Play. Enjoy. Review. Indy plays Ord. - Indie Game

Every year I set myself a challenge - how many games can I buy for a total of £10 in the January sale? This year - 11. Now that's value! I specifically look for indies and weird horror games and Ord. fell into the indie category.

I can honestly recommend this challenge, I've played some wonderful things when I've searched by lowest price first, and also some terrible garbage that was at least amusing. Which category does Lady in a Leotard with a Gun fall into? I'll let you decide. But I digress.

Ord.'s gimmick is that it tells short text adventures with 3 words. A prompt word, and two action choices. The results are quite often hilarious. For example. Racoon. Wrestle. Bribe. The wrestle option goes about as well as you'd expect.

For a game that is as sparse as Ord., I was really surprised at the variety of stories told. Quest plays like a choose your adventure book. Heist uses choice to illustrate the lack of freedom their protagonist has. Dimensions goes hard into sci fi and Foul Things tells a quite scary Cthulu-esque horror story. It's surprising how effective this media is.

I guess it just goes to show sometimes it isn't about 4k and surroundings so realistic you feel like you could reach out and touch them. If you have the ability to tell a good story, sometimes less is more. Three words might be pushing it for most people, but the developers made it work.

With the exception of some text effects used sparingly and to great effect - the screen distorting when you choose to eat a 'magic' mushroom for example - you have a black screen and white dialogue choices. This also has the bonus of being quite accessible, whack a screen reader on and you have exactly the same experience as everyone else.

I also laughed so much. I feel like Ord. encourages a 'fuck around and find out' attitude and it was fun to just see what would happen if you picked, say, jumping off a cliff. The result for that one was about what you'd expect. I could almost hear the game go "what did you expect dumbass?". I respect that I was allowed to make the choice though. Sometimes you have to let the intrusive thoughts win.

Although it is not currently on sale, I still recommend picking up Ord. It is going for the princely sum of £1.69 on Steam, but I played it on PSN. You can't even get a double cheeseburger for that nowadays. Treat yourself to an inventive little storyteller instead.