Living Pipes

You are... a maintenance technician tasked with fixing some clogged plumbing in a rundown apartment in [b]LIVING PIPES[/b], a game by [b]ASHTON WALDEN, SAERON SEOK & JAE YOON KIM.[/b] Even before moviegoers were introduced to the oddly stone & gothic apartment building, "The Bradbury" (yes, named after the author), in the movie "Blade Runner," authors and illustrators were beginning to transition away from the bright, cheerful futuristic visions from the 1950s and 60s into a more cyberpunk dystopia where freedom is a lie, everyone is a slave to technology and people only live to serve mega-corporations and the governments that love them. In LIVING PIPES, you play as a maintenance technician tasked with fixing some plumbing for a wheelchair-bound resident in a rundown apartment building not unlike "The Bradbury," a building that would give the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fits for days on end. However, your task is immediately in peril as the front-desk robot is malfunctioning and it's up to you to repair it or your task is over before it even began. After you fix the robot via a short "switching the wires" puzzle, you meet with a rather ungrateful client who now wants for you to fix their television so that they can watch their favorite program. Grabbing an antenna out of nearby cabinet, you are finally allowed to perform the task that you were hired for and fix the pipes in his nearby bathroom. Trying to fix the pipes gives the player an old-fashioned "route the flow"-styled puzzle. Even after fixing that problem, though, you suspect that the problems are far worse than expected and head into the basement where you realize that an unknown mold of some type is infesting the plumbing system of the entire apartment building! This prompts you into another "route the flow" puzzle and then the game ends. The presentation for the game is very nice and the aesthetic is instantly recognizable as a low-budget dystopian future as envisioned from the early 1980s. With the Cathrode-Ray Tube monitors mixed with somewhat advanced robotics, the look gave off a "Max Headroom"-type of dystopian future. Despite the good graphics, though, the gameplay left a lot to be desired. For starters, the game is very short. Point-and-click adventure games of yesteryear have traditionally had relatively short play times, especially if you know what you're doing. The first "Space Quest" adventure game could be completed in under 30 minutes if you knew exactly what you needed to do in order to complete the game and that was a full-sized game meant to be sold to the public. The bulk of the time spent in an adventure game is in figuring out what you need to do in order to finish the game. However, LIVING PIPES is over before it hardly even begins. It feels more like a tech-demo for a proposed much-larger game than a game itself. Beyond the very short play time, though, was the confusion over how to interact with the environment and the puzzles. There's no instruction and the player is left to fend for themselves in figuring out just about everything. Some aspects of gameplay were intuitive, such as movement (the familiar WASD keys) but a lot of other aspects for interacting with the environment wasn't. Hitting the "C" key brings up your arm so that you can scan for desired objects (such as a power box that controls the robot front desk receptionist or a television antenna). The "V" key shows you a forearm-mounted smartphone (Most people would regard it as a "Pipboy 3000"-knock off but the Fallout franchise isn't the originator of the "computer on the arm or wrist" invention... amirite, ♥♥♥♥ Tracy & B.A.T.?). Also, there was a message on the wrist computer and I never was able to access it. Or was the message displayed automatically? I didn't understand that aspect. Another aspect of the gameplay that needed more explanation was the "route the flow" puzzles because switching from one valve to another valve wasn't mentioned anywhere at all. The player needs to hit the WASD keys to switch between the valves and the frustration over the puzzle in the apartment is made even more so because it is timed. By itself, there's nothing wrong with timed puzzles but not having any sort of introduction to them in order to understand the rules for solving these puzzles does not make the puzzle more challenging and fun, it just makes them more frustrating. Couldn't the developers have programmed in a simple pause screen explaining how the puzzle worked? After you solve the apartment piping puzzle, you have more one piping puzzle down in the basement. Now, here, I thought that this puzzle would be more appropriate to be timed than the first piping puzzle (since that puzzle is the 'introductory' piping puzzle meant to get players acclimated to that kind of puzzle). However, it's not timed but it is more complex than the first puzzle and you are timed in finding a mask in order to breathe down in the basement. [b]Overall, I just can't recommend this game[/b] to the average gamer even though it's free. At my most generous, perhaps people who are very inclined to cyberpunk and dystopian environments might want to look at this game if they're extremely bored with what they currently have. Even then, I can't outright recommend this game to them or adventure gamers, either, because of the issues that the game has. I deeply encourage the three developers to keep producing the games that they desire. They clearly have the ability to make games. The graphics were perfectly fine for what was needed and they knew the concepts for putting together a first-person point-and-click adventure game. A lot of the concerns with this game stems from the implementation of those gaming elements. The first piping puzzle shouldn't have been timed and with only three puzzles in total (the control box, the first and second piping puzzle), the game feels extremely slight and short for its size (a whopping 4.7 gigs). Even with modern-day game-size bloat, that size is still excessive. A lot of people might end up spending more time downloading the game than playing it. I understand that this is a school project and you never want to discourage prospective game developers. I thank them for giving us, the gaming community, the opportunity to play that project. However, I hope that their next project provides for longer gameplay and is clearer in instructions on how to play that game. Such improvements would be a great next step in enjoying their future game offerings.

