Every once in a while, a game comes out of the Japanese development scene that makes you question your sanity. I feel like I’m pretty numb to this stuff in general by now, but Million Onion Hotel from Onion Games is… something else. Headed up by industry veteran Yoshiro Kimura, who previously worked on No More Heroes, Little King’s Story, and Chulip, the game is basically a variation on Whack-A-Mole. Yet, reducing it to that feels a bit like calling Katamari Damacy a game about rolling a ball around.
The game is based around a hotel belonging to a guy named Dr. Peace. This hotel is famous for its onion soup, and tons of people come to enjoy its delicious flavor. Making all that onion soup takes a lot of onions, and that’s where you come in. You have to pluck onions as quickly as possible. If time runs out before you have enough onions, too bad. If you manage to reach the goal, however, you get to watch a brief, bizarre cutscene taking place in the hotel. The play field is a five by five grid, and onions can pop up anywhere on it. When they appear, you simply tap them to take them before they disappear, but if you miss, you lose some time. When you pull an onion, the square underneath it is highlighted, and if you match a row or a column, you gain some time. As you progress, more difficult onions appear that need to be tapped more than once.
Something strange happens if you manage to complete a row and a column at the same time, however. A bonus mode is activated where onions sprout like crazy, allowing you to rack up tons of points in short order. While this is happening, the gates to madness open in full, with random objects like fish or cows moving across the screen, or some weird asparagus guy popping up, and then there’s the mooing? I’m sorry, I just don’t know how to describe it. It’s weird. It’s very, very weird. That said, after you’ve seen it once, you thirst for it. You want to see it again just to see what else will happen. So you become obsessed with trying to line up that row and column thing again, but the onions just won’t spawn on the point you want them to. Why won’t they peel back their layers and reveal the truth?
I apologize for losing my composure there for a minute. Million Onion Hotel will do that to you. It’s a pretty simple game concept that uses its theme well to keep you coming back. Its bizarre nature is a breath of fresh air, the kind of air we used to take for granted in older days when budgets for video games weren’t so high and taking risks wasn’t so fatal to a developer’s well-being. That’s really one of the things I love the most about the mobile market of today. If a man who really loves onions wants to express that love in a way that resonates only with him, that’s something he can do. I’m definitely looking forward to playing more of this game when it releases later this year, even if it does make my brain hurt.
I highly doubt they used this to make their IOS apps. Last I checked you couldnt do any kind of stat-tracking, or inventory or any of the nifty RPG stuff, pretty much strictly branching story.
We don't, but mainly because of scale. You can do stat tracking: inklewriter has boolean flags (e.g. for items you might carry) and counters (for hit points and the like). But, there are limited ways to print that info out without writing Actual Code. Things like Sorcery!'s fighting and spell-casting are, of course, made from the ground up.
Haha just so you guys know, I wasn't knocking you. I think INKLE is great and I hope you attract a ton of budiness that allows you to grow! For me personally it was too much time investment for me to have to learn to make what I really wanted to make. I have confidence that you guys will implement some of that stuff in an easy to use way in the future however and keep checking in on you.
As someone who has tried writing branching narrative stories in the past (using pen and paper--confusing, using Word--confusing, using WordPress--confusing), I could see this being a neat tool that does a better job of keeping track of multiple story threads.
Of course, from the perspective of app making, anything outside of crafting narrative would have to be done outside of this tool.
I started using this to try writing a gamebook I've had in my head for a while. I haven't quite gotten the hang of the counters you can use to track stats, and it's still too early to see if it all comes together, but considering this is a lot further than I've gotten before (just writing out a basic outline), I'm quite happy.
One thing, and I'm not sure if you can hide it or not, is that even in the reading mode, it will show the stats you've tracked. In the story/game I'm trying to write, I want all that to be hidden from the reader.
Oh no! It looks like their server's down right now. I went back to my book to add some stuff and it asked me to log in again only to spit out a server error. If this were on the AppStore, I'd totally buy it so I didn't have to worry about server issues.
Those issues are now fixed!
Yep, thanks! I'm getting really deep into my gamebook, and a friend who is much more talented than me at writing is hopefully going to help it look more polished.
As I use the service more, my list of feature requests is growing longer. One in particular would be to allow more than one user access to the same book for editing (like in my case where I'm working out the mechanics and story framework, and my friend will flesh out the text).