In Trials of the Gauntlet, You wake up in the courtyard of a Steampunk mansion, your arm replaced with an electric grappling hook. You use your new arm to solve puzzles, traverse the mansion and fight your way to the top of the clock tower where you confront the mad scientist who did this to you.
Trials of the Gauntlet from Broken Dinosaur Studios, a studio formed by students of Full Sail University, is a midterm project for Game Development that has been released as a full game. The setting of the game is a Steampunk mansion, where your character awakens with a grappling hook where one of their arms should be and proceeds to enter the mansion to find the scientist that performed the mad experiment on you.
Gameplay consists of traversing the mansion in an upward fashion, largely using your grappling hook to do so. The grappling hook has another function: an electric hook which is used to activate some electronics and slow down enemies so you can bash them with your other arm.
The graphic style is decidedly retro with large pixels eschewing the need for a lot of detail. The art of the game isn’t bad – but it’s nothing amazing either – with fairly generic looking bad guys and environments. Due to the nature of the project (being a school project) it was developed in a limited time frame and so some of the animations feel a bit floaty at times, with the character and enemies feeling somewhat out of place when moving.
I found the controls of the game to be quite fiddly and using the grappling hook was more cumbersome than fun, which is not a particularly good trait for your main game mechanic, and like most aspects of the game it was largely forgettable.
Overall, the game feels very much like the school project that it is. The runtime of the game is estimated at 90 minutes, but glitches and bugs are frequent, which the developers are aware of – again, due to the limited timeframe for development, only critical game breaking bugs were worked on. Now that the project has been completed the devs can go back and try to neaten up the edges and expand the game, or move on to a new project, but in the current state the game is hard to recommend.
Rating 4 / 10
~Sirhc
Trials of the Gauntlet is available now on STEAM
