The first challenge in Odlaw—Heather Robertson's minimalist multiplayer stealth game—is to figure out who you are. On a field covered in colorful blocks—dots, really—you can only tell which one you control by hitting a button to change your color.But if you do that too obviously, your opponent—a friend on the other side of the keyboard—will see you, track you, hit you with the same button, and win the round. You both have the same constraints, and the same basic controls: one on the arrow keys and enter button, the other with WASD and spacebar.So you wander the play field, looking for conspicuous changes. If you spot them first, you try to blend in, creeping closer. But, maybe they saw you first?
It's a beautiful, minimal cat-and-mouse chase with that added element of surprise from the get-go, and I can confirm, through a playtest with Waypoint Editor-in-Chief Austin Walker, that it is also very fun.Odlaw has really smart design, making use of its constraints wisely: a 2D plane, simple movement and physics, a lot of visual noise to both confuse and eventually be used by the player. I haven't had this much fun sharing a single keyboard since the olden days of You Don't Know Jack.Odlaw is free to download for Mac, PC and Linux, or you may support the game on the page.
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