30/05/2007 - Review - Chalk

Joakim Sandberg, author of the intermittently excellent Noitu Love has released a brand new mouse-based game called Chalk. It's best described as a shoot 'em up except you don't really shoot in it, instead you draw lines of chalk in order to deflect bullets from enemies, destroy floating shapes and do various other actions. All this information is relayed to you via a nice interactive tutorial, which has replaced the initial releases arse-achingly long help section which consisted of pages and pages of dry text.

Vexingly, Chalk doesn't provide you with enough of the titular substance to draw a complete cock and balls.

Now, while you might think that drawing lines wouldn't result in much variety and depth you'd be very wrong as Chalk positively brims over with different things to do. And if you've played Noitu Love then you'll already know that Joakim knows how to make really interesting boss characters. Chalk doesn't disappoint at all, with some really inventive ones which are defeated in extremely varied manners, such as one which has to be wired into a series of batteries and shocked repeatedly and a mid-level boss where you have match two clockfaces while avoiding bullets from other enemies. It really makes you think of the sort of madness that Japanese developers put in to their games and which Western developers often neglect. It also has the great side-effect of making the pace of the game change constantly so it doesn't fall into the bullet-hell trap of being too one-note.

Here we see me attempting to kill a pair of blue crabs with a ball on some elastic. Pff... Bloody gaming cliches!

If there's any downside to Chalk it's that the inclusion of keyboard controls to supplement the mouse control makes it quite easy to breeze through the game. As I've mentioned before I'm not the greatest game player in the world but I clocked Chalk on my second go, and it's almost a pity that it didn't force me to play for longer because I really enjoyed the ride and would have happily had several cracks at most of the levels, if it had asked politely.

The look of Chalk is reminiscent of a more monochromatic version of Rakugaki Showtime from Treasure. Everything in the game appears to have been drawn on a magical blackboard, with many of the elements looking like they're constantly being redrawn by hand.

Must... not... mention... fisting...
Damn.

The sound fits the game very well, with each sound effect clearly denoting whether you've accomplished something or not. There's very little ambiguity as a result.

The music is pleasingly off-beat, too, with operatic vocals opening up the boss tune and reminding me of my favourite boss from Noitu Love.

Chalk is available to download from www.konjak.org and is heartily recommended.

Graham

Source: TIGsource

P.S. Joakim said that was how to pronounce his name, so stop looking at me like that.