Game was a great concept and had great art, just some issues with optimization with the smoothness of the wire game and the strange controls working on the pipes. Also I loaded into the game the first time without changing the graphics settings and the game had the highest graphics as default which was a struggle with no in game settings access. If this game was continued into a full game I would definitely want to play that if more puzzle concepts were added and the game was a bit smoother. Otherwise a great game that I don't regret downloading and trying out!!!

Парни выручайте, не хватает 7000 очков для профиля Dying Light, закидайте наградами пожалуйста.

2080'in distopik geleceğinde geçen, hikaye odaklı birinci şahıs bulmaca oyunudur. Hiçbir şeyin göründüğü gibi olmadığı, harap bir apartman binasındaki garip arızaları araştıran bir bakım işçisinin rolünü üstlenin.

This game made me mad a little bit, at least the ending. The real thing is, the game just isn't that great to begin with, and then you get slapped with a REALLY crappy troll ending... and it rubbed me the wrong way. There is a decent attempt at world building, but it's too short to really have enough flavor. Honestly, the only things that the game does well are the visuals and the controls, but the rest of it stink-stank-stunk. The puzzles sucked, and I'll be honest, I pretty much just random lucked my way through the game, the first puzzle in particular (it was super janky). I've played a ton of these games, and this one is just not good. It [i]tries[/i], but it never gets there.

Мда, короткая не оптимизированная игра, на низких можно сыграть, но все становится мылом, диалоги на английском но даже если прочтете их мало и есть ли в них какой то интерес? Геймплей это медленно ходить и и решать супер простые 3 головоломки. Кроме арт дизайна, сеттинга, тут ничего нет. Это концепция, может наработка, но игрой в которую стоит поиграть это не назвать.

Although the premise and story seem to be fresh and engaging, this game lasts 10 minutes, and thats even if you have to reload the game because of soft locks and poor optimization. Why even publish a game if it has almost no content. Wish this was more than it is.

免费 没中文 没成就 《活体管道》 受雇来修缮一栋建筑，报酬高得让你懒得追问缘由。 《活体管道》是一款第一人称叙事解谜游戏，由瑞林艺术与设计学院的毕业设计团队打造。在神秘的境遇下，你被派往一栋偏远的建筑。本是一场常规的维修工作，却迅速演变成一件令人极度不安的怪事。 探索、修缮，揭开真相。 借助扫描与维修工具，在昏暗的走廊和诡异腐朽的房间中穿行，修复破损的基础设施 —— 检修电气系统、封堵管道泄漏、重新连接中断的网络。但随着工作的推进，周围的环境变得愈发诡异反常，你不得不开始质疑自己来到这里的真正原因。 核心特色： 第一人称探索：由虚幻引擎 5 打造的沉浸式氛围环境。 叙事解谜：通过发现的文件、音频日志和环境叙事拼凑完整故事。 解谜机制：使用诊断工具排查故障，解决与建筑系统相关的空间及逻辑谜题。 不安的进程：当你深入探索，这栋建筑 —— 以及掌控它的未知存在 —— 开始抗拒你的闯入。 你会完成这份工作…… 还是会发现墙壁之后真正 “存活” 的东西？

Damn...what a shame :( I usually have a very low threshold for recommending free games, after all, they're free. Someone has put a lot of effort into creating a game and then allowed you to play it without charging you. Unfortunately I still can't recommend this game. It started off with such promise! OK, so moving around was a bit clunky and the puzzles were not challenging (unless you take into account that they are hard to work out what to do). As with other reviews I have no idea whether you were supposed to be able to read the 'new message' that flashes up on your screen or not. But it's so short! 0.2 hours and it was over, I actually thought I'd hit a bad ending and could try something else, but on checking, nope, that is the end. It spent 3 times longer downloading than I did playing it. That being said, I liked the slightly rude robot receptionist...but still not enough to recommend this game at this time.