inTentz

Mysteries are always engaging in books, movies and video games, because they provide the audience with something that distracts them from everything else. Obviously, it’s a huge bummer if the answers to these mysteries do not live up to the hype, but then again the journey might be worth the sacrifice. Video games are even better at this, because there’s a lot of gameplay involved before the mystery is revealed.

inTentz is an interesting multiplayer game in which you have to work together with other people in order to survive a few nights in the woods and get rid of a nasty curse. The game is very simple when it comes to gameplay mechanics, but it can also be quite a lot of fun if the players put some effort into it. Naturally, it needs more content and a few new ideas in the future, but it’s definitely on the right track.

You start by choosing one of the available characters, and they are all classic high school archetypes, such as the quarterback, the geek or the stoner. They are all on a camping trip with their tents, but what they don’t know is that one of them is actually a powerful necromancer that puts a curse on everyone. Hence, the goal is to find the traitor, who is randomly played by one of the players.

Each character has a special ability that allows you to participate in the effort to avoid the curse, such as moving people from one tent to another, or various other abilities that come in handy. You have to pick an action every day and hope that the traitor is found before everyone is affected by the curse. In order to get the necromancer, you have to perform a ritual that would normally kill a normal human, but wouldn’t affect the traitor too much.

The interface is fairly simple, but even so, it lacks the explanations needed to make it easy to play at first. It takes a while to understand what the rules are, and it’s mostly trial and error at this point, unless you read the official game description, which is also very vague. A lot more work is needed in this regard, but the game is still in active development at the moment.

Even if it has its fair share of flaws, inTentz can really keep players intrigued for a while, especially since you are actively playing against one of the other humans, which makes things interesting. However, more effort is needed on behalf of the developers if this is ever going to be a polished product.