GRIMWATER: Night at the Lake

Shareware demo, episode 1 of 1.

It is raining in Grimwater, West Virginia, and it is Friday night. The bait shop is closed, the pier lights are on and something is wading out of the lake. You have a double-barrel, a Bowie knife and a town that is about to get very crowded.

The night shift

GRIMWATER is one level and one rule: survive. The ghouls come out of the water, the holler bats come down out of the storm and the neighbours come up out of the cemetery, and every wave is bigger and faster than the last. Shells, first aid and the sheriff's kevlar turn up around town. So do beer, six-packs and moonshine, which tells you most of what you need to know about the game's sense of humour. The hero has one-liners, and the browser's speech synthesizer reads them out in a voice that never quite matches the mood. That is part of the joke.

Only red survives

The town is built from polygons at 320×240, and it moves the way games moved on the first PlayStation: vertices wobble, textures slide across the walls and the whole frame is dithered down to 15-bit color. The monsters are flat sprites walking through that 3D world, an odd marriage that the period produced more than once.

Then there is the color, or the lack of it. Everything is black and white except red: neon signs, flannel shirts and the ghouls' eyes. The liner notes call it "noir mode" and claim it began as a palette fault that nobody wanted to fix.

FIELD TEST. Press O for Options and untick Noir grade (only red survives). The town comes back in full color, and looks smaller for it. Tick it again before the next wave.

The shoebox

The build carries its own account of where it came from, and it is a good one. According to those liner notes, it was made by Bubba Joe Software, three people in a garage beside Grimwater Lake. They mailed out forty floppies in March 1997, the same week Redneck Rampage reached the shelves, and a Texas shareware publisher turned the game down by letter. The master disks reportedly went into a shoebox marked TAXES 1997 so that nobody would open it.

The full game was to have three episodes, a boss called the Lake Mother and a secret level inside a Waffle House. None of that is on the disk. What survived is a single rainy night, and it is enough.