Jun 6

Jun 6 Review | Mayhem in Single Valley

At around the midpoint of Mayhem in Single Valley, I found a car.

It was parked in a closed-off space, a hidden collectable in the corner, and an NPC had just given me the keys for it. This game hadn’t featured cars up until then. It’s been a game about dodging zombies, throwing food, and doing puzzles. Indeed, Jack Johnson (the character you play as) said earlier that he’s only driven a golf buggy up until now. But now there’s a car in front of me.

“This is brilliant,” I thought to myself.

And I drive. The rad chiptune music track begins as I start up the car. I drive at full acceleration down an underground tunnel, avoiding exploding barrels, parked garbage trucks, and huge chasms which inexplicably have ramps put in front of them for me to jump over. I have played games like this when I was a kid, the now lost flash games of Shockwave or PopCap, but this comes out of left field in Mayhem in Single Valley. I am right back in my element.

And then I choose a route that traps me into a collision with a garbage truck and I die. I then try to drive between two red barrels, knick one, then blow up, and die. I even reach the final jump: I speed towards a ramp that will launch me through a crack in the wall, bursting into a new and exciting level. But I must have hit the crack just slightly to the left or slightly to the right, because even though I am absolutely certain I hit it straight on… I, once again, explode immediately and die.

The level loads me back in. The music starts all over again. The car and the collectables are waiting for me. I am standing at the start of a level and all I can think about is how interesting and surprising Mayhem in Single Valley can be and I am very much wondering how much longer I can stand to play this game.

In a nutshell, this is Mayhem in Single Valley. It is a puzzle action game that surprises you with interesting and new ideas at every turn. But it is also still a platformer and the platforming controls are extremely frustrating.

Yep. You’ll get yourself an apocalypse on your hands with that.

In Mayhem in Single Valley, you play as Jack Johnson, a young man about to leave home to go to university, but is prevented from doing so because of a sudden zombie outbreak. To make matters worse, Jack is also blamed for the outbreak, so he has to get through swathes of infected people and animals while trying to clear his name.

The core mechanic of the game is throwing food at the infected people and animals to distract (and later cure) them as they eat what you leave behind. This is an idea I really, really like; a zombie game in which your foes can’t be killed and you have to learn their individual likes, dislikes, patterns, and habits to bypass them. You can also help the residents of Single Valley by completing fetch quests, which are repetitive, but are fairly simple to complete and add some texture to the world.

At least, that is what is happening in a general sense. The game joyfully leaps to a series of strange directions throughout, that keep you on your toes as you play. You help a video game astronaut defeat an alien. You investigate a laboratory filled with clones of yourself. You help a ghost child come to terms with their death. You rob a bank.

It also has a weird meta-layer of story beneath it all. From the jump, your family members are hiding your plane tickets and passport, and everyone in the city is quietly doing their hardest to prevent you from leaving town. An old woman poisons you with hard candy. Later (mild spoilers for the rest of this paragraph), some characters reveal that they know their world exists within a video game controlled by an external viewer and Jack is nothing but the avatar the player uses to manipulate things. It’s a lot of fun high concept writing that you don’t really expect in a puzzle platformer.

Quick zombie bugs, look over there! A ROCK!

Mayhem in Single Valley is the first full-length title by Fluxscopic, a small Canadian-based developer and, for a small team, it’s a beautiful result. It’s clear that they put a lot of work into taking the pixel art style usually associated with 2D platformers, putting it in a 3D space, and doing an incredible job with the lighting which developer Brian Cullen broke down in very interesting a blog post. Yes, there are some bugs, including one which trapped me in the door of a portable toilet, but I found that one kind of funny and not really gamebreaking.

I also really, really like how they included the music (which, for the record, is made up of some really catchy chiptune tracks). Cassette tapes are placed at the start of levels, so Jack can just pick them up, play on repeat throughout the level, and then change tapes when he enters a new level. The music’s menu is styled after a Walkman and allows you to put any track you like on repeat or stop the music without needing to go to the settings menu. It’s a simple little thing, but I genuinely enjoyed that.

