Our daily pick of the best free software – a free indie game that delivers vital lessons in road safety and color-matching.
The objective of free indie game RiskyPhone is simple – make your way to the station and catch your train before it leaves. Walk into one of your fellow pedestrians (crash test dummies marching blindly with fierce determination) and you’ ll both be sent sprawling onto the pavement (or road, if you’ re particularly clumsy) .
Shaking hands with a car isn’ t a good idea either – the world will tumble and turn black and, just in case you weren’ t certain, you’ ll be informed that yes, you are indeed dead.
That’s tricky enough, but it’s made even tougher by the need to concentrate on your smartphone as you roam the streets. Rather than something useful like Google Maps, your app of choice is a game that requires you to tap a button corresponding with the color displayed on the screen. To throw yet another spanner into the tool-clogged works, this word might be ‘purple’ written in blue, or ‘blue’ in yellow. Risky indeed.
The navigation takes a while to get used to, using a variation on the usual keyboard and muse system. You move using the WASD keys, but instead of making your character turn, A and S make you strafe left and right, respectively. You can look around using the mouse, but this won’ t affect your direction of travel. That awkwardness just adds to the slapstick fun, though – it’s reminiscent of the classic track and field game QWOP, in which each of the athlete’s limbs is controlled independently.
RiskyPhone also has a delightful synth-heavy soundtrack that matches the moody marching of its faceless inhabitants. You might never catch that train, but it’s brilliant fun.
To play the game, download and extract the ZIP archive, then run the file SmartPhone.exe.
