Indie Royale Profile: Containment (Bootsnake Games)

May 5, 2012 1:00 AM | John Polson

[Colin Brown of Backlog Journey guest reviews the games in the latest Indie Royale offering, The May Hurray Bundle.]

Sick of zombies? I don't blame you, because there's definitely a few too many of the undead blighters showing up in games these days. Still, I was pretty happy to give Containment: The Zombie Puzzler the benefit of the doubt because, well, you don't often see zombie puzzlers. Luckily Bootsnake Games backs up the neat genre mash-up premise with a puzzle game that brings in unique mechanics, a great presentation and an excellent dynamic feeling to the levels. Let me just expand on all three of these points for you.

First, the mechanics. While I might be a little tired of zombies, I'm far more burnt out on match three puzzles so looking at screenshots left me a bit wary of what to expect here. Fortunately Containment keeps far away from the usual coloured gems tropes. In each puzzle, you have four different types of humans, the usual match three colours, and a handful of undead. You need to swap humans and surround each group of zombies with matching ones so they can pull off some coordinated zombie slaying and remove the zombie pieces from the board. Of course, zombies aren't so inclined to just stand around and get shot, and they'll convert your humans into more zombies making it more difficult to surround them and clear the board. It's a fresh style of puzzle, and makes terrific use of zombie tropes to deliver interesting mechanics.

So the base mechanics are great, but can they float an entire game? Not really, but that's where the great level design comes in. It may seem weird to discuss level design for a random puzzle game, but Containment does a great job with it. The puzzle boards are varied and dynamic, and random events and scenery can have a big impact. Sometimes a truck will block new human pieces from entering the board, or a clickable barrel will explode half of the pieces. Zombies enter the board constantly from environment pieces like broken fences and hospitals, and sometimes even jump down from above. Even favouring particular humans influences the game, as that group's item will appear more rapidly. Like the grenade? Use soldier pieces more to get grenades to drop. It altogether adds a lot of much needed variety.

The presentation deserves a mention as well. The game is divided into acts of five parts each, and each part is divided into several "blocks" of one puzzle per city block. After clearing the block, the camera pulls away and flies over the streets, offering morose text on the sides of buildings and in the ground to explain how the Franklin County pandemic came to be. It's moody yet cheesy at the same time, supported by the drive in move style menus and hilariously over the top lines the humans shout after particularly good kills ("Looks like you just got laid... to rest" is a particular favourite). The straddling of the line can be a bit alienating, as it seems like Bootsnake never really wants to commit to complete seriousness or full cheese. Still, the presentation is far above and beyond the usual puzzle game.

The main audience might be iOS, but the PC version of Containment offers a pretty great casual puzzle game to fill just enough of your time without becoming unwelcome. Better yet, the Indie Royale offers a chance for you to pick it up on a whim with four other games. Seems to me like a great way to try out a very unique puzzle game that ditches the worst tropes of the genre for zombie killing fun.

[Get this game and more in the current running May Hurray Bundle on the IndieGames co-created site, Indie Royale.]

Tags: indieroyale