But then... you start platforming.

Fun fact: this concept is often referred to as “Coyote Time” by developers.

I watched a video a few years back about how the developers of Dead Cells cheated how platforming worked to make the game feel better to play. If the player pressed jump a moment after their character left a platform, they wouldn’t fall to their death. The game anticipates what they meant to do and would adjust accordingly. Even though the player walked off a ledge, the game would let them jump (technically in the air). The point is the game doesn’t punish you for not having pixel perfect platformer skills when you have other things to be worrying about. You are instead freed up to enjoy moving around and concern yourself about how to approach each enemy.

Mayhem in Single Valley most certainly doesn’t do this. The platforming is punishing and demands your full attention, even while you are trying to solve puzzles and deal with enemies. The flow of playing the game grinds to a halt as you have to stop and figure out precisely when you have to press which button to convince the game you know what you’re doing.

I have mentioned the game’s seeming demand for precision when I found myself stuck at the driving section already. However, any time you have to jump diagonally, glide over vast chasms using an (initially) fun umbrella you find, or just perform any normal jump, you come face to face with frustration.

It’s not just the platforming, either. As I said before, throwing food around is a core mechanic, yet the throwing mechanic itself is so clunky that I spent most of my time trying to avoid it. Because of this, it wasn’t until about halfway through the game that I realised the depth of the mechanic.

This is also where I discovered that the game’s controller support was disappointingly limited. See, I initially played with a PS4 controller and had to manually switch to my mouse if I wanted to throw an object at a target with any accuracy. Which, given that it’s the core combat mechanic in the game, is a problem. Most of the other combat options also feel superfluous. You get whole upgrades that improve your ability to stun and knockback foes and I maybe stunned a half dozen enemies in my whole playthrough. I feel like that’s a damn shame.

And then there’s the autosaves.

The game autosaves whenever you enter a level or pick up a key item. Sometimes this means you find a collectable at the end of a difficult platforming section and you have to repeatedly platform your way back to the central path. If you pick up an item in the middle of a swarm of enemies then that is where you respawn every time you die. This also means that you’ll often have to replay entire set-pieces over and over, since there wasn’t an item to pick up right after it.

This genuinely sucks and makes Mayhem in Single Valley a frustrating experience to play. It is such a shame as the game has so many things I like that are overshadowed by these issues.

For instance, to upgrade your equipment, you have to rescue clones of yourself from life or death situations. When you rescue them, they drop duct tape, and run off. Then you combine the duct tape to make new items. The game doesn’t explain this and I absolutely love how weird it is.

I also really like that Jack, as a protagonist, is just a nice young man.From the get-go, all his quests are just going around and doing nice things for people. Getting a flower for his mother since she seems sad, finding his little brother’s lost teddy bear, returning an old lady’s walker to her. I enjoyed that way more than playing as some gruff, reluctant hero who kills everything on sight and hates everybody. I like to have the experience of playing a character like that.

Credit where credit is due, Mayhem in Single Valley looks better than a lot of games with much bigger teams.

And I can’t overstate how much I enjoyed the sheer variety of levels in this game. It helps all these different locales tend to fold in a unique mechanic too. A shadowy cave area where you had to keep a torch constantly alight or else bats would swarm and kill you. Laboratories where you have to control two characters walking through two separate mazes simultaneously, both at risk of falling to their death. Stealth levels where you sneak past heavily armed soldiers. There is even a tower defense level, which I had a bunch of fun with.

Mayhem was developed by a small team, so I am incredibly impressed by just the sheer number of areas to explore and levels to play. Some of the levels did drag on for longer than they should or were hampered by the control issues I said before, but a lot of them hit and there were genuine gems in this game.

I wish I could give a more glowing review for this game. Mayhem in Single Valley does some smart and creative things that makes it stand out as an interesting platformer, but to get there you have to be able to stomach the bad save system, frustrating platformining, the game's unclear demand for accuracy and having to use unreliable core mechanics.