Did you like “Plucky’s 3D Adventure”? How about “Bleed”? What about “Freqµency”?
That publisher has another game! Well, they have several other games, but one we’re talking about today! And that game is “The Useful Dead”. And it’s worth stressing that it’s not a zombie game.
In the grand tradition of “Lemmings” you must sacrifice for the greater good. The hook here is that you have direct control over the characters, and you’re not trying to save the bulk of them. Getting a single one to the objective is good enough. So you will impale them on spikes to make an area safe for the next one to traverse, for example, or use a dead body of a former character as a floatation device, or as an impromptu stool to jump off of, etc. The body count can get high as you platform across each level’s dangers but, rather than each death being a frustration that requires a restart, each death gets you closer to your goal.
And the difficulty here is not crazy hard, which is a nice change of pace for Xbox Live Indie Games (as the trend in XBLIG games has been to ultra hardcore platformers with unlimited lives). This is a unique $1 puzzle platformer with a lot of great ideas behind it.
Here’s what the publisher (Ianthraxx) has to say about the game:
“Help a brave cadre of dunce-like critters in their quest to find buried treasure at any cost!”
Writings of Mass Deduction 