When you hear the name “Jamestown,” visions of pilgrims and a newly colonized Americausually come to mind. It will take on a whole new meaning, however, after you play the free Windows download, Jamestown: City of Lights. The developers at Skeletrumpet (that made another favorite of mine, A Day at the Lake) has come out with another deeply weird yet slightly charming world for us to adventure through.
For this game, instead of saving your puppy princess, you take on the radio world in this simple little game based on the popularJamestownpodcast. Despite the famous location that has inspired the name, theJamestownpodcast is an interview show hosted by two guys named James. Don’t worry; they apologize to the realJamestowninVirginiafor the confusion. Though the game is definitely based on the podcast, it is not clear weather or not the James’ were involved in its creation. Either way, this game is some terrific PR of them and will probably help earn a few new listeners.
Jamestown has the mechanics of a classic arcade game but the aesthetic is a little bizarre. As the floating image of a stately seated old man, you must destroy flashing blocks of dead air and oversized former guests in your path in order to restore glory to your podcast. What kind of secret weapon can destroy both dead air AND an annoying guest you may ask? Why flying pencils and microphone bombs of course! The pointy pencils are your unlimited source of ammunition, so feel free to fire them off as rapidly as you like using the space bar or x key. You do have a mildly powerful secondary weapon that can take out a couple dead space boxes at once. By blowing up a few microphones with your pencil power, you can collect bombs that will take out around 3 or 4 blocks at a time. Though they may be your heavy artillery, they are slow and almost unnecessary for the game. Almost everything is destroyed in one hit any way so it’s pretty easy to stick to rapid fire pencils.
Eventually, if you fill enough of that pesky dead space with “lead” (it’s a pencil pun), you’ll reach a boss battle. Since the levels are not clearly marked in Jamestown, they kind of just flow seamlessly into each other. One minute you’re sailing through dead air and the next, there is a boss battle in your face. In other games this can be quite annoying but due to the simplicity of this game, it doesn’t really pose much of a problem. Instead of frustration, the quick, seamless flow ofJamestown makes every boss battle a giggly surprise.
The baddies in Jamestown are your previous podcast guests and you must destroy them to bring order back to the podcast realm. Among these former guests that taunght you up and down the screen are Henry Winkler (who cleverly tries to thwart you with his mighty borage of combs) and the all powerful Mr. Barnacle as well as other talk show ready freaks of nature. In order to make sure they never come back and disturb your radio program again, you must keep shooting them till they shrink to nothing but I little puff of red dust (or blood, I’ll admit, it could be blood).
After playing Jamestown: City of Lights, I will definitely be keeping my eye on Skeletrumpet and its sister developer Nomesoft (which have made their games available on all of the major independent gaming websites). The simplicity of the mechanics mixed with an ascetic the Time and Eric Awesome Show would envy makes their games both fun the first time and repeatedly entertaining. I can’t tell you how many times I have returned toJamestown this week and have continued to have an awesome experience. The game has even inspired me to look up the podcast and if it’s half as fun as the game, it’ll be worth a listen.