Our first reaction to Hollow was “Haha oh man what? That’s something Indiegogo does.” It’s a game with MS paint level art and hacking that appears to have been taken from the old Shadowrun. So therefore we’re going to write about it for you because it’s amusing on at least two levels. That is good enough for us. They have also met their goal in record time. You think about that.
The Gameplay of Hollow
The game has turn-based combat and stat based conversations. It also has hacking taken from other games. Everything in this game appears to be drawn from another game. If it weren’t so derivative of so many other games then we might actually have found small parts of it charming.
The Art and Sound of Hollow
The audio is pretty terrible and sounds like it was recorded from a speaker. Some parts of it are ripped straight out of other games, such as the menu from Shadowrun. Some the sound is also taken from better games. We were going to cut this game some slack but after actually playing the demo it was worse than we ever though. That being said the spelling isn’t terrible in this game unlike many others. It just seems the person does not have any artistic or auditory design skills.
What to Learn from Hollow
The first is that you can even take projects like this to Kickstarter. You can also learn that while crowd funding can push to the top it can also push to the bottom. While some would say we need to push games like this out you can’t have the good without the bad. This is the necessary bad that you get when you have major crowd funding sites. This is very likely one of the first efforts of this person but games like this are why some people hate the indie gaming scene. According to some profiles this actually wasn’t done by a kid, but a 26 year old man according to a few pages. Wow.
