That game jam based on Oblivion’s terrible persuasion wheel actually produced some good, weird ideas
A couple of months ago PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens bemoaned the state of this world with regards to how there is not in fact an elaborate remaster or remake of Oblivion available to him. He was consoled, however, by the fact that some indies were making an entire slew of jam games based on Oblivion’s uh, polarizing, persuasion wheel. (It’s bad, actually. You can watch a little video of it.)
Well, the game jam’s runtime is over and it… actually produced some really good, weird ideas for games. These were all made in a week of total chaos by indie developers—which is to say they’re proof of concept, not finished games. But they’re free, cute, and fun.
One of the best is Blade & Wheel, a game that twists the wheel into a method of going on a heroic journey to battle monsters. The wheel’s elements become things like Attack and Struggle during combat, or Meander, Move, and Rush during exploration.
There’s also the rather clever ObliviGun, which retitles the now rather ancient joke about Fallout 3 just being Oblivion With Guns into a little hardcore boomer-esque shooter where your wheel-powered gun just can’t ever really be relied on to shoot in the way you expect it to because you’ve got to rebuild its properties via wheel every time you reload it.
There’s a lot more that’s cool too. There’s one about fighting demons using your wheel-driven office productivity software. There’s one about the wheel being a magic circle. There’s one pretty straightforward one about befriending weirdo cryptids via wheel. There’s one about cooking chili using the wheel. There’s one about engine flywheels and I’ll bet you can figure out where the wheel is in there.
There’s even one made just for me, specifically, about the beautiful and perfectly engineered control systems of vintage spacecraft. It’s called Reaction Wheels. Obviously.
You can find all of these and more on itch.io’s wheeljam page.
