft that is manoeuvred via a series of thrusts that create a trail of exhaust fumes from the rear of the craft. The player is contracted to carry out missions that typically involve stealing items from other vessels or even destroying them. This requires the player to hunt them down and dock with them, all without being within their cone of fire. For, if you do stray into this cone, you'll have a series of missiles to contend with, which doesn't end well (unless you run away, of course).

Once docked the player moves through the ship in a similar manner to the top down view found in Hotline Miami. Those familiar with that title will be very much at home dispatching guards and crew members as they try to complete their mission within the ship.

The one thing that really struck me about Heat Signature was the visual scaling technique that it boasts. It is possible to zoom very far out to the point where the player's ship is little more than a dot and the ships it is trying to dock with are only slightly bigger. This gives Heat Signature an extraordinary sense of scale as one moment you're concerned with the location of your craft in deep space and the next you're walking around a spaceship trying to set a detonator for a bomb you've just installed.

Heat Signature is still very much in early development, but from my initial experiences with the game, it is most definitely one to watch. It's due to appear sometime in 2015 on Windows PC.

Hue
Developer: Henry Hoffman
Format(s): Windows PC, Mac and Linux

The ZX Spectrum was well known for its colour clash attribute problem. No character could have more than two colours within it, making differing colour pixels an impossibility. This meant that when one character of a colour set met another with differing sets, a 'clash' occurred that resulted in violent flickering and distortion. It was annoying and off-putting, forcing developers to invent all sorts of weird and wonderful tricks to avoid it.

But what if they embraced it? What if they made it a feature of their game? They never did of course, but in 2015 someone has. And that someone is Henry Hoffman and he has made Hue.

Hue is a puzzle platform game that uses a spectrum of colours to hide and reveal items in the world that Hue is set in. The player controls a small black and white boy who can change the colour of the background and, by doing so, can reveal objects that are of a different colour while those that share the same hue vanish. They don't merely become invisible mind you, they actually physically disappear.

It is this core mechanic that runs through Hue which drew me to it. To think that parts of the world can cease to be because the background is merely a garish yellow had me hooked from the outset. The concept has been done before, but only in terms of a binary. Light and dark are the two shades that are used, but never colours. By using colours Hue expands the concept of altering states of a level within a platform game to a very different place.

Hue is in its very early stages right now and the demonstration version seen at EGX Rezzed 2015 was embryonic at best. But the core idea of it is a very appealing one and I will certainly be looking out for it when it arrives for the Windows PC, Mac and Linux sometime in 2016.

Inside My Radio
Developer: Seaven Studio
Format(s): Xbox One

A while ago I reviewed Beat Buddy, a game that encourages the player to interact with its music score while traversing the world. It was a wondrous game that I enjoyed playing immensely, even if it did boast a fair amount of game crippling bugs that prevented me from finishing it. Now we have Inside My Radio, a platforming game that again has the player to interact with the game's score. Is it as fun as Beat Buddy? Well, I thought it was from what I played at EGX Rezzed 2015.

The player controls a cube that moves in time with the beat of the Inside My Radio's score. Every action has to be coordinated with the tempo of the music that pervades every facet of Inside My Radio. Any mis-timing will result in failure, and sometimes even the death of the block the player is controlling. Thankfully for those of us who are rhythmically challenged there is an optional visual clue as to when to carry out an action, so the barrier to entry is dropped ever so slightly without making Inside My Radio too easy.

Inside My Radio boasts a very simplistic graphical style, with glowing platforms set against a generally dark background. This makes it very easy to discern what is going on, which is handy as the pace of Inside My Radio is very fast and does place a significant amount of demand on the player as they try to traverse levels while keeping in time with the music.

I found Inside My Radio to be thoroughly engrossing and very quickly the hustle and bustle of EGX Rezzed 2015 melted away as I drifted along to the tunes emitting from the game. Inside My Radio is due to appear on Xbox One very soon and will likely appear on other formats in the